Nineteen

The Wild Hunt was out almost every night that second winter in Dorset—or that’s the way it seemed, anyway. Most of the time I’d be awakened, not by the horsemen, but by Julian scrambling frantically into bed with me, or by Mister Cat slamming through the window I always left partway open for him. Once or twice Meena was staying over, so it would be all of us huddled together: Mister Cat hissing and growling, Julian trying not to whimper, and Meena doing her best to stay cool and logical. Which is tricky when you’re dealing with that crazy howling and baying and laughing, all riding on an icy wind that never seemed to come from any one place. Nothing with feathers sounds like the Wild Hunt, and everybody knows it. I know everybody knows it.

And Meena heard the other thing one night—that awful, hopeless almost-human wail crossing the sky just ahead of the Hunt. Julian didn’t hear it, but Meena’s face went almost transparent, as though you could see right through her brown skin to the trembling underneath. She said, very softly, “We have demons in India, demons with a hundred terrible heads—even demons that can be gods at the same time, it depends. We don’t have that. We don’t.” She wasn’t over it in the morning, like Julian; she didn’t get over it for days. It’s still the one time I’ve ever seen Meena afraid.

Other people were hearing the Hunt too—there was even a squib in the Dorchester paper about it. The Colfaxes, next farm over, said their chickens couldn’t sleep and were off their feed; and at school everyone told me their parents were really spooked and pretending not to be. It didn’t matter whether they believed in the Wild Hunt or not—it was there. People are different about stuff like that in England.

I’d been frantic to go find Tamsin the same night after I’d talked with Mr. Guthrie and been to the Lodgings with Sally. But I couldn’t, not then, and not for more than a week. There was school, and there was fixup stuff around the Manor—as there is to this day, it’s never done with—and there was always the farm. The Lovells had clamped down hard on Evan’s hiring budget, so Tony and Julian and I got pressed into more fieldwork than anybody’d bargained for. In some ways the no-till business was easier for us than deep plowing would have been; in other ways it was a lot more delicate, because you have to use exactly the right amount of fertilizer—you can’t slather it on anymore—and we had to be sparing with the seeds because the new kind Evan needed were really hard to come by that first year. And the weather never quit being mean and messy. That’s another thing that accounts for a lot of Thomas Hardy.

Finally I had the Manor more or less to myself one afternoon— Evan and Sally were working, Tony was locked in his studio, and Julian was at a school friend’s house, the two of them totally involved in some experiment I didn’t even want to think about. I couldn’t find Mister Cat anywhere, so I figured he must be off with Miss Sophia Brown. The Wild Hunt never bothered her, by the way. If it got too noisy overhead, she might open one eye and yawn, but that was it. You could plop Miss Sophia Brown down on an iceberg, and she’d probably burst into flame.

I grabbed a paper clip and went up the east-wing stairs to the third floor. It was as comfortably desolate as ever, dim as it was, even in midafternoon, I could actually see Mister Cat’s footprints in the dust on the floor. I found Tamsin’s door, straightened the clip, poked around in the lion’s left eye, heard the double click, and I was in the secret room. I could do it almost as fast now as Miss Sophia Brown could pour herself through the panel.

Tamsin wasn’t there. I called for her a few times, which was silly, and then I wandered around the little room, investigating the bedframe-chest combination, staring at the painting of Roger and Margaret Willoughby for a long while, looking for Tamsin—and finally I sat down in her chair. I felt like her, a little bit, sitting there, looking out into a world that couldn’t see me. I saw the chestnut tree, and the clouds heaped up like fresh laundry, and I saw the back of a woman going into the dairy, and William slogging past in the mud with a feed sack on each shoulder. I thought about New York, I thought about having been in Dorset for a whole year and a half, and about being practically fifteen and a Fourth Former, and what Marta and Jake would say if they could see me doing no-till farming. Tamsin’s chair was more comfortable than I’d expected, and the room was warmer than it should have been, considering the weather outside. I fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes, I was looking straight into Judge Jeffreys’s face.

It was the portrait at the Lodgings come perfectly to life: robes, brown wig, white lace at the throat, gentle expression and all. Even the hands were right, long and graceful and… reposeful as Tamsin’s hands. It’s a good thing I saw the eyes before I screamed, because I’d have brought the whole east wing down. But the eyes were angled, golden, mocking, and I didn’t scream. I said, “Evan warned me you had a really crude sense of humor.”

Judge Jeffreys shrugged lightly, and the Pooka said, “My humor suits me well. What else should concern me?”

“Nothing, I guess,” I said. “But could you please look like something different? Anything, I don’t care what—just not him, okay?” The Pooka shrugged again, and became Mister Cat, crouched at my feet, tail whipping back and forth. I yelled that time—not screamed, there’s a difference, just yelled ‘Wo!’—and the Pooka chuckled. I can’t describe that sound, as well as I came to know it: The best I can get into words is that there’s never any smile in the Pooka’s laughter. But he did change himself into Albert the sheepdog, and I was grateful for that.

I said, “You ever turn into things that hide under bathtubs?”

The Pooka sat back on his haunches and lolled his tongue out, which is the other thing Albert can do. “No fear, Jenny Gluckstein, I do not often come peeping at you or yours. I am here with word for Tamsin Willoughby.”

“Sorry, she’s in a meeting,” I said. “You want to leave a pager number or something?”

The main trouble with shapeshifters is that it’s too easy to forget what they really are and get careless. The Pooka didn’t turn into some other form, but slobby old Albert suddenly reared up over me like a grizzly bear, drooling blood, those giveaway eyes gone streaky-red and his chipped yellow teeth bulging his mouth. That time, all right—that time I screamed, and I knocked Tamsin’s chair over, trying to get to the door… and then it was just old Albert again, the only dog who smells like a wet dog when he’s dry. The Pooka said, quite calmly, “I am no billy-blind, Jenny Gluckstein.”

“No,” I agreed. I was pretty shaky. I said, “I’m sorry. I honestly don’t know where Tamsin is.”

“With the dancer,” the Pooka said. “She watches the dancer.”

I couldn’t take that in. “Tony? You mean she’s in Tony’s studio right now?”

Albert always seems to be grinning like an idiot, but the Pooka was definitely overdoing it. “Indeed, she had always a great fancy for galliard or brawl, or even a running-battle, such as men dance with swords. It often comforts her to watch the dancer.”

And like that I was jealous. My God, I was roaring jealous, howling jealous, Gaynor Junior High School jealous—horribly, disgustingly jealous. Tamsin belonged to me—I was her comfort, nobody else. I didn’t have a minute to brace myself; it rushed me like one of those waves that slams you down and tumbles you in so many different directions you can’t remember which way the air is—there was a moment where I was really fighting just to get my breath. It was absolutely horrible, and I was so ashamed.

And the Pooka knew. He didn’t say anything, but I took one look at that stupid old dog’s face and I couldn’t look at him again. I said, “Would you mind? Somebody I don’t actually know, please.”