And I can’t believe—not now—that any ghost could do what he was out to do: just assimilate, just consume another ghost, take another spirit into itself. But I don’t know the rules now any better than I did then, and I don’t want to know. All I’m saying is that back in that potato patch, with the sun going down and Tamsin dwindling to nothing while I looked on, I believed him. If I hadn’t believed him, maybe I’d never have thought to do what I did. I’ve wondered a lot about that.
I caught the tiniest glimmer of a white dress out of the corner of my eye, and I turned away from him and called out—and there wasn’t much more left of my voice than there was of Tamsin—“He gave Edric Davies to the Wild Hunt! That’s what happened, that’s why Edric couldn’t meet you! The Wild Hunt’s got him!”
Nothing happened. Nothing happened to me, anyway, though that wasn’t Judge Jeffreys’s fault. For one instant I saw him as he must have looked in his courtroom: not when he was foaming and raging, but right at the moment when he pronounced the death sentence. The story is that he’d get suddenly quiet—weary, almost regretful—and that’s when you knew you’d had it. That’s the way he was gazing at me now, as though he really would have spared me if he could. The Wild Hunt couldn’t have been any more frightening than that look.
I wasn’t even sure if Tamsin had heard me—if there was enough Tamsin left to hear me—so I shouted again, “It’s true! I’ve seen him! Judge Jeffreys must have called down the Wild Hunt to take him, I don’t know how. That’s why you’re still here—because Edric needs you! We have to save him!” I didn’t mean to say we, it just came out.
And this time she heard. She began to back away, she began to pull against whatever was reeling her in; she began to remember her own real shape, the color of her hair and her skin and her clothes, her own texture in the world. I saw her growing Tamsin again around that last poor fragment of herself, until she was facing me, as solid looking as him, with her wide eyes full of what I’d just told her. She didn’t speak, but she knew me. She knew us both.
Behind me Judge Jeffreys whispered, “No matter. It begins again.”
“Oh, no, it doesn’t,” I said. I turned around to say it right into his delicate, sad, handsome face. “No, it doesn’t, because she knows now. Finally, she knows what she’s supposed to do, and she’ll fight the Wild Hunt and you to do it. And I’m going to help her. You’ll never get near her again, not if you hang around another three hundred years. You’ve had your shot.”
“My shot?” He laughed outright then, for the first time. I wonder if I’m the only person in history who ever heard Judge Jeffreys laugh. He said, “Fool, what need for me to wait another hour, when all that woman’s immortal soul yearns to lose itself in mine a thousand times more than it yearns for heaven? This is the moment she was born for, and nor you nor Edric Davies, nor any multitude of devils like you will keep Tamsin Willoughby from her destiny. Behold it now.”
He stretched his left arm out toward her and he beckoned. He didn’t say a word, just crooked his forefinger once, smiling that sleeping-snake smile of his. Miss Sophia Brown opened her mouth for what must have been the longest, most despairing cat wail I never heard. Mister Cat pressed as close against her as he could, considering that she wasn’t there, trying to comfort her. And Tamsin vanished.
For a moment my insides fell off the World Trade Center, because I thought that was it—all over, all over—I thought she’d merged with him, her tender ghost-light lost forever in his endless night. But then I saw the look on Judge Jeffreys’s face, and I heard the wordless sound he made, and I wheezed, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I scooped up Mister Cat, and I danced through that potato field with him—and I’d even have tried to pick up Miss Sophia Brown, too, but she’d disappeared the instant Tamsin did. She probably wouldn’t have cared for being half-strangled and waltzed with, anyway. Mister Cat loved it.
And Judge Jeffreys came completely unglued, as though he were back in his court with a whole gang of Monmouth’s rebels facing him, instead of just me and Mister Cat. It was a Rumplestiltskin fit, a Wicked Witch of the West tantrum; it was Captain Hook dithering between rage and panic, slashing the guts out of the nearest pirate at hand. “Devils, devils—devils, imps, demons and cacodemons! I am God’s own, and by the holy names of Jesus and His Father, I charge you—back, back to your burning cesspools, back to your stinking pits of abomination, back to your eternal filth and vileness! Tamsin Willoughby is mine to me, and not all Hell itself shall keep us from being joined as we were destined to be joined! Not all the loathsome might of Hell shall keep me from her!”
You don’t have to believe in Hell. All you need is to hear someone who really does, who believes in it this minute, today, the way people believed in 1685—all you have to do is see his face, hear his voice when he says the word… and then you know that anyone who can imagine Hell has the power to make it real for other people. I don’t mean I understood any of that right then—just barely do now—but at that instant I understood Judge Jeffreys, and why I ought to be even more frightened of him, dead or alive, than I’d known to be. There’s a lot to be said for never quite grasping the situation.
Then it was gone, that one flash of comprehension—and so was he, with his last words hanging in the air like the burned-out skeleton of fireworks—and I was running for the Manor, still hugging Mister Cat against my chest, knowing beyond any doubt where Tamsin had to be, and knowing that he knew, too.
Twenty-five
Except that we were both wrong.
She wasn’t anywhere in the Manor—and by now I knew how to search that house. He must have been searching, too, though I never saw him. The billy-blind said he wouldn’t be able to come into Roger Willoughby’s secret room—anyway, that’s what it had sounded like he was saying—but the billy-blind hadn’t just seen Judge Jeffreys beckoning Tamsin to her doom, commanding her with no more magic than her name. I wasn’t about to assume there was anything Judge Jeffreys couldn’t do.
But there was a whole lot I couldn’t do. I couldn’t ask anyone for help—not even Meena, not with things gone this hairy—and I couldn’t lurk and slide around home looking as though I were trying to rescue a ghost from a crazy ghost judge who’d somehow condemned her boyfriend to being chased across the sky forever by a howling pack of ghost huntsmen. There is no really good time or way to break something like this to sensible people like Sally and Evan and—all right—Tony. Julian was weird enough to believe me, but he was also entirely weird enough to wind up running the Wild Hunt. Master of the Hounds, or whatever. Uh-uh.
And I couldn’t go to Mrs. Fallowfield, either. That was my first impulse—after all, she’d shown me what had happened to poor Edric Davies, which I’d never have found out if she hadn’t let me see the Wild Hunt with her eyes. But I didn’t dare assume that she was on my side, or on Tamsin’s, or anyone else’s but her own. The one thing I knew for sure about Mrs. Fallowfield was that I couldn’t take one thing about her for granted.
I didn’t tell Meena about Edric, but I did tell her about Tamsin’s face-off with Judge Jeffreys. Meena was too smart to be optimistic: She knew way too much about Indian ghosts. She said, “Jenny, you must be so careful, more careful than ever. Now it’s not just Tamsin—now it’s personal. He will harm you if he can.”