I couldn’t say anything, and she didn’t speak again for a long while. “ ‘Twas the Pooka found me, else I’d have stopped there. He’d taken the guise of my brother Hugh, but I remember yet those yellow eyes looking down at me as he carried me home. My mother put me to bed.”
Saying that, she suddenly realized that I was standing barefoot beside her, and she got really upset, almost angry with me. “Get into bed yourself, child, at once! Am I to have you catching a chill and dying of it”—and that was the one time she used the word— “as I did? That I’ll not have.” Just the way she’d said it to the Pooka when she came flying to rescue me. In the middle of everything, I was absolutely thrilled.
“That’s how it happened,” I said. “It really is like my story, sort of.”
Tamsin blinked in puzzlement at that, but she went on talking. “I lingered some days—just how long, I cannot say, for they swam all around me, the days, in and out, like fish. My parents and brothers were always at my bedside, whenever I should open my eyes; and he came every day, his labors at the Assizes done, to clasp my hand and gaze tenderly upon me by the hour. But my mother made sure never to leave me alone with him, dread him as she might, for she guessed something of what had passed between us. Indeed, it was he who was nearest when I drew my last breath in this world.”
I’d gotten into bed by then, and she meant to sit on the edge, but she couldn’t do it. It was as though she’d suddenly forgotten sitting, forgotten what bodies have to do so they can sit down on a bed, or in her own chair in her little secret room. She looked frightened—anyway, I think she did, because she was beginning to fade, and it was hard to be sure. I said, “Tell me. Tell me what you remember.” Because I knew it was important, though I couldn’t have said why, not then.
She tried to tell me. “He spoke,” she said. “He leaned close—for a moment he was Edric, but the eyes… the eyes betrayed him…” Like the Pooka again, I thought weirdly. Tamsin said, “He whispered to me. He took both my hands in one of his, and he leaned over me, and he whispered…”
And she was gone.
I couldn’t even call after her, for fear of waking someone. But I couldn’t just fluff my pillow and crash, even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, because I knew what I’d dream. So I sat up and hugged my knees—and Julian’s gorilla—and I thought about things until morning came.
Twenty-one
Spring came the way it does in Dorset, like a really small child hiding behind a curtain to pounce out at the grown-up world for a moment, and then dash right back into cover. Tony’s mustache actually took hold, and Julian quit sleeping with the stuffed turtle that was Elvis’ successor. The first no-till crops looked promising—although Evan kept warning us and the Lovells that there’d probably be a yield hit this year, until the soil got used to the new regime. But when he spaded up a chunk of black dirt, it crumbled pretty easily in his hand, and there were a lot of earthworms, which even I know is a good sign. Evan said it was too stiff by half, wouldn’t be proper for a couple of years yet, but he looked happy.
The April nights were way too cold to go walking with Tamsin, so I mostly went to her room (which was cold enough—we didn’t have any heating in the east wing then), or in Tony’s studio, where she used to watch him practicing and sigh now and then: a long, liquid, three-hundred-year-old adolescent sigh that used to embarrass me even more than it made me jealous. Tony never heard it, never noticed it at all, and tried really hard not to notice me. I envied him his gift and his devotion, and I envied him Tamsin’s worship; but for once that seemed to be happening far away, in some other region of myself. I had bigger, scarier fish to fry.
She didn’t remember a single word that Judge Jeffreys had said to her on her deathbed. She didn’t even remember a lot of the things she’d already told me; that’s how hard she shrank away from thinking about that man, three centuries later. I made things worse because I kept asking her if it could have had anything to do with Edric Davies. Because I couldn’t get rid of the idea that Judge Jeffreys might have met him at the cow byre on his way to the Manor to make his awful proposal to Tamsin. And Edric might have been younger, and maybe even stronger, but he wouldn’t have stood a chance. I knew that much.
It took me a while to understand that what she did remember was her desperate anger at Edric for not being there when she scrambled up that rainsoaked path, not coming to protect her when those hands were pinning her arms. She felt it still, that anger, but by now it was all mixed up with three hundred years’ worth of regret and confusion and fear—three hundred years of never knowing. Guy Guthrie says that there are ghosts who go mad after their deaths. I don’t know why Tamsin didn’t.
That cow byre isn’t there, of course—nothing left but a kind of impression of the floor. I’d never have found it if Tamsin hadn’t guided me out there one afternoon when I should have been helping Sally in her garden. There wasn’t anything to look at, but I stood still for a long time, trying to see into the past the way Tamsin did. But I couldn’t find a foothold, a place to begin imagining… except maybe one thing. The wild grasses had long since taken the place back comphetely; all but a single small area, about the size of a bath mat, bare and bald as a brick. I pointed it out to Tamsin, and she said it was right where the door had been— maybe a few inches inside and to the right. Some things she remembered like a photograph after all the years. I just couldn’t ever be sure which they’d be.
“Seems weird, the grass not growing in that one place,” I said. “I wonder what would cause that.”
“My mother says—” Tamsin began. She stopped herself, and then she said it again, very deliberately. “My mother says that nothing will grow where a murderer lies. Or where a virgin has been martyred—for she inclines just a bit to papistry on some points, does my mother. Or where the Wild Hunt has set foot.”
I froze on the spot—it actually felt as though hands had reached out of the tall grass and grabbed my ankles. The whole notion of those mad, laughing horsemen wheeling down from the night sky, leaping to earth, stalking this ground where I stood, where Tamsin Willoughby had come running desperately to find her man… to find what? You’d think seeing the Wild Hunt close to would be something that stayed with you, but Tamsin went completely blank on that—all she remembered was Edric’s absence and the Pooka carrying her home. But I kept standing in that empty place, staring at the patch where nothing grew.
On the first halfway warm weekend Meena and I went on a picnic. Julian wanted to come, but he also wanted to go to a big football match in Dorchester, and football won. Meena brought an Indian box lunch for the two of us, and I chipped in Sally’s stuffed mushrooms, which Meena adores, and a thermos of iced coffee. We got started late, because Dr. Chari had an emergency to handle at the Yeovil hospital before she could bring Meena, so Sally told us not to worry about getting back, as long as we were home for dinner. She did want to know where we’d be picnicking, and I told her probably around the Hundred-Acre Wood. Not in—not after that first time—but somewhere around.
It’s a good hike to the Hundred-Acre Wood: uphill, pretty much, but not too uphill, and the path mostly runs through land that probably hasn’t been cultivated since Roger Willoughby’s time. All kinds of berries growing wild, and some elm and ash trees that look even older than Tamsin’s beeches, and a lot of snug little dells just perfect for spreading out the tablecloth and unrolling the mats. Meena sang songs from Indian movies as we walked. She says they’re incredibly silly, but I’m getting so I like them. After that we sang practically the entire score of My Fair Lady.