“My parents quite approved of him,” she said. “As singer, as musico—as a gentleman, even, for he was better educated than they, while never making show of it, and they’d have been shamed to have him eat with the servants. But had they known what was passing between our eyes, while the hired dauber toiled away and my mother knitted in a corner…Jenny, we said no word of it to each other—what need? It was our good fortune that the painter was slow and clumsy, and cross with it, and must be forever scratching out and starting over. My father grew impatient, but as for Edric and me, we’d have stopped time and the world in that music room, could we have done so. Perhaps we did. I think sometimes we did.”
I didn’t know how to take it. I never used to get squirmy about other people’s big romances—as many crushes as I saw Jake Walkowitz through, let alone Meena’s broken heart over Chris Herridge. But this was something altogether else, this wasn’t anything I knew anything about, and I didn’t even know how to look back into Tamsin’s eyes. I said, “So you ran off together.”
Tamsin sighed so softly that I almost didn’t hear her, because of the rain. I still don’t understand how ghosts can make sounds at all. “We had such plans, Jenny. It was to be Bristol first, then to Cardiff, where Edric had family, and where we might be married— and then London, oh, London! There was work for a musician, and friends who might yet arrange an introduction at Court—for James does prize music, I’ll grant him that.”
She’d do that sometimes, slipping between past and present, like a radio at sundown, when the little faraway stations start coming in. Now she said, “I love him so, and dare tell none. I fear to sleep—what if I should cry out his name, and my mother or a servant hear? My parents will be destroyed to lose me, and I will surely be destroyed to think of them finding me gone—but there’s naught for it, Jenny, there’s naught for it. Bristol first, then, tomorrow night, and chance the elements.” The rain started falling harder right on those last words. Dorset weather is very dramatic.
“And you got caught in the storm,” I said. It was working out practically the way I’d made it up, except maybe for the duel. But Tamsin shook her head, coming back to the present tense so hard that her outline shivered like a candle flame.
“A storm, yes—a storm it was indeed, but not the one we knew to beware.” She put her hands on mine, so that I could see our fingers laced together even if I couldn’t feel it. “There came a man to Lyme Regis. Lyme Regis, the eleventh of June. I could never forget that, not if I had been stopped twice as long as I have. I’d forget Edric’s voice ere I forgot the eleventh ofJune.”
And I knew. Tony hadn’t told me the date, and we hadn’t gotten up to it in British History, but I knew. I said, “Monmouth’s Rebellion.”
“Was that his name? Monmouth?” Tamsin thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Very like. There were folk who followed his banner, crying that he should be king. My father was not of their number.” She laughed a little. “He said to me, ‘Catty, never you go trailing after a Stuart, not one step. The best of them love their dreams, the worst love none but themselves, but no Stuart born cares for you, or for me, or for any of the poor fools who love them. Follow a moontouched zany, follow an ignis fatuus, but never a Stuart. Mind what I say, little one.’ ”
It was making sense, it was even better than my story. I said, “But Edric followed him. Edric went with Monmouth.”
“No, not Edric,” Tamsin said. “Not he, but his pupil, Francis Gollop. For Edric did take students, as does your mother, and Francis was all his pride. A yeoman’s son, nothing more, but he would learn the harpsichord, and Edric told me often that Francis had the same gift of love as his own for the music he played. He said… he said that was better than having clean hands, better than quick, slender fingers. Oh, Jenny, I do remember everything!”
There was joy in her voice, but more pain—even I could tell the difference, even back then. It woke Miss Sophia Brown up, or whatever; anyway, she came and put her paws around Tamsin’s neck, the way Mister Cat does with me. “Right. So this Francis joined Monmouth’s Rebellion. But Edric didn’t go with him.”
“Nay, Edric went after him. Francis’s mother came pleading to him, on her knees, that he would bring her son home—but be sure that Edric would have gone to find him had she never done so. For he was greatly fond of the boy, and had no mind to lose him to such madness. ‘What cares music who’s king?’ he would ask me, expecting no answer, and getting none. ‘Thieves, murderers, the lot of them, crowned and uncrowned alike. Francis’s left hand, Francis’s improvisations—these are worth all the thrones of all the world, all the kings and queens, all the bloody wretched seaports, frontiers, principalities. And the worse for that idiot boy if he doesn’t know it. I’ll fetch him straightway back, for his mother’s sake and my own. The kings shall not have this one.’”
For that moment I could actually see Edric Davies. That can happen with ghosts, when they’re thinking of a person who meant as much in their living days as they did to themselves. Tamsin’s face changed—not a lot, but just enough for me to glimpse a pointed, off-center nose, a chin like a football, and cheekbones you could borrow money on. Long dark hair, not quite shoulder length—eyes much darker than Tamsin’s… a quirky face, sort of lopsided. Not at all handsome, but nice. Then Edric was gone and she was herself again, looking a little lonelier for the memory. She said quietly, “But they did. They did, Jenny.”
I didn’t know my throat was hurting until I tried to talk. “He was killed? Francis?”
“At Sedgemoor, fighting on foot against mounted men with swords. Edric found his body in a ditch, still clutching a broken shepherd’s crook. It was over by then, Monmouth already taken, and rebels ordered left where they fell, for the dogs and the ravens. But Edric would not have it so, and he brought Francis by night to his parents on a handbarrow.” She was smiling now, holding Miss Sophia Brown chose. “I was never so proud of him as I was when we buried Francis in a wheatfield, with his music and that broken stick at his side. Even my father said it was well done.”
It was too much. It was all too much, and it was all coming too fast, and it was too real, at three or whatever in the morning, with a ghost sitting on my bed, petting her ghost-cat and remembering. People running and shouting and falling, horses screaming, armored men battering peasants down into the mud of meadows and pastures I actually knew—and Tamsin’s Edric Davies, Edric the musician, who wanted nothing to do with any of it, struggling in the same rainy Dorset darkness as this, pushing his barrow along lanes lined with bodies just like the one he was lugging home… it was still happening in her voice, everything that had really happened here three hundred years ago. It wasn’t me making up a silly story about Tamsin and Edric for Julian—it was real and right now, and I couldn’t handle it. I started to cry.
Tamsin took my face between her hands. It seemed to me that my hot skin cooled just a bit when she did that, but what do I know? I was busy gulping and coughing and hiccuping, trying to hold it all back, because I was afraid of waking people, and because I can’t stand to cry in front of anybody, even her. She said, “Little one, Jenny, hush, hush, there, never mind,” but I couldn’t stop, and she didn’t know what to do—poor Tamsin, how could she? So finally she went back one more time to that song her sister taught her: