What’s more amazing than me not catching cold, though, is how few questions anyone ever asked me about what the hell I was doing in the Alpine Meadows, and why I hadn’t had the sense to come in out of the rain. I really expected Sally to put the screws to me, but she never did, and I’ll always wonder if that was Evan’s influence. I think Evan knows more than he wants to about the history of the Manor, and about what goes on around Stourhead Farm at night—wild geese or no. But he left it alone, and Sally pretty much did, too.
I had more trouble with Julian, who’s got an incredible instinct for these things. He kept asking if I’d been with “that scary old woman,” and why those prints in the dried mud and trampled cornstalks didn’t really look like the jeep’s tire tracks. He stayed on the case for absolute weeks, until his hormones finally kicked in, and he abruptly discovered girls. Thank God for puberty, that’s all I’ve got to say.
No, I’ve never seen Tamsin again. I really didn’t expect to. What’s odd is that when I dream of her—and I dream of her a lot—the dreams aren’t exactly about Tamsin. She’s in them, and I always know it’s her, and sometimes we even talk, but she’s not the center of the dream: That’s more likely to be the Wild Hunt, or Judge Jeffreys, or even myself. And the dreams can be frightening, but they’re never—I don’t know… they’re not yearning dreams, not dreams of loss. I’m just happy that she’s there, and that’s all.
I asked Meena, more than a year later, why she thought that was. Meena knows almost everything about the Alpine Meadow, except what happened to Judge Jeffreys. She’d feel bad for him; she wouldn’t be able to help it. Meena doesn’t need that.
Anyway, I asked her at school one day, and she answered me two days later, because that’s how Meena is. “Maybe you don’t have that kind of dream about Tamsin because you don’t have to. Dreams are loose ends sometimes, dreams are unfinished business, but there is none of that between you and Tamsin. You are complete with her, I think—you have her, really, for always. You don’t need to dream.”
“Well, I don’t feel like I have her,” I said, “and I definitely don’t feel complete. I feel like Mister Cat, still looking and looking everywhere for Miss Sophia Brown after a whole year. I feel like a whole damn barrel of loose ends, Meena.”
“But you’re not,” Meena said, and she was right. I went on remembering Tamsin all the time, but not missing her, not always longing to be with her, the way I used to be when she was in the little secret room on the third floor of the east wing, and nobody knew but me. Mostly I’ve been happy thinking about her, these four years—almost five now—and pretty proud of myself, too, because she needed my help, and nobody else could have done it, and I actually didn’t wimp out or screw up. And she told me I was beautiful, or anyway she said I had “all the makings of a proper beauty.” I never told Meena about that, either.
The portrait of Tamsin and Judge Jeffreys is still hanging in the Restaurant, as far as I know—I don’t go in there anymore. But I do go back to Tamsin’s room every so often, me and Mister Cat. Once she was gone, I didn’t keep it a secret, but nobody was ever much interested. Sally thinks it’s cute—she calls it “Jenny’s lair”—but the boys got bored, and I’m not sure Evan’s been up at all. I sit in Tamsin’s chair, and Mister Cat does his usual tour of the room, sniffing in corners and under the weird bedframe-trunk contrivance, because you never know… But in a while he comes and jumps into my lap (a little stiffly now, but I don’t notice it, for both our sakes), and we stay there for hours sometimes. Not doing anything, mostly not even thinking very much—we’re just there, where they were for so long, even though nothing of them remains. Mister Cat’s always the one who decides when it’s time to go.
Stourhead Farm’s doing fine. There were a couple of years, after Evan started using his no-till method, when the yield fell off a bit more than he’d expected and the Lovells started getting seriously skittish. But they picked up the third-year option anyway, and that was when things began turning around—you could probably grow pineapples and papayas in that soil now, except for one or two places where you somehow can’t grow much of anything. The Lovells are so stoked on Evan that they want him to take over another dilapidated old property of theirs in Herefordshire. It’s possible, I guess—Evan can get restless when he’s not fixing something—but I don’t think he’ll do it. Sally likes it in Dorset.
And I don’t know what musical Dorset would do without Sally, at this point. Dorchester and Yeovil, anyway: She’s directing choirs in both places now, the last time I looked, teaching a class for accompanists at the university, still taking a few private students, and—for relaxation—playing with a very amateur jazz quartet now and then. She’s branching out, too: This summer she’s going to be handling the music for a Ben Jonson masque they’re staging in Salisbury. I don’t think you could get Sally out of Dorset with dynamite and a backhoe.
Like I said somewhere early on, Julian’s the only one of us still home, with Tony mostly off dancing one place or another and me here at Cambridge, where Meena’s supposed to be. Meena’s back in India, for God’s sake, working with a group that arranges loans for village women to start their own businesses. Mr. and Mrs. Chari are being good about it, but they’re not a bit happy, and she’s promised to come back sometime soon and go be a brain surgeon. I miss her a lot, in all the ways I don’t really miss Tamsin. We send a lot of e-mail back and forth, when she can get to a computer, which isn’t too often. I’m going to India to see her next Christmas.
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.