So between one damn thing and another, it seemed a lot like forever until I was finally free to go search for Tamsin. By then I was out-and-out frantic—and unable to let anyone see it—because there was not only no reason why Judge Jeffreys wouldn’t have thought of the same place, there was one major hell of a reason why he would have. I hadn’t seen him since the shootout in the potato field, but ten angels could have sworn that he’d left town on the two-fifteen train, and I wouldn’t have believed them. For all I knew, he was shadowing me this time; so there was something else driving me to that ruin of a seventeenth-century cow byre, with nothing remaining but a bald scorch mark near where the door had been. Because that was what it was, I knew it for sure now: the footprint of the Wild Hunt, called down by Judge Jeffreys to hound Edric Davies far from Tamsin Willoughby, if he survived at all. That was where they found him waiting for her, as he’d promised he would.
And that was where I went to find Tamsin, one evening after dinner, with everything anyone could possibly stick me with out of the way. Sally stopped me, all the same—I was actually opening the door when she called to me, “Take a brolly, it’s going to rain.”
“No, it’s not,” I called back. “Ellie John says it’s not, and she always knows.”
“Take it anyway—do me a favor.” Sally came close and put her hand lightly on my arm. “Where are you off to?”
“No place special. just walking around, to clear my head. I’ll be back soon.”
“You’ve been doing a lot of that,” Sally said quietly. “Clearing your head. Is everything all right?”
I don’t get great whopping visions and insights into the human condition—I don’t think I’m made like that—but for one moment I did have an image of thousands, millions of mothers all over the world asking their daughters the same question at that same moment. I said, “Fine, I’m fine, really,” and Sally said, “Don’t be out too long, I don’t care what Ellie John says,” and I said, “Right,” and I practically ran out of the house, in such a hurry that I forgot to take the umbrella. It wouldn’t have helped.
Tamsin was exactly where I thought she’d be, though I couldn’t make her out right away. She sat huddled like a sad little girl in what would have been a far corner of the cow byre: All there, all fully present—not like she’d been when Judge Jeffreys was dragging her into him—but so transparent that I felt I could see through her all the way to Mrs. Fallowfield’s house among the elders, or all the way to the seventeenth century… It was a warm night, and very still, but there was heat lightning sputtering on the horizon.
She knew me when she saw me. She said softly, “Mistress Jennifer. So you are come.”
“Jenny,” I said. “No Mistress, no Jennifer. Just Jenny.” I went and sat down next to her, I said, “Yes, I’m come. And we’re going to talk about what happened on the night that Edric Davies didn’t come for you.”
Tamsin shivered—or maybe that was a breeze rising. She said, “Jenny. I know what you did. Until you called to me, I was lost, truly lost beyond your imagining. While I remember anything, I will remember—”
“Never mind that,” I said. “Do you remember what I called? What I told you?”
She didn’t reply for a few moments, and when she did, her voice was very low. “That the Wild Hunt… that they took him. Yes, I know—I know that must have happened, and who it was summoned the Huntsmen—”
I interrupted her again. “This isn’t about Judge Jeffreys—I don’t think so, anyway. Yes, he’s a bad guy, he’s a psychopath, he’s the only real monster I’ve ever met, and somehow he learned how to sic the Wild Hunt on a rival like Edric Davies. But that would just have been for one night, and Edric’s out there still, running the way he’s been running from the Hunt, night after night for three hundred years. Do you understand me?” Because I couldn’t be sure she was taking any of it in, sitting there so wide-eyed. “No way Judge Jeffreys could have done that to him—that took somebody else. Somebody with more power than Jeffreys, a kind of power Jeffreys never had in his whole rotten life. Do you understand?” Tamsin didn’t move or answer me.
“I used to go nuts,” I said, “drive myself absolutely crazy, trying to figure out what Judge Jeffreys could possibly have whispered to you when you were… you know, at the last. Then I got to wondering about you—if you maybe said something to him.” I waited, but she didn’t say anything, so I just plunged ahead, point-blank. “Do you remember? It’s really important, it might explain everything. Even a couple of words.”
No answer, no sense that she was trying to remember a thing more than she wanted to. And suddenly I was really pissed at her, Tamsin or no Tamsin. I shouted at her. I said, “Damn it, you owe me a damn effort! I’m knocking myself out to help you learn the truth, even though I don’t want to, because once you do learn, you’ll go wherever you go, and I’ll never see you again. But I’m doing it anyway, because it’s the right thing for you, and I love you. Now you think, and you think hard, and you help me for a change!” I could have cut my tongue out, even while I was yelling, but I only stopped because of what was happening to her face.
When people write about living people facing up to something shocking, some awful memory that’s just come back to them, they always have them turn pale, bloodless, or else they get weak-kneed and have to sit down, or press their hands against their mouths and start to cry. Tamsin didn’t do any of that, and it wasn’t that her face got twisted with horror or distorted with fear, like in books. Tamsin’s face stopped, the way she always talked about herself stopping. I’d seen her go really still at times, but that softly pulsing ghost-light would be there, if you knew how to look. But this was different, this was something so else I don’t think anybody’s yet got the right words for it. They just call it the stillness of death.
“O, Jenny,” she said. “O, Jenny.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t breathe.
“O, Jenny,” Tamsin said. “I cursed him. I cursed my love.”
I was the one who began to tremble, the one who put her fingers to her dry, cold mouth. There was a half-moon rising behind clouds. The wind was definitely picking up, and I could smell rain. Tamsin said, “Jenny, I remember.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t, you don’t have to, I’m sorry.”
But she didn’t hear me. “I was in such despair. I so needed him to be there—to be here, where we are—and he was not, and he had sworn, sworn to me… And I was frightened, Jenny—frightened of being abandoned to Judge Jeffreys, frightened of such things as he might do to my family—and then I was sick and all a-fevered, and truly not in my proper senses. Jenny, my Jenny, I remember.”