I’m at Cambridge, reading English history, to absolutely everyone’s surprise but my own. Because I was part of English history for a while, in a strange way, and it was part of me. It picked me up by the neck and shook me, and it scared the living hell out of me, but it kissed me, too. And afterward, after everything, I couldn’t stop wanting to know more. About Tamsin’s time first, of course; but then I started working backward, and my grades took off like the Wild Hunt, and here I am in Cambridge, biking to lectures, meeting with my tutor, sharing digs with a girl from Uganda named Patricia Mofolo, and feeling like somebody in an English novel. And there’s a boy—or I think there’s starting to be one—but that’s my business. I get enough static from Julian as it is.
But I still feel like loose ends sometimes. Not a barrel, but close enough. It’s not just remembering Tamsin—it’s that world I got a glimpse of because of Tamsin: That night world where the Black Dog still walks the roads, and the billy-blind waits for someone to give advice to, and the Oakmen brood in the Hundred-Acre Wood over whatever it is Oakmen brood over. That world of moonlight and cold shadows where the Pooka is king and little creatures giggle under my bathtub. It’s gone with Tamsin, completely, and I wish I had it back. I don’t want her back, honestly—I know she’s where she should be—but that other, that night place, yes. The Wild Hunt doesn’t ever pass over Cambridge.
But you never know. I saw the Pooka the last time I went home.
It was late spring, and I’d sneaked back to Dorset for the weekend to hear Sally’s Sherborne choir, and to inspect Julian’s newest girlfriend. He has terrible taste in women, but this one isn’t too bad. Her name is Diana, but that’s not her fault, and she obviously thinks Julian’s the ultimate end of evolution, which he is not, and it’s going to make him even more impossible than he already is. But he’s my baby brother, and I like any idiot who treats him like the end result of evolution.
The night before I left was practically warm, and I went for a walk with Evan and Sally—just a slow stroll to nowhere special, talking about the farm and the choir and Cambridge, and a bit about Diana, and not at all about the boy I’m sort of seeing. Sally asked, “Did you ever think, back on West Eighty-third…?” and Evan said, “I might try a few fruit trees in the Alpine Meadow next year,” and I told them about the time Norris sang in Cambridge and hung around for a couple of days afterward. He took Patricia and me out to dinner at Midsummer House every night, made a mild pass at Patricia once, when I was in the loo, and whisked off to sing in Dublin. He was very good about not calling me Jennifer.
Evan and Sally went back to the Manor after a while, making their usual running joke of warning me to come in if it started storming. I stood watching them walk away with their arms lightly around each other’s waists and Evan reassuring Sally that nobody noticed the soloist going flat during the Handel oratorio. When they were out of sight, I turned and wandered down the tractor path to check on Tamsin’s row of ancient beech trees. I always do that when I’m home, even though I know Evan won’t cut them until he really has to. I see Tamsin best there, for some reason, talking to them, dancing with them, laughing like a little girl. It’s just something I do.
The trees hadn’t changed. They’re as huge and three-quarters dead as ever, and I’m not easy with them by myself. They tolerated me when I was with Tamsin; now they feel… not menacing, not like the Hundred-Acre Wood, but completely unwelcoming. But I can’t not go there, even though I never stay long, because that’s where I hear Tamsin’s voice most clearly, saying, “Still holding to Stourhead earth, they and I.” With her gone, I think they’ll start to fall soon. She gave them permission.
I was turning away when my foot bumped against something, and I glanced down to see a hedgehog. They’re all over the place at Stourhead: grayish-brownish, with silver-tipped spines, about the size of a kazoo, and totally unafraid of people. This one looked up at me with angled yellow eyes and said, “Pick me up, Jenny Gluckstein.”
“Fat chance,” I said. “I’d be picking those fishhooks out of my hands for a week. I know you.”
“Pick me up,” the hedgehog repeated, and after a moment I did, because what the hell. The Pooka kept his spines down—they felt like rough silk tickling my skin—and studied me the way my tutor does when he’s not quite sure I’m ever going to get a grip on the Corn Laws. He said, “You have grown, Jenny Gluckstein.”
I blushed blotchy, sweaty hot, the way I hardly ever do anymore. “Well, I didn’t have a lot of choice,” I answered. “Hang around with ghosts and boggarts and the Wild Hunt—”
“And the Old Lady of the Elder Tree,” the Pooka said. “You are fortunate beyond your imagining. She cares even less for humans than I, but she will take a fancy to this one or that betimes. Not all can endure her regard as you did.” He curled up in my palm, the way hedgehogs will do. “And none see her truly, as you saw her, without growing greater or shrinking quite small. You have done well.”
“I miss her,” I said. “I miss you. I miss those nasty little monsters Mister Cat used to fight with at night. I don’t mean miss, exactly, it doesn’t keep me awake… I mean, I wish there were pookas and Black Dogs and whatnot around Cambridge, that’s what I wish. Or London, or New York, or wherever I’m going to wind up doing whatever I’m going to wind up doing. Somehow, I’ve developed some kind of nutsy taste for… for old weirdness, I guess you’d say. That’s what I miss, and I don’t think I’ll ever meet up with it again. Unless I spend my life in Dorset, or someplace like that, where the nights are still different—still dark. But I can’t do that, so I don’t know. I just miss, that’s all.”
The Pooka didn’t say anything. I started walking away from the beeches, back toward the Manor, but the Pooka didn’t move in my hand. He didn’t direct me to go this way or that, or to put him down, so I kept going along until I heard Sally playing the piano, singing “What Shall a Young Lassie Do with an Old Man?” and Evan singing with her. Then I stopped, and listened, and waited.
“Jenny Gluckstein,” the Pooka said at last, “mystery belongs to mystery, not to Dorset or London. You are yourself as much a riddle as any you will ever encounter, and so you will always draw riddles to you, wherever you may be. If there should be a boggart in New York, he will find your house, I assure you, as any pooka in London will know your name. You will never be further from— what did you call it?—old weirdness than you are at this moment. And on that you may have my word.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you,” and I actually bent to kiss him, but his spines came up with a mean whisper, and I backed off. Then I said, “But a pooka’s word isn’t good for much. Pookas lie. Tamsin told me.”
The Pooka kept his back spines up, but hedgehogs don’t have any on their bellies, so my hand was all right. “True enough, Jenny Gluckstein. Pookas lie as humans lie, but not to hide the truth. Never that.”
“No?” I said. “Silly me. I thought that was why everyone lied. Human or anything else.”
“Of course not,” the yellow-eyed little creature in my hand said. “Only humans would lie for so drab a reason. Pookas lie for pleasure, for the pure joy of deception, and so do all your other old weirdnesses—all those night friends you pine for now. Remember that in London.”
“Yes,” I said. I felt tears in my eyes, without knowing why. I said, “I’ll remember.”
“Yet sometimes we tell the truth,” the Pooka added, “for very delight in confusion. Remember that, too. Set me down here.”
We were near Evan’s swing, which was stirring very slightly in the night breeze, like Mister Cat’s sides when he sleeps. I stooped to put the hedgehog on the ground, but it rose through my hands in the form of a tall gray bird—some kind of heron, I think—and circled over me once before it flew off, away from the light. I thought I heard it say some last thing that ended with my name, but that’s probably just because I wanted to hear it so. I stood there for a while, and then I walked the rest of the way to the Manor, because I had to finish packing and get moving early.