And this time she heard. She began to back away, she began to pull against whatever was reeling her in; she began to remember her own real shape, the color of her hair and her skin and her clothes, her own texture in the world. I saw her growing Tamsin again around that last poor fragment of herself, until she was facing me, as solid looking as him, with her wide eyes full of what I’d just told her. She didn’t speak, but she knew me. She knew us both.
Behind me Judge Jeffreys whispered, “No matter. It begins again.”
“Oh, no, it doesn’t,” I said. I turned around to say it right into his delicate, sad, handsome face. “No, it doesn’t, because she knows now. Finally, she knows what she’s supposed to do, and she’ll fight the Wild Hunt and you to do it. And I’m going to help her. You’ll never get near her again, not if you hang around another three hundred years. You’ve had your shot.”
“My shot?” He laughed outright then, for the first time. I wonder if I’m the only person in history who ever heard Judge Jeffreys laugh. He said, “Fool, what need for me to wait another hour, when all that woman’s immortal soul yearns to lose itself in mine a thousand times more than it yearns for heaven? This is the moment she was born for, and nor you nor Edric Davies, nor any multitude of devils like you will keep Tamsin Willoughby from her destiny. Behold it now.”
He stretched his left arm out toward her and he beckoned. He didn’t say a word, just crooked his forefinger once, smiling that sleeping-snake smile of his. Miss Sophia Brown opened her mouth for what must have been the longest, most despairing cat wail I never heard. Mister Cat pressed as close against her as he could, considering that she wasn’t there, trying to comfort her. And Tamsin vanished.
For a moment my insides fell off the World Trade Center, because I thought that was it—all over, all over—I thought she’d merged with him, her tender ghost-light lost forever in his endless night. But then I saw the look on Judge Jeffreys’s face, and I heard the wordless sound he made, and I wheezed, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I scooped up Mister Cat, and I danced through that potato field with him—and I’d even have tried to pick up Miss Sophia Brown, too, but she’d disappeared the instant Tamsin did. She probably wouldn’t have cared for being half-strangled and waltzed with, anyway. Mister Cat loved it.
And Judge Jeffreys came completely unglued, as though he were back in his court with a whole gang of Monmouth’s rebels facing him, instead of just me and Mister Cat. It was a Rumplestiltskin fit, a Wicked Witch of the West tantrum; it was Captain Hook dithering between rage and panic, slashing the guts out of the nearest pirate at hand. “Devils, devils—devils, imps, demons and cacodemons! I am God’s own, and by the holy names of Jesus and His Father, I charge you—back, back to your burning cesspools, back to your stinking pits of abomination, back to your eternal filth and vileness! Tamsin Willoughby is mine to me, and not all Hell itself shall keep us from being joined as we were destined to be joined! Not all the loathsome might of Hell shall keep me from her!”
You don’t have to believe in Hell. All you need is to hear someone who really does, who believes in it this minute, today, the way people believed in 1685—all you have to do is see his face, hear his voice when he says the word… and then you know that anyone who can imagine Hell has the power to make it real for other people. I don’t mean I understood any of that right then—just barely do now—but at that instant I understood Judge Jeffreys, and why I ought to be even more frightened of him, dead or alive, than I’d known to be. There’s a lot to be said for never quite grasping the situation.
Then it was gone, that one flash of comprehension—and so was he, with his last words hanging in the air like the burned-out skeleton of fireworks—and I was running for the Manor, still hugging Mister Cat against my chest, knowing beyond any doubt where Tamsin had to be, and knowing that he knew, too.
Twenty-five
Except that we were both wrong.
She wasn’t anywhere in the Manor—and by now I knew how to search that house. He must have been searching, too, though I never saw him. The billy-blind said he wouldn’t be able to come into Roger Willoughby’s secret room—anyway, that’s what it had sounded like he was saying—but the billy-blind hadn’t just seen Judge Jeffreys beckoning Tamsin to her doom, commanding her with no more magic than her name. I wasn’t about to assume there was anything Judge Jeffreys couldn’t do.
But there was a whole lot I couldn’t do. I couldn’t ask anyone for help—not even Meena, not with things gone this hairy—and I couldn’t lurk and slide around home looking as though I were trying to rescue a ghost from a crazy ghost judge who’d somehow condemned her boyfriend to being chased across the sky forever by a howling pack of ghost huntsmen. There is no really good time or way to break something like this to sensible people like Sally and Evan and—all right—Tony. Julian was weird enough to believe me, but he was also entirely weird enough to wind up running the Wild Hunt. Master of the Hounds, or whatever. Uh-uh.
And I couldn’t go to Mrs. Fallowfield, either. That was my first impulse—after all, she’d shown me what had happened to poor Edric Davies, which I’d never have found out if she hadn’t let me see the Wild Hunt with her eyes. But I didn’t dare assume that she was on my side, or on Tamsin’s, or anyone else’s but her own. The one thing I knew for sure about Mrs. Fallowfield was that I couldn’t take one thing about her for granted.
I didn’t tell Meena about Edric, but I did tell her about Tamsin’s face-off with Judge Jeffreys. Meena was too smart to be optimistic: She knew way too much about Indian ghosts. She said, “Jenny, you must be so careful, more careful than ever. Now it’s not just Tamsin—now it’s personal. He will harm you if he can.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Exactly what I needed to hear.” But Meena looked so worried that I told her, “I don’t think either of us are going to see her again, him or me. I think she’s broken free of him, and free of the Manor, too. I really do think that was it.”
Which I didn’t think for a minute, but Meena seemed to feel better, so I felt better. But what I knew was that this time I couldn’t afford to wait for Judge Jeffreys to locate Tamsin, the way I’d been doing. This time I had to get to her before he did, and the only edge I had was that I knew Tamsin better than he did. Or I thought so, anyway, but maybe I was totally wrong about that, too—maybe I didn’t, couldn’t, mean any more to her than any other unreal figure in this half-dream world she’d lingered in. But I had to believe I did; and I had to believe that if dead, mad Judge Jeffreys could call Tamsin to him, so could I. I just had to find the right place and the perfect moment. And the words.
It took a while. The secret room wasn’t it—I had a sense that Tamsin wouldn’t ever come back to that room—and no other place in the house felt right. I was going to have to find the one spot in the seven hundred acres of Stourhead Farm where the daughter of Roger Willoughby might choose to make her stand. Because she wasn’t running from Judge Jeffreys, not this time. She was going after Edric Davies—she was going to find Edric and rescue him from the Wild Hunt, whatever it took, however she could. Like I said, it took me a while to understand, but once I did, then I knew where she’d be.
A lot of stuff got in the way of my finding her, though. It’s funny now, but at the time I was at least half-convinced that it was all Judge Jeffreys’s doing, all the delays and distractions that landed on me together right then. School was starting again, for one thing, and there was farm work to help out with almost every day—hoeing and singling, mostly. (That was one thing about Evan’s new no-till system—the weeds were crazy about it, especially thistles.) And Tony picked that time to use me again as a sort of dressmaker’s dummy for some new dance; and Julian got left off his form’s cricket team and tagged after me more than ever, being miserable and making mournful plans to blow up the school. I talked him down to a scheme involving piranhas in the water supply, but it was so complicated that I think he lost interest. I think.