Peter Beagle - Tamsin

You don’t have to believe in Hell. All you need is to hear someone who really does, who believes in it this minute, today, the way people believed in 1685—all you have to do is see his face, hear his voice when he says the word … and then you know that anyone who can imagine Hell has the power to make it real for other people. I don’t mean I understood any of that right then—just barely do now—but at that instant I understood Judge Jeffreys, and why I ought to be even more frightened of him, dead or alive, than I’d known to be. There’s a lot to be said for never quite grasping the situation.

Then it was gone, that one flash of comprehension—and so was he, with his last words hanging in the air like the burned-out skeleton of fireworks—and I was running for the Manor, still hugging Mister Cat against my chest, knowing beyond any doubt where Tamsin had to be, and knowing that he knew, too.

Except that we were both wrong.

She wasn’t anywhere in the Manor—and by now I knew how to search that house. He must have been searching, too, though I never saw him. The billy-blind said he wouldn’t be able to come into Roger Willoughby’s secret room—anyway, that’s what it had sounded like he was saying—but the billy-blind hadn’t just seen Judge Jeffreys beckoning Tamsin to her doom, commanding her with no more magic than her name. I wasn’t about to assume there was anything Judge Jeffreys couldn’t do.

But there was a whole lot I couldn’t do. I couldn’t ask anyone for help—not even Meena, not with things gone this hairy—and I couldn’t lurk and slide around home looking as though I were trying to rescue a ghost from a crazy ghost judge who’d somehow condemned her boyfriend to being chased across the sky forever by a howling pack of ghost huntsmen. There is no really good time or way to break something like this to sensible people like Sally and Evan and—all right—Tony. Julian was weird enough to believe me, but he was also entirely weird enough to wind up running the Wild Hunt. Master of the Hounds, or whatever. Uh-uh.

And I couldn’t go to Mrs. Fallowfield, either. That was my first impulse—after all, she’d shown me what had happened to poor Edric Davies, which I’d never have found out if she hadn’t let me see the Wild Hunt with her eyes. But I didn’t dare assume that she was on my side, or on Tamsin’s, or anyone else’s but her own. The one thing I knew for sure about Mrs. Fallowfield was that I couldn’t take one thing about her for granted.

I didn’t tell Meena about Edric, but I did tell her about Tamsin’s face-off with Judge Jeffreys. Meena was too smart to be optimistic: She knew way too much about Indian ghosts. She said, “Jenny, you must be so careful, more careful than ever. Now it’s not just Tamsin—now it’s personal. He will harm you if he can.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Exactly what I needed to hear.” But Meena looked so worried that I told her, “I don’t think either of us are going to see her again, him or me. I think she’s broken free of him, and free of the Manor, too. I really do think that was it.”

Which I didn’t think for a minute, but Meena seemed to feel better, so I felt better. But what I knew was that this time I couldn’t afford to wait for Judge Jeffreys to locate Tamsin, the way I’d been doing. This time I had to get to her before he did, and the only edge I had was that I knew Tamsin better than he did. Or I thought so, anyway, but maybe I was totally wrong about that, too—maybe I didn’t, couldn’t, mean any more to her than any other unreal figure in this half-dream world she’d lingered in. But I had to believe I did; and I had to believe that if dead, mad Judge Jeffreys could call Tamsin to him, so could I. I just had to find the right place and the perfect moment. And the words.

It took a while. The secret room wasn’t it—I had a sense that Tamsin wouldn’t ever come back to that room—and no other place in the house felt right. I was going to have to find the one spot in the seven hundred acres of Stourhead Farm where the daughter of Roger Willoughby might choose to make her stand. Because she wasn’t running from Judge Jeffreys, not this time. She was going after Edric Davies—she was going to find Edric and rescue him from the Wild Hunt, whatever it took, however she could. Like I said, it took me a while to understand, but once I did, then I knew where she’d be.

A lot of stuff got in the way of my finding her, though. It’s funny now, but at the time I was at least half-convinced that it was all Judge Jeffreys’s doing, all the delays and distractions that landed on me together right then. School was starting again, for one thing, and there was farm work to help out with almost every day—hoeing and singling, mostly. (That was one thing about Evan’s new no-till system—the weeds were crazy about it, especially thistles.) And Tony picked that time to use me again as a sort of dressmaker’s dummy for some new dance; and Julian got left off his form’s cricket team and tagged after me more than ever, being miserable and making mournful plans to blow up the school. I talked him down to a scheme involving piranhas in the water supply, but it was so complicated that I think he lost interest. I think.

So between one damn thing and another, it seemed a lot like forever until I was finally free to go search for Tamsin. By then I was out-and-out frantic—and unable to let anyone see it—because there was not only no reason why Judge Jeffreys wouldn’t have thought of the same place, there was one major hell of a reason why he would have. I hadn’t seen him since the shootout in the potato field, but ten angels could have sworn that he’d left town on the two-fifteen train, and I wouldn’t have believed them. For all I knew, he was shadowing me this time; so there was something else driving me to that ruin of a seventeenth-century cow byre, with nothing remaining but a bald scorch mark near where the door had been. Because that was what it was, I knew it for sure now: the footprint of the Wild Hunt, called down by Judge Jeffreys to hound Edric Davies far from Tamsin Willoughby, if he survived at all. That was where they found him waiting for her, as he’d promised he would.

And that was where I went to find Tamsin, one evening after dinner, with everything anyone could possibly stick me with out of the way. Sally stopped me, all the same—I was actually opening the door when she called to me, “Take a brolly, it’s going to rain.”

“No, it’s not,” I called back. “Ellie John says it’s not, and she always knows.”

“Take it anyway—do me a favor.” Sally came close and put her hand lightly on my arm. “Where are you off to?”

“No place special. just walking around, to clear my head. I’ll be back soon.”

“You’ve been doing a lot of that,” Sally said quietly. “Clearing your head. Is everything all right?”

I don’t get great whopping visions and insights into the human condition—I don’t think I’m made like that—but for one moment I did have an image of thousands, millions of mothers all over the world asking their daughters the same question at that same moment. I said, “Fine, I’m fine, really,” and Sally said, “Don’t be out too long, I don’t care what Ellie John says,” and I said, “Right,” and I practically ran out of the house, in such a hurry that I forgot to take the umbrella. It wouldn’t have helped.

Tamsin was exactly where I thought she’d be, though I couldn’t make her out right away. She sat huddled like a sad little girl in what would have been a far corner of the cow byre: All there, all fully present—not like she’d been when Judge Jeffreys was dragging her into him—but so transparent that I felt I could see through her all the way to Mrs. Fallowfield’s house among the elders, or all the way to the seventeenth century… It was a warm night, and very still, but there was heat lightning sputtering on the horizon.