Peter Beagle - Tamsin

But he was all right. He said, “Tamsin has told me of all you did for us, and of what might have befallen her but for you. If I had the world to give you, we would never be quits.” He smiled in a crooked, crinkly way that Tamsin must have loved at first sight— no, that sounds mean; it was a very nice smile, really. Edric Davies said, “But I have nothing, Mistress Jenny Gluckstein. I cannot promise that we will come to you at need, nor even that we will ever remember your kindness, because I do not know what waits beyond for us. I can only bless you now, with all my human heart. Nothing more.”

And he was out of there. Just vanished, the way ghosts do.

Tamsin picked up Miss Sophia Brown. She came very close, and looking into my eyes, she said, “My Jenny,” and then she bent her head and kissed me—here, on the left-hand corner of my mouth. And nobody knows better than I that I couldn’t have felt anything, because Tamsin was a ghost—but nobody but me knows what I felt. And I’ll always know.

Then she stepped back and was gone, and it was just me and Mrs. Fallowfield in the dark of the Alpine Meadow that seemed so much darker now. Me and the Old Lady of the Elder Tree, as though I gave a damn. Mrs. Fallowfield cupped my cheek in her calloused hand, and she said softly, “Forget, ye brave child. Forget.”

And after that there’s nothing but night—but thinning now, turning blue and silver, and I’m being carried somewhere, like a baby. First I think it’s the Pooka come to get me, but it’s way too bumpy a ride for the Pooka, and I can smell rubber, which I hate. When I open my eyes, it’s Evan holding me, walking fast, with Sally on one side and Tony on the other, everybody shiny in rain slickers… or are we already in the old Jeep? If we’re in the Jeep, then I’m lying with my head in Evan’s lap while he drives us home, and my feet in Sally’s lap. Tony keeps talking about the beating the fields have taken from the storm—he’s really shocked, the way things have been battered down. Sally wants to hold me by herself, so Evan can drive more easily, but Evan says, “No, leave it, love, she’s asleep,” and I am.

But I didn’t forget. I haven’t forgotten a thing.

I think that was Tamsin’s doing, the reason she kissed me at the very last. I think she didn’t want me to forget her, even if she doesn’t remember me wherever she and Edric Davies have gone. How she did it, I won’t ever know, but I’m pretty sure Mrs. Fallowfield knows she did it. I don’t see much of Mrs. Fallowfield anymore; when we do meet, she’s the same skinny, ageless lady in the duffel coat and the Russian hat, and she looks at me with those cold blue eyes as though she almost recognizes me from somewhere. As though she were the one who forgot.

He wasn’t from Dorset, you see. Judge Jeffreys wasn’t from Dorset, he didn’t know about the Old Lady of the Elder Tree. Maybe things would have been different if he’d known. Maybe not.

Sally told me it was Evan who got anxious about me being out with weather coming on—he smelled it, and he was already cranking up the Jeep to start after me even before the storm hit. He wanted to go alone, because that clunker only has a canvas top, and it’ll shake your teeth loose on pavement, let alone a dirt path. But Sally insisted on coming—and so did Tony, which surprises me in some kind of way even now. I asked him if he was afraid of losing his dance dummy, and he said that was exactly it. That’s how you thank Tony.

Anyway, they racketed around the farm for hours, trying to figure logically where I might have gone. The Alpine Meadow was the last place they’d have thought to look; but the beasts of the Wild Hunt had left a track you couldn’t miss, even in the darkness, and Evan followed it on an impulse, bucketing the Jeep up through that scrubby desolation as far as he could, until they had to get out and walk the rest of the way. Sally says they found me curled up like a baby, soaked through and sound asleep next to an elder thicket. I should have gotten pneumonia, but I didn’t come down with so much as a sniffle, even though I can catch cold on email. I know she’s still wondering about that.

What’s more amazing than me not catching cold, though, is how few questions anyone ever asked me about what the hell I was doing in the Alpine Meadows, and why I hadn’t had the sense to come in out of the rain. I really expected Sally to put the screws to me, but she never did, and I’ll always wonder if that was Evan’s influence. I think Evan knows more than he wants to about the history of the Manor, and about what goes on around Stourhead Farm at night—wild geese or no. But he left it alone, and Sally pretty much did, too.

I had more trouble with Julian, who’s got an incredible instinct for these things. He kept asking if I’d been with “that scary old woman,” and why those prints in the dried mud and trampled cornstalks didn’t really look like the jeep’s tire tracks. He stayed on the case for absolute weeks, until his hormones finally kicked in, and he abruptly discovered girls. Thank God for puberty, that’s all I’ve got to say.

No, I’ve never seen Tamsin again. I really didn’t expect to. What’s odd is that when I dream of her—and I dream of her a lot—the dreams aren’t exactly about Tamsin. She’s in them, and I always know it’s her, and sometimes we even talk, but she’s not the center of the dream: That’s more likely to be the Wild Hunt, or Judge Jeffreys, or even myself. And the dreams can be frightening, but they’re never—I don’t know… they’re not yearning dreams, not dreams of loss. I’m just happy that she’s there, and that’s all.

I asked Meena, more than a year later, why she thought that was. Meena knows almost everything about the Alpine Meadow, except what happened to Judge Jeffreys. She’d feel bad for him; she wouldn’t be able to help it. Meena doesn’t need that.

Anyway, I asked her at school one day, and she answered me two days later, because that’s how Meena is. “Maybe you don’t have that kind of dream about Tamsin because you don’t have to. Dreams are loose ends sometimes, dreams are unfinished business, but there is none of that between you and Tamsin. You are complete with her, I think—you have her, really, for always. You don’t need to dream.”

“Well, I don’t feel like I have her,” I said, “and I definitely don’t feel complete. I feel like Mister Cat, still looking and looking everywhere for Miss Sophia Brown after a whole year. I feel like a whole damn barrel of loose ends, Meena.”

“But you’re not,” Meena said, and she was right. I went on remembering Tamsin all the time, but not missing her, not always longing to be with her, the way I used to be when she was in the little secret room on the third floor of the east wing, and nobody knew but me. Mostly I’ve been happy thinking about her, these four years—almost five now—and pretty proud of myself, too, because she needed my help, and nobody else could have done it, and I actually didn’t wimp out or screw up. And she told me I was beautiful, or anyway she said I had “all the makings of a proper beauty.” I never told Meena about that, either.

The portrait of Tamsin and Judge Jeffreys is still hanging in the Restaurant, as far as I know—I don’t go in there anymore. But I do go back to Tamsin’s room every so often, me and Mister Cat. Once she was gone, I didn’t keep it a secret, but nobody was ever much interested. Sally thinks it’s cute—she calls it “Jenny’s lair”—but the boys got bored, and I’m not sure Evan’s been up at all. I sit in Tamsin’s chair, and Mister Cat does his usual tour of the room, sniffing in corners and under the weird bedframe-trunk contrivance, because you never know… But in a while he comes and jumps into my lap (a little stiffly now, but I don’t notice it, for both our sakes), and we stay there for hours sometimes. Not doing anything, mostly not even thinking very much—we’re just there, where they were for so long, even though nothing of them remains. Mister Cat’s always the one who decides when it’s time to go.