I saw her, you know. did. Probably partly because of the way ghosts change when they remember something that intensely—but I’ll swear forever that it was more than that. Her eyes were brighter than I’d ever seen them, bright as flowers in moonlight, and she was there in them, three hundred years before—she was on the stairs in this same house, so frightened she could hardly stand up, and so wildly happy, and so brave. It was there still, that moment, in her own eyes.
“But you didn’t go to meet him? What happened?” My voice sounded like a dry little cricket chirp, far away. The room had grown darker; or maybe that was Tamsin’s brightness gathering— I don’t know. I thought she’d take a long time answering me, but she didn’t.
“I did set forth to meet Edric,” she said. “But he was not the one I met.” Miss Sophia Brown appeared on her lap half a second before Mister Cat eased through the window and poured himself into mine. They were both looking very pleased about one cat thing or another, and promptly settled down to washing each other’s faces. Tamsin said, “I had taken but a dozen steps beyond my doorstep when he was there. Smiling, bowing over my hand, murmuring that he should be properly disappointed to find my family gone from home, but could not, so enchanted was he at this chance to speak with me in sweet solitude.” Her voice had dropped into a nasty dry whisper, like insect wings rubbing together, and she kept going back and forth between that voice and her own as she talked.
“I told him that my parents would return quite soon, and that he might await them within and welcome. He answers me, nay, but he’ll pass our farm quite by and rate such hospitality poor stuff indeed if I’d not bide him company a while. And truly he means more by that than the mere words. There’s naught in England to hinder him from declaring my father Monmouth’s fellow and agent—naught but his fancy for me, and well he knew I knew it. We looked each other in the eyes, Jenny, and both of us knew all.”
She laughed suddenly, which spooked me about as much as if she’d cursed or screamed. “Aye, there was a droll moment, if you will, set snug in horror like a currant into a Yorkshire pudding. I told him I was in the habit of my evening stroll, and he replied on the instant, he was bound to convoy me, to see me safe from just such vile rebels as he’d that day been sending by the score to meet their black Master in hell. And ere I could speak, there’s my arm tight through his, and him guiding me down the path to the byre where Edric waits for me.” She looked at me as though she’d just now remembered I was there, and she smiled, almost mockingly. “As good as a play, is’t not, Jenny?”
And it was that, all right. I couldn’t speak for seeing her: alone, arm in arm with that soft-eyed monster, him bending down to her, breathing on her, moving her along… and her unsuspecting lover in the cowshed: a rebel himself, or the next thing to it. I just about managed to croak out, like Julian, “What did you do?”
“Do? I did nothing—a blessed wet rock did it all. The rain had begun—my ankle turned—I fell, drawing him down with me.” The laugh was closer to a gasp this time, as though she was falling again, right there. “He bore me back to the house, arranging me on a couch, and propping up my ankle, tender as a nurse—indeed, I believe he would have salved and bandaged me, had I let him. And all the while crooning to me, vowing he’s never been so ensorcelled, and I must truly be a witch, and he knows what to do with witches. And then he laughs, to show ‘twas all meant as lovetalk. I think it was, Jenny. God’s mercy, but I think so.”
She stood up, pushing Miss Sophia Brown off her lap (the Persian reacted just as indignantly as though she’d been a real cat), and walked to my window. I’ll always wonder what she saw, standing with her back to me, looking out into one night or another. I could see the moon through her left shoulder.
“He spoke to me of marriage,” she said quietly. “Marriage and hanging—the same voice, the same passion, ’twas all one to that man. Oh, aye, he was already wed, but what of that? his wife was rotten with consumption, unlikely to last the year. I would be a baroness, the lady wife of the Lord Chief Justice, living a life as far above this jumped-up croft as it would be above a shepherd’s hut. Land, society, horses, servants—and him merely the first among those, ever at my side, as now, asking only my love and approval.” She turned, and when she smiled this time I saw the crooked wolf tooth. “Oh, it does come back in your presence, my Jenny,” she said, “it comes back. There was a reason the cats brought you to me.”
“And all that time you were worrying about Edric,” I said. “He was carrying on, proposing to you and everything, and you must have been just frantic, thinking about Edric—”
Tamsin laughed a third time, and this one came out dry and small and rueful. “Oh, aye—nor was I the only one. For of a sudden, between this fond word and that, Judge Jeffreys’s hands were gripping my arms like fetters, and his face was kissing-close to mine so I could only see his eyes—his great, gentle, terrible eyes. His lips did hardly move when he spoke to me again, saying, ‘And as for that twangling fool in the cowshed, you need have no dismay on his score. He never purposed to wait your coming, but was gone from there ere you had set out. And I know this, Mistress Willoughby, because I passed that way coming here.’ His hands on me, Jenny. I cannot feel, and yet I feel them now.”
I felt them myself. I said, “He knew? About Edric and Francis Gollop and everything?”
“He knew,” Tamsin said. “He held me there, and he told me what he knew, and told me further what fate Edric and my father merited, who had knowingly harbored a damned rebel against His Majesty James II—aye, and even dared remove the body for the Christian burial it had forfeited, in direct violation of the King’s own command. Oh, Jenny, Jenny, it comes back.”
How can I write what she looked like—my Tamsin—made so bright by her own memory, and cringing away from it at the same time? She said, “He went on, on, half raving, half singing—now swearing eternal adoration, now threatening horror to my entire family if I were denied him. After a time I but half heard him, Jenny, so hard was I listening for my father’s returning—and for Edric as well, come at last to carry me safe away. But there was no one, and the rain fell harder.”
I couldn’t just sit still. I dumped Mister Cat, stood up and went to her, standing as close—kissing-close, she’d called it—as maybe the Judge had been that day; so close that the ghost-glimmer seemed to fall right on me, like moonlight. Tamsin touched my hair, but I couldn’t feel it.
“I ran,” she said. “The moment those hands loosened on me in the slightest, I was up and out, splashing and sliding toward the cow byre once again, for I would never credit that Edric had abandoned me. Behind me I hear him calling furiously, but I dare not look back, hard as it was to keep my balance on the wet stones. I fall, I fell—the ankle turns grievously under me a second time— and I was near crawling when at last I reached the byre.” She turned away, back toward the window. There hadn’t been any rain that day, but the buildings and fences and bits of machinery I could see were all glinting in the moon like new grass.
Tamsin said, “Edric was not there. My portmanteau was there still—and his traveling bag beside it—but not he. I stand in the rain, holding to the byre door, staring and staring within—and then I truly run, Jenny, lame ankle and all. I cannot say where I ran, for my wits were as gone from me as Edric, whose name I shrieked into the storm until I fell. This time—or perhaps the next, or the next—I lay where I’d fallen.”