Peter Beagle - Tamsin

She was something to see. No Russian hat; the long yellow-white hair she’d had bunched up under it was rippling down her back like something alive. No wool shirt, no Army boots—instead, a dark-green toga sort of thing, only with full sleeves, fitting close round her tough, skinny body. Her face was Mrs. Fallowfield’s, feature for feature, but the woman wearing it wasn’t Mrs. Fallowfield—not the one I knew. This face was the pale-golden color of the half-moon, and it was just as old: It looked as though it had been pounded and battered for billions of years by meteors, asteroids, I don’t know what; the eyes weren’t blue anymore, but black as Mister Cat, black to the bone. And even so, she was dreadfully beautiful, and she was taller than Mrs. Fallowfield, and she walked out of that thicket and toward the Wild Hunt the way queens are supposed to walk.

At her side was the thing that had growled. It was the size of the Black Dog, and it had staring red eyes like the Black Dog, but that was it for the resemblance. Nothing about it fit with a damn thing else about it: I saw long, pointed, leathery ears and a head like a huge bat, only with an alligator muzzle stuck onto it. The body was more like a big cat’s body than a dog’s, with the rear quarters higher than the front; but it had a sheep’s woolly coat, coming away in dirty patches as though the thing were molting—and the skin underneath was pink! And I guess the moral of that story is, be nice to people’s disgusting, yippy little dogs. You never know.

Mrs. Fallowfield—or whoever—didn’t look at me. She pointed a long arm at the Wild Hunt, at each Huntsman in turn, moving on to the next only when that one lowered his eyes, until finally she was pointing straight at Judge Jeffreys. He looked right back at her—he didn’t flinch for a minute. He had the courage of his awfulness, Judge Jeffreys had.

Mrs. Fallowfield said, “You. I know you.” The Dorset sound was still there, but her whole voice was different—deep enough to be a man’s voice, and with that metallic clang to it that I could feel all along my backbone. She said, “I remember.”

Judge Jeffreys didn’t give an inch. He answered her, gentle, almost apologetic, “I will have what is mine.”

“The woman,” Mrs. Fallowfield said. No expression—just those two flat words. Judge Jeffreys nodded. “The woman,” Mrs. Fallowfield repeated, and this time there was something in the voice which would have made me a little nervous. She held her other arm away from her side, and Tamsin was standing beside her, and the first thing she did was to smile at me. And I couldn’t breathe, no more than I could when we were running from the Wild Hunt.

“And the man,” that voice said. Mrs. Fallowfield did something with her arm almost like something I’ve seen Tony do, dancing— and there was Edric Davies standing with Tamsin. As though she had somehow taken them into herself, and given them birth again—not that she could do that, I mean they were still ghosts… never mind. Maybe Meena can help me with that sentence, if I ever figure out what I was trying to say. All that mattered to me then was that Tamsin was smiling at me.

“The man belongs to them ,” Judge Jeffreys said, gesturing around at the Wild Hunt in his turn. “The woman to me.” He might have been sharing out the dishes at a Chinese restaurant.

Mrs. Fallowfield’s dog-bat-alligator-sheep thing growled at him, but stopped when she touched its horrid head. She looked at Judge Jeffreys for a long time, not saying anything. The night was clearing—I could see a few stars near the half-moon—but I was drenched and hurting, starting to shiver, starting to be aware of it. Tamsin saw. She started to come to me, but Mrs. Fallowfield shook her head. Edric moved closer to her, and there I was—cold and jealous. I’d have hugged that creature of Mrs. Fallowfield’s just then, if I could have, for comfort as well as warmth. Hell, I’d have hugged a Huntsman.

Mrs. Fallowfield said to Judge Jeffreys, “I remember you. Blood and fire—soldiers in my woods. I remember.”

“Ah, the great work,” he answered, as proud as though he were pointing out those tarred chunks of bodies stuck up on trees, fences, steeples, housetops. “They’ll not soon forget the schooling I gave them, the rabble of Dorset. I felt God’s hand on my shoulder every day in that courtroom, and I knew they all deserved hanging, every last stinking, treacherous Jack Presbyter of them. And I’d have done it—aye, gladly, with my whole heart, I’d have rid King James of all of them but the one. All but her.”

He never stopped looking at Tamsin, even though she wouldn’t look back at him. Edric Davies did, though, and the hatred and horror in his face matched Judge Jeffreys’s pride and maybe went it one better. Feelings like that don’t die; memories like Tamsin’s memory of Edric and her lost sister don’t die. That’s why you have ghosts.

Judge Jeffreys said, “For her I would have betrayed my post, my King and my God—indeed, I did so in my heart, with never a second thought. That makes Tamsin Willoughby mine.”

I know it looks stupid, writing it down like that. But you didn’t hear him, and I still do. He really would have done all that for her, you see, and done it believing he’d burn in hell forever for doing it. He hadn’t done it, and it wouldn’t have made her his anyway, but you see why he’d have figured it did. Or I saw it anyway, at the time. He was a maniac and a monster, but people don’t love like that anymore. Or maybe it’s only the maniacs and monsters who do. I don’t know.

Edric Davies didn’t say anything—he just moved in front of Tamsin, but she stepped past him and turned to face Mrs. Fallowfield. I remember everything she said, because they were the last words—but one—that I ever heard her speak.

“I am Tamsin Elspeth Catherine Maria Dubois Willoughby,” she said. “I knew you when I was small. I was forever wandering and losing myself in your elder bushes, and your friend”—she nodded toward that patchy pink gargoyle—“would always find me.”

Mrs. Fallowfield chuckled then, that coal-chute gargle I remembered from another world. “As your friend was aye rescuing him .” She took her hand off the thing and gestured toward me, telling it, “Run see your deliverer, little ’un.” The pink thing ignored her, thank God. I had enough troubles right then without alligator breath.

Tamsin said, “That one is my true and beloved sister. He ”—and she smiled at Edric Davies in a way that squeezed my heart and roiled my stomach—“ he is my love, and was delivered to the mercy of the Wild Hunt through my most grievous fault. Now I’d have him free of their torment, that I may have eternity to do penance. Of your great kindness, do for me what you may.”

Word for word. I couldn’t ever forget. I couldn’t.

She started to say something else, but Judge Jeffreys’s voice drowned her the way his ghost-light had done. “Nay, they’re not yours to dispose of, those two! The Almighty rendered them both into my hands, and you dare not oppose His will!” As loudly as he spoke, he sounded practically serene—that’s the only word I can think of. He was playing his ace, and he knew she couldn’t match it, this old, old lady with her weird, nasty pet. Belief is really something.

Mrs. Fallowfield smiled at him. That was scary, because it was like the desert earth splitting into a deep dry canyon, or like seeing one of those fish that look like flat stones on the ocean bottom suddenly exploding out of the sand to gulp down a minnow and fall right back to being a stone. When she spoke, the Dorset was so thick in her voice I hardly understood a word. “Take good heed, zonny. We was here first.”