Peter Beagle - Tamsin

Judge Jeffreys spoke Tamsin’s name a second time. No mad laughter, no “Ha- ha , me proud beauty, I have you in me power at last!” Her name, nothing more, softly, but it cracked across her like a whiplash, and that ragged remnant of Tamsin Willoughby twitched toward him again. And right around there I went seriously crazy.

I threw myself between them—and that’s definitely the word, because I tripped over something and fell flat in Julian’s potato patch, practically at Judge Jeffreys’s feet. (He wore high-heeled red boots, I remember, with big floppy red bows on them.) Judge Jeffreys didn’t look at me, not even when I stumbled up and started shouting at him, “Get away from her! Get away !” I actually grabbed a rock—or maybe a potato, who remembers?—and threw it at him, catching him right below that elegant nose, bang on the mouth. Of course it went on through him and hit an old outhouse, but it’s the thought that counts. I placed myself in front of Tamsin—as nearly as I could guess where she was—and I yelled, “You can’t touch her! You’ll have to walk over me first! Try it! Go ahead, just try it!”

Yes, I know people only say things like that in movies, but that’s all that comes to mind when you’re crazy. Me, anyway. So there I was, screaming my head off, snatching up fistfuls of stones and earth and God knows what and hurling them at the ghost of a seventeenth-century psycho with great taste in clothes. I did get his attention at last, though I can’t say how: he took that savage focus off Tamsin long enough to give me another long, narrow smile. He said, “How now, girl? I cannot touch her, say you? But I will touch her—here, in your sight—as the wretch Edric Davies never had power to do, not with all her guiltless connivance. For I will make her a part of myself—I will make her a sharer in myself, intimate equal in deed and memory, until there shall remain no singular Tamsin Willoughby, but a greater Jeffreys withal, a Jeffreys enhanced, not merely possessing the object of his desire, but including her. See now, how ’tis accomplished. See now.”

I’m slow about some things. I know I am. Meena would definitely have caught on faster than I—hell, Julian and Tony both probably would have—about the reason for Tamsin’s looking so dreadfully changed, and why he hadn’t needed to hunt her down. He had been hunting her, all these silent, motionless weeks—he’d been drawing her back to him, wherever she fled over Stourhead Farm’s seven hundred acres, by the pure power of want, by the power of hating Edric Davies beyond death, beyond whatever waits for everyone as he’d waited for Tamsin Willoughby. I don’t know if a ghost’s ever done that—stopped the whole bureaucracy of passing on, whatever it is—right in its tracks, but it shows you what’s possible if you really put your mind to it. Inspiring, actually, in a way.

And I can’t believe—not now—that any ghost could do what he was out to do: just assimilate, just consume another ghost, take another spirit into itself. But I don’t know the rules now any better than I did then, and I don’t want to know. All I’m saying is that back in that potato patch, with the sun going down and Tamsin dwindling to nothing while I looked on, I believed him. If I hadn’t believed him, maybe I’d never have thought to do what I did. I’ve wondered a lot about that.

I caught the tiniest glimmer of a white dress out of the corner of my eye, and I turned away from him and called out—and there wasn’t much more left of my voice than there was of Tamsin—“He gave Edric Davies to the Wild Hunt! That’s what happened, that’s why Edric couldn’t meet you! The Wild Hunt’s got him!”

Nothing happened. Nothing happened to me, anyway, though that wasn’t Judge Jeffreys’s fault. For one instant I saw him as he must have looked in his courtroom: not when he was foaming and raging, but right at the moment when he pronounced the death sentence. The story is that he’d get suddenly quiet—weary, almost regretful—and that’s when you knew you’d had it. That’s the way he was gazing at me now, as though he really would have spared me if he could. The Wild Hunt couldn’t have been any more frightening than that look.

I wasn’t even sure if Tamsin had heard me—if there was enough Tamsin left to hear me—so I shouted again, “It’s true! I’ve seen him! Judge Jeffreys must have called down the Wild Hunt to take him, I don’t know how. That’s why you’re still here—because Edric needs you! We have to save him!” I didn’t mean to say we, it just came out.

And this time she heard. She began to back away, she began to pull against whatever was reeling her in; she began to remember her own real shape, the color of her hair and her skin and her clothes, her own texture in the world. I saw her growing Tamsin again around that last poor fragment of herself, until she was facing me, as solid looking as him, with her wide eyes full of what I’d just told her. She didn’t speak, but she knew me. She knew us both.

Behind me Judge Jeffreys whispered, “No matter. It begins again.”

“Oh, no, it doesn’t,” I said. I turned around to say it right into his delicate, sad, handsome face. “No, it doesn’t, because she knows now. Finally, she knows what she’s supposed to do, and she’ll fight the Wild Hunt and you to do it. And I’m going to help her. You’ll never get near her again, not if you hang around another three hundred years. You’ve had your shot.”

“My shot ?” He laughed outright then, for the first time. I wonder if I’m the only person in history who ever heard Judge Jeffreys laugh. He said, “Fool, what need for me to wait another hour, when all that woman’s immortal soul yearns to lose itself in mine a thousand times more than it yearns for heaven? This is the moment she was born for, and nor you nor Edric Davies, nor any multitude of devils like you will keep Tamsin Willoughby from her destiny. Behold it now.”

He stretched his left arm out toward her and he beckoned. He didn’t say a word, just crooked his forefinger once, smiling that sleeping-snake smile of his. Miss Sophia Brown opened her mouth for what must have been the longest, most despairing cat wail I never heard. Mister Cat pressed as close against her as he could, considering that she wasn’t there, trying to comfort her. And Tamsin vanished.

For a moment my insides fell off the World Trade Center, because I thought that was it— all over, all over —I thought she’d merged with him, her tender ghost-light lost forever in his endless night. But then I saw the look on Judge Jeffreys’s face, and I heard the wordless sound he made, and I wheezed, “Yes! Yes! Yes !” I scooped up Mister Cat, and I danced through that potato field with him—and I’d even have tried to pick up Miss Sophia Brown, too, but she’d disappeared the instant Tamsin did. She probably wouldn’t have cared for being half-strangled and waltzed with, anyway. Mister Cat loved it.

And Judge Jeffreys came completely unglued, as though he were back in his court with a whole gang of Monmouth’s rebels facing him, instead of just me and Mister Cat. It was a Rumplestiltskin fit, a Wicked Witch of the West tantrum; it was Captain Hook dithering between rage and panic, slashing the guts out of the nearest pirate at hand. “Devils, devils—devils, imps, demons and cacodemons! I am God’s own, and by the holy names of Jesus and His Father, I charge you—back, back to your burning cesspools, back to your stinking pits of abomination, back to your eternal filth and vileness! Tamsin Willoughby is mine to me, and not all Hell itself shall keep us from being joined as we were destined to be joined! Not all the loathsome might of Hell shall keep me from her!”