You wouldn’t have thought that soft, scratchy voice—a dead man’s voice—could make that sound. He was hanging in the air over the cornfield like some awful glowing kite, and he screamed like someone losing a leg or having a baby—there was as much pain as rage in the sound, maybe more. I couldn’t even make out the words at first, simple as they were. “Never! They’ll not walk free of me, neither of them, never! The Welsh bastard fell at my hand, there in the muck of the byre, which was nothing but his vile due—and I did enjoin you by certain cantrips to harry his spirit away, which was his due as well, as it ever shall be! Obey me! Living or dead, I command you yet!”
When I think about it now, I’m sure even the Wild Huntsmen must have felt anyway the least bit bewildered and pushed around, what with Tamsin running them off on one hand and now Judge Jeffreys badgering them to get after Edric Davies again. They weren’t making any sound among themselves yet, but their beasts were growling and shifting, and I saw the riders who had edged away from Tamsin nudging their horses back toward her. Judge Jeffreys saw that, too.
“No!” he rasped, and the Huntsmen were still. That’s when it struck me that he’d maybe had dealings with the Wild Hunt before Edric Davies. They knew each other, anyway—I’ll always be sure of that much. Judge Jeffreys said, “The woman is mine, as God yet wills her to be. The Welshman is yours, as I mean for him. As for that one—”
He glanced over me, not at all as though I weren’t there, but as though my being there was something he’d always meant to take care of and kept forgetting about. I got one last clear look at his eyes—dead as newsprint, they would have been, if not for the hatred that had been holding him together all these centuries, the way Tamsin’s memories kept her who she was. All his memories were of pain and vengeance, and—I’m really ashamed of this— there was one moment, just one, when I felt sorry for Judge Jeffreys. I’ve never said that until now.
I never did find out exactly what he had in mind for me, because Tamsin cried out, “Jenny, fly, on your peril! ”—and the next moment she and I and Edric Davies were abandoning ship and heading for the hills. Or for the wheatheld, as far as I could tell, because I can get lost in a phone booth. Even in daylight, even when I’m not being chased by the Wild Hunt.
And I just might actually be the only living person in England who’s ever been chased by the Wild Hunt. They made one long sound together, like a fiery sigh of relief, and came after us, not yelling now, but silent as the Black Dog. Which was much worse, strangely, because of course I couldn’t keep from looking back, and they always seemed nearer than they were. But they weren’t racing through the clouds now; they were on the muddy Dorset earth, like me, and if it sucked at my skidding shoes and made me fall twice, it slowed their horses, too. The Huntsmen may have been ghosts themselves, but those beasts were alive, wherever they came from. Maybe in the sky the wind and rain didn’t touch them, but down here they were as soaked as everything else, and having to pick their way over the crops they crushed and the ditches and irrigation pipes under their feet, and they didn’t like any of it. As long as the fields kept slanting uphill, I actually had a bit of an edge.
Tamsin never left my side. She could have flown on to be with Edric, even if it meant running from the Hunt with him forever, as she must have known it would. But she stayed close to me, leading me through the storm, that glimmer of hers almost bright enough to see by. Every time I stumbled, she reached out to catch me, and couldn’t, but the terror in her eyes always got me back on my feet right away, yelling at her to go on, the way Edric was calling, “Tamsin, beloved, hurry!” He’d have abandoned me in a hot second, if he’d had the choice—I know that, and I can’t blame him. He’d had the Wild Hunt after him for a lot longer time than I had—or Tamsin either—he knew what we were dealing with, and all he cared about was getting Tamsin the hell away from them. But she wouldn’t leave me.
I don’t honestly know what kind of danger I was in. They’d been ordered to get Edric back on the rails, and to bring Tamsin to Judge Jeffreys, but I’m not sure even the Huntsmen knew what he had in mind for me. But Tamsin did—I’m sure of that—and she kept driving me on when I could have lain down right there and gone straight to sleep in the rain and mud. Absolutely crazy, when you think about it: scrambling and stumbling through what people here call a real toadstrangler of a storm, with a ghost who couldn’t even touch me trying to protect me from another ghost—who maybe could—and also save her ghost-boyfriend from the pack of immortal hellhounds hunting us all. But I think if not for her I could have wound up where Edric had been, and with no Tamsin to come and find me. I think so. I don’t know.
I remember the maddest things about that flight; in fact, the mad stuff is about all I do remember. I’d swear I remember Tamsin singing to me, for one thing—just snatches of her sister Maria’s nursery song——.
I know Tamsin had us running through a deep place called Digby’s Coombe—that’s where I lost my shoes—and I remember Miss Sophia Brown running with us, bounding along like the Pooka, and keeping up, too. The rain was flashing through her as she ran, turning her blue-gray coat to silver.
And I couldn’t tell you for certain how we reached the Alpine Meadow without crossing the wheatfield, because you can’t, but we did. The name’s just a joke of Evan’s: It isn’t alpine, and it isn’t a real meadow at all—maybe it was long ago, but now it’s useless to anyone short of Wilf’s billygoat. It’s just a huge stretch of brush and sinkholes and twisted, nameless shrubs, with a few dead cherry trees left from some Willoughby’s vision of an orchard. It’s a blasted heath, like in Macbeth, and nobody goes up there much. Evan says you could still do something with the land, but Evan always says that.
I’ve never gone back to the Alpine Meadow since that night. I do dream about it once in a while: me scrabbling along out there in the storm, with the rain bouncing off me like hail and the Wild Hunt on my track—sometimes they’re right on top of me, sometimes not—and it’s so dark that all I can see is those two lights fluttering just ahead. Tamsin and Edric, twinkling away like Tinker Bell, for God’s sake. My legs are unbelievably painful, and I can’t get my breath at all—it’s like my lungs are full of broken glass— but Tamsin won’t let me give up, so Edric won’t either, even though there’s no point, no hope, no damn reason. I’d rather breathe, I’d rather breathe than anything in the world, and those damn ghosts won’t let me. In the dream I’m always angrier at them than I am at the Wild Hunt and Judge Jeffreys.
The Huntsmen’s horses were still having trouble with the mud and gaining only slowly, if they were gaining at all. But Judge Jeffreys was on us all the way, swooping and howling, popping out of the dark so close to my face that I’d jump back and fall, and then slashing in at Tamsin or Edric when they came to me. And he was hurting them, though I couldn’t see how. I don’t know what ghosts can actually do to other ghosts, but when the light that pulsed around him even came near them, their own light would go dim for a few seconds, or whip around and flicker as though the storm wind was almost blowing them out. I was really scared to see that, really frightened that they would go out and leave me alone; but they always came back, bright as before. It just seemed to take a little longer each time.
The next-to-last time I fell, I tripped over one rock and turned my ankle, and my chin hit another one, or something that hard, and I didn’t know where I was, or who, until I heard Tamsin saying my name. “Jenny, you must get up, Jenny, please,” over and over, like Sally trying to rouse me for the school bus.
“Can’t,” I mumbled. “You go. Catch me anyway.”
The Horsemen were coming on, still not making a sound themselves, but I could feel their beasts’ hoofbeats, lying there. Beside me, Tamsin said, “No. No, they will not catch us, Jenny—not if you can only make one more effort. Only one more, Jenny.” I didn’t move. Tamsin said, “Jenny, please—I promise thee. One more.”
It was the “thee” that did it, of course. She’d never called me that before. I got up with my ankle hurting and my head swimming worse than the one time Marta and Jake and I got stupid drunk on Jake’s mother’s Courvoisier. Tamsin was on one side of me, saying, “Oh, brave, my Jenny—only a little now,” and Edric on the other. He still wasn’t a bit happy about my entire existence, but he was practically polite when he growled into my ear, “Girl, for her sake.” And I put my weight on that bad ankle, and I started on.
The one thing the storm hadn’t had much of up to now was lightning and thunder. That all hit about the time the ground leveled off and the Wild Hunt really began gaining on us. Tamsin told me not to turn, but I twisted my head around once, and saw them in the flash, as though someone in heaven was taking pictures. The lightning made them look motionless, frozen in the moment, like the dead cherry trees, or the shrubby thicket coming up just ahead. Not Judge Jeffreys, though. He was divebombing us worse than ever, and he was screeching continually now. I couldn’t make out all the words, but most of it was Jesus and God and the King, and Welsh traitors a stink in the nostrils of the Almighty. And Tamsin belonging to him through eternity—that one I got, I heard him right through the thunder. And all the while he kept smothering Tamsin and Edric’s ghost-lights with his own, and every time they’d be slower coming back. Dimmer, too, now.
“Jenny, my Jenny—canst run only a little faster?” I didn’t even have the breath to answer Tamsin, but I think I maybe got an extra RPM or two out of my legs. I like to think so, but probably not.
But it wasn’t any good. The wind had switched around so it was blowing straight in my face, and between that and my ankle buckling with each step, we weren’t even going to make that thicket before the Wild Hunt caught up with us—as though we could have hidden there for one minute. The Huntsmen had started baying at us again the moment the wind changed, which makes me think maybe they actually hunted by smell, not that it matters. They sounded different than they did in the sky: not as loud, not whooping maniacally, but precise now, united, calling to each other. Like the West Dorset Hounds blowing their dumb horns when the poor fox is in full sight and they’re closing in.
And I couldn’t run anymore. The last time I went down, it wasn’t a question of getting me back on my feet, and Tamsin didn’t ask me again. All she said was “Here,” to Edric; and to give him credit, he didn’t ever suggest that they drop me and head for the border. At least I didn’t hear him say anything like that, because things were starting to slide away from me now, leaving me peaceful and sleepy, with my ankle hardly hurting at all. I did hear Tamsin say, “Twas this place, this, exactly this. I am sure to my soul of it, Edric.”
And Edric, with a sudden laugh that sounded very young, considering he can’t have done that for three hundred years: “Well, dear one, you are my soul, so there’s naught for me to do but bide with you.” Miss Sophia Brown sat calmly down beside me, looked in my face and said “Prrp?” just like Mister Cat, only small and faraway. Edric was saying, “—there’s no knowing or compounding her, nor there never was. She might as easily—”
Thunder and the wail of the Wild Hunt drowned the rest of it, just as Judge Jeffreys’s last gobbling squall of triumph seemed to drown Edric and Tamsin’s lights together. Far away as I was, numb as I was, I could feel them going out this time, as though a phone line between us had been cut. It hurt terribly—it hurt a lot more than my ankle—and I think I called for them. I know I tried to get up—or anyway I wanted to, but that line was down, too, and the Wild Hunt was on us. On me, their beasts rearing right over me on their spider legs, monkey legs, goats’ hooves, hawks’ claws… and the weird thing was that I didn’t care one damn bit. Tamsin was gone, Tamsin and her Edric, and I didn’t care what the hell happened to me now.
That was when I heard Mrs. Fallowfield.
Heard, not saw, because I was lying the wrong way, and I couldn’t even raise my head, but I knew it was her. She was speaking in a slow, buzzing language that sounded like Old Dorset, but I couldn’t separate any of the words from each other; and I hardly recognized her voice, the way it rang on the syllables like a hammer on a horseshoe. All around me the Huntsmen’s beasts dropped down to all fours—or all eights, or whatever—and the Huntsmen got really quiet, a different quiet from the way they’d first been with Tamsin. Then they’d been puzzled, uncertain, practically embarrassed—now they were scared. Even in the state I was in, I could tell the difference.
There was another sound under Mrs. Fallowfield’s voice, and it wasn’t any of the Huntsmen. Or Judge Jeffreys, either—he was watching silently from one of the dead trees, wedged in the branches, a snagged kite now. The growl was so low it seemed to be coming out of the ground, and it was so cold and evil that the thunder just stopped, and the lightning shrank away, and the whole storm sort of sidled off, scuffing its feet, pretending it hadn’t been doing anything. I got my elbows under me, and I dragged myself around to look at Mrs. Fallowfield.
She was something to see. No Russian hat; the long yellow-white hair she’d had bunched up under it was rippling down her back like something alive. No wool shirt, no Army boots—instead, a dark-green toga sort of thing, only with full sleeves, fitting close round her tough, skinny body. Her face was Mrs. Fallowfield’s, feature for feature, but the woman wearing it wasn’t Mrs. Fallowfield—not the one I knew. This face was the pale-golden color of the half-moon, and it was just as old: It looked as though it had been pounded and battered for billions of years by meteors, asteroids, I don’t know what; the eyes weren’t blue anymore, but black as Mister Cat, black to the bone. And even so, she was dreadfully beautiful, and she was taller than Mrs. Fallowfield, and she walked out of that thicket and toward the Wild Hunt the way queens are supposed to walk.
At her side was the thing that had growled. It was the size of the Black Dog, and it had staring red eyes like the Black Dog, but that was it for the resemblance. Nothing about it fit with a damn thing else about it: I saw long, pointed, leathery ears and a head like a huge bat, only with an alligator muzzle stuck onto it. The body was more like a big cat’s body than a dog’s, with the rear quarters higher than the front; but it had a sheep’s woolly coat, coming away in dirty patches as though the thing were molting—and the skin underneath was pink! And I guess the moral of that story is, be nice to people’s disgusting, yippy little dogs. You never know.
Mrs. Fallowfield—or whoever—didn’t look at me. She pointed a long arm at the Wild Hunt, at each Huntsman in turn, moving on to the next only when that one lowered his eyes, until finally she was pointing straight at Judge Jeffreys. He looked right back at her—he didn’t flinch for a minute. He had the courage of his awfulness, Judge Jeffreys had.
Mrs. Fallowfield said, “You. I know you.” The Dorset sound was still there, but her whole voice was different—deep enough to be a man’s voice, and with that metallic clang to it that I could feel all along my backbone. She said, “I remember.”
Judge Jeffreys didn’t give an inch. He answered her, gentle, almost apologetic, “I will have what is mine.”
“The woman,” Mrs. Fallowfield said. No expression—just those two flat words. Judge Jeffreys nodded. “The woman,” Mrs. Fallowfield repeated, and this time there was something in the voice which would have made me a little nervous. She held her other arm away from her side, and Tamsin was standing beside her, and the first thing she did was to smile at me. And I couldn’t breathe, no more than I could when we were running from the Wild Hunt.
“And the man,” that voice said. Mrs. Fallowfield did something with her arm almost like something I’ve seen Tony do, dancing— and there was Edric Davies standing with Tamsin. As though she had somehow taken them into herself, and given them birth again—not that she could do that, I mean they were still ghosts… never mind. Maybe Meena can help me with that sentence, if I ever figure out what I was trying to say. All that mattered to me then was that Tamsin was smiling at me.
“The man belongs to them,” Judge Jeffreys said, gesturing around at the Wild Hunt in his turn. “The woman to me.” He might have been sharing out the dishes at a Chinese restaurant.
Mrs. Fallowfield’s dog-bat-alligator-sheep thing growled at him, but stopped when she touched its horrid head. She looked at Judge Jeffreys for a long time, not saying anything. The night was clearing—I could see a few stars near the half-moon—but I was drenched and hurting, starting to shiver, starting to be aware of it. Tamsin saw. She started to come to me, but Mrs. Fallowfield shook her head. Edric moved closer to her, and there I was—cold and jealous. I’d have hugged that creature of Mrs. Fallowfield’s just then, if I could have, for comfort as well as warmth. Hell, I’d have hugged a Huntsman.
Mrs. Fallowfield said to Judge Jeffreys, “I remember you. Blood and fire—soldiers in my woods. I remember.”
“Ah, the great work,” he answered, as proud as though he were pointing out those tarred chunks of bodies stuck up on trees, fences, steeples, housetops. “They’ll not soon forget the schooling I gave them, the rabble of Dorset. I felt God’s hand on my shoulder every day in that courtroom, and I knew they all deserved hanging, every last stinking, treacherous Jack Presbyter of them. And I’d have done it—aye, gladly, with my whole heart, I’d have rid King James of all of them but the one. All but her.”
He never stopped looking at Tamsin, even though she wouldn’t look back at him. Edric Davies did, though, and the hatred and horror in his face matched Judge Jeffreys’s pride and maybe went it one better. Feelings like that don’t die; memories like Tamsin’s memory of Edric and her lost sister don’t die. That’s why you have ghosts.
Judge Jeffreys said, “For her I would have betrayed my post, my King and my God—indeed, I did so in my heart, with never a second thought. That makes Tamsin Willoughby mine.”
I know it looks stupid, writing it down like that. But you didn’t hear him, and I still do. He really would have done all that for her, you see, and done it believing he’d burn in hell forever for doing it. He hadn’t done it, and it wouldn’t have made her his anyway, but you see why he’d have figured it did. Or I saw it anyway, at the time. He was a maniac and a monster, but people don’t love like that anymore. Or maybe it’s only the maniacs and monsters who do. I don’t know.
Edric Davies didn’t say anything—he just moved in front of Tamsin, but she stepped past him and turned to face Mrs. Fallowfield. I remember everything she said, because they were the last words—but one—that I ever heard her speak.
“I am Tamsin Elspeth Catherine Maria Dubois Willoughby,” she said. “I knew you when I was small. I was forever wandering and losing myself in your elder bushes, and your friend”—she nodded toward that patchy pink gargoyle—“would always find me.”
Mrs. Fallowfield chuckled then, that coal-chute gargle I remembered from another world. “As your friend was aye rescuing him.” She took her hand off the thing and gestured toward me, telling it, “Run see your deliverer, little ’un.” The pink thing ignored her, thank God. I had enough troubles right then without alligator breath.
Tamsin said, “That one is my true and beloved sister. He”—and she smiled at Edric Davies in a way that squeezed my heart and roiled my stomach—“ he is my love, and was delivered to the mercy of the Wild Hunt through my most grievous fault. Now I’d have him free of their torment, that I may have eternity to do penance. Of your great kindness, do for me what you may.”
Word for word. I couldn’t ever forget. I couldn’t.
She started to say something else, but Judge Jeffreys’s voice drowned her the way his ghost-light had done. “Nay, they’re not yours to dispose of, those two! The Almighty rendered them both into my hands, and you dare not oppose His will!” As loudly as he spoke, he sounded practically serene—that’s the only word I can think of. He was playing his ace, and he knew she couldn’t match it, this old, old lady with her weird, nasty pet. Belief is really something.
Mrs. Fallowfield smiled at him. That was scary, because it was like the desert earth splitting into a deep dry canyon, or like seeing one of those fish that look like flat stones on the ocean bottom suddenly exploding out of the sand to gulp down a minnow and fall right back to being a stone. When she spoke, the Dorset was so thick in her voice I hardly understood a word. “Take good heed, zonny. We was here first.”
I don’t think Judge Jeffreys heard her much better than I did; or if he heard her right, he didn’t take it in. He just gaped at her; but a sort of whimper came from the Wild Huntsmen, waiting where she’d ordered them to stay. Even in the darkness, I could see Mrs. Fallowfield’s eyes: blacker than the Black Dog, black as deepest space. She said, “We was here when your Almighty woon’t but a heap of rocks and a pool of water. We was here when woon’t nothing but rocks and water. We was here when we was all there was.” She smiled at Judge Jeffreys again, and that time I had to look away. I heard her say, “And you’ll tell me who’s to bide with me and who’s to hand back? You’ll tell me?”
And Judge Jeffreys lost it, lost it for good, and I’ll tell you, I don’t blame him. There’s no way I’ll ever again hear the kind of contempt—the size of the contempt—that was in those words. He went straight over the edge, shrieking at her, “You dare not defy, dare not challenge… You’ll be as damned as they, hurled down with the rebel angels—hurled down, hurled down.” There was more, but that’s all I want to write.
He was plain gibbering when he came for Tamsin and Edric Davies that last time, stooping at them like a hawk from tree-top height. I can’t guess what was in his mind—he might have thought his rage would darken them, put them out, the way it had before, this time for good, before Mrs. Fallowfield could protect them. As much as I saw of him, as much as I feared him and hated him and tried to imagine him, finally I don’t have any idea who he was— just what he was. It’ll do.
Mrs. Fallowfield hardly moved, Judge Jeffreys was right over her before she raised her left hand slightly and made a sound like clearing her throat. And he… froze in the air. Or maybe he didn’t freeze; maybe the air condensed or something, thickening around him so he couldn’t move, ghost or no ghost. He stuck there, burning, like a firefly trapped in a spiderweb—although what he really reminded me of was the fruit that Sally cooks into lime-green Jell-O for big dinner desserts. It’s always lime—I don’t know why—and the bits of peaches and pears always look like tropical fish hanging motionless in the deep green sea. Except that the fish are silent, and Judge Jeffreys was still screaming his head off, though we couldn’t hear him anymore.
Mrs. Fallowfield said, “I’m wearied of ye. Dudn’t like ye then, wi’ your soldiers—dun’t like ye no better now. Off wi’ ye, and dun’t ye plague me and mine nivver no more. Hear.”
I thought she was letting him go with a warning—not even a speeding ticket—and I was getting ready to mind, because it wasn’t right, it wasn’t justice, no matter who she was. But she hadn’t been saying, “Hear,” the way I heard it—what she really said was, “Here.” The way you call your dog.
And the Wild Huntsmen came to her. Their monstrous beasts were actually trembling under them, actually having to be kicked and goaded toward Mrs. Fallowfield and that animal of hers, and even the most horrendous of the Huntsmen themselves were looking small and rained on. I still dream about them, like I said; but when I get awakened by the pounding of my heart, I can put myself back to sleep by remembering them then, as terrified of Mrs. Fallowfield as I was of them. And me not scared of her at all, but pissed because I thought she was going to let Judge Jeffreys off way too lightly. I can’t believe it. I was really pissed at her.
Mrs. Fallowfield looked up at Judge Jeffreys for a long time without saying anything. He’d stopped his yelling and was watching her, poised helpless just above her in the flypaper night, his own ghost-light flickering like a bad bulb. I couldn’t help wondering if he might be imagining what those people dragged up before him at the Bloody Assizes must have felt, waiting for him to sentence them… hoping, crying, praying—looking into that gentle, handsome face of his and hoping. Probably not. I don’t think he had much imagination that way.
“Off wi’ ye, then,” Mrs. Fallowfield said again. “Till mebbe zomeone cares to come for ye.”
She didn’t seem to make any gesture this time, and I didn’t hear her say anything else, but Judge Jeffreys was ready when the air turned him loose. He shot crazily backward like a toy balloon when you let go of the pinched end, growing so small so fast that it seemed as though we were racing in terror away from him. Maybe we were, in a way, Tamsin and Edric Davies and me. Not Mrs. Fallowfield.
She turned to the Wild Hunt, and she said one word. I heard it very clearly, and I’d forget it if I possibly could, but it’d be like forgetting my own name. He must have remembered it, too—however he learned it; he used it at least once, I’m sure of that. But I never, never, never will.
The Wild Hunt gave one great howl and went after Judge Jeffreys. They took off like helicopters, rising straight up into the night sky in a kind of windblown spiral; and in a weird way they made me think of children just let out of school, running and yelling for the pure unreasoning joy of making noise. But they weren’t children: They were the Wild Hunt, the pitiless harriers of the dead, and they roared and wailed and laughed their skirling laughter, and blew their horns and spurred their dragony horses on, chasing that spark of desperation that had been Edric Davies for three hundred years, and was Judge Jeffreys now. It didn’t matter to the Wild Hunt.
And it didn’t matter to me. It should have—I know that—and it should matter now, on nights when I hear them again, the terrible Huntsmen in the wind, eternally hounding a human spirit whose only crime was being just as cruel as they. There’ll never be a Tamsin Willoughby come to save Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys of Wem. Most times I go back to sleep.
Things get a little blurry here—not the things themselves, but the order they happened in. I can’t remember when I finally made it up on my feet—maybe I could still hear the horns of the Wild Hunt, maybe not—but I know it was while Tamsin and Edric Davies were still there. Because it was time to say good-bye, had to be, and I didn’t want to make a stupid scene. So I got up, all over mud and with my ankle giving me fits, and I limped toward them where they stood with Mrs. Fallowfield.
She was just Mrs. Fallowfield then: everything back in place, from the army boots to the cold, sharp blue eyes, to the little pink horror squirming in her coat pocket. No fur hat, though—that hair was still streaming away over her scraggy shoulders like the Milky Way. Her voice was strangely gentle when she spoke to me. She said, “Ye’ll forget this, girl. Ye’ll forget this all.”
“No,” I said. “No, don’t make me—I have to remember. Please, I have to.”
Mrs. Fallowfield shook her head. “And have ye meet me in the lane or the market tomorrow, and know? What I am—what we’ve seen this night, the two on us—”
“I don’t know who you are,” I practically yelled at her. “And I don’t care, either!” I pointed at Tamsin, where she stood beside Edric Davies, so beautiful I could hardly stand to look at her. I said, “I don’t want to forget her. I don’t care about a damn thing else, but I have to remember Tamsin. Please. Whoever you are.”
Mrs. Fallowfield smiled at me very slowly, showing her strong gray teeth; but when she spoke, it might have been to Tamsin, or maybe herself, but not me. “Aye, and here’s first ’un, here’s first on ’em. Aye, I knowed they’d be cooming along any day, the childern as wuddn’t know Lady of the Elder Tree. Zo, there ’tis. No harm.”
I remembered Tamsin saying—God, a hundred years ago— “Even the Pooka steps aside when she moves.” I started in on some kind of dumb apology, but Mrs. Fallowfield had turned away and Tamsin and Edric Davies were coming to me. It was awkward with Edric—there’s not a whole lot to say to someone who’s been through what he’d been through, and who’s now going away forever with the person who really did become your sister for a little while. I was happy she’d rescued him, and happy that her task was done, and that she wouldn’t be stuck haunting the Manor anymore… but at the same time I hated him worse than I’d ever hated Judge Jeffreys, and that’s the truth. There—I’ve got that down.
But he was all right. He said, “Tamsin has told me of all you did for us, and of what might have befallen her but for you. If I had the world to give you, we would never be quits.” He smiled in a crooked, crinkly way that Tamsin must have loved at first sight— no, that sounds mean; it was a very nice smile, really. Edric Davies said, “But I have nothing, Mistress Jenny Gluckstein. I cannot promise that we will come to you at need, nor even that we will ever remember your kindness, because I do not know what waits beyond for us. I can only bless you now, with all my human heart. Nothing more.”
And he was out of there. Just vanished, the way ghosts do.
Tamsin picked up Miss Sophia Brown. She came very close, and looking into my eyes, she said, “My Jenny,” and then she bent her head and kissed me—here, on the left-hand corner of my mouth. And nobody knows better than I that I couldn’t have felt anything, because Tamsin was a ghost—but nobody but me knows what I felt. And I’ll always know.
Then she stepped back and was gone, and it was just me and Mrs. Fallowfield in the dark of the Alpine Meadow that seemed so much darker now. Me and the Old Lady of the Elder Tree, as though I gave a damn. Mrs. Fallowfield cupped my cheek in her calloused hand, and she said softly, “Forget, ye brave child. Forget.”
And after that there’s nothing but night—but thinning now, turning blue and silver, and I’m being carried somewhere, like a baby. First I think it’s the Pooka come to get me, but it’s way too bumpy a ride for the Pooka, and I can smell rubber, which I hate. When I open my eyes, it’s Evan holding me, walking fast, with Sally on one side and Tony on the other, everybody shiny in rain slickers… or are we already in the old Jeep? If we’re in the Jeep, then I’m lying with my head in Evan’s lap while he drives us home, and my feet in Sally’s lap. Tony keeps talking about the beating the fields have taken from the storm—he’s really shocked, the way things have been battered down. Sally wants to hold me by herself, so Evan can drive more easily, but Evan says, “No, leave it, love, she’s asleep,” and I am.