Peter Beagle - Tamsin

I was perfectly charming at dinner. I talked a lot, and I made jokes, and I took turns with Julian talking about Mrs. Fallowfield’s scones and her weird house.Julian did mention that we’d thought we’d heard the Wild Hunt, but I didn’t back him up on that one, and nobody else paid much attention. Sorry; Julian.

Sally had her Yeovil choir that evening, but I didn’t go with her. I went up to the third floor, to Tamsin’s room—with Mister Cat following me every step of the way—and I let myself in with my bent paper clip, like always. Tamsin wasn’t there. I sat down in her chair and watched Mister Cat sniffing out every corner of the room for Miss Sophia Brown, as though she had her own smell for him, ghost or no, the way Tamsin smelled of vanilla to me. Finally, reluctantly, he came over and climbed into my lap, looking weary. I’ve never seen Mister Cat look just like that. Lazy, yes; pissed off, sure—but not tired and sad. I stroked his throat, and under his chin, but he didn’t purr.

“Yeah, right,” I said. “Same here.” I raised my voice a little and spoke to Tamsin, wherever she was. I said, “I’ve seen him. I’ve seen Edric Davies. I know what happened to him.” Then I sat still as Roger Willoughby’s secret room darkened around me until I couldn’t see the chestnut tree outside the window, or the window itself, or even Mister Cat silent on my lap, but not asleep.

I couldn’t find her.

Stourhead Farm is about seven hundred acres, maybe a little less—I’ve already said that. That sounds like a lot, but I covered every damn one of them on foot, looking for Tamsin. Sometimes Meena was with me, but more often I was by myself, just trudging from one fence to another, from the creepy fringes of the Oakmen’s Wood—which was the way I thought of it now—to Evan’s walnut orchard where I’d seen Kirke’s Lambs; zigzagging between fields, cutting across the downland, actually getting lost in sudden fogs a couple of times. Once I found a place that Evan himself hadn’t ever seen: a kind of brambly mini-meadow, covered with a kind of grass whose name I forget, but which doesn’t grow anywhere else on the farm. There were wild apple trees, too, most of them dead, but a few still putting out papery blossoms, almost transparent. I wondered if Roger Willoughby had ever seen them, or if he’d missed them, too, like us. It would have been wonderful to find Tamsin there.

The worst of it was that I couldn’t feel her. I’d gotten much better at that over time: sensing her presence even when she wasn’t around—in the house, out in the fields, it didn’t matter. Sometimes I could feel her wanting me, needing my company, needing to be around me, which was a sensation I’m not about to try to put into words, but it made me more vain than I’ll probably ever be again. Now, nothing—a kind of nothing I never knew existed, because you have to have lost something incredibly precious for that, and you have to have not quite known how precious it was. I hadn’t ever taken Tamsin for granted—not ever—but I hadn’t known.

And watching him waiting for her didn’t help. He had all the time in the world; he didn’t have to move, or think, or pretend to be living a normal human life with a family and a best friend and a cat, with chores to remember, and conversations to keep up. All he had to do was wait for Tamsin to come to him, like those cowboys. He knew she’d come.

I wouldn’t have known if it hadn’t been for Mister Cat. And even he wouldn’t have known if not for Miss Sophia Brown. I’ll never have a clue where or when she finally showed up—the important thing is that the two of them found me in my room one bright, windy afternoon, trying to get into the sari that Meena gave me to practice with. They didn’t have to jump around me, or yowl meaningfully: The moment I saw that fluffy blue shadow whose feet never quite touched the floor, I was back in my jeans and out of the house, running like a maniac after the two cats, who were flashing across the courtyard, scurrying between barns and tool-sheds as though their tails were on fire. I almost knocked Ellie John over, almost stumbled into a half-dug drainage ditch, did crack both shins on a wheelbarrow heaped high with fresh cowshit, and swivelhipped around Wilf’s billygoat so fast he had no chance for a clear shot at me. This one time in my life, I moved the way Mister Cat’s always been trying to teach me to move. I think he’d have been proud of me, if he could have been bothered to look back.

Tamsin was in Julian’s potato field, of all places. Julian’s got no interest in gardens, but he was experimenting to see if he could grow potatoes the size of pumpkins, which he was getting really close to before he got bored. His patch was right at the base of a hillside, with KEEP OUT notices everywhere, so the place looked like a construction site. Tamsin came drifting down that hill and through Julian’s warning signs, and I never saw anything more beautiful in my life. When I dream about her today, most often that’s the way I see her.

He was there, standing at the edge of the potato field, watching her come toward him. I have to say that he’d put on his Sunday best to receive her: not his judge’s robes, but a long deep-red coat with absolutely dozens of little buttons, a kind of broad white cravat around his neck, and a curly brown wig that fell down past his shoulders. Gloves, too—fringed gloves, like a movie cowboy. He looked grand. He looked like a perfect match for Tamsin.

She didn’t seem to be awake. I mean, her eyes were open, but it was as though she couldn’t remember sight , or didn’t want to. Something was moving her down that hillside and slowly across Julian’s potato patch toward him—moving her like a chess piece, like a shadow puppet—and it wasn’t her own will. She was lovely in a way I’d never seen her before—she might have been all those shivering, transparent Dorset twilights bent into a human shape—but she was dead twice over like this, somehow: doubly gone, both from the world and from herself. I’m saying all this now, ages later, but at the time I didn’t think any of it. I just knew that she didn’t look like Tamsin, and I ran.

It is true, that thing that happens in dreams, where you run and run harder than you ever could awake, but it’s like running in water, and you can’t get anywhere. I ran toward that damn potato patch, waving my arms and calling like that woman I used to see on Eighty-third Street, shouting at the cabs—and I’ll swear to this day that it took me hours to get a few yards closer to Tamsin… Tamsin and Judge Jeffreys, him standing and smiling and waiting for her, and me yelling, “No! Don’t go near him! Stay where you are, I’m coming! Tamsin, no !” until my voice shredded. I sounded like Julian by the time I reached his first KEEP OUT sign.

Neither of them paid the slightest bit of attention to me. Tamsin floated to a stop in the middle of the field, and they faced each other for the first time in three hundred years. Judge Jeffreys said her name— “ Tamsin Willoughby ” —just that and no more. In his mouth, in that voice like dead leaves, it sounded like a curse, like a witch’s spell.

Which you could say it was, I guess, because it started her moving again. The ocean-colored eyes were completely without light, empty of any memories; and the closer she got to him, the less of her there was—she was so barely there that sometimes I couldn’t make her out at all against the green hillside. A cobweb after rain, a breath on a freezing day—even those don’t tell you how it was to see her like that. My heart hurts now, just writing this little about it, and it always will.

It hurt to see Miss Sophia Brown, too. There was a lady who could have given Mister Cat lessons in cool: nothing in this world or that one ever ruffled her fur, or disturbed her poise for half a second—whatever the act, she’d already caught it, she’d been to the show, thank you very much. But now she was frenzied, hysterical, looking back and forth from Judge Jeffreys to me, meowing so desperately that I almost heard her. Miss Sophia Brown was asking for help, and she was asking the wrong person.