Peter Beagle - Tamsin

She knew me when she saw me. She said softly, “Mistress Jennifer. So you are come.”

“ Jenny ,” I said. “No Mistress, no Jennifer. Just Jenny.” I went and sat down next to her, I said, “Yes, I’m come. And we’re going to talk about what happened on the night that Edric Davies didn’t come for you.”

Tamsin shivered—or maybe that was a breeze rising. She said, “Jenny. I know what you did. Until you called to me, I was lost, truly lost beyond your imagining. While I remember anything, I will remember—”

“Never mind that,” I said. “Do you remember what I called? What I told you?”

She didn’t reply for a few moments, and when she did, her voice was very low. “That the Wild Hunt… that they took him. Yes, I know—I know that must have happened, and who it was summoned the Huntsmen—”

I interrupted her again. “This isn’t about Judge Jeffreys—I don’t think so, anyway. Yes, he’s a bad guy, he’s a psychopath, he’s the only real monster I’ve ever met, and somehow he learned how to sic the Wild Hunt on a rival like Edric Davies. But that would just have been for one night, and Edric’s out there still, running the way he’s been running from the Hunt, night after night for three hundred years. Do you understand me?” Because I couldn’t be sure she was taking any of it in, sitting there so wide-eyed. “No way Judge Jeffreys could have done that to him—that took somebody else. Somebody with more power than Jeffreys, a kind of power Jeffreys never had in his whole rotten life. Do you understand?” Tamsin didn’t move or answer me.

“I used to go nuts,” I said, “drive myself absolutely crazy, trying to figure out what Judge Jeffreys could possibly have whispered to you when you were… you know, at the last. Then I got to wondering about you —if you maybe said something to him .” I waited, but she didn’t say anything, so I just plunged ahead, point-blank. “Do you remember? It’s really important, it might explain everything. Even a couple of words.”

No answer, no sense that she was trying to remember a thing more than she wanted to. And suddenly I was really pissed at her, Tamsin or no Tamsin. I shouted at her. I said, “Damn it, you owe me a damn effort! I’m knocking myself out to help you learn the truth, even though I don’t want to, because once you do learn, you’ll go wherever you go, and I’ll never see you again. But I’m doing it anyway, because it’s the right thing for you, and I love you. Now you think , and you think hard , and you help me for a change!” I could have cut my tongue out, even while I was yelling, but I only stopped because of what was happening to her face.

When people write about living people facing up to something shocking, some awful memory that’s just come back to them, they always have them turn pale, bloodless, or else they get weak-kneed and have to sit down, or press their hands against their mouths and start to cry. Tamsin didn’t do any of that, and it wasn’t that her face got twisted with horror or distorted with fear, like in books. Tamsin’s face stopped , the way she always talked about herself stopping. I’d seen her go really still at times, but that softly pulsing ghost-light would be there, if you knew how to look. But this was different, this was something so else I don’t think anybody’s yet got the right words for it. They just call it the stillness of death.

“O, Jenny,” she said. “O, Jenny.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t breathe.

“O, Jenny,” Tamsin said. “I cursed him. I cursed my love.”

I was the one who began to tremble, the one who put her fingers to her dry, cold mouth. There was a half-moon rising behind clouds. The wind was definitely picking up, and I could smell rain. Tamsin said, “Jenny, I remember.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t, you don’t have to, I’m sorry.”

But she didn’t hear me. “I was in such despair. I so needed him to be there—to be here, where we are—and he was not, and he had sworn, sworn to me… And I was frightened , Jenny—frightened of being abandoned to Judge Jeffreys, frightened of such things as he might do to my family—and then I was sick and all a-fevered, and truly not in my proper senses. Jenny, my Jenny, I remember.”

Her eyes were burning. I never knew what that meant before. She was growing more and more clear and solid—I couldn’t see through her anymore. She said, “I spoke evil words against Edric. I cursed him for deserting me, and I vowed that he should wait as I had waited, wait on forever and forever for someone who never came. Jenny, do you understand me now?”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Oh, no wonder you forgot.” My teeth were actually chattering, dumb as that sounds.

Tamsin said, “The last breath of a passing soul has such power— the power of a transient angel, of a momentary demon… And I loosed it against him. It was I sent him to his eternal torment—I, not Judge Jeffreys. My doing, my doing—three hundred years.” She was rocking herself slowly, like a grieving old woman.

The big, warm drops of rain were starting to fall, one at a time, but Tamsin couldn’t feel them, and I didn’t care about them. Of all the damn, damn things, I wanted to see Evan. Evan would think of something. I said, “I don’t know what to do . I don’t know what we can do to save him.”

Tamsin smiled at me. I know I’ve written all over the place about the way I felt when she smiled, but this one didn’t turn my heart and my insides gooey: This was a smile like Marta’s, like Jake’s, on my last night on West Eighty-third Street. An old friend saying good-bye.

“ Do , Mistress Jenny?” she said. “Why, there is nothing for you to do, having aided me so far beyond my deserving. What I do now is for me.”

And with that the storm broke, and the Wild Hunt came.

There wasn’t a lot of rain, not like when Julian and I were caught at Mrs. Fallowfield’s farmhouse. This was mostly wet wind, but it was the strongest wind I’ve ever been out in. It knocked me back down when I tried to stand, punching at me from every side; it slashed my hair across my face and into my eyes so it stung like mad, and it shook me the way I’ve seen Albert shake a poor little mole to bits before he tossed it up and swallowed it. I saw Tamsin’s face, bright as the moon, if there had been a moon. She touched her right-hand fingers to her remembered lips, blowing me a kiss—and then she was gone, swept away by the wind like a rag snatched off a clothesline.

I screamed after her—couldn’t hear myself, of course—and then did something a lot more useful, which was pushing myself to my feet. The Wild Hunt was tight overhead, shrieking and banging and yammering like the D train barreling uptown, but for once I hardly paid any mind to them. I had one glimpse of Tamsin, not being driven by the wind but riding it to meet the Huntsmen, flashing like a meteor, up and out, on an angle that would intercept them somewhere over the downland. Then I lost sight of her for good, and I sank back down in total despair, because there wasn’t any way for me to catch up, to be with her when she turned to deal with the Wild Hunt and fight them all for Edric Davies, if she had to. I’d always figured I would be there at the end, without thinking much about it, but I wasn’t going to be, and I couldn’t even cry about it, because of the damn wind. I think that’s the lowest I’ve ever been—though I’m sure there’s worse waiting, as Mrs. Fallowfield would say.

The black pony materialized slowly out of the storm, as though it were drifting up from the bottom of the sea. It looked at me out of its yellow eyes and remarked, “I had thought better of you. Slightly better.”