Free The Silence of Ghosts by Jonathan Aycliffe

Did they say?’
    ‘They want me to join them.’
    She said nothing more, but she would not go back to sleep.
    Monday, 16 December
    Rose arrived today with Mrs Mathewman, the witch doctor. I call her that because I distrust anything superstitious or occult, be it holy healers or holy places or medicines or fairies at the bottom of someone’s garden.
    I have only allowed this woman in because it pleases Rose to bring her, and I will do almost anything for Rose, though I have known her for only a very short time. She was here on Saturday and again on Sunday, although she had no need to come, and I’m sure she has plenty of other patients to see to. She told me she had attended church service at St Peter’s in Martindale on the way to see me, and she overheard a plan to put up a window in memory of over one thousand men whodrowned in the sinking of HMS
Glorious
in Norwegian waters earlier this year. She wants me to come to church with her next week, and I’ve said what it seems right to say, to keep her happy, though in truth I have never been much of a believer. I may go with her at Christmas and sing carols and admire their nativity. I find it odd that she is an active churchgoer, especially in a time of war, when I have lost my faith in man.
    As I have said before, I am falling in love with Rose, and even though I know there can be no future in it, I cannot steady my heart or its trembling when I set eyes on her, the agitation when she is not around.
    But I’m rushing ahead. I haven’t yet said a word about what happened. Rose got me up and into an armchair, and we stayed in the living room all the time. Mrs Mathewman took Octavia off to the sun room, where we used to sit and look at the lake across a vista made by cutting down some trees at the front of the house. I don’t know what they talked about: afterwards, Octavia refused to say what it was. All she would say was that it was ‘private’. She was given a second bottle of medicine, one more palatable to a child, and searched out a spoon to administer it to herself.
    Mrs Mathewman came as a surprise to me. She did not look remotely like a witch or any other being with claims to supernatural powers. She was well dressed and softly spoken, with little trace of an accent. Rose later told me that she had been to university, to Newnham College, Cambridge and studied like a man, except that they won’t let women have full degrees. She’s not a great beauty perhaps, but not what I had expected. And she is clearly intelligent.
    She told me what she had made of Octavia’s asthma, and assured me her remedies could improve it, maybe even banish it for good. I nodded and said ‘of course, of course’, or feignedsurprise with a string of ‘surely nots’. To be honest, I wasn’t overly enthusiastic, but the woman made a good impression on me. That is, until she changed the subject.
    She got up to take her leave, then sat down again hesitantly. Her confident manner deserted her, as if she was having second thoughts about what she’d just been saying. A shadow seemed to cross her face.
    ‘Lieutenant,’ she said, ‘I hope you will forgive me if I raise another matter. Octavia told me one or two things that are troubling me. She says you might not like her having told me, that you are a sceptic. I understand that. My years at university taught me the importance of a sceptical attitude. But I’m not a sceptic through and through like you. I’ve come to realize that there are realities that fall between the grids and cages we make for ourselves. I studied mathematics and came top of my year, beating men as well as other women. I am a scientist, but I have learned to keep an open mind.
    ‘Octavia told me she heard sounds in the living room when you were out with Rose, and that she feels uneasy about the upstairs rooms. She is not, I think, an imaginative child. After she had her medicine, when she went to talk to you, I slipped upstairs. I went into a few rooms, then