Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  I remembered the way Mr. Guthrie had looked at me when I said that Tamsin talked to me. I said, “Then you tell me where she’s supposed to be. Because she doesn’t know.”

  The Pooka shook his fierce weasel head. “Not here. It is dangerous, it makes wrongness, and in time other wrongness follows. Somewhere a single stream runs backward—one tree flowers in deep winter—in one nest a hatchling devours its parent. A door meant to close behind Tamsin Willoughby bides open.” He didn’t say anything more for a moment: We just stood looking at each other, me and this completely impossible creature in a room only cats could find. The Pooka said, “This concerns me.”

  “Well, me, too,” I said. “Whatever it means. Look, she knows she shouldn’t still be here—it’s not like she wants to stay. Something’s holding her, there’s some kind of reason. Maybe you ought to be concerned about that, instead of trees and doors and baby birds.”

  The Pooka looked at me for a long time. Weasels have eyes like round maroon pinheads, but the Pooka’s eyes were as yellow as ever, and just as deep with danger. The weird thing was, though, that he also seemed the least bit uncomfortable—embarrassed, even—which was ridiculous. We hadn’t spent a lot of quality time together, but if there was one thing I already understood, it was that the Pooka doesn’t get embarrassed. He’s the Pooka.

  What he finally said was, “That is not in my power.”

  I said, “What? Oh, please.”

  The Pooka actually almost smiled, I think—it’s hard to tell with weasels, even big weasels with human legs. He said, “I do not lie about such things, Jenny Gluckstein. If I could have been of help to Tamsin Willoughby, I might well have done so long ago, but I cannot. It is forbidden, which is only to say impossible. She is not of my world.”

  “Please, ”I said again. “She’s a lot more of your world than she is of mine or anyone else’s. She’s like a damn tour guide to your world, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Tours… I have seen such things,” the Pooka said, which surprised the hell out of me. Though I guess it shouldn’t have, when you think about it. “But this guide belongs no more to the world she reveals than do those who trudge behind her. Quick or dead, Tarnsin Willoughby remains human, and even I” —and when the Pooka said even I, you heard it— “even I cannot guide her in her turn. I might as well be the Black Dog, silently foreboding, or I might be the billy-blind, forever offering the right advice at the wrong time.” The weasel-head leaned over me; the Pooka’s golden eyes drew me up and in. The Pooka said, “Quick or dead, there’s no helping a human, but if anyone is to succor Tamsin Willoughby, it must be you.”

  And if anything could have snapped me out of the blank enchantment the Pooka’s eyes always laid on me, that was it. I jumped back, right away from him. I yelled, “What?”

  “Only you. And no chance of that unless you come rightly to understand her plight—which you do not, no more than she.” The Pooka got bored with the weasel and became a little gray rabbit with yellow eyes. He said, “Listen to the Wild Hunt. The Wild Hunt will tell you what you must know.”

  “The Wild Hunt,” I said. I’m not even sure the words actually came out. The rabbit sat up on its haunches and began washing its face and fluffing its whiskers, just the way cats do.

  “Listen to the Wild Hunt, Jenny Gluckstein,” it said again. Then it turned and leaped straight through that pointy dark window, in a flurry of wings that looked too big to fit. And left me standing alone in Tamsin’s room, which didn’t smell at all of vanilla when she wasn’t there.

  So that was also the winter when I learned a lot more about Tony’s dancing than I ever expected to. If Tamsin was spending time in his studio, maybe I wouldn’t be so jealous if I were there with her, at least trying to understand what she got out of it. Tony was not crazy about the idea, even though I’d already been in his damn studio, and let him try out his moves on me, and generally behaved a lot better than his brother. I could have told him that there was a ghost watching him get into his tights and put on the legwarmers that Sally had knitted for him, but I didn’t. It took us a while, but we cut a deal. I promised to sweep the floor when it needed doing, and absolutely never to comment unless asked. And not ever to bring Mister Cat.

  Personally, I think he’d been ready for a long time to have someone see him practicing. He just would have liked it to be someone who understood what the hell he was trying to do. Sally and Evan both love music, but even Sally doesn’t know much more about dance than I do. Poor Tony. Working by himself in a real vacuum—no one to study with, no one to talk to him or trade ideas with, hardly ever getting even a glimpse of real dancers—he finally had to settle on me as an audience, the best of a bad lot. Maybe.

  And he couldn’t know that he had another one, a better one than all his family put together. I didn’t see Tamsin the first time I dropped in when he was working. (I’m saying “dropped in” because I tried hard to make it casual—just sort of sidling through the door, don’t mind me, and sidling over to sit in a corner.) I could smell her, but it took a while before I made her out, almost invisible on a chair that Tony was using for some of his stretching exercises. She wasn’t more than a few inches away from him— when he braced his foot on the chair to bend over it, he actually stepped through Tamsin’s own foot, and the hem of her white dress. It was a nightgowny sort of thing, and she looked like a little girl in it, staring up at Tony as he touched his forehead to his knee, then straightened, then did it again, and again. Usually he wears a headband when he works, but he didn’t have it on that day, and his sweaty brown hair kept flopping into his eyes. Once or twice Tamsin lifted her hand, as though she wanted to brush it away.

  It took me a while to get her attention, because she was so totally caught up in watching Tony at work. He didn’t do anything terribly glamorous or dramatic: It was all fits and starts—a slow half-turn here, a sudden little run there, or a burst ofjumps, and then most likely a shake of the head and a mumble, and he’d be trying it over a different way. It wasn’t dancing, it was making a dance, which is about as boring as making anything, unless you’re the one doing it. Believe me, I know.

  But Tamsin couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t stop breathing with him, if you can imagine that, considering that she didn’t breathe. The more she watched, the clearer she grew, until she was practically as distinct as Tony, and still he was too absorbed to notice her. He was using the chair as a center to work around, now spinning away from it, now sort of bouncing off it, now actually picking it up and dancing with it—holding Tamsin in his arms, though he didn’t know. He didn’t see her, and she didn’t see me, and there was a moment when I really couldn’t have said just whom I was jealous of.

  Then it was past, and Tamsin did notice me, and came to be with me in my corner while Tony went on dancing with the chair. She didn’t look like such a little girl now, but someone closer to my age, or Meena’s—that’s it, she looked like Meena watching Chris Herridge playing football. She said without looking at me, “Oh, Jenny, but he’s a springald, your brother—a gerfalcon, if ever I saw one—”

  “Stepbrother. You know he’s my stepbrother.” I was whispering as low as I could but Tony said, with his head practically touching the small of his back, “No comments from the cheap seats. That’s part of the deal.”

  “La, stepbrother then, what of it?” I’d never seen Tamsin this wound up. “Jenny, I’d no notion—we never had such a mode when I…” Tony was scribbling something on a yellow pad—he has his own kind of dance notation—and Tamsin watched him at it, fascinated, not taking the least note of me. “How Edric would love this,” she whispered, so low I could hardly make it out. “Edric would play such music for such dancing.”

  “He’s just practicing, for God’s sake,” I said. “Listen, I have to talk to you.” Tony turned and pointed at me. He didn’t say anything, but I shut up and waited it out, until he’d worked himself down to a dripping rag—Tony never knows when to quit, even now that dancing’s what
he does all the time. Then he said, “That’s it, show’s over,” and limped off with a towel around his neck to take a shower. I really thought Tamsin was going to follow him, but she came outside with me instead.

  February still, but this was one of those gentle afternoons that Dorset slips in now and again, even in the middle of a miserable Dorset winter. Two of those in a row, and tiny green and white things start peeking out of the mud, and I always want to run around pushing them down again and yelling at them, “Don’t fall for it, stay low, it’s a trick!” It is, too, always; but right then it was what people here call a soft day, with a breeze pushing against me like a dog’s wet nose. Tamsin’s white dress seemed to flutter a little, even though it couldn’t have.

  “He’s there every day,” I said. “But you know that.” Tamsin didn’t answer. I said, “I’ve never seen anybody that obsessed about anything. I mean, school’s just something that gets between him and that studio.”

  We were walking down toward the dairy, and Wilf passed me, humping a couple of fence posts along on his shoulders, actually doing something. He gave me a weird look, hearing me talking to myself, and turned around slowly to stare after me, so the fence posts clonged against a metal stanchion. Somebody yelled at him to bleeding-Christ watch it.

  Tamsin said again, “Edric would have played and played.” She was quiet now, and maybe not as distinct, as different from the air, as when she’d been watching Tony. She said, “Jenny, it is not any dancing I know, what your brother does. I see no form or course to it, no rule that I might follow, no design that I understand. And yet… and yet I dance, Jenny. Past any fathoming of mine, I see your brother dancing, and I, too, I, too…” She put her hand to her breast, as though she could touch herself. “I feel, Jenny. It cannot be, but I feel.”

  I was good then. I like remembering that I was all right. It didn’t matter if it was Tony’s dancing and not me being with her that made her remember she was somewhere still human, the way the Pooka said. I looked straight at her, shimmering in the pale sunlight like dew along a spiderweb, and I said, “Yes, Mistress Tamsin. I know you do.”

  I headed us back toward the chestnut tree where I’d been writing to Marta the day I met Tamsin, a hundred years ago. I sat on the damp ground, and Tamsin floated down beside me, careful and precise as any well-brought-up, young seventeenth-century lady settling herself. I said, “He’s Judge Jeffreys, isn’t he? The Other One. I have to know, Tamsin.”

  She vanished. Instantly. One second of the purest terror and plain shock I’ve ever yet seen on a human face, whether you could see bare chestnut branches through it or not—the next second, so gone you could practically hear the air snapping to behind her. I jumped to my feet and yelled after her, top of my voice, not even thinking what I was doing, “You come back here! Tamsin Willoughby, you come back!” To this day, I can’t believe I did that. Three people and a goat whipped around and gaped, and Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown strolled out of the dairy together and gave me a Look. Mister Cat almost seemed to be apologizing for me. “She gets like that, it’s embarrassing, I’m sorry. Just ignore her.”

  But I wasn’t letting Tamsin get away with it. After dinner that night I went to the secret room—Tony wasn’t in his studio—but she wasn’t there. I plunked down in her chair, bound and determined to wait her out, until it got… I guess scary’s the only word. I’d never been frightened in Tamsin’s room before: But this time, as the last light went, all the shadows seemed to be drawing in around that chair, and each of them looked more like Judge Jeffreys than the one before. I knew how stupid it was, but knowing didn’t help. The night mist was gathering, and it made a soft, raspy sound when it stirred against the window. I knew that couldn’t be happening either. My mouth was getting drier and drier, and I kept feeling like I had to pee. You can’t think straight when you’re like that. The mist was coming into the room, through the leaks around that ancient window frame. It felt cold and sticky, and it smelled of sour bedsheets.

  Between one rustle and the next, one more tongue-tip of cold air against the back of my neck, I just suddenly lost it. I ran out of the room, down the hall, with the old dust not quite muffling the echo of my footsteps, and down the stairs, and I didn’t stop running until I almost fell over Julian. He was trying to get a rubberband-powered model plane to take off and fly straight down the corridor, but it kept spinning in circles on one wheel. Julian never has any luck with things like that.

  “Trample me and I’ll put a curse on you,” he warned me in that rasping little rumble of his. He was into putting curses on people then—I think he got it from EllieJohn. “All your hair will fall out, and you’ll always want to sneeze, only you won’t be able to.” Evan used to go on at him about it, but it never did any good.

  “Don’t talk about curses,” I said. “Not here. Just shut up about curses, Julian.” I think I was actually shaking. I know I was yelling.

  Julian looked really hurt for a moment—I’d never once raised my voice to him before—and then he saw, the way he still does sometimes, even now that he’s a foul teenager, and he just came and leaned against me without saying anything. He got something sticky and permanent on my sweater, but what the hell.

  Twenty

  Tamsin came to me late that night. Not in my bedroom, like the other time, but in my damn bathroom, when I was standing naked at the mirror, mumbling to myself, just checking the damage. These days I can look pretty straight into a mirror, not flinching away or making idiot faces; but back then it took me weeks to work up to something like that, staring head-on at what I’m going to be staring at for the rest of my life. Skin actually not too hideous for once—maybe Sally’s right about the climate. Hair… well, the billy-blind’s brown egg just made a mess, but the porter actually helped some. Shape absolutely hopeless—live with it, that’s all. Too much mouth, too little nose—makes my eyes look too close together, but I don’t think they are. No, eyes probably okay— eyelashes too damn stubby. Meena’s got such pretty eyelashes. Live with it.

  I didn’t see Tamsin in the mirror—ghosts don’t reflect—but I knew she was there even before I smelled her. She was balancing on the edge of the bathtub, poised on one foot—doing Tony, for God’s sake!—and I caught my breath to warn her not to lean against the curtain rod, because it comes down if you look crosseyed at it. I was going to be embarrassed or annoyed or something at being caught and inspected like that, but Tamsin smiled, and all I said was, “Where’d you go?”

  Tamsin didn’t answer that right away. She looked me up and down very thoughtfully, not smiling now. At last she nodded firmly and she said, “I remember.”

  “You remember what?” I got back into my bathrobe, not because of being shy or anything, but because of drafts. Tamsin went on studying me in a way she hadn’t ever done—so clear for the moment that I almost couldn’t see the shower curtain behind her. So clear that what I could see was something I’d never noticed before: a crooked right eyetooth, crowding just a bit over the tooth to its left, whatever it’s called. Not grotesque, not a deformity—just something I didn’t expect, and it startled me. And Tamsin knew.

  “We call it a wolf tooth,” she said. “I cannot say what your time’s name for it might be. But the hours I spent staring at it in my glass—oh, Jenny, the foolish years! My parents were kind, but what could they do for me, save pretend it made no matter and increase my dowry? And well they might indeed, for a daughter who never smiled at them, let alone at a suitor? When my father told me he’d engaged a painter for my portrait, I wept all night to think of it, and I vowed that I’d no more smile for him than for the hangman.” Her voice softened then, and she remembered a face even younger than mine, the way she did sometimes. “And I kept my word, too, Jenny, for it was never the painter I smiled at.”

  “You’ve got a beautiful smile, for God’s sake,” I said. “I never saw a smile like yours. I’ll do anything—I mean, people would do anything when you smile.”

  And Tamsin pounced�
�she even sort of swooped her head down close to mine, like a butterfly landing on something sweet. “Aye, well then—and your eyelashes are in no way too short, and your eyes are perfectly set in your head, and your mouth is a womanly mouth, a sister’s vow on’t.” I didn’t take it in at first, that word, sister. Tamsin said, “Mistress Jenny—I call you so a’purpose, mind—you’ve all the makings of a proper beauty, and a sympathetic heart beside. Trust me, there will be more than one man comes to grief over you in a little time.”

  My womanly mouth was hanging open, and all I could think of was Mr. Hammell and Introduction to Drama. But Tamsin went on looking at me as proudly as though I really were her sister, dressed for a ball in her borrowed clothes, instead of my mildewy old bathrobe. Mister Cat looked like that when he was first showing Miss Sophia Brown off to me.

  I asked her again, when I could talk, “Where did you go? When I asked you about Judge Jeffreys? Why did you disappear like that?”

  She didn’t do it again this time, though you could see how much she wanted to. She went all filmy and indistinct, fragile as a dragonfly wing, but without any color, and without that pulse of light that she always had. But she stayed visible, and she seemed to take a long breath and let it out again, though she couldn’t have. She whispered, “I was afeared.”

  “He’s gone,” I said. “He’s gone, and he can’t come back, you told me that. He died in 1688, three years after you.” Tamsin had grown so faint in the air that I remembered being a kid watching Peter Pan and clapping my hands wildly to save Tinker Bell from dying. I said, “But he was here, I know that. You remember him.”

  “He came often to dine with us.” Tamsin’s voice wasn’t even as loud as those squeaks and chitterings I’d heard under the tub. “My parents despised him to their souls, but what could they… ?” She broke off for a moment, and then she burst out, “My father feared no man born, you must know this, but in the presence of that— that… Jenny, I’d not have known him, he was grown so small, as though all the marrow were out of him. And my mother the same, tiny and white, not able to swallow so much as a bit of bread, and her hand so cold… and him smiling at me across the table, peeling oranges to make me share with him, and talking, talking, all evening long, about the things he’d done that day. The things, Jenny.”