"Tamsin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Beagle Peter S)

Eighteen

The rains don’t exactly stop in a Dorset winter—there’s a reason so many places are called Puddletown, Tolpuddle, Piddlehinton, Piddletrenthide, and like that—but they do ease up from time to time. Once he could get out to the fields, Evan started mounding up strips of earth straight across the muddy stubble and rotten leftover bits, everywhere there was going to be any planting. “To keep the soil warm,” he told Ellie John and Seth—right, Seth was there by then—and they stared at him, and then told everybody else about it, and they stared, but they went ahead and did what he told them. The fields looked weird when it was done—welted up like an attack of hives—and the Lovells damn near got hives themselves when Evan invited them to come down from Oxford and take a look. But Evan didn’t care. He was as cool as Mister Cat with the Lovells that time.

“It’s called no-till farming,” he told them. “I studied it fairly extensively when I was in the States. Very much the new thing. Very popular in the Midwest.”

The Lovells weren’t buying. They particularly weren’t buying Evan’s explanation that with this method you don’t do any plowing at all—just lay the seeds down on the ground and walk away. Not really walk away; you need to be using special improved seeds, and just the right amounts of the right kinds of fertilizer. Sometimes you don’t get as big a crop the first year or two, because the ground’s so used to disks and blades harrowing it up. And if it sounds for a minute as though I know what I’m talking about, forget it. I just live here.

Tony and I were on floor-mopping duty when Evan laid it on the line for the Lovells. “I know it’s hard to imagine, after so many millennia of people all over the world doing exactly the same thing with their land. Good soil or bad—you turn it over, you break it up, you hack furrows into it, you sow—you weed, you spray, you harvest, you market, you start over, world without end.” He shook his head solemnly. “All those centuries, basically unaltered. Amazing, when you think of it.”

Masses of Lovells glowered back at him. (Actually, they never came more than three or four at a time, but they always managed to look like an entire Board of Directors.) One Lovell said, “Nothing wrong with that. Civilization’s always built on people farming their land.”

“Civilizations change,” Evan said. “People change. And land changes—that’s what I’ve been trying to make you see. This soil, this earth we’re standing on has had the equivalent of a hurricane blowing through it every year for a thousand years. There’s nothing left. I want you to understand this. There is nothing left. The only reason Stourhead Farm and all the farms in West Dorset produce so much as a dandelion, a bloody burdock leaf, is that they’re absolutely saturated in chemical fertilizers. Zombie farms, the walking dead!” The Lovells’ mouths were hanging open like steamshovel jaws. Evan said, “If you’re serious about wanting to restore Stourhead to what it was when the land was young, then you’re going to have to change with the land. This is what’s needed, and this is how I’m going to be managing here from now on.”

A big bald Lovell was the first to stop spluttering. He said, “And I suppose there’s not a thing we can do about it.”

Evan smiled. “You’re my employers. You’ve always got a choice.”

The Lovells didn’t exactly call for a time out and a huddle, but close enough. There was a lot of silent shrugging, grunting, head shaking, mouth twitching, hand spreading, and general eyebrow athletics going on, while Evan leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs, just as though none of their antics meant a thing in the world to him. When he looked over and saw Tony and me leaning on our mops and watching, he gave us a long, slow wink. Cool as Mister Cat.

And he got away with it. The bald Lovell finally grumbled, “Might have said something . . well, in for a penny, in for a pound, hey?” and the rest of them went along. Evan could have two years to try out his no-till method, with an option for a third year if the second crop at least equaled this last harvest. It didn’t seem like much of a shot to me, but it was plainly all he was going to get out of the Lovells. He told them what kind of new equipment he’d need, and how much it would cost, and the Lovells pissed and moaned some more, but it came out consent. Evan got them to put everything in writing before they left, just in case.

“They could have fired you,” Tony said afterward. “They could have bloody bounced you, right on the spot. We’d have been back bunking in with Charlie.”

Evan shook his head. “They’d lose at least a year and a harvest finding another manager this late—they know it, and I know it, and they know I know. Now, on their way home, they’ll start looking around in a hurry, but it’ll keep them busy for a while. All I’ve done is buy us a bit of time, which was all I wanted. Who’s for chess? Julian, I’ll give you a rook, how about it?” Evan would have made a great chess hustler, like the ones in Central Park, if he weren’t a crazy farmer.

Later, with the rain coming down hard again, with the lights going on and off and the TV completely dead, and everyone piled together in the music room listening to Sally playing Rolling Stones songs the way Bach or Schubert or Mahler would have done them, I asked on an impulse, “Evan, does anybody know anything about Roger Willoughby’s family?”

Evan was leaning against the piano bench with his head resting lightly on Sally’s leg. By now I was almost used to seeing them like that, as though they’d been married forever; it only got to me once in a while, when I was offguard or in some kind of mood. He said, “It depends on what you want to know, Jenny. I could show you a copy of Roger’s will, which is quite detailed about who gets what, and I could describe the changes his oldest son, Giles, made when he took over the farm in 1699. But that’s not what you’re after, is it?”

“No,” I said. Tony was propped on an elbow, thumb-wrestling with Julian, but he was watching me really curiously, which is why he was losing. I said, “What about the other children? There were the two boys and two girls, only one of them died of the Black Plague.” That was a mistake—now everybody was looking at me. Well, in for a penny, like the Lovells. “I mean, that’s what I heard, anyway. I was just wondering about the other daughter, and about—I don’t know… if any of them could have gotten mixed up in Monmouth’s Rebellion or anything like that? Tony doesn’t think so, but I was wondering.”

If human life on this planet ever depends on whether or not I can tell a lie without blushing, humanity had better start packing. I wasn’t even lying—I was just trying for casual, and I can’t even do that without my whole face spontaneously combusting. Everybody was polite about it, though, and nobody asked any of the questions I’d left myself wide open for. Evan did give me a long look, way too thoughtful—Tony gets it from him, it just occurs to me now—but all he said was, “You should talk to old Guy Guthrie.”

Sally stopped playing for a moment. “The man at the market? What would he know about the Willoughbys?”

“Guy Guthrie knows everything,” Evan said. “Everything about Dorset, anyway. The Celts, the Romans, the people who cut the Cerne Abbas Giant in the turf, the ones who lived in Maiden Castle, the ones who went with Monmouth—the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Thomas Hardy, Barnes, the lot. And their ghosts.” I must have dropped my teeth, because Evan smiled his long, slow smile at me. “He collects ghosts, old Guy does. Hobs and bogles too—get him to tell you about the Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe Manor—but mostly it’s Dorset history, the bits and loose ends that don’t fit into books. He’ll know about the Willoughbys.”

He did, too. Does, I mean: Guy Guthrie’s still alive, still doesn’t look any more than seventy-five—though he’s got to be ninety— still wears Sherlock Holmes tweeds and ulsters, and still works part-time at the Dorchester Museum, though you don’t see him running the cattle auctions at the farmers’ market the way he used to do. He lives alone in Puddletown, a few miles east of Dorchester, in a stone cottage that smells of old books and a nice old dog named Clem. Sally dropped me off there one Saturday afternoon when she had pupils to see.

Mr. Guthrie served me milky Indian tea, the way they have it at Meena’s house, and little cakes, the kind that taste like sweet sand, and which you can actually feel rotting your teeth while you’re eating them. He’s a tall man, with a big broad face, Crayola-blue eyes, and a hayrick of white hair that used to be red. He poured tea for himself, leaned forward, and asked me, “Now why on earth would a child like yourself be wanting to know about Tamsin Willoughby?”

Sally hadn’t told him about Tamsin—she couldn’t have. She’d simply gotten his phone number and called to say that her daughter was very interested in the history of Stourhead Farm and the Willoughby family. And there he sat, smiling a little over the rim of his teacup, and getting straight to the heart of things first crack. I said, “Well, I didn’t mean Tamsin—I mean, not just Tamsin—”

“Of course you do,” Mr. Guthrie interrupted me. “Tell me, does she still smell of vanilla?” I sloshed tea into my saucer, and Mr. Guthrie’s smile got wider. He said, “I’m sorry, my dear—that was a silly parlor trick, and I do apologize. But you see, Tamsin Willoughby has appeared a number of times over the last three centuries. Always to young women—girls, really, none very much older than yourself—and always accompanied by the scent of vanilla.” Mr. Guthrie was born in the north of England, not the west, so his accent isn’t really Dorset, and people tease him about it, but I liked it right away. He said, “Please do tell me about her.”

I didn’t tell him everything I knew, but just to be able to talk about Tamsin at all was like early spring in Mr. Guthrie’s little parlor. When I said that I’d spoken with her, and that we’d gone walking together, he didn’t answer me for a while. Then he said, very carefully, “As a rule, Miss Gluckstein—ah, Jenny, then—as a rule the sightings of Tamsin Willoughby have usually been very brief, and always occurred within the walls of the Manor itself. And no one has ever reported—ah—any sort of actual conversation with her. Are you absolutely sure…?” He let his voice trail away then, the way people do when they’re too polite to call you a liar, so they offer you a way out. Like in all those English movies Sally took me to, when they leave the villain alone with a drink and a pistol. I said that I was telling the truth, and he gave a sigh, leaned back in his chair, and didn’t speak for another while. But it was a different kind of not speaking.

“The story of Tamsin Willoughby,” Mr. Guthrie said, “is to my mind the most romantic legend between Winchester and Exeter. I call it a legend because the people involved were most real, but every other aspect of the tale is guesswork, there’s no other word for it. It begins with a chap who was apparently engaged to play to her while she was having her portrait painted—”

“Edric Davies,” I said. I didn’t mean to say it—it just came out of me, that fast. Mr. Guthrie looked at me. I said, “He was Welsh—I think.” Because it was his story to tell, after all.

“Edric Davies,” Mr. Guthrie said. “Yes. Yes, he was indeed a Welshman. Of course they fell in love, quite properly—what sort of a legend would this be if they didn’t?—and made plans to elope together, since her family would never have consented to such a marriage.” He stopped, narrowing his eyes, which made them look even brighter. “You know all this, I can see.”

I nodded. “She told me,” I said. “I’m really not making it up, Mr. Guthrie.”

Mr. Guthrie sighed again. “Eigh, dear, I rather wish you were. Because I know what to do with fabrications, Jenny, with all the ridiculous nonsense that always collects around stories like this one of Tamsin Willoughby. I sieve them out, like one of your American goldminers—I shake them up and turn them on their heads, and I shake them some more, and in time all the silliness and all the superstition sift through and sink. And most of the time there’s nowt more than that to the business, but once in a while, once in a while… some bit of gold is left behind, and that’s what I collect, do you see? Those tiny flecks of inexplicable truth that won’t dissolve, won’t wash away.” He smiled again, a little sadly now. “It’s not a very big collection, for as long as I’ve been at it, but you’re welcome to what’s there.”

As far as he knew, Edric Davies had been lost in Monmouth’s Rebellion. When I told him about Edric’s student, Francis Gollop, being the one who went, and how Edric had gone after him and brought the body home by night, he gave a funny, nice little yelp, the way Julian still does when the crossword puzzle suddenly falls into place. “That accounts for it!” He set his cup down too hard, spilling tea himself, and clapped his hands. “That accounts for it!”

“What? Accounts for what?”

“Why, for the way he disappears from the story,” Mr. Guthrie practically shouted. He hopped to his feet—then saw I didn’t have a clue what he was carrying on about, and he laughed and sat down again. “Jenny, in all the years I’ve been asking Dorset people about the ghost stories their parents and grandparents told them, I’ve come across four versions of the tale of Tamsin and Edric. And in every one of them, Edric vanishes into the Rebellion and Tamsin never learns what becomes of him—nobody does. Maybe he was killed, maybe Judge Jeffreys had him hanged or transported; maybe he simply fled to safety in Wales. I must tell you, it’s never felt right to me. Wrong shape to the story, Edric never coming back. Wrong shape.”

“Well, he did,” I said. “He came back, all right, and he buried Francis Gollop in a wheatfield. But I don’t know what became of him after that. Tamsin won’t ever say.”

“She died,” Mr. Guthrie said. “Maybe that’s all that happened.” There was one little sugary cake left, and he waved it to me, but I wrapped it in a paper napkin to take home to Julian. A kid gives you his damn gorilla, you have obligations.

I said, “I don’t believe that. And you don’t either.” Mr. Guthrie didn’t answer right away. Clem wandered over and slobbered on my shoes. I scratched his ears, keeping Julian’s cake well out of range. Once Mr. Guthrie started to say something, but then he didn’t. The old stone cottage got really quiet, but not scary. You could hear a clock ticking somewhere, and smell something on the stove, and a bird scratching for shelter under the eaves. I studied a framed photograph on an end table: three little girls, each one holding a doll. They must have wanted them in the picture, too, the same way I still don’t like to be in a photo without Mister Cat. I need all the diversions and evasive maneuvers I can get.

“Do you know anything about Judge Jeffreys?” Mr. Guthrie finally asked me. I told him what Tony had told me about the Bloody Assizes, and he nodded his head, but he was sort of shaking it at the same time. He said, “You can’t imagine him. You can’t imagine what he did here. The Irish still damn each other with the Curse of Cromwell, because of the terrible way he drove them off their land, and the thousands and thousands who were killed when they resisted. We in Dorset could call down the Curse of Jeffreys on our enemies, but we never would—no one could deserve that, and it’s no name to be conjuring with. Oh, I talk about him to the tourists all the time, but I don’t think about him, do you see? I don’t like to think about him.”

He was looking flushed and agitated, and old for the first time. He saw me seeing it and snapped his fingers to call Clem, calming himself some by smoothing the dog’s messy coat. I almost didn’t hear him when he said, “Jeffreys knew the Willoughbys. I’m sure he knew Tamsin.”

My entire inside turned to ice-cold mashed potatoes, that fast. When I could talk, I said, “No. No, he couldn’t have. Roger Willoughby stayed out of the Rebellion, they didn’t have anything to do with it. I know that.”

Mr. Guthrie’s northern accent was getting stronger, and his rough, easy voice had turned pinched and harsh. “Jeffreys convicted an eight-year-old girl of treason. He raved at her in his courtroom until she collapsed and died. He didn’t care who was involved with Monmouth and who wasn’t. King James had sent him down to make an example of Dorset—he was after the whole county, not just a handful of miserable peasants. He was a bloody terrorist, Jenny. Guilt or innocence didn’t matter tuppence to Judge Jeffreys.”

Clem yelped, and Mr. Guthrie looked down at his hand, clenched hard in the dog’s fur as though it were somebody else’s hand. He let go and petted Clem, crooning and apologizing to him. I said, “You can’t be sure. That he actually knew them. Her.”

“He kept a diary,” Mr. Guthrie said. “Not a real diary—more of a schedule, you’d call it. A few scribbled notes on the trials—you wouldn’t want to read those—but most are social things. Visitors, dinner invitations. He was a very popular dinner guest during the Assizes, the judge was.”

I stared at him. I said, “That’s crazy. With everything he was doing every day?”

“Well, that’s precisely why.” Mr. Guthrie made himself smile. “Just you think about it. Here’s a man can send anyone, anyone he chooses to the gallows or worse. Commoners can’t offer him an evening’s entertainment, but the gentry can. Wouldn’t you want to keep in his good books—make certain he doesn’t decide you might have thought about supporting Monmouth, even for five minutes together? Oh, take my word, they fought to have him to their homes, people like the Willoughbys, people far greater than they. That’s how it was then, during the Bloody Assizes.”

I didn’t want to hear what he was going to tell me. I looked at my watch to see when Sally would be back to pick me up. Mr. Guthrie said, “His journal is in the County Museum. There are several entries for the Willoughbys.”

“She wouldn’t have had anything to do with him,” I said. “I don’t care how many times he came to dinner, I don’t care what he could have done to her family, she wouldn’t have talked to him, looked at him. You don’t know her.” I was getting red-faced myself, I could feel it—not gracefully around the cheekbones like Mr. Guthrie, but pop-eyed and smeary and awful. I said, “I’m sure that sounds incredibly dumb, saying I know someone who’s been dead for three hundred years, but I do.”

“And I know George Jeffreys—Baron Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys of Wem,” Mr. Guthrie answered. “Haven’t I looked in his face, forty years, time and time, and seen what that poor little girl saw? Haven’t I looked in his face?”

He was on his feet now, though I don’t think he knew it, and he had to grip the back of the chair to steady himself, he was trembling so. For a moment I was sure he meant he’d actually seen Judge Jeffreys, just as I saw Tamsin. But then he went on—quickly, as though he knew what I was thinking—“There’s a portrait in the Lodgings. Ask them to show you.”

It got awkwardly, embarrassingly quiet again after that, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say, except to ask if I could have some more tea. Mr. Guthrie seemed relieved to go and make it. I sat there, so caught up in imagining Judge Jeffreys at Stourhead Farm, dining with the Willoughbys in the Manor, that I kept forgetting to stroke Clem. Then he’d shove his head into my hand for attention, and I’d get back to my job. But all I could think about was Tamsin, Tamsin looking across the dining table, seeing that man staring at her. Because he would have stared. And she’d have looked straight back into his face, like Mr. Guthrie, and seen what she saw. I didn’t taste that second pot of tea at all.

Sally was tired from teaching when she came to get me, and I felt guilty about it, but I talked her into taking me by the Judge jeffreys Restaurant, back in Dorchester. The Restaurant is on High West Street, around the corner from the Antelope Hotel, where they held the Bloody Assizes. It’s a three-story, half-timbered building, all stone and oak, over four hundred years old, and it’s so real that it looks absolutely fake, if you can figure that. Judge Jeffreys’s picture is on the sign hanging out front, but you really can’t make much out of it, except that he’s wearing a wig. I’ve passed it any number of times without giving it any thought, even after Tony told me about the Assizes.

But upstairs, in the Lodgings, where he slept and wrote in his journal and where people probably came to beg him for their lives, or their children’s lives—upstairs they have the portrait Mr. Guthrie was talking about. It was late, and the Lodgings part was closed, but the restaurant people knew Sally—she eats there a lot, in between pupils—so they showed us up and left us alone. And we stood there and looked at Judge Jeffreys together.

The thing I wasn’t the least bit prepared for was that he was pretty. I can’t say it any other way—he was out and out pretty, that mad, evil man. And he was young—the painting wasn’t done at the time of the Assizes, but maybe seven or eight years before, so he’d have been around thirty at the most. It’s almost a woman’s face: delicate, calm, even thoughtful, with big heavy-lidded eyes and a woman’s soft mouth. You can’t possibly imagine that face screaming and raging and foaming—which is what everybody says he did—sentencing people by the hundreds to be hacked into pieces, and ordering their heads and quarters boiled and tarred and stuck up on poles all over Dorset. There’s no way you can see that face doing those things.

I told Sally that, and she said, “Well, you know, in those days portraits didn’t necessarily look much like the people who were paying for them. Oliver Cromwell’s supposed to have told a painter that he wanted to be shown warts and all, but I don’t think that was ever much of a trend. I’ll bet nobody was about to chance painting Judge Jeffreys the way he really looked.” She put her arm around me—I guess because of the way I was staring at the portrait. “Too bad they didn’t have Polaroids back then, huh?”

But he did look like that. He looked exactly like that.