Twenty-four

That summer Sally landed a gig as musical director for a women’s choir in Yeovil. I liked that, because I could usually go with her and visit with Meena while she was working; and Meena liked it because she knows more about the Byrd and Bach and Dowland stuff Sally had them singing than I do, and I was raised with it. Meena thinks my mother is the best piano player south of Horowitz, and Sally’s flattered by that, as who wouldn’t be? It doesn’t make me jealous to watch them together; but sometimes it does make me wish that I understood my mother’s music—really understood, down deep the way my best friend does. I talked to Tamsin about that once. I said, “Maybe it’s not possible if it’s your mother.”

Tamsin smiled. I don’t really expect anyone ever to smile at me the way Tamsin used to do. “Dear Mistress Jenny,” she said, “my mother was such a gardener as Dorset has never seen. There was no flower, native or no, robust or tender, failed to thrive under her hands. Our folk swore that Squire Willoughby’s gardens flourished as they did because even the most delicate, contrary bloom fair worshipped my mother, and would have budded in the deeps of winter to please her. Yet it was never so with me—I admired flowers well enough, but there was no intimacy between us, no liaison. And I sorrowed greatly over this—oh, not for myself, not for the poor blossoms that dropped their petals and began to die the first moment I looked at them—but because I so, so wanted to know the truth of my mother’s joy in her garden. But I never could, Jenny. I could only look on and admire, and wonder.”

“I guess,” I said. “But I just wish—”

Tamsin’s face changed then, closing against me as I’d never seen it do since the day we met. She said, “Child, never speak to me of wishes,” and that was the end of that.

Anyway, Meena and I spent a lot more time at those choir rehearsals than I’d ever bargained for, scrunched in bare-metal folding chairs at the back of the auditorium while Sally took those women through four bars of some cantata over and over again. I told Meena everything I could—I honestly didn’t hold much back, except the stuff I thought would only worry her—and she listened carefully to all of it and told me how much the whole business worried her. “It’s you and him now,” she said one evening. “It’s not simply a matter of helping Tamsin anymore, is it? It’s you and him, and I hate it, Jenny.”

I said, “I read a story once about the way some cowboys used to trap wild horses by walking after them, slowly, day after day after day. After a while, the horses would get so frightened, so bewildered, finally they’d just stand still until the men caught up with them. That’s exactly what he’s doing with Tamsin. Waiting until she gives up and comes to him. He’s told me.”

“But she won’t do it,” Meena said. “All this time, and he hasn’t seen her once. She can hide from him, she has the whole farm—”

“He can wait forever,” I said. “She can’t. I’m starting to understand a little bit, Meena, the way the Pooka said I had to. It’s the painting—he got himself into that portrait of her, and I think somehow that connects them, that’s why he’s been able to hang on or come back, whichever. Or maybe it’s because she didn’t leave when she was meant to—maybe that left a door open for him, like the Pooka said. I wonder what would happen if we could steal the painting and just destroy it? That might be all it takes to set her free.”

“And him, too?” I didn’t have an answer. “Besides, Edric Davies is in that picture too—in her face, in her eyes. He’s not painted in, but he’s there. What would happen to him, wherever he is?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how any of that stuff works.” We sat without talking for a while, listening to Sally trying to get her sopranos to sing on pitch. Finally I said, “The Pooka told me the Wild Hunt would tell me what I needed to know. How do you ask the Wild Hunt for advice?”

“E-mail,” Meena said. “Faxes.”

Actually, the Wild Hunt hadn’t passed over Stourhead in weeks, almost as long as I hadn’t seen Tamsin. You mostly hear the Hunt in the autumn and winter, not too much in spring. I asked Guy Guthrie why that was so, and he peered over his glasses at me and said, “A lot of people would tell you it’s because that’s when the geese are traveling south, and between their carry-on and perhaps the howling of a winter storm…”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s what Evan thinks.”

Mr. Guthrie grinned. “But you don’t. And what do I think?” He wouldn’t say anything more until the tea was ready—he makes tea the way Evan rumples his hair and Mr. Chari plays with cigars he doesn’t light half the time. At last he said, “Well, if I thought much about such things, I suppose I’d think that more folk everywhere die in the cold months, as the year dies, and perhaps the Wild Hunt have their best pick of poor souls to hound through the sky then. Perhaps they seek them on the other side of the world, come springtime. There’s not a great deal known about the Wild Hunt, I’m afraid.”

I asked him, “Do they… are they on their own, or does someone, somebody—”

“Direct them? Ah now, I can’t tell you that for certain either, nor how they choose their quarry. Some say the Devil’s their master— in Cornwall they’re called the Devil’s Dandy Dogs—and that you can find refuge from them in churches, in prayer. Others will have it that there’s no sanctuary once they’re on your track. Living or dead, saint or sinner—no sanctuary.” He took off his glasses and leaned forward, one hand scratching behind Clem’s ears, but his old blue eyes as intent on me as Cornet Simmons’s had been. “Why do you need to know, Jenny?”

I think I told him I was working on a folklore project for school. I’m not only a bad liar, I’m an over-elaborate one. I don’t think he bought it for a second; but just before I heft, he said, “There’s one other belief about the Hunt. I’ve only come across it a few times, and only here in Dorset. Supposedly they can be summoned— called down and actually set to run a victim to his death—by someone who knows the proper spell, and has the required force of personality to achieve it. But it’s a risky thing to attempt, as you might imagine, and in any case the pursuit only lasts for one night. So there’d be a bit of a chance of escape that way. I don’t know if you’ll want to bother with that one for your project, though.”

Between that and what the Pooka had said about the Wild Hunt, I started finding myself looking out for them, listening for them, almost in the way that I looked for Tamsin all the time, and with just the same result. The only thing assuring me that she and Miss Sophia Brown hadn’t vanished for good was that Judge Jeffreys hadn’t. I saw him most often in the morning and early twilight, never far from the Manor: solid-looking enough that you might take him for an ordinary person on first sight, but casting no shadow, motionless, waiting for Tamsin the way nothing human ever waited. He didn’t speak to me anymore, but sometimes our eyes met from a distance, and the patient, patient hatred in him would slam into me right below my ribs. He might be dead as roadkill, but that hatred was every bit as alive as I was.

One day in mid-August, when Dorset’s as hot as it ever gets, and the poor sheep lie down in each other’s shade, Julian and I were out on the downs, him trying to teach Albert to fetch (Albert does not do dog stuff), and me flat on my back, same as always, eyes almost closed, trying not to think about anything but a couple of blue butterflies about to settle on my forehead. Then they were gone, and I was staring straight up at Mrs. Fallowfield. Practically nobody looks good from that angle, especially a bony old woman in a big fur cap, with no hips. She said nothing but, “Scones. Five minutes. Bring the boy.” And she tramped off, the way she always did, as though she were breaking a trail through the snow for people to follow.