He was there, standing at the edge of the potato field, watching her come toward him. I have to say that he’d put on his Sunday best to receive her: not his judge’s robes, but a long deep-red coat with absolutely dozens of little buttons, a kind of broad white cravat around his neck, and a curly brown wig that fell down past his shoulders. Gloves, too—fringed gloves, like a movie cowboy. He looked grand. He looked like a perfect match for Tamsin.
She didn’t seem to be awake. I mean, her eyes were open, but it was as though she couldn’t remember sight, or didn’t want to. Something was moving her down that hillside and slowly across Julian’s potato patch toward him—moving her like a chess piece, like a shadow puppet—and it wasn’t her own will. She was lovely in a way I’d never seen her before—she might have been all those shivering, transparent Dorset twilights bent into a human shape—but she was dead twice over like this, somehow: doubly gone, both from the world and from herself. I’m saying all this now, ages later, but at the time I didn’t think any of it. I just knew that she didn’t look like Tamsin, and I ran.
It is true, that thing that happens in dreams, where you run and run harder than you ever could awake, but it’s like running in water, and you can’t get anywhere. I ran toward that damn potato patch, waving my arms and calling like that woman I used to see on Eighty-third Street, shouting at the cabs—and I’ll swear to this day that it took me hours to get a few yards closer to Tamsin… Tamsin and Judge Jeffreys, him standing and smiling and waiting for her, and me yelling, “No! Don’t go near him! Stay where you are, I’m coming! Tamsin, no!” until my voice shredded. I sounded like Julian by the time I reached his first KEEP OUT sign.
Neither of them paid the slightest bit of attention to me. Tamsin floated to a stop in the middle of the field, and they faced each other for the first time in three hundred years. Judge Jeffreys said her name— “Tamsin Willoughby” —just that and no more. In his mouth, in that voice like dead leaves, it sounded like a curse, like a witch’s spell.
Which you could say it was, I guess, because it started her moving again. The ocean-colored eyes were completely without light, empty of any memories; and the closer she got to him, the less of her there was—she was so barely there that sometimes I couldn’t make her out at all against the green hillside. A cobweb after rain, a breath on a freezing day—even those don’t tell you how it was to see her like that. My heart hurts now, just writing this little about it, and it always will.
It hurt to see Miss Sophia Brown, too. There was a lady who could have given Mister Cat lessons in cooclass="underline" nothing in this world or that one ever ruffled her fur, or disturbed her poise for half a second—whatever the act, she’d already caught it, she’d been to the show, thank you very much. But now she was frenzied, hysterical, looking back and forth from Judge Jeffreys to me, meowing so desperately that I almost heard her. Miss Sophia Brown was asking for help, and she was asking the wrong person.
Judge Jeffreys spoke Tamsin’s name a second time. No mad laughter, no “Ha-ha, me proud beauty, I have you in me power at last!” Her name, nothing more, softly, but it cracked across her like a whiplash, and that ragged remnant of Tamsin Willoughby twitched toward him again. And right around there I went seriously crazy.
I threw myself between them—and that’s definitely the word, because I tripped over something and fell flat in Julian’s potato patch, practically at Judge Jeffreys’s feet. (He wore high-heeled red boots, I remember, with big floppy red bows on them.) Judge Jeffreys didn’t look at me, not even when I stumbled up and started shouting at him, “Get away from her! Get away!” I actually grabbed a rock—or maybe a potato, who remembers?—and threw it at him, catching him right below that elegant nose, bang on the mouth. Of course it went on through him and hit an old outhouse, but it’s the thought that counts. I placed myself in front of Tamsin—as nearly as I could guess where she was—and I yelled, “You can’t touch her! You’ll have to walk over me first! Try it! Go ahead, just try it!”
Yes, I know people only say things like that in movies, but that’s all that comes to mind when you’re crazy. Me, anyway. So there I was, screaming my head off, snatching up fistfuls of stones and earth and God knows what and hurling them at the ghost of a seventeenth-century psycho with great taste in clothes. I did get his attention at last, though I can’t say how: he took that savage focus off Tamsin long enough to give me another long, narrow smile. He said, “How now, girl? I cannot touch her, say you? But I will touch her—here, in your sight—as the wretch Edric Davies never had power to do, not with all her guiltless connivance. For I will make her a part of myself—I will make her a sharer in myself, intimate equal in deed and memory, until there shall remain no singular Tamsin Willoughby, but a greater Jeffreys withal, a Jeffreys enhanced, not merely possessing the object of his desire, but including her. See now, how ’tis accomplished. See now.”
I’m slow about some things. I know I am. Meena would definitely have caught on faster than I—hell, Julian and Tony both probably would have—about the reason for Tamsin’s looking so dreadfully changed, and why he hadn’t needed to hunt her down. He had been hunting her, all these silent, motionless weeks—he’d been drawing her back to him, wherever she fled over Stourhead Farm’s seven hundred acres, by the pure power of want, by the power of hating Edric Davies beyond death, beyond whatever waits for everyone as he’d waited for Tamsin Willoughby. I don’t know if a ghost’s ever done that—stopped the whole bureaucracy of passing on, whatever it is—right in its tracks, but it shows you what’s possible if you really put your mind to it. Inspiring, actually, in a way.
And I can’t believe—not now—that any ghost could do what he was out to do: just assimilate, just consume another ghost, take another spirit into itself. But I don’t know the rules now any better than I did then, and I don’t want to know. All I’m saying is that back in that potato patch, with the sun going down and Tamsin dwindling to nothing while I looked on, I believed him. If I hadn’t believed him, maybe I’d never have thought to do what I did. I’ve wondered a lot about that.
I caught the tiniest glimmer of a white dress out of the corner of my eye, and I turned away from him and called out—and there wasn’t much more left of my voice than there was of Tamsin—“He gave Edric Davies to the Wild Hunt! That’s what happened, that’s why Edric couldn’t meet you! The Wild Hunt’s got him!”
Nothing happened. Nothing happened to me, anyway, though that wasn’t Judge Jeffreys’s fault. For one instant I saw him as he must have looked in his courtroom: not when he was foaming and raging, but right at the moment when he pronounced the death sentence. The story is that he’d get suddenly quiet—weary, almost regretful—and that’s when you knew you’d had it. That’s the way he was gazing at me now, as though he really would have spared me if he could. The Wild Hunt couldn’t have been any more frightening than that look.
I wasn’t even sure if Tamsin had heard me—if there was enough Tamsin left to hear me—so I shouted again, “It’s true! I’ve seen him! Judge Jeffreys must have called down the Wild Hunt to take him, I don’t know how. That’s why you’re still here—because Edric needs you! We have to save him!” I didn’t mean to say we, it just came out.