Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  And if I just stand up and walk to the front door, and open it, and look outside, past the courtyard, past both barns and the dairy and the cowpen and the workshop… out there in the dark there are creatures moving around who have been out there since before the Manor was ever built—since before there were people in Dorset, for all I can say. And I’ve seen them. I’ve spoken to them, I’ve run from them, and two of them maybe saved my life, and maybe more than my life. You can pave Dorset over from Cranborne to Charmouth, Gillingham to Portland Isle—they’ll still be there, come nightfall. I really know this.

  The funny part is that before we got here Stourhead Farm came that close to being declared an SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), because of one particular species of vole that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere but in this part of West Dorset. Which would have meant the end of Stourhead—you can’t farm an SSSI—but there isn’t a country in the world that has a Strangeness Preserve, so we were all right. Nothing that lives on our land counts as an endangered species.

  Since I couldn’t ever know for certain when Tamsin would show up, I always had to go by feeling, and whether I had it right or wrong, it made for some bad moments. Once we were all in the car, bound for a movie in Yeovil, and I backed out at the last minute— literally jumped out on the driveway—because I suddenly just knew that Tamsin was waiting for me. She was, too, that time, but it took a ton of explaining when everybody got home. And when I went out at night—“to stretch my legs,” “to clear my head,” whatever excuse I used—I’d have to deal with Julian at one end, wanting to come with me, and Sally at the other, because she never fell asleep until she knew I was in the house. One time I was on the phone to Meena, and I saw a pale shiver at the window that I was sure had to be Tamsin, and I just cut Meena off—just hung up and ran outside to be with her. But it was some sort of bird, a nightjar, whatever, and I had to call Meena back and apologize. I never did that again, hang up on Meena, even when it was Tamsin.

  We covered Stourhead Farm on those walks, Tamsin and I, and sometimes the cats, chasing each other practically under our feet and vanishing again. Tamsin just wafted along beside me like dandelion fluff, like a toy balloon that got away. The truly amazing thing was that she absolutely remembered every field, every crop: She’d say things like, “Ah, you’ve let this meadow go back to rye-grass; my father was forever making trial of the French grasses— lucerne, sainfoin and those.” Or, again, “I vow, Jenny, how wonderful well they do drain in these times of yours. We’d no such pipes and culverts, no such siphon engines—only spades, only ditches filled with stones and bramble. Oh, could my father have seen those pipes!” And she’d actually sigh, and we’d move on. She was a country girl, all right, Tamsin Willoughby, dead or alive.

  The sheep weren’t ever aware of her when we’d cross their downland pasture (sheep are barely aware they’re sheep), but she used to scare the hell out of the collie, Albert. Nothing short of foxes threatening a new lamb ever roused that dog; but whenever I passed by with Tamsin, he’d race to head us off, plant his feet and go into an unbelievable frenzy of barking until he actually lost his voice. And that did scare the sheep, so we stopped walking there.

  She wanted to know everything about me, about Sally and Evan and the boys—even Norris, even the Lovells. Especially the Lovells, come to think of it—she knew the farm wasn’t in her family anymore, but she didn’t have a clue about the hands and changes it had passed through in the last fifty years. I explained what I could, which wasn’t a lot. Tamsin seemed to understand most of it; but when I started in on the twentieth century, she wasn’t much interested. It took me a while to realize that for all her father’s money, she’d never once been out of Dorset, except for a couple of holidays in Bath; for all her education, Dorset was the world, and all she really cared about was how much Dorset had changed. She said it herself: “Jenny, Jenny, what should I do in this place where I am—stopped—but dream my long dreams of what was? Yet I need to know what is, I must know, if I am ever to—” She broke off right there, and didn’t say anything more for a long time.

  I told her the hills were still there, and the butterflies and wildflowers, and the evening fog off the Channel. I talked about dark, soft little coombes like the one where Julian caught his foot in the stream, about barns and cottages that she’d have recognized, and farms where I’d seen horses pulling binding and threshing machines so old that Thomas Hardy probably helped uncrate them. I went into a whole lot of detail about the time Meena and I met a man in the woods making sheep hurdles by hand, weaving split hazel stems together and singing to himself. And I never said a word about plowed-up heathland and air pollution and housing developments on the hills. What for?

  “If I could but leap these bounds of mine,” she kept saying. “If I could walk my Dorset but once, one time only, before I pass to… to wherever I should be. Dear and close as it chips me yet, Stourhead is no more my home, nor has been since Edric—”

  And she’d quit there, every time, like a record with the needle caught in a scratch. And I’d ask her again who Edric was, and Tamsin either wouldn’t answer or she’d change the subject entirely and tell me how her mother used to make conserves out of rose leaves and sugar, or how her father kept bees. “He would say to me, ‘Catty’—for that was his pet name for me—‘Catty, girl, if a man would be solaced, if he would find respite from daily harassments and grievances, let him observe these creatures at their labor. There’s amnesty for you, there’s plenary absolution for all sins, all sorrows.’ Oh, I do think of him still, Jenny, and I am so sad that the bees are gone.”

  Which may all have been her way of keeping me from asking any more questions about Edric—or even the Other One—and if it was, it worked. Ghosts can’t cry, but I about did, every time she remembered something that small from three hundred years ago. The more time we spent together, the more things like that came back to her—just as she herself was growing clearer, easier to see. Her father called her mother “Magpie,” short for Margaret, and the two of them privately called him—roaring Roger Willoughby, the Prodigious Romantic—“Sir Fopling Flutter,” after someone in a play. Her favorite horse was a mare named Elegance; her favorite smell came from the lavender hedges that her mother planted all along the front of the Manor. They’re long gone with the Willoughbys, of course, like her father’s beehives.

  She’d had an older sister who died of the Black Plague—the same Black Plague we’d had to study in British History—“and how I failed of catching it, I am sure I do not know, Jenny, for we slept together always. Her name was Maria, so I put it straight into my own name, thinking to make my mother less forlorn. But she grew terrible wroth with me and beat me, which she never did, and bid me not ever use my sister’s name so again. But I kept it anyway.” That one time I thought she remembered tears.

  She was looking for someone, I knew that; someone she really especially wanted me to meet. I thought it must be that old friend of hers who’d hopped away through the beech trees, on two legs or four, that first night—the one with the golden eyes. I asked her about it, but she wouldn’t ever say.

  Whenever we passed an oak grove—especially Julian’s Hundred Acre Wood—she’d warn me again about oak trees. “It is a thricecut coppice, Jenny, for all these seem virgin. Twice was it cut before my time, and once since, and each time saplings sprang from the stumps with speed uncanny. The old of these parts, they’ve a saying, ‘Fairy folk are in old oak,’ and a thrice-cut wood harbors Oakmen, always. Never, Jenny, never step foot under oak after sundown.” She made me promise that one over and over.

  Which is why when I first saw the billy-blind I went probably six feet straight up. He wasn’t in any oak grove, but standing on a barrel in the North Barn. He was about the same size as the boggart, but slighter, not as burly. He wore a sort of old-style suit, with an eggplant-colored cravat fluffed around his neck, and a waistcoat to match. No hat, thank God. I don’t think I could have handled a hat. Ankles crossed, one han
d in his pocket, bracing the other against the wall—a mini-Jimmy Cagney, Sally’s all-time favorite. Only in the moonlight slanting through the window behind him, he looked more like that English actor who played LongJohn Silver in the old Disney movie. Robert Newton, that’s it.

  Tamsin introduced us, very formally, like people meeting at a party or a fancy dinner. “Jenny, this is the billy-blind. The billyblind, I have the honor to present to you Mistress Jennifer Gluckstein.” I almost didn’t mind the Jennifer when she said it.

  I’d had a lot of practice with curtsies by now, so I made him a really deep one and he put his right hand flat on his belly and bowed. Then he straightened up fast and said, “Oughtn’t wear your hair all strained back like that, child—doesn’t suit, doesn’t suit. Take my advice, you’ll comb it forward.”

  He had a Dorset accent, but not old Dorset, not like the boggart. You could hear the Z’s buzzing around in there, and the I’s wanting to come out like oi, but I didn’t have any trouble understanding him. What I did have trouble with was the whole notion that a two-foot-high Robert Newton was telling me what I ought to do with my hair. I said, “Look, Mr. billy-blind, I really appreciate your interest—”

  Well, he turned absolutely pink at that. Fuchsia. He pulled himself up as tall as he could, and he actually stamped his foot as he shouted at me, “I’m noo Measter billy-blind! You call me the billy-blind, same’s her does, that’s what you call me! I am the billy-blind!”

  I took a step back, he was so angry, but Tamsin moved in in a hurry. “The billy-blind, she’s but young and meant no harm. I was just so myself when first we met, you’ll remember.”

  That calmed him down a bit, and he tidied his cravat and smoothed out his vest. “I do that, I remember. No bigger than the billy-blind, you were, and no more manners than a hedge-pig.” Now he was all mush, that fast, with real tears in his eyes. He bowed to me again and said, “Your pardon, Mistress Jennifer—”

  “Jenny—”

  “Mistress Jenny, then. You’ve all my apologies, but you’d do better to take my advice about your hair. And now I’m at it, yellow’s noo your color. Green’s what you want, mind me, greens and blues. The billy-blind knows.”

  And he just went on like that, nonstop. He told me my sinuses would clear up if I ate red clover, and that I wouldn’t keep waking up with headaches if I moved my bed to the other side of the room. “And there’s noo use in your friend, the dark girl, greeting her eyes out for that boy in choir. W’ole family be gone away come fall, moved off to Afriky somewhere. You tell her the billy-blind said so.”

  I said I would. The billy-blind gave me a really long stare, studying me all up and down. His eyes weren’t Disney eyes at all, but they weren’t wicked either, like the boggart’s. They were more like jewelled passages leading a long way backward or a long way forward, I couldn’t tell which. He nodded suddenly.

  “Aye, you’d be needing the billy-blind’s counsel, the pair on ye.” He was looking at Tamsin now. “You want to sit still, that’s what you want. Sit still, don’t be running about so.” Giving a ghost lessons in deportment sounded like the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of, but Tamsin nodded. The billy-blind turned back to me. “You,” he said. “You’ll do best to stay away from that place. And stop eating them grapes.”

  I couldn’t take it in. I gaped at him like a baby bird. I said, “What place? And what’s wrong with me eating grapes?”

  “You’ll be eating them all,” the billy-blind said calmly. He went back to talking with Tamsin, and I was too busy blushing to hear what they were saying. Because it’s perfectly true about me and grapes. I always mean to leave some, but I’m just not reliable.

  I was going to ask him again about whatever place I was supposed to stay away from, but right at that moment I heard Evan’s voice saying, “Jenny? Is that you?”

  Tamsin went out the way a match goes out, and the billy-blind was through the window and gone in a blur of eggplant. I turned and saw Evan standing in the doorway, absently rumpling his hair the way he was always doing. He said, “We were getting a bit anxious.”

  “I lost track of time,” I said. “Sorry.” I’d gotten a lot better with Evan by then. I didn’t blame him anymore for wrecking my life— I even had long stretches when I thought maybe he hadn’t wrecked it at all. But I didn’t like him knowing that, and I had an uneasy feeling he did. I’d invested a lot of time and thought and energy in hating Evan. I wasn’t ready to call it a waste and let it go. That’s how I was then.

  “I was looking for something,” I said as I came out. Evan gave me a funny look. Back then the North Barn was more of a glorified storage shed, all farm machinery and things under tarpaulins, and mysterious old barrels like the one the billy-blind had been standing on. But Evan didn’t push it, and we started back toward the Manor together.

  Even in the darkness I could see he was looking tired. He said, “Your mother worries about these night walks of yours. I do myself. It’s easy to step into something, a furrow, and break an ankle, if you don’t know where you’re going.”

  “I’m careful,” I said. “I really do know this place pretty well by now.” Of course the moment I said that, I tripped—not in a hole, but over Mister Cat, flopped right down in my path, the way he does sometimes. He yowled at me, and I yowled back at him to watch it, stupid cat, and he scatted away into the brush with his feelings hurt. I figured we’d make it up at bedtime.

  Evan started to say, “I think it’d be a good idea if you had someone—Julian or Tony—” but I headed him off by asking if he knew what a billy-blind was. You can almost always sidetrack Evan with a question like that, about legends or folklore. The boys do it all the time.

  “Billy-blinds?” He shook his head and smiled a little. “Lord, I haven’t heard that word in years. Who told you about billyblinds?”

  “Just a friend,” I said. “Someone at school. She said they’re supposed to give advice?”

  Evan laughed. “That they do. Your billy-blind absolutely lives to give advice. Doesn’t matter what subject, never mind the time or the place or the person—the billy-blind will tell you what to do, whether you ask or not. It’s their nature, and there’s only the tiniest problem with it. They aren’t always right.”

  I asked if there was only one billy-blind at any one time, like the phoenix. Evan said he’d never heard that, nor that you had to call each one the billy-blind. “But maybe it’s different in Dorset. There’s a lot of regional variation among British boghes. Like the way our boggart just vanished—I’ve never heard of that before. You maybe make a deal with boggarts, but you don’t get rid of them.”

  He was glad we were talking, and it was easy to keep him from asking any more questions about me wandering the farm at night. I felt a bit guilty about that, and guilty all over again for not telling everyone what had really happened with the boggart. But Evan was telling me a story about a Yorkshire family who moved from their farm to get away from a boggart, only to find that they’d brought it along with them. And I was thinking of Tamsin, and wondering again who Edric was, and what the Black Dog and the billy-blind knew that we didn’t. And where Tamsin was supposed to be, instead of here, where I wanted her to be.

  All the same, I was feeling guilty enough that I actually asked Evan a question about himself before we reached the Manor. “What is it that’s not going right with the farm? I hear you and Sally talking, but I don’t understand. It’s looking great, as far as I can see.”

  Evan stopped in his tracks and blinked at me. I don’t think he could have been more amazed if Tamsin had walked up to him and tried to bum a cigarette. He messed his hair again, sighed, stared around vaguely, and finally said, “Jenny, people have been plowing up this land for over three hundred years, and the soil’s exhausted, played out. It’s losing topsoil, it’s starved for nutrients, and what it’s been given is bloody rivers of chemical fertilizers. I went along with that style of farming this whole last year, because the Lovells expected it—because t
he land’s literally addicted to it. Maybe it looks good to you now, but the yield’s half what it should be, and it’ll be less next year, less than that the next. It’s my fault, and I know what I have to do. And I’m scared to do it.”

  We were at the house by then, and Evan walked in without saying another word to me. I waited around outside for a bit, hoping for a quick moment with Tamsin. But she didn’t show, so I went up to bed, waiting for Mister Cat instead. No luck there, either. I lay awake forever, holding Julian’s funky old gorilla, with my head too full of too many things to think straight about any one of them. I’d have settled for snickery little voices in my bathroom right then, just for the distraction.

  But I must have fallen asleep sometime, because I was awakened by Mister Cat going round and round with something outside. I know that sound he makes when he’s in a fight: low and evil, like a saw cutting bone. I stuck my head out of the window and yelled for him to get up here, and he came scrambling in a moment later, while something I couldn’t see clearly scuttled out of sight under Evan’s Jeep. Mister Cat was panting hard, and his eyes were as red as the Black Dog’s. There was blood high on his chest. I wanted to look at it, but he backed away from me and settled down to licking the wound, still growling to himself. He was still doing it when I dozed off again.

  He was fine in the morning, cool and sleek as ever, though he still wouldn’t let me inspect the slash on his chest. I went into my bathroom and started doing things with my hair, trying to see what bangs would look like. I got Julian to help me move the bed.