Peter Beagle - Tamsin

I didn’t exactly jump in the air and yell my head off for Guy Guthrie and Julian—“I was right! Yes ! They did run away! I was right !”—but I came pretty close. Tamsin said, “No ladder to my casement, no whistles or birdcalls for signal. We were to meet in twilight, at a crumbling old cow byre to which my parents knew me accustomed to walk in the evenings. Little margin it left us before our flight were noticed—but the portrait was near done, and Edric had two days’ hire left at best. No choice, you see.”

Outside, in the hallway, Sally: “Jenny? You still up, babe?” Nights when she can’t sleep, she prowls like old Albert, making certain that all her sheep are tucked in safely. I mumbled something about working on an oral presentation for school. She didn’t especially believe me—I can always feel that with Sally—but she just called, “Well, get some sleep sometime,” and left it alone. I really, really like my mother.

“I was clever, Jenny,” Tamsin said. “I walked out to the byre the day before, and there concealed a portmanteau containing a change of clothes and sturdy shoes as well. No food—Edric was to bring that—and no keepsake but a miniature of my sister, Maria. Which was not theft, for my father gave it me.” Tamsin was always picky and precise about things like that. After a moment she added, “I saw the Black Dog that day.”

Better and better. I hadn’t even thought to put the Black Dog in the story. “He came to warn you not to go,” I said. “But you went anyway.”

Tamsin was far away, not looking at me now, but ages beyond me. “I cannot tell you his errand, nor how I responded, for I hardly saw him at all, so full I was of plans and dreams and terrors. Next day’s weather was cool and blowy, with a smell of rain. My father and brothers were in Dorchester, not to return till late afternoon—my mother was advising a friend’s daughter on her wedding. I came down the stairs for the last time as bold and trembling as though I were already a bride myself, saying farewell to all I loved, all I understood, walking away with my husband. I wept, dear Jenny, and I blessed my family a dozen times over and begged their forgiveness, and I walked away.”

I saw her, you know. did. Probably partly because of the way ghosts change when they remember something that intensely—but I’ll swear forever that it was more than that. Her eyes were brighter than I’d ever seen them, bright as flowers in moonlight, and she was there in them, three hundred years before—she was on the stairs in this same house, so frightened she could hardly stand up, and so wildly happy, and so brave. It was there still, that moment, in her own eyes.

“But you didn’t go to meet him? What happened ?” My voice sounded like a dry little cricket chirp, far away. The room had grown darker; or maybe that was Tamsin’s brightness gathering— I don’t know. I thought she’d take a long time answering me, but she didn’t.

“I did set forth to meet Edric,” she said. “But he was not the one I met.” Miss Sophia Brown appeared on her lap half a second before Mister Cat eased through the window and poured himself into mine. They were both looking very pleased about one cat thing or another, and promptly settled down to washing each other’s faces. Tamsin said, “I had taken but a dozen steps beyond my doorstep when he was there. Smiling, bowing over my hand, murmuring that he should be properly disappointed to find my family gone from home, but could not, so enchanted was he at this chance to speak with me in sweet solitude.” Her voice had dropped into a nasty dry whisper, like insect wings rubbing together, and she kept going back and forth between that voice and her own as she talked.

“I told him that my parents would return quite soon, and that he might await them within and welcome. He answers me, nay, but he’ll pass our farm quite by and rate such hospitality poor stuff indeed if I’d not bide him company a while. And truly he means more by that than the mere words. There’s naught in England to hinder him from declaring my father Monmouth’s fellow and agent—naught but his fancy for me, and well he knew I knew it. We looked each other in the eyes, Jenny, and both of us knew all .”

She laughed suddenly, which spooked me about as much as if she’d cursed or screamed. “Aye, there was a droll moment, if you will, set snug in horror like a currant into a Yorkshire pudding. I told him I was in the habit of my evening stroll, and he replied on the instant, he was bound to convoy me, to see me safe from just such vile rebels as he’d that day been sending by the score to meet their black Master in hell. And ere I could speak, there’s my arm tight through his, and him guiding me down the path to the byre where Edric waits for me.” She looked at me as though she’d just now remembered I was there, and she smiled, almost mockingly. “As good as a play, is’t not, Jenny?”

And it was that, all right. I couldn’t speak for seeing her: alone, arm in arm with that soft-eyed monster, him bending down to her, breathing on her, moving her along… and her unsuspecting lover in the cowshed: a rebel himself, or the next thing to it. I just about managed to croak out, like Julian, “What did you do ?”

“Do? I did nothing—a blessed wet rock did it all. The rain had begun—my ankle turned—I fell, drawing him down with me.” The laugh was closer to a gasp this time, as though she was falling again, right there. “He bore me back to the house, arranging me on a couch, and propping up my ankle, tender as a nurse—indeed, I believe he would have salved and bandaged me, had I let him. And all the while crooning to me, vowing he’s never been so ensorcelled, and I must truly be a witch, and he knows what to do with witches. And then he laughs, to show ‘twas all meant as lovetalk. I think it was, Jenny. God’s mercy, but I think so.”

She stood up, pushing Miss Sophia Brown off her lap (the Persian reacted just as indignantly as though she’d been a real cat), and walked to my window. I’ll always wonder what she saw, standing with her back to me, looking out into one night or another. I could see the moon through her left shoulder.

“He spoke to me of marriage,” she said quietly. “Marriage and hanging—the same voice, the same passion, ’twas all one to that man. Oh, aye, he was already wed, but what of that? his wife was rotten with consumption, unlikely to last the year. I would be a baroness, the lady wife of the Lord Chief Justice, living a life as far above this jumped-up croft as it would be above a shepherd’s hut. Land, society, horses, servants—and him merely the first among those, ever at my side, as now, asking only my love and approval.” She turned, and when she smiled this time I saw the crooked wolf tooth. “Oh, it does come back in your presence, my Jenny,” she said, “it comes back. There was a reason the cats brought you to me.”

“And all that time you were worrying about Edric,” I said. “He was carrying on, proposing to you and everything, and you must have been just frantic, thinking about Edric—”

Tamsin laughed a third time, and this one came out dry and small and rueful. “Oh, aye—nor was I the only one. For of a sudden, between this fond word and that, Judge Jeffreys’s hands were gripping my arms like fetters, and his face was kissing-close to mine so I could only see his eyes—his great, gentle, terrible eyes. His lips did hardly move when he spoke to me again, saying, ‘And as for that twangling fool in the cowshed, you need have no dismay on his score. He never purposed to wait your coming, but was gone from there ere you had set out. And I know this, Mistress Willoughby, because I passed that way coming here.’ His hands on me, Jenny. I cannot feel, and yet I feel them now.”