Tamsin

Twenty

Tamsin came to me late that night. Not in my bedroom, like the other time, but in my damn bathroom, when I was standing naked at the mirror, mumbling to myself, just checking the damage. These days I can look pretty straight into a mirror, not flinching away or making idiot faces; but back then it took me weeks to work up to something like that, staring head-on at what I’m going to be staring at for the rest of my life. Skin actually not too hideous for once—maybe Sally’s right about the climate. Hair… well, the billy-blind’s brown egg just made a mess, but the porter actually helped some. Shape absolutely hopeless—live with it, that’s all. Too much mouth, too little nose—makes my eyes look too close together, but I don’t think they are. No, eyes probably okay— eyelashes too damn stubby. Meena’s got such pretty eyelashes. Live with it.

I didn’t see Tamsin in the mirror—ghosts don’t reflect—but I knew she was there even before I smelled her. She was balancing on the edge of the bathtub, poised on one foot—doing Tony, for God’s sake!—and I caught my breath to warn her not to lean against the curtain rod, because it comes down if you look crosseyed at it. I was going to be embarrassed or a

Tamsin didn’t answer that right away. She looked me up and down very thoughtfully, not smiling now. At last she nodded firmly and she said, “I remember.”

“You remember what?” I got back into my bathrobe, not because of being shy or anything, but because of drafts. Tamsin went on studying me in a way she hadn’t ever done—so clear for the moment that I almost couldn’t see the shower curtain behind her. So clear that what I could see was something I’d never noticed before: a crooked right eyetooth, crowding just a bit over the tooth to its left, whatever it’s called. Not grotesque, not a deformity—just something I didn’t expect, and it startled me. And Tamsin knew.

“We call it a wolf tooth,” she said. “I ca

“You’ve got a beautiful smile, for God’s sake,” I said. “I never saw a smile like yours. I’ll do anything—I mean, people would do anything when you smile.”

And Tamsin pounced—she even sort of swooped her head down close to mine, like a butterfly landing on something sweet. “Aye, well then—and your eyelashes are in no way too short, and your eyes are perfectly set in your head, and your mouth is a womanly mouth, a sister’s vow on’t.” I didn’t take it in at first, that word, sister. Tamsin said, “Mistress Je

My womanly mouth was hanging open, and all I could think of was Mr. Hammell and Introduction to Drama. But Tamsin went on looking at me as proudly as though I really were her sister, dressed for a ball in her borrowed clothes, instead of my mildewy old bathrobe. Mister Cat looked like that when he was first showing Miss Sophia Brown off to me.

I asked her again, when I could talk, “Where did you go? When I asked you about Judge Jeffreys? Why did you disappear like that?”

She didn’t do it again this time, though you could see how much she wanted to. She went all filmy and indistinct, fragile as a dragonfly wing, but without any color, and without that pulse of light that she always had. But she stayed visible, and she seemed to take a long breath and let it out again, though she couldn’t have. She whispered, “I was afeared.”

“He’s gone,” I said. “He’s gone, and he can’t come back, you told me that. He died in 1688, three years after you.” Tamsin had grown so faint in the air that I remembered being a kid watching Peter Pan and clapping my hands wildly to save Tinker Bell from dying. I said, “But he was here, I know that. You remember him.”

“He came often to dine with us.” Tamsin’s voice wasn’t even as loud as those squeaks and chitterings I’d heard under the tub. “My parents despised him to their souls, but what could they… ?” She broke off for a moment, and then she burst out, “My father feared no man born, you must know this, but in the presence of that— that… Je

Robe or no robe, I was freezing, and my throat was closing up on me. I got her out of the bathroom and into my room, and we just sat together on the bed, with Tamsin’s voice going on in the dark, soft and toneless, and I couldn’t even put my arm around her. “Courting me, from the very first—there, at my parents’ table, before their eyes—and taking such grand pleasure in his knowledge that there was naught they could do against my Lord Justice George Jeffreys. And leaning forward, whispering, offering slips of orange between his fingers, like to a man feeding a pet bird. I see him still, Je

“He was sort of handsome, wasn’t he?” I said. “Pretty eyes.” Tamsin was staring at me. “I mean, in his pictures, anyway.”

If nobody ever again, for the whole damn rest of my life, looks at me the way Tamsin did then, I’ll be just as happy. I honestly thought she might never be going to speak to me again, but after about a year she said, “Pretty eyes. So they were—nor did he ever take them from me in all that time, not for two minutes together. Edric would be playing, and the portraitist daubing and scratching, my father snoring—and those pretty eyes so softly on me…”

“He came to see you being painted?” I should have figured that—Meena would have. “So he saw Edric, and… he saw Edric and you?”

“He saw everything.” She began to sound a little more like the Tamsin I knew then, speaking faster and with a bit of expression back in her voice. “Aye, he knew the truth of us, I think before we did! He never spoke word to Edric, but whiles that gentle gaze would rise to take the two of us in—never more than a moment, a single breath— and Je

I felt like Edric, unable to cross three hundred years to hold her and say, It’s all right, it’s all right. I won’t let anything bad happen, as though that would have helped. All I could do was ask helplessly dumb things like, “Did he ever get you—I mean, were you ever alone with him?”

“Always,” Tamsin said. She was turning her hands over and over in her lap, and she looked like a child being scolded for something she hadn’t done. She said, “Je