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.
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 g
one 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.”
The Pooka didn’t say anything. I started walking away from the beeches, back toward the Manor, but the Pooka didn’t move in my hand. He didn’t direct me to go this way or that, or to put him down, so I kept going along until I heard Sally playing the piano, singing “What Shall a Young Lassie Do with an Old Man?” and Evan singing with her. Then I stopped, and listened, and waited.
“Jenny Gluckstein,” the Pooka said at last, “mystery belongs to mystery, not to Dorset or London. You are yourself as much a riddle as any you will ever encounter, and so you will always draw riddles to you, wherever you may be. If there should be a boggart in New York, he will find your house, I assure you, as any pooka in London will know your name. You will never be further from— what did you call it?—old weirdness than you are at this moment. And on that you may have my word.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you,” and I actually bent to kiss him, but his spines came up with a mean whisper, and I backed off. Then I said, “But a pooka’s word isn’t good for much. Pookas lie. Tamsin told me.”
The Pooka kept his back spines up, but hedgehogs don’t have any on their bellies, so my hand was all right. “True enough, Jenny Gluckstein. Pookas lie as humans lie, but not to hide the truth. Never that.”
“No?” I said. “Silly me. I thought that was why everyone lied. Human or anything else.”
“Of course not,” the yellow-eyed little creature in my hand said. “Only humans would lie for so drab a reason. Pookas lie for pleasure, for the pure joy of deception, and so do all your other old weirdnesses—all those night friends you pine for now. Remember that in London.”
“Yes,” I said. I felt tears in my eyes, without knowing why. I said, “I’ll remember.”
“Yet sometimes we tell the truth,” the Pooka added, “for very delight in confusion. Remember that, too. Set me down here.”
We were near Evan’s swing, which was stirring very slightly in the night breeze, like Mister Cat’s sides when he sleeps. I stooped to put the hedgehog on the ground, but it rose through my hands in the form of a tall gray bird—some kind of heron, I think—and circled over me once before it flew off, away from the light. I thought I heard it say some last thing that ended with my name, but that’s probably just because I wanted to hear it so. I stood there for a while, and then I walked the rest of the way to the Manor, because I had to finish packing and get moving early.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter S. Beagle is the bestselling author of the fantasy classic The Last Unicorn and many other highly acclaimed works, including Giant Bones, A Fine and Private Place, and The Innkeeper’s Song, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and winner of the Locus Award. His novels and stories have been translated into at least sixteen languages worldwide, and his long and fascinating career has covered everything from journalism and stage adaptations to songwriting and performances. He has given readings, lectures, and concerts of his own songs from coast to coast, and has written several screenplays, including Ralph Bakshi’s film version of Lord of the Rings. He is presently at work on a new novel.
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Tamsin Page 33