First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2021

Published in this ebook edition in 2021

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Text copyright © Sophie Cleverly 2021

Cover illustration © Hannah Peck 2021

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

Sophie Cleverly and Hannah Peck assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work respectively.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008297350

Ebook Edition © 2021 ISBN: 9780008297367

Version: 2021-01-07

For Lyanna – I love you more than all the stars in the sky

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Epilogue

Dear reader …

Keep Reading …

Books by Sophie Cleverly

About the Publisher

was born in the mortuary. Topsy-turvy, I know, but that’s the truth of it. My mother said the slab was cold and hard, but that she was in no fit state to quarrel at the time.

They named me Violet, for the flower – the twin to my mother’s name, Iris. I think they were hoping I would be a Shrinking Violet, modest and shy, but it was soon apparent that I was not.

My middle name is Victoria, after the queen. They said she was in mourning for her husband these days, roaming the palace dressed only in black. I didn’t see anything unusual about that. Father had clothed us in dark and sombre colours for as long as I could remember. ‘We’re always in mourning for someone,’ he’d say.

Being on the edge of life and death was a funny thing. Sometimes, out among the graves, I could sense the dead. It was just a feeling – an echo of emotion, a scattering of words. It was just a part of me, and I had grown used to it – grown used to keeping quiet about it too, because all I got were strange looks and shushes from grown-ups if I were to mention it.

Often the dead didn’t have much to say. But I was soon to encounter a dead person who had a lot more to say than usual.

The day of the miracle, I had recently turned thirteen years old, and I was out collecting apples in the cemetery. I took a bite of one and it was as crisp as the autumn air. My black greyhound, Bones, ran circles around my feet, sniffing the ground with his long nose.

Bones was a fairly recent addition to the family. I had found him wandering amongst the headstones. As soon as he’d spotted me, he wouldn’t leave me alone. He wore no collar and looked skinny – but then all greyhounds do.

I named him Bones, because growing up as the daughter of an undertaker and living, as we did, beside a graveyard, it just seemed fitting. I fed him scraps and begged Mother to let me keep him. She said no. So I asked Father, who said maybe. Mother finally gave in and said I could have him, but all the same, she made Bones sleep outside.

For two weeks, he slept just beyond our back wall, curled at the foot of a stone cross. By the third week, Mother took pity on him and let him sleep in the back garden. It was only a few days more before he was in the house, and often on my bed.

Now he was my constant companion – at least when he wasn’t distracted by doggy things such as chasing squirrels and chewing shoes.

That day, when my skirts were full of the ripe fruit, I dashed back through the graves and into the parlour – the funeral parlour, that is – leaving Bones rolling in the grass. The breeze whipped my long dark hair across my eyes.

Father was sweeping up when I got in. ‘Honestly, Violet, can’t you use the back door to the house? What if there had been someone in here?’

‘Someone?’ I chuckled. ‘Your guests are usually a little too dead to notice, aren’t they, Father!’

He huffed at me and shook the broom out of the open door. I turned to see Bones trying to get a mouthful of broom before Father tugged it back. ‘And what about the family members? They could be visiting the deceased.’

‘We don’t have any visitors. Not today. I know the arrangements. I do pay attention sometimes, you know.’

‘Really? You surprise me.’ He tousled my hair affectionately and then mopped his brow. ‘What are you going to do with all those apples?’ he asked, but he turned away and I could tell he was no longer paying attention. In the past he would have played with me, juggled the apples, told me some little story about how fruit was somehow a metaphor for life – but he always seemed rather distracted these days.

I looked around the room. My arms were aching with the weight of my skirts, and I suddenly realised I wouldn’t be able to hold on to them much longer, but neither did I want to spill the apples all over the floor.

Aha! There was a coffin on the dais, freshly varnished and upholstered but currently empty. Perfect. I lifted the front of my dress and tipped them all in.

It made quite a racket, as you can probably imagine. That got his attention.

‘VIOLET!’ he shouted, spinning round. ‘Good heavens, girl, whatever do you think you’re doing?’

I grinned at him. ‘I just needed somewhere to put them down for a moment. Don’t worry! I’ll have them out of here before you can spit.’

‘I do not. Wish. To spit,’ he replied.

I realised it was time for a hasty exit. So, with Bones trailing behind me, I scooped up an armful of the red apples and headed through the door into the house.

Mother was in the kitchen, darning some of Thomas’s socks by the fire.

‘Apples!’ I called cheerily.

She looked up and smiled, her bright eyes lighting the room. ‘More apples? I’ll be making a pie or three, then. Add them to the basket in the larder.’

I did as she said. When I returned, she spoke again. ‘You know, my dear old mother used to say that an orchard in a graveyard could only grow bones. How wrong she was!’ She pulled a finished sock from her darning mushroom and tossed it aside. ‘Though we do seem to be overburdened with apples.’ She looked down at the dog. ‘I’m sure this one would prefer a beef bone.’

Bones pricked up his ears and sat wagging his tail, perhaps hoping Mother might actually have one somewhere about her person.

‘You could make a fine bone broth with one,’ I said.

My brother, Thomas, came in just then, his black trousers scuffed at the knees with dirt and grass stains. ‘Yeeuch!’ he exclaimed, throwing his leather football to the floor. ‘Who wants nasty old bone broth?’

Mother reached up and gave him a gentle clip on the ear– he was only six years old, and not yet as tall as me. He was at home for a few weeks after his school had been flooded. I still thought it unfair that he was seven years younger than me, but got to go to school when I didn’t. But then I was a girl and he was a boy and that was just how it was.

‘You’ll eat what you’re given and be thankful, whether it’s broth or five apple pies. We have to make do these days. And look at the state of your trousers!’ Mother was forever having to fix and alter our clothes, whether it was for repairs or to try and keep up with the latest fashions.

Thomas dragged a chair out from under the table, scraping the legs on the floor. Then he sat down heavily on it and ruffled a hand through his dark hair. A few blades of grass fell out. Bones ran over and sniffed them while Mother rolled her eyes at the sight.

I was about to return for more apples (after all, Father would not be pleased if I left them where they were) when Thomas spoke again.

‘Mother,’ he said, ‘who’s to be buried in plot two hundred and thirty-nine?’

Bones looked up at him, his eyes like small galaxies.

Mother put down the darning mushroom and stared at the wall for a moment in thought. ‘Is that one of the new ones? It’s just been dug out?’

‘Yes,’ he replied solemnly.

‘A young man, I think. He came in this morning. No relatives have come forward for him, poor thing. But your father will see to it that he gets a good burial. He always does. Even though it isn’t very good for business.’

I shivered a little, and took hold of a chair-back to steady myself. I remembered the young man she was talking about from earlier. He was fairly tall and pale, with blond hair (a little on the long side). He couldn’t have been much older than me – sixteen, perhaps? I’d sat with him for some time, just talking to him quietly – even the dead need company, though I never heard much back from them when they had recently passed. It was as though they hadn’t settled in yet.

‘Why do you ask, Thomas?’ I said.

He looked up at me. ‘I just wondered. There’s been a few in a row. What if it was murder?’ He made a horrified face. ‘Murder most foul?’

Mother narrowed her eyebrows at him, her favourite look of disapproval. ‘Murders? What nonsense. You’ve got a vivid imagination, my boy. Have you been reading those Penny Dreadfuls again? They are not suitable reading material for a boy of your age.’

Thomas stuck his tongue out, and I covered my mouth with one hand to suppress a giggle.

Mother tutted at him. ‘Your imagination is running away with you,’ she continued. ‘There have just been some nasty accidents, that’s all.’ She went back to her darning.

Bones padded round the table and sat by my feet. I stared into his soulful eyes and, not for the first time, wondered what he was thinking. He had a strange sense for these things, as did I. My skin was beginning to tingle, and I wondered if there was something to Thomas’s bizarre theory. There had been an unusual amount of men in their prime in the past couple of weeks – three or four, I thought. And now this boy. I wondered what could have happened to him. Surely it couldn’t be murder – Father would have noticed.

‘Violet!’ Father was calling me from the funeral parlour. Oops. He was certainly angry now. When I was sure that Mother wasn’t looking, I pulled a grotesque face at Thomas and then headed back down the corridor.

‘Violet,’ he repeated when I entered the room, followed by Bones. ‘Something’s missing.’

‘What?’ I asked. I noticed that he had removed most of the apples already, and began to wonder if the coffin would be the one for the blond boy.

‘One of the files.’

He gestured for me to follow him into the shop at the front of the house (not really a shop in the strictest sense of the word, of course – but death was our business, and money was exchanged here). The shop was filled with gloomy oak furniture – chairs, a desk, bookshelves and row after row of huge filing cabinets that contained all the information about those who were now resident in the cemetery. It was all so dark that I wondered how other people could stand to be in there for any length of time, especially when they had just lost a loved one. Father said it was respectful.

Thankfully, that day the autumn sun was bright and spilled in through the gaps in the heavy curtains. A carriage rattled past outside and a few flecks of dirt splattered on to the glass.

‘It was here,’ said Father. I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the light, and turned to where he was standing. He pointed into one of the drawers in the cabinet.

I walked over and took a look at a row of files. Bones sniffed them curiously. ‘I don’t see anything.’

‘Precisely! It’s missing!’ He wriggled two of the files this way and that with his fingertips. ‘There should be a file here, the one for the boy who came in early this morning.’

I looked at the names written on the top of the paper in my father’s neat hand. All of them read the same: John Doe. ‘The blond boy?’

‘Yes. Did you take it, perhaps?’ He gave me a stern look, and I began to feel a little uneasy. I certainly hadn’t taken it, but under his gaze I felt guilty, as though I had done something. Did he suspect me because he’d seen me talking to the boy as he’d lain there?

I squirmed. ‘No, Father. I haven’t seen the file at all.’

He wrinkled his brow. ‘Well, do you have any idea who might have done?’

I thought about it. ‘Thomas, perhaps? He was asking about the boy just now. He seems to have some theory about murder, but Mother said he’s just been reading too much nonsense.’

There was a moment of silence as Father stared at the wall, and then pushed his spectacles higher up his nose. ‘Thomas,’ he repeated. ‘Of course, I should ask Thomas as well.’ He walked back out of the shop again, in the direction of the house.

I went over to the window and brushed a few cobwebs away. We kept rows of flowers there, tastefully arranged in vases to show what manner of establishment we were. The sign above the door read

EDGAR D. VEIL AND SONS LTD, UNDERTAKERS.

The Edgar that it referred to was my grandfather, now five years dead, and my father Edgar Junior was his only remaining son. I’d told Father that he ought to change it to Edgar Veil and Son and Daughter Ltd, but he had only laughed and ruffled my hair.

I had been serious, though. Why shouldn’t I be recognised as part of the family business just because I was a girl? I did a lot more work than Thomas did.

Well, except for when I was picking apples instead.

The glass in the shop window was rippled with age, but you could still see through it. Now, as I glanced up, I could see a woman on the outside, looking in at the porcelain flowers.

A mourner, I thought. A widow in black. She must be here to arrange a funeral.

Yet there was something strange about her. I couldn’t see her eyes behind the waterfall of black lace and pale hair that cascaded past her shoulders, yet I felt for sure they were now staring straight at me.

Bones began to growl softly, a low rumbling in his throat.

‘Shh, boy,’ I said. ‘Don’t scare the customers.’

I thought I ought to go out and greet her, but then the woman quickly turned her head and darted across the street, hitching up her skirts as she went.

I frowned. Why had she looked so furtive? But before I could think anything more of it, I heard raised voices coming from the house.

‘I did not take your silly file!’

‘Thomas! Don’t you dare talk that way to your father!’

My family could be rather a nightmare at times. Was it any wonder that I often preferred the company of the dead? At least they seldom argued.

With a sigh, I headed back to the kitchen.

* * *

That evening, after supper, Father lit the gas lamp and we all sat round the fire in the parlour. I tried to read my book, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but I couldn’t concentrate and my eyes kept slipping away from it. It was dark outside, and I could hear the rain falling over the crackle of the fire. Bones was sleeping on the rug, pawing at imaginary rats in his dreams.

Thomas wasn’t talking to Father after their squabble earlier. He sat in the corner of the room, painting wooden soldiers with a grim expression on his face. Occasionally I heard him mutter something to himself under his breath about not being a thief.

I began to think again about the missing file as I stared into the flames. Maybe Father had just misplaced it, but was there a chance that someone had taken it? Who would want to steal records on a boy that nobody knew? If they’d known who he was, and that he was dead, they would have come to claim him, wouldn’t they? Unless Thomas was right, and someone had murdered the blond boy. I felt a tingle of a shiver run down my spine.

We’d had murder victims in before, of course. Not many, but enough. Yet the blond boy, who now lay in his apple-free coffin, seemed different somehow.

Tap.

‘What was that?’ asked Thomas.

I’d heard it too. I looked to the window. Only darkness.

Bones’s ears pricked up, and suddenly he was on his feet, staring in the direction of the sound.

‘Perhaps it was the tree outside,’ said Father, tapping the bowl of his pipe out into the ashtray. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask the groundskeeper to cut it back. The branches are getting too near the house.’

‘It didn’t come from upstairs,’ Thomas insisted. ‘It came from out there.’ He pointed to the front window.

‘Probably only the rain, my dear,’ said Mother. ‘Come along now, Thomas, it’s past your bedtime.’ She stood up and shepherded my little brother out of the room, despite his protests.

Father simply shrugged and went back to reading his newspaper.

But I hadn’t looked away from the window. Because I had seen something that the others had not.

A flash of white eyes in the darkness, and a shadow disappearing into the night.

couldn’t sleep that night, though goodness knows I tried. My down quilt felt hot and heavy, and no matter which way I turned I couldn’t get comfortable. I knew, though, that wasn’t the real reason I couldn’t sleep. It was because of the face I’d seen at the window.

The grandfather clock downstairs was chiming an hour past my bedtime, but my eyes hadn’t closed. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d seen. Someone had been out there, looking in on us. What if they had been a grave robber or a vandal? I wouldn’t forgive myself if something happened.

Why I hadn’t told my father about what I’d seen, I don’t know. Perhaps I thought he wouldn’t listen, given how preoccupied he seemed at the moment. But I hadn’t said a word, and now if anything did happen, I’d be responsible.

And it was after that thought that I heard a noise downstairs.

Bones, who had been sleeping on my bed (which, needless to say, he was not supposed to do), woke up and began growling softly. He hopped down, padded over to the door and started to paw at the floorboards.

I had to go and look.

It was a ridiculous idea, and I tried to talk myself out of it. What could I possibly do if I confronted a dangerous villain? Nothing but call for help, and by then it could be too late. If they ran, I could chase them, I supposed, but it was night-time and the autumn sky was black as ink.

I wasn’t scared of being in a graveyard – how could I be, when I had been raised here? In the daylight, when the sun was shining and the poppies and daisies would gently blow in the breeze, it was beautiful. At night, things where different. The moon wouldn’t be enough light to see by, and a candle would be extinguished by the rain. I was fairly certain I had nothing to fear from the dead, but the living were another matter altogether.

More noises came to my ears: shuffling and banging.

Bones’s tail went upright like an exclamation mark. His eyes met mine, and I nodded at him. I felt my courage building, knowing that he was by my side. He could probably give anyone he didn’t like the look of a good bite.

I found myself throwing off the covers and climbing out of bed. I pulled open the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed down the landing. I could hear Mother snoring gently and the ever-present rain on the rooftops.

I slipped silently down the stairs, Bones padding ahead of me – his footsteps remarkably quiet for a large dog. He went straight for the funeral parlour, and started barking. In trepidation, I followed. I felt something was wrong immediately, but it took a few moments for me to realise what it was.

I peered around the dark room, at outlines in the gloom of shelves and coffins and urns. I stepped further inside, and I could see the edge of the coffin on the dais, the sharp angles of the cheap wood, and my eyes swept past it to the tiled floor.

And then I looked again.

The coffin was empty.

Only hours ago, the blond boy had been lying in it. It was the same coffin, that much was certain. It still smelled faintly of apples.

Thoughts raced through my head.

It’s a grave robber. Or a murderer has come back to steal the body. Or … I gulped, thinking of Frankenstein’s creation in the novel as it shuddered to life.

Bones wobbled around the room, sniffing everything. I tried to contain my panic, told myself I should just go back to bed. But in a flash, Bones was racing out of the door, heading for the back of the house.

I didn’t know why, but I felt I had to follow. It took all my strength to put one foot in front of the other, but I did it. I felt a cold breeze on my skin, and heard the sound of falling rain grow louder.

Now Bones batted at the back door, whining. It was open a crack. Someone had come inside.

Or gone out.

After a deep breath, I pulled the door back a little and peered through. I could see nothing but rain. A lantern, I thought. That was what I needed. Father often kept one by the back door.

I snuck into the tiny cloakroom by the porch and pulled out a black overcoat that was a little too big for me, buttoning it on over my nightgown. Soft leather boots that were now old and battered went on over my feet – they felt odd without any stockings.

The glass lantern was on a hook next to the door, almost too high for me to reach, but I managed it on tiptoes. There was a white candle stub inside, so I found a box of matches and lit it. Then I took a deep breath. It was time for a very unwise decision.

I stepped outside.

The rain fell around me in waves, immediately sticking strands of my hair to my forehead. Gooseflesh rose on my legs in seconds as the wind bit into them. The light from the lantern illuminated only a mere few feet in front of my eyes. Bones quivered in the cold, before striding ahead into the dark.

There were fresh footprints in the mud, leading away from the house. Human footprints. Footprints that were just a little larger than mine.

Definitely an unwise decision.

As I went through our back gate, the footprints disappeared as the grass of the cemetery took over.

I began to walk through the graves. I knew them well. I passed John Beckington and steadied myself on the headstone. I passed Annie Arkwright and Mr and Mrs Jones and Jeremiah Heap. I stopped for breath by the O’Neill family crypt and leaned against the cold wall. The vast tomb gave a little shelter, at least.

If I listened hard enough, I could hear their whispers.

Keep going.

You’re close.

They sensed something that I could not. So far I had seen nothing but the faint grey shadows of the ghosts, which shifted and changed like wisps of fog. I had heard no movement in the grass or trees, no sounds of footsteps or heavy breathing. But it was so dark and so loud out there that I began to wonder if I wasn’t being totally foolish. Perhaps I had just imagined the footprints, the way they looked. Perhaps they had belonged to Thomas from earlier in the day, and I just hadn’t noticed them before.

The only way I would know if someone was there was if they jumped out at me, and that wasn’t an idea I relished. Bones was still moving forward, as if he had caught a scent.

I shivered. I was sure to catch a chill in this weather. ‘Who’s there?’ I whispered, blinking through the rain at the iron clouds and the few stars that dappled the empty space between. I wondered if I might hear a ghostly answer, but whatever I sensed from the dead, it was never an answer to my burning questions.

It was time to move on – I needed to keep going. I could see Bones running on ahead, investigating the graves as he passed. I decided I would loop back on myself once I got to the far hedgerow (I longed for my bed already), but I soon realised I was getting nearer to the spot where the blond boy was to be buried.

Bones stopped at the graveside, where the freshly dug hole gaped like the mouth of Hell. Then I really could hear something. A moaning sound that seemed as though it were coming from the grave.

I was near paralysed with fear. Bones hung close to my leg, and I felt his skin rumbling as he growled.

Slowly, I dangled the lantern and peered in.

The grave was empty. Nothing but a muddy hole, rapidly filling with rainwater.

The sound reached my ears this time. It was definitely someone moaning. I bit my lip so hard that I could taste blood.

‘H-hello?’ I called into the night. ‘Is someone there?’ I blinked in the rain, in the flickering glow of the candlelight.

Something moved behind one of the gravestones. A shadow, shuffling, ungainly.

Watch out, one of the ghostly voices whispered on the breeze.

I gasped, and Bones barked into the wind. The shadow moved nearer, pushing through the grass. I stayed frozen, held out the lantern like a shield. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see what was approaching, but I had no choice.

A figure lurched into the light, and I caught a strangled breath in my throat.

There, standing before me, was the blond boy. The boy who was supposed to be dead.

I screamed.

ou’re ALIVE!’ I gasped.

Alive, the deathly voices around me echoed in whispers. Not one of us. This would be the talk of the graveyard now.

The blond boy was dressed in funeral finery, the best that could be put together for a pauper from the tailor’s cast-offs, but even so – his face was as pale as the moon above us, a sliver of it peeking through the dark clouds. He was soaked with rain, dishevelled and muddy, his hair sticking up at strange angles. His skin was ashen, his eyes sunken and hollow, blinking in the light.

I finally caught my breath again. ‘Are you all right?’

The boy stumbled towards me, and I jerked backwards. Bones barked again, a warning.

The boy opened his mouth, as if not quite sure how it worked. He rubbed a hand against the back of his head. ‘Where … am I?’ he asked, the words coming slowly like they were rising up through treacle.

I shushed Bones and held on to his collar. ‘You’re in the graveyard,’ I said. ‘Um, well, Seven Gates Cemetery, to be precise.’ I realised that I was going to have to step a little nearer, but my legs were fighting against me. I ignored them and moved closer to the boy so he could hear me.

‘Are you a ghost? Am I … dead?’ the blond boy asked, his dark eyes wide with terror.

I paused, a little taken aback by his humanity. Perhaps he wasn’t some terrifying creature of the night after all.

‘I’m certainly not a ghost!’ I said. ‘Ghosts are more …’ I looked down at myself. ‘See-through. And you certainly don’t look dead,’ I admitted. ‘In fact, you seem rather upright.’

The boy suddenly stumbled sideways, falling into the mud beside the grave. Bones pulled away from me and began to lick his face.

‘Violet! Violet! Are you there?’

It was Father! I had never been so thankful in my entire life. ‘Father! Come quick, please!’

He dashed through the darkness towards me, his hand shielding his eyes. ‘What on earth …’ he shouted as the water drummed on the stones around us. Bones pressed a wet nose against his trousers. My father was wearing nightclothes under an overcoat, like myself.

I watched as Father slowly took in the sight before him – the pouring rain, his daughter looking like a drowned rat, and the blond boy slumped against a stone cross, chest heaving with the breath of life.

‘Oh my …’ Father said, as though hardly able to believe his own eyes. He looked at me desperately. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘I don’t know!’ I said breathlessly. ‘I heard a noise, so I went downstairs, and I found his coffin empty! The door was open, and there were footprints …’

Father pulled me into his arms. There was a brief moment of warmth and shelter, before he released me. ‘You should have fetched me immediately! There could have been grave robbers about!’ His words were cut short as he looked at the boy again. I didn’t know how Father could see a thing – his spectacles were steamed up and splattered with rain. ‘How could this have happened?’ His face had gone as pale as the boy’s.

The boy shook his head as if trying to regain his senses, and shivered in the cold. He looked up at us, and finally spoke again. ‘W-what’s … happened to me?’

* * *

The blond boy was dead. He had been dead. Hadn’t he? He’d been sent to us to be buried – I’d seen it with my own two eyes. And yet, whatever he had been, he was very much alive now and firmly back in the land of the living.

Father held a shaking hand out to the boy. The boy took it, but it took several attempts to lift him up – his weakened legs kept buckling beneath him. When he was finally standing, he seemed to be capable of staying up. I wanted to take his hand so badly, to give him comfort in any way that I could, but Mother’s voice in the back of my head whispered that it would be improper.

He moaned again, and tried to bat the light away.

‘He’s delirious,’ Father said.

I gulped. ‘It’s all right,’ I said to the boy, trying my best to soothe his quick breaths. ‘Please, stay calm. We need to get you inside. Can you walk?’

‘I think so,’ he said, but his voice was barely a whisper, and I wasn’t sure whether I’d truly heard or only seen his lips move.

Father tentatively put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. ‘I’ll run for Doctor Lane. Violet will help you back to the house, if you can make it.’

The boy nodded again, silently, and I couldn’t help but shudder. I knew he was alive, but at the same time still felt as though he were a dead man walking. Like Frankenstein’s monster.

In the lamplight, I could see that he was covered with mud and damp grass. Bones gently licked him.

Then Father was running, and Bones shot away after him with a sudden burst of greyhound speed. They darted through the headstones like minnow through a stream – they knew them as well as I did.

The blond boy staggered again, and I ducked underneath his arm to try to bear him up. To heck with improper, I thought. He needs me. And I couldn’t keep calling him ‘the blond boy’. ‘What’s your name, master?’ I asked.

‘Oliver,’ he replied, and then he began coughing violently.

When the coughing subsided, I spoke again. ‘Can you walk? We’ll need to get you back to the house. You’ll catch your de—’ I stopped myself. ‘Sorry.’

He didn’t seem to notice my faux pas. He began to stumble forward, and together we walked back through the rain-washed graveyard, the mud and sodden grass threatening to pull our shoes from our feet. I tried to steer him around the graves, but at one point he tripped on Nathaniel Partridge’s broken headstone and nearly brought us both down.

It seemed like it took an age, the two of us walking in silence under the black sky. The ghosts’ voices were mere tingling whispers now – I fancied they were talking amongst themselves, not to me, about the evening’s excitement. The barrier between living and dead was a hard one to cross, like shouting underwater.

As the clouds began to melt away, I glimpsed stars beginning to twinkle. ‘Not long now,’ I kept saying. ‘Nearly there.’ Eventually it was true, and we were outside the back door.

It was wide open – Father must have run through the house.

The boy – Oliver – stopped and leaned against the wall, his breathing still rapid. One of his hands clutched his stomach, the other his head. I quickly reached inside the door and stretched to hang up the lantern on the hook, so that I had both hands free.

‘Please … Master Oliver,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to get inside.’

He looked at me, and I was suddenly struck by his eyes, which were – for all their sunkenness – a deep, dark brown like a warm cup of cocoa. So different from my own, which were storm grey.

‘I …’ he paused. ‘I don’t want to tread mud inside your house, miss.’

And then he fainted.

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