The weather got warmer, even in Dorset. Wheat and barley, corn and peas and hay were popping up in Evan’s unplowed fields, fruit trees were blossoming overnight, and Meena and I had to start dodging football and field hockey again. Mister Cat was shedding his first real winter coat all over my room (he’d never needed to grow one in New York), and swaggered Stourhead Farm like Roger Willoughby. Sally finally got her first vocal student, in Frampton; Tony actually found a ballet class in Dorchester started up by a retired, slightly alcoholic Sadler’s Wells dancer; and Julian the Mad Scientist discovered what happens when you run experiments involving the electrical conductivity of water in the Male Faculty toilets at Sherborne Boys. Evan yelled at him about it, but it made him a celebrity for the rest of the term, and I was proud to be his sister.
Me, I went to see Guy Guthrie again, to ask if it seemed the least bit odd to him, Judge Jeffreys’s face being reflected in Tamsin Willoughby’s portrait. But the most even he could tell me was that the thing had always had a strange sort of reputation, almost from the time it was painted. “Maybe it’s owing to her dying so soon after, or perhaps it does have to do with Jeffreys—hard to say these days, when he’s become such a cash crop for Dorchester. In any case, the last Willoughby left it for the Lovells, and the Lovells gave it to the Restaurant.” He chuckled suddenly. “Very nearly the day it opened, as I recall.”
I said they certainly didn’t take much care of it, and Mr. Guthrie nodded agreement. He said slowly, “They’re afraid of it, too, I think, but they don’t know why. They won’t put it upstairs, in the Lodgings—they keep it in shadow, they never clean it, and I think they’d leave it for the dustman tomorrow, if they could. But it’s Dorset history, it’s part of the atmosphere they sell—they can’t quite make themselves get rid of it. I don’t know whether that’s any use to you, Jenny, but it’s the best I can do.”
Well, it was and it wasn’t. It convinced me that I was right to feel the weird way I did about the portrait, but it didn’t get me any closer to understanding why. So I finally gave up on it, and on the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant, and on anybody being much help to me but me. And I went looking for Tamsin.
It was still chilly to be walking out at night, but there wasn’t much choice if I wanted to be with her, restive and fretful as she’d become. No more sitting in her chair, both asleep and awake, decades at a time—now she was truly haunting the Manor, wandering endlessly, upstairs and down, leaving a hint of vanilla in the laundry, or the Arctic Circle, or Sally’s music room; giving Julian scary, bewildering dreams and giving Evan a sense of being constantly followed in the fields by something he didn’t want to turn around and see. Tony complained to me that lately he couldn’t concentrate in his studio well enough to choreograph jumping jacks for a Phys Ed class. He blamed me for it, which figured.
As for Sally… Sally just watched me and didn’t say much. It’s taken a long time for me to realize that I’d probably never have learned how smart that woman is if we hadn’t moved to England. She knew something was going on, and she knew me, and she almost felt the connection somewhere. She’d have understood Tamsin better than I ever did, my mother.
One flukey warm evening in May, I spotted Tamsin from a distance, whisking across a cornfield like a scrap of laundry blown off a clothesline. When I ran to catch up with her and she turned to face me, for a moment I was more frightened than the Oakmen could have made me. She was tattered, as though dogs had been tearing at her, ripping away her memories of herself. There were holes between shoulder and breast, I remember, and another one gaping below her waist… and you couldn’t see through them—there was nothing on the other side. I read about black holes now, where comets and planets and all the light in the universe get sucked in forever, and I think of those holes in Tamsin.
“Who are you?” Her voice was like a wind over my own grave.
“It’s me,” I said. Squeaked. “Tamsin, it’s me, it’s Jenny. Don’t you remember?”
She didn’t, not at all, not at first. Her eyes were still Tamsin’s bluegreen eyes, practically the one undamaged thing about her, but I wasn’t there. And I was twice as scared then, feeling myself being drawn into those black holes, and all I could think of was to squeak out those first lines of the song her sister Maria had taught her:
Nothing… and then—very, very slowly—she came back. It’s hard to describe now. It isn’t that she became clear and whole and solid, recognizing me, because she didn’t; what happened was that the old transparency returned, little by little, until you could see irrigation pipes and skinny young cornstalks through her, and I was as overjoyed as if she’d come back to me in the flesh. The holes—or whatever they really were—faded as her memories knitted themselves back together; when she looked at me again, her eyes took me in, and she smiled.
“Mistress Jenny,” she said. “I’faith, but how much older you’ve grown since last we met.” It hadn’t been that long at all, though I surely felt a deal older than I had when I’d run after her. “Jenny, did I know you at first? You must tell me truly.”
“No,” I said. “Not right away.” Tamsin was already nodding. I said, “What is this? What’s happening to you?”
She wouldn’t quite look at me, and that was just about more than I could bear. I held my hands out to her, which was something we’d gradually begun to use as sign language for a hug. I didn’t think she’d remember, but she put her own hands out, slowly. She whispered, “I do not know. It comes on me often now.”
“There’s a reason,” I said. “There has to be. Something’s happening, and maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe it means you’re breaking loose, about to get out of here at last. To go wherever you’re supposed to be.” But I said it pretty lamely, because I was afraid it was true, and it’s hard to sound encouraging about something you hope isn’t going to happen. Even if you’re ashamed of yourself.
Tamsin shook her head. “I would know if that were so. This is far other, this is a rending such as I have not known, and each time there’s less of me comes back able to say where I have been.” It was turning chilly: A little wind blew through her, and I smelled her vanilla and the musty scent of the green corn together. Tamsin said, “Jenny, I am afraid.”
“I’ll help you,” I said. “I will. We’ll stay together, I’ll watch you every minute, some way, so any time it starts coming over you, I’ll be there, I’ll remind you.” But it was crazy, and we both knew it. Tamsin didn’t say anything. I said, “It’s my turn to make dinner,” and we started back toward the Manor, but she vanished before we were out of the cornfield. I called her name, and I thought she answered me in the wind, but if she did, I never caught a word.
The cornfield was pretty near the Manor—I could see the lights and both chimneys from where I stood—but with Tamsin gone the house seemed as far away as New York, and with a deeper, colder sea between me and it. I wasn’t scared, but I was afraid that I was going to be, so I walked fast—not running—and I kept telling myself that I’d be home in a minute, in a warm kitchen with people all around me and Sally pissed because I was late. And I was practically on top of the Black Dog before I saw him.
I can feel him now, most of the time, the way Tamsin could. It’s a little like smelling rain a whole day away, or like knowing the phone’s going to ring. But then he was just there in front of me, where he hadn’t been a second before: big as a Harley-Davidson, and so black there has to be another word for it; people just call him the Black Dog because they don’t know the real word. Nothing—not a cave, a mine, not the bottom of the ocean, not even deep space—is the color of the Black Dog.