Memories…
Himself and Lucy spending holidays here…Lucy very much the smaller cousin, but determinedly keeping up with everything Edmund did. Long summers, and log-scented Christmases and glossily bronze autumns…Picnics and cycle rides…Berries on trees, and buttercup-splashed meadows, and misty bluebells in the copse…The time they had set the stove on fire making toffee when Aunt Deborah was away for the weekend and they had had to call the fire brigade and repaint the kitchen after the fire was doused. Lucy had been helpless with laughter, but Edmund had been panic-stricken.
He set down the small suitcase he had brought, and went back out to the car for the box of provisions he had picked up on the way. He would have to spend most of the weekend here because he would have to sort through the magpie gatherings of an elderly lady’s long and full life, but there was no point in going out to a pub for his meals (the White Hart charged shocking prices even for bar meals) when he could quite well eat in the house while he worked.
He carried the groceries through to the big old-fashioned kitchen, dumped them on the scrubbed-top table, and reached for the light switch. Nothing. Damn. He had not bargained for the power having been switched off. He rummaged for candles and matches, eventually finding both in a kitchen drawer, and set several candles to burn in saucers around the kitchen, with a couple more to light the hall. Huge shadows leapt up at once, which Edmund found slightly unsettling. He found the house’s silence unsettling as well. Once upon a time, he had lain in bed in the room at the top of the stairs and been able to think, That’s the old lime tree tapping its branches against the window of Aunt Deborah’s bedroom. Or, That fluttering is the house-martins nesting in the eaves: they always go there at this time of year. But the house’s sounds were no longer familiar or reassuring. He would make himself a cup of tea to chase away the ghosts; he usually had one at this time anyway, and there was no reason to change his habits.
The kitchen range was cold, of course, but the gas was still on for the cooker. Edmund set a kettle to boil, and then wondered if the lack of power was simply due to a mains switch being off. He picked up one of the candles, thinking he would check the fusebox, and he was just crossing the hall, the prowling candle-flame shadows walking with him, when he heard, quite unmistakably, the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path outside. He stopped, his heart skipping several beats, because the footsteps had been rather slow, rather careful footsteps – they had walked around the front of the house and then paused. Exactly in the way an ageing, but still-agile lady would walk across the front of the house, dead-heading plants as she went and pausing to prune the wisteria growing near to the front door. (Aunt Deborah, returning to the house where she had lived for so many years? Of course not! Snap out of it, Edmund!)
But as Edmund glanced uneasily at the narrow windows on each side of the front door, a shadow appeared at one of them and a face swam up against the glass, peering in. Edmund prided himself on his unemotional temperament but fear clutched instantly at his throat. There is someone out there!
And then the shadow stepped back from the window, and there was the crunch of footsteps again, and then a sharp, perfectly normal rat-a-tat on the front door. And after all, it was barely five o’clock in the evening, and ghosts would not knock politely on doors, and there was no reason in the world why someone should not have come out here on a perfectly legitimate, entirely innocent, errand.