Peter Beagle - Tamsin

Stourhead Farm’s doing fine. There were a couple of years, after Evan started using his no-till method, when the yield fell off a bit more than he’d expected and the Lovells started getting seriously skittish. But they picked up the third-year option anyway, and that was when things began turning around—you could probably grow pineapples and papayas in that soil now, except for one or two places where you somehow can’t grow much of anything. The Lovells are so stoked on Evan that they want him to take over another dilapidated old property of theirs in Herefordshire. It’s possible, I guess—Evan can get restless when he’s not fixing something—but I don’t think he’ll do it. Sally likes it in Dorset.

And I don’t know what musical Dorset would do without Sally, at this point. Dorchester and Yeovil, anyway: She’s directing choirs in both places now, the last time I looked, teaching a class for accompanists at the university, still taking a few private students, and—for relaxation—playing with a very amateur jazz quartet now and then. She’s branching out, too: This summer she’s going to be handling the music for a Ben Jonson masque they’re staging in Salisbury. I don’t think you could get Sally out of Dorset with dynamite and a backhoe.

Like I said somewhere early on, Julian’s the only one of us still home, with Tony mostly off dancing one place or another and me here at Cambridge, where Meena’s supposed to be. Meena’s back in India, for God’s sake, working with a group that arranges loans for village women to start their own businesses. Mr. and Mrs. Chari are being good about it, but they’re not a bit happy, and she’s promised to come back sometime soon and go be a brain surgeon. I miss her a lot, in all the ways I don’t really miss Tamsin. We send a lot of e-mail back and forth, when she can get to a computer, which isn’t too often. I’m going to India to see her next Christmas.

I’m at Cambridge, reading English history, to absolutely everyone’s surprise but my own. Because I was part of English history for a while, in a strange way, and it was part of me. It picked me up by the neck and shook me, and it scared the living hell out of me, but it kissed me, too. And afterward, after everything, I couldn’t stop wanting to know more. About Tamsin’s time first, of course; but then I started working backward, and my grades took off like the Wild Hunt, and here I am in Cambridge, biking to lectures, meeting with my tutor, sharing digs with a girl from Uganda named Patricia Mofolo, and feeling like somebody in an English novel. And there’s a boy—or I think there’s starting to be one—but that’s my business. I get enough static from Julian as it is.

But I still feel like loose ends sometimes. Not a barrel, but close enough. It’s not just remembering Tamsin—it’s that world I got a glimpse of because of Tamsin: That night world where the Black Dog still walks the roads, and the billy-blind waits for someone to give advice to, and the Oakmen brood in the Hundred-Acre Wood over whatever it is Oakmen brood over. That world of moonlight and cold shadows where the Pooka is king and little creatures giggle under my bathtub. It’s gone with Tamsin, completely, and I wish I had it back. I don’t want her back, honestly—I know she’s where she should be—but that other, that night place, yes. The Wild Hunt doesn’t ever pass over Cambridge.

But you never know. I saw the Pooka the last time I went home.

It was late spring, and I’d sneaked back to Dorset for the weekend to hear Sally’s Sherborne choir, and to inspect Julian’s newest girlfriend. He has terrible taste in women, but this one isn’t too bad. Her name is Diana, but that’s not her fault, and she obviously thinks Julian’s the ultimate end of evolution, which he is not, and it’s going to make him even more impossible than he already is. But he’s my baby brother, and I like any idiot who treats him like the end result of evolution.

The night before I left was practically warm, and I went for a walk with Evan and Sally—just a slow stroll to nowhere special, talking about the farm and the choir and Cambridge, and a bit about Diana, and not at all about the boy I’m sort of seeing. Sally asked, “Did you ever think, back on West Eighty-third…?” and Evan said, “I might try a few fruit trees in the Alpine Meadow next year,” and I told them about the time Norris sang in Cambridge and hung around for a couple of days afterward. He took Patricia and me out to dinner at Midsummer House every night, made a mild pass at Patricia once, when I was in the loo, and whisked off to sing in Dublin. He was very good about not calling me Jennifer.

Evan and Sally went back to the Manor after a while, making their usual running joke of warning me to come in if it started storming. I stood watching them walk away with their arms lightly around each other’s waists and Evan reassuring Sally that nobody noticed the soloist going flat during the Handel oratorio. When they were out of sight, I turned and wandered down the tractor path to check on Tamsin’s row of ancient beech trees. I always do that when I’m home, even though I know Evan won’t cut them until he really has to. I see Tamsin best there, for some reason, talking to them, dancing with them, laughing like a little girl. It’s just something I do.

The trees hadn’t changed. They’re as huge and three-quarters dead as ever, and I’m not easy with them by myself. They tolerated me when I was with Tamsin; now they feel… not menacing, not like the Hundred-Acre Wood, but completely unwelcoming. But I can’t not go there, even though I never stay long, because that’s where I hear Tamsin’s voice most clearly, saying, “Still holding to Stourhead earth, they and I.” With her gone, I think they’ll start to fall soon. She gave them permission.

I was turning away when my foot bumped against something, and I glanced down to see a hedgehog. They’re all over the place at Stourhead: grayish-brownish, with silver-tipped spines, about the size of a kazoo, and totally unafraid of people. This one looked up at me with angled yellow eyes and said, “Pick me up, Jenny Gluckstein.”

“Fat chance,” I said. “I’d be picking those fishhooks out of my hands for a week. I know you.”

“Pick me up,” the hedgehog repeated, and after a moment I did, because what the hell. The Pooka kept his spines down—they felt like rough silk tickling my skin—and studied me the way my tutor does when he’s not quite sure I’m ever going to get a grip on the Corn Laws. He said, “You have grown, Jenny Gluckstein.”

I blushed blotchy, sweaty hot, the way I hardly ever do anymore. “Well, I didn’t have a lot of choice,” I answered. “Hang around with ghosts and boggarts and the Wild Hunt—”

“And the Old Lady of the Elder Tree,” the Pooka said. “You are fortunate beyond your imagining. She cares even less for humans than I, but she will take a fancy to this one or that betimes. Not all can endure her regard as you did.” He curled up in my palm, the way hedgehogs will do. “And none see her truly, as you saw her, without growing greater or shrinking quite small. You have done well.”

“I miss her,” I said. “I miss you. I miss those nasty little monsters Mister Cat used to fight with at night. I don’t mean miss , exactly, it doesn’t keep me awake… I mean, I wish there were pookas and Black Dogs and whatnot around Cambridge, that’s what I wish. Or London, or New York, or wherever I’m going to wind up doing whatever I’m going to wind up doing. Somehow, I’ve developed some kind of nutsy taste for… for old weirdness, I guess you’d say. That’s what I miss, and I don’t think I’ll ever meet up with it again. Unless I spend my life in Dorset, or someplace like that, where the nights are still different—still dark . But I can’t do that, so I don’t know. I just miss , that’s all.”