“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.”