Bryony had always wished she could write more details in the day-book reports; she especially wished she could record some of her suspicions of Matron Prout.
‘I daren’t do it, though,’ she said to her father. ‘She’d have the pages torn out before you could turn round. But she’s milking Latchkill for all she’s worth. I’ll swear that half the poor souls in there are being fleeced of every farthing they own.’
‘Chancery lunatics,’ said Bryony’s father. ‘I wouldn’t put it past the old trout.’
Bryony asked what a Chancery lunatic might be.
‘Remember your Dickens, my girl,’ said Cormac. ‘Bleak House. Jarndyce versus Jarndyce. The diverting of inheritances and the snaffling of land by greedy families–God Almighty, have you never heard of it, Bryony? It stems from an old English law–twelfth or thirteenth century–wouldn’t you know the English would still be using rules from the Dark Ages. It gave the Crown custody of the lands of natural fools and guardianship of the property of the insane. If your Prout isn’t up to that little game or one very like it, I’ll take a vow of chastity and enter a monastery.’
‘There isn’t a monastery in the world that would have you,’ said Bryony at once, and he grinned and said, ‘Nor there is, thanks be to God. Are we having supper soon?’
‘Yes. Why? Are you going out later?’
‘I am.’
It would be better not to ask where he was going, so Bryony did not. It might be poaching or it might be a lady. He was about as trustworthy as a sleeping wolf, Cormac Sullivan but Bryony did not really mind. She loved him better than anyone in the entire world, and what was even better, she liked him. The two things did not necessarily go together.
So she just said, ‘Don’t get caught, will you?’ and he smiled his guileless smile and said he would not.
CHAPTER FIVE
There was no cut and dried textbook treatment for coping with ghosts, even if you believed in them, which Antonia did not.
Richard was dead; Don Robards had certainly died more than five years ago, and the presence of Paganini’s music in Quire House had been merely a coincidence. Yes, but there had been that car–the same as the car Don used to drive–that followed her yesterday. Had that just been another coincidence? Antonia supposed it was possible.
What about that dark pocket of fear inside Charity Cottage itself? It was still there, like a bruise you avoided touching, but how much of it was due to Antonia’s own state of mind? Could it conceivably be connected to the cottage’s past? Sensitivity to an atmosphere was not an unknown phenomenom. It was something a surprising number of psychiatrists would cautiously admit existed. Antonia was not quite admitting it now, but she was open to persuasion. She thought she was no more and no less receptive than anyone else, but a number of times, trying to reach deeply disturbed patients, she had been able to feel very distinctly the muddy tangle of their confusion and unhappiness. Like poking a stick into a stagnant pool and feeling the silt stir before you actually saw it reach the surface.
So did the silt sometimes stir in Charity Cottage? Had something violent and tragic once happened here and left a lasting imprint?
On balance, ghosts and the imprints of old emotions might be easier to cope with than delusions. Routing ghosts was not a question of reciting some Macbeth-like incantation or waving garlic and crucifixes around. The solution, quite simply, was to systematically crowd the wretched creatures out. To immerse your mind so thoroughly in something else that there was no room left for spooks and no energy to spare for noticing their presence.
A project. A programme of work, a quest, a venture.