It took forever for Meena and me to get into Dorchester together, until we managed to arrange to meet her father at the university for dinner. That gave us time to have tea by ourselves at the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant, and we stood in front of the portrait of Tamsin for a long time, neither of us saying a word.
“Is that really how she looks?” Meena’s voice was very quiet and young.
“Yes,” I said, “exactly. Except sometimes, when she forgets.”
We didn’t say anything more for some while after that, and then Meena said, “There’s somebody else.”
I said, “What? No, there isn’t. Where?”
Meena pointed. The painter had posed Tamsin in a chair with a tall, narrow back and no armrests. There was a small table to her right, with a book open on it, and to her left a bigger table with some kind of beaker made of copper, or even gold; the painting was too old and dirty to be sure. Meena said, “Look at that. Closely, Jenny.”
In the surface of the beaker—and you had to squint to be sure it wasn’t one more smudge on the canvas—I could just dimly make out a face. Only part of a face, really, but I didn’t need more than a part. I felt my hand at my mouth, though I couldn’t remember how it got there.
“He’s in the portrait,” Meena said. “The painter put him in.”
I didn’t waste time saying no, no, impossible, it couldn’t be. It was him, all right. Maybe the painter thought it helped the composition somehow; more likely he did it out of flattery; most likely Judge Jeffreys ordered him to do it, and who was going to refuse? But why did the Judge—the Other One—why did he want to be in Tamsin’s portrait? The man might have been completely loose in the flue, but when it came to Tamsin he didn’t do anything without a reason. So we just stood there, Meena and I, looking and wondering, while our tea got cold.
On our way out of the café to meet Mr. Chari, we ran into Mrs. Fallowfield. I was always running into Mrs. Fallowfield back then. She lived alone on a tiny farm not far from ours, mostly growing apples, pears, cherries, and I think walnuts. How she managed everything by herself, nobody could quite figure, but she never hired anyone to help with the harvest, or with the grafting and fertilizing either. A tall, skinny woman who could have been sixty or ninety-five, all knobby bones and bundles of gristly muscle, with no lips—just a down-curving slash, like a shark—and bright, hard blue eyes. She wore jeans, thick woolen shirts, and army boots, winter and summer, and she always had a kind of Russian fur cap crammed on her head, rain or shine, summer or winter. With earflaps.
I didn’t like her much, but Mrs. Fallowfield liked me, in her extremely weird way. The reason for that was that one time the yippy little dog she always carried in a pocket of her duffel coat—it looked like a kind of pink possum with mange—got lost and wound up at Stourhead Farm, with Albert the collie about to turn him into dog jerky. Albert’s very territorial. I scooped the nasty thing up—it bit the hell out of my finger—and took it home to Sally, who called Mrs. Fallowfield, and she came right over and got it. I still remember shivering to see it scuttle up her sleeve like a mouse and dive into her pocket. I’d never seen a dog do that before.
“Thank ’ee,” she said to me. “I wun’t forget.” And God knows she didn’t. She kept turning up, from then on, in the fields, or stumping along a back road or a Dorchester street—where she didn’t belong any more than a boggart would have—or crossing our land to check out Evan’s no-till technique. And somehow she’d always come by at just the right time to stop me and ask how I was doing in school, or how a city girl was getting along on a Dorset farm these days. Her voice went with the rest of her: It sounded like chunks of coal rattling down a chute. But I’d stand and answer her questions as politely as I could. I was always polite to Mrs. Fallowfield.
This time she just grunted, “Nut seen you in here before, I han’t. Who’s this one?”
I introduced Meena. Mrs. Fallowfield gave her one swift up-and-down sweep with those small blue eyes, but didn’t say anything. I said, “We go to school together. We were just in for tea. Very nice tea. Great scones.”
Mrs. Fallowfield’s dog—or whatever—stuck its head out of her coat pocket and yipped at me. I’d saved his miserable life, and he hated my guts from that day. She scratched his head with a hairy forefinger, tilting her head and squinting sideways at me. She said, “Been looking at ’er.” It wasn’t a question.
“Her,” I said. “Yes. Never saw that picture before. We were supposed to study it for class.” I’m a really stupid liar when I’m nervous, but that’s the only time I lie.
Mrs. Fallowfield said harshly, “Right bad ’un, she was. Family suffered untold grief, along of that girl.”
I wasn’t having that. I didn’t know I wasn’t having that until I heard myself saying, “That is not true.” Meena says I turned absolutely white, which would be a change anyway. I said, “Tamsin Willoughby loved her family! She never did anything to harm them! She was the one who suffered, and she’s still suffering, and you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” I didn’t even realize what I’d done until I saw Meena’s face, I was that angry.
Mrs. Fallowfield didn’t answer me. Instead she smiled, which I’d never seen her do before—I’m not sure anybody ever had, from the work her face muscles had to do to squeeze out a kind of pained twitch around her mouth. But it wasn’t a mean smile, and the blue eyes seemed somehow larger for a moment. Just as hard, but maybe a little larger. Then she turned her head and said something to Meena—not in English—and Meena’s mouth fell open, and Mrs. Fallowfield clumped on into the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant.
“What was she speaking?” I demanded. “What language was that?”
“Tamil,” Meena said faintly. “With a Madras accent.”
“What did she say?” Meena shook her head, and then she smiled a little bit herself, almost like Mrs. Fallowfield.
“She said, ‘Keep an eye on her.’ ” I waited. Meena blushed—she can’t even lie by omission. “Actually, she didn’t say her. She said, ‘Keep an eye on that child—she’s not fit to be let out alone.’ But she wasn’t making fun of you, I’m sure she wasn’t. There was something else, something about her.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Let’s go meet your dad.”
I kept going back to the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant whenever I was in Dorchester. Mostly I was with Sally, but she came for tea, and I was there to stare at that portrait of Tamsin. I got to the point where I literally knew every brush stroke that made up that painting, from the hundreds of fussy little ones that created the highlights in her hair and every detail of her gown, to the half dozen or so that put Judge Jeffreys on that gold beaker, watching Tamsin forever with his mild, tender eyes. I wasn’t looking for anything exactly—I was waiting for the picture to tell me something, which is different. And it did tell me something terribly important, but I didn’t understand. I couldn’t possibly have understood then, but I still think I should have.
Tamsin couldn’t tell me a thing, of course. All she remembered of the painting sessions was Edric, and Edric’s music—she didn’t even know that Judge Jeffreys was in the portrait, too, and I could see her forgetting it almost as soon as I’d told her. I actually thought of bringing Tony to look at it, because of him knowing so much about Dorset history, but I decided against risking his curiosity. As for asking the Pooka or the billy-blind… no, there wouldn’t be any point to that. The Pooka was right—it was my problem, my business. And I hadn’t a clue.