It took me a while to get her attention, because she was so totally caught up in watching Tony at work. He didn’t do anything terribly glamorous or dramatic: It was all fits and starts—a slow half-turn here, a sudden little run there, or a burst ofjumps, and then most likely a shake of the head and a mumble, and he’d be trying it over a different way. It wasn’t dancing, it was making a dance, which is about as boring as making anything, unless you’re the one doing it. Believe me, I know.
But Tamsin couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t stop breathing with him, if you can imagine that, considering that she didn’t breathe. The more she watched, the clearer she grew, until she was practically as distinct as Tony, and still he was too absorbed to notice her. He was using the chair as a center to work around, now spinning away from it, now sort of bouncing off it, now actually picking it up and dancing with it—holding Tamsin in his arms, though he didn’t know. He didn’t see her, and she didn’t see me, and there was a moment when I really couldn’t have said just whom I was jealous of.
Then it was past, and Tamsin did notice me, and came to be with me in my corner while Tony went on dancing with the chair. She didn’t look like such a little girl now, but someone closer to my age, or Meena’s—that’s it, she looked like Meena watching Chris Herridge playing football. She said without looking at me, “Oh, Jenny, but he’s a springald, your brother—a gerfalcon, if ever I saw one—”
“Stepbrother. You know he’s my stepbrother.” I was whispering as low as I could but Tony said, with his head practically touching the small of his back, “No comments from the cheap seats. That’s part of the deal.”
“La, stepbrother then, what of it?” I’d never seen Tamsin this wound up. “Jenny, I’d no notion—we never had such a mode when I…” Tony was scribbling something on a yellow pad—he has his own kind of dance notation—and Tamsin watched him at it, fascinated, not taking the least note of me. “How Edric would love this,” she whispered, so low I could hardly make it out. “Edric would play such music for such dancing.”
“He’s just practicing, for God’s sake,” I said. “Listen, I have to talk to you.” Tony turned and pointed at me. He didn’t say anything, but I shut up and waited it out, until he’d worked himself down to a dripping rag—Tony never knows when to quit, even now that dancing’s what he does all the time. Then he said, “That’s it, show’s over,” and limped off with a towel around his neck to take a shower. I really thought Tamsin was going to follow him, but she came outside with me instead.
February still, but this was one of those gentle afternoons that Dorset slips in now and again, even in the middle of a miserable Dorset winter. Two of those in a row, and tiny green and white things start peeking out of the mud, and I always want to run around pushing them down again and yelling at them, “Don’t fall for it, stay low, it’s a trick!” It is, too, always; but right then it was what people here call a soft day, with a breeze pushing against me like a dog’s wet nose. Tamsin’s white dress seemed to flutter a little, even though it couldn’t have.
“He’s there every day,” I said. “But you know that.” Tamsin didn’t answer. I said, “I’ve never seen anybody that obsessed about anything. I mean, school’s just something that gets between him and that studio.”
We were walking down toward the dairy, and Wilf passed me, humping a couple of fence posts along on his shoulders, actually doing something. He gave me a weird look, hearing me talking to myself, and turned around slowly to stare after me, so the fence posts clonged against a metal stanchion. Somebody yelled at him to bleeding-Christ watch it.
Tamsin said again, “Edric would have played and played.” She was quiet now, and maybe not as distinct, as different from the air, as when she’d been watching Tony. She said, “Jenny, it is not any dancing I know, what your brother does. I see no form or course to it, no rule that I might follow, no design that I understand. And yet… and yet I dance, Jenny. Past any fathoming of mine, I see your brother dancing, and I, too, I, too…” She put her hand to her breast, as though she could touch herself. “I feel, Jenny. It cannot be, but I feel.”
I was good then. I like remembering that I was all right. It didn’t matter if it was Tony’s dancing and not me being with her that made her remember she was somewhere still human, the way the Pooka said. I looked straight at her, shimmering in the pale sunlight like dew along a spiderweb, and I said, “Yes, Mistress Tamsin. I know you do.”
I headed us back toward the chestnut tree where I’d been writing to Marta the day I met Tamsin, a hundred years ago. I sat on the damp ground, and Tamsin floated down beside me, careful and precise as any well-brought-up, young seventeenth-century lady settling herself. I said, “He’s Judge Jeffreys, isn’t he? The Other One. I have to know, Tamsin.”
She vanished. Instantly. One second of the purest terror and plain shock I’ve ever yet seen on a human face, whether you could see bare chestnut branches through it or not—the next second, so gone you could practically hear the air snapping to behind her. I jumped to my feet and yelled after her, top of my voice, not even thinking what I was doing, “You come back here! Tamsin Willoughby, you come back!” To this day, I can’t believe I did that. Three people and a goat whipped around and gaped, and Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown strolled out of the dairy together and gave me a Look. Mister Cat almost seemed to be apologizing for me. “She gets like that, it’s embarrassing, I’m sorry. Just ignore her.”
But I wasn’t letting Tamsin get away with it. After dinner that night I went to the secret room—Tony wasn’t in his studio—but she wasn’t there. I plunked down in her chair, bound and determined to wait her out, until it got… I guess scary’s the only word. I’d never been frightened in Tamsin’s room before: But this time, as the last light went, all the shadows seemed to be drawing in around that chair, and each of them looked more like Judge Jeffreys than the one before. I knew how stupid it was, but knowing didn’t help. The night mist was gathering, and it made a soft, raspy sound when it stirred against the window. I knew that couldn’t be happening either. My mouth was getting drier and drier, and I kept feeling like I had to pee. You can’t think straight when you’re like that. The mist was coming into the room, through the leaks around that ancient window frame. It felt cold and sticky, and it smelled of sour bedsheets.
Between one rustle and the next, one more tongue-tip of cold air against the back of my neck, I just suddenly lost it. I ran out of the room, down the hall, with the old dust not quite muffling the echo of my footsteps, and down the stairs, and I didn’t stop running until I almost fell over Julian. He was trying to get a rubberband-powered model plane to take off and fly straight down the corridor, but it kept spinning in circles on one wheel. Julian never has any luck with things like that.
“Trample me and I’ll put a curse on you,” he warned me in that rasping little rumble of his. He was into putting curses on people then—I think he got it from EllieJohn. “All your hair will fall out, and you’ll always want to sneeze, only you won’t be able to.” Evan used to go on at him about it, but it never did any good.
“Don’t talk about curses,” I said. “Not here. Just shut up about curses, Julian.” I think I was actually shaking. I know I was yelling.
Julian looked really hurt for a moment—I’d never once raised my voice to him before—and then he saw, the way he still does sometimes, even now that he’s a foul teenager, and he just came and leaned against me without saying anything. He got something sticky and permanent on my sweater, but what the hell.