Peter Beagle - Tamsin

“You remember what ?” I got back into my bathrobe, not because of being shy or anything, but because of drafts. Tamsin went on studying me in a way she hadn’t ever done—so clear for the moment that I almost couldn’t see the shower curtain behind her. So clear that what I could see was something I’d never noticed before: a crooked right eyetooth, crowding just a bit over the tooth to its left, whatever it’s called. Not grotesque, not a deformity—just something I didn’t expect, and it startled me. And Tamsin knew.

“We call it a wolf tooth,” she said. “I cannot say what your time’s name for it might be. But the hours I spent staring at it in my glass—oh, Jenny, the foolish years! My parents were kind, but what could they do for me, save pretend it made no matter and increase my dowry? And well they might indeed, for a daughter who never smiled at them, let alone at a suitor? When my father told me he’d engaged a painter for my portrait, I wept all night to think of it, and I vowed that I’d no more smile for him than for the hangman.” Her voice softened then, and she remembered a face even younger than mine, the way she did sometimes. “And I kept my word, too, Jenny, for it was never the painter I smiled at.”

“You’ve got a beautiful smile, for God’s sake,” I said. “I never saw a smile like yours. I’ll do anything—I mean, people would do anything when you smile.”

And Tamsin pounced—she even sort of swooped her head down close to mine, like a butterfly landing on something sweet. “Aye, well then—and your eyelashes are in no way too short, and your eyes are perfectly set in your head, and your mouth is a womanly mouth, a sister’s vow on’t.” I didn’t take it in at first, that word, sister . Tamsin said, “Mistress Jenny—I call you so a’purpose, mind—you’ve all the makings of a proper beauty, and a sympathetic heart beside. Trust me, there will be more than one man comes to grief over you in a little time.”

My womanly mouth was hanging open, and all I could think of was Mr. Hammell and Introduction to Drama. But Tamsin went on looking at me as proudly as though I really were her sister, dressed for a ball in her borrowed clothes, instead of my mildewy old bathrobe. Mister Cat looked like that when he was first showing Miss Sophia Brown off to me.

I asked her again, when I could talk, “Where did you go? When I asked you about Judge Jeffreys? Why did you disappear like that?”

She didn’t do it again this time, though you could see how much she wanted to. She went all filmy and indistinct, fragile as a dragonfly wing, but without any color, and without that pulse of light that she always had. But she stayed visible, and she seemed to take a long breath and let it out again, though she couldn’t have. She whispered, “I was afeared.”

“He’s gone,” I said. “He’s gone, and he can’t come back, you told me that. He died in 1688, three years after you.” Tamsin had grown so faint in the air that I remembered being a kid watching Peter Pan and clapping my hands wildly to save Tinker Bell from dying. I said, “But he was here, I know that. You remember him.”

“He came often to dine with us.” Tamsin’s voice wasn’t even as loud as those squeaks and chitterings I’d heard under the tub. “My parents despised him to their souls, but what could they… ?” She broke off for a moment, and then she burst out, “My father feared no man born, you must know this, but in the presence of that— that… Jenny, I’d not have known him, he was grown so small, as though all the marrow were out of him. And my mother the same, tiny and white, not able to swallow so much as a bit of bread, and her hand so cold… and him smiling at me across the table, peeling oranges to make me share with him, and talking, talking, all evening long, about the things he’d done that day. The things , Jenny.”

Robe or no robe, I was freezing, and my throat was closing up on me. I got her out of the bathroom and into my room, and we just sat together on the bed, with Tamsin’s voice going on in the dark, soft and toneless, and I couldn’t even put my arm around her. “Courting me, from the very first—there, at my parents’ table, before their eyes—and taking such grand pleasure in his knowledge that there was naught they could do against my Lord Justice George Jeffreys. And leaning forward, whispering, offering slips of orange between his fingers, like to a man feeding a pet bird. I see him still, Jenny. I see him now.”

“He was sort of handsome, wasn’t he?” I said. “Pretty eyes.” Tamsin was staring at me. “I mean, in his pictures, anyway.”

If nobody ever again, for the whole damn rest of my life, looks at me the way Tamsin did then, I’ll be just as happy. I honestly thought she might never be going to speak to me again, but after about a year she said, “Pretty eyes. So they were—nor did he ever take them from me in all that time, not for two minutes together. Edric would be playing, and the portraitist daubing and scratching, my father snoring—and those pretty eyes so softly on me…”

“He came to see you being painted?” I should have figured that—Meena would have. “So he saw Edric, and… he saw Edric and you?”

“He saw everything.” She began to sound a little more like the Tamsin I knew then, speaking faster and with a bit of expression back in her voice. “Aye, he knew the truth of us, I think before we did! He never spoke word to Edric, but whiles that gentle gaze would rise to take the two of us in—never more than a moment, a single breath— and Jenny, the pit , the fiery, filthy cavern just below that gentleness! Afterward—him having taken his leave at last—I’d weep and shiver all night, and bite my fingers with fear, and no way Edric could ever come to comfort me. And one still night—once only, somewhere in the house—I heard my mother weeping as well.”

I felt like Edric, unable to cross three hundred years to hold her and say, It’s all right, it’s all right. I won’t let anything bad happen , as though that would have helped. All I could do was ask helplessly dumb things like, “Did he ever get you—I mean, were you ever alone with him?”

“Always,” Tamsin said. She was turning her hands over and over in her lap, and she looked like a child being scolded for something she hadn’t done. She said, “Jenny, when he was in this house, it made no matter who else was here. Not servants, not my parents—not Edric, even. Dissolved, vanished , every one, leaving me alone… there was nothing but him, no one to stand between us, do you take me? And no hope, for all knew he would surely ask for me when his horrible Assizes was done, and who in Dorset would say Judge Jeffreys nay? Who would dare?”

She tried to grip my hand, and I felt that little cool breath that sometimes happened between us. “Do you wonder I fear him still, Jenny, even to speak of? Do you wonder I forget?”

“No,” I said, “no, of course not, of course I don’t.” Her smell had changed—not vanilla now, but sharper, drier, almost making me sneeze. I took a gamble. I said, “But Edric said nay, didn’t he? No , I mean. Edric dared.”

A big, fuzzy moth was thumping and flopping against the window, just crazy to get to the faint ghost-light, which was the only brightness in the room. I pushed again, like the moth. “You did run away. You made your plans, just like the first time, and you ran away together. Tell me, Tamsin.”

I didn’t call her often by her name; maybe that’s what got her attention. She looked straight in my eyes, and her voice grew stronger, with a calm pride in it now. She said, “Yes. We chose our night once again.”