hippy types she supposed that was not unusual. Perhaps she was a traveller of some kind. She raised a hand and smiled at the woman. ‘Sorry to disturb you. I couldn’t resist sitting here for a moment in the evening sun.’
The woman didn’t respond. She went on staring, not so much at Abi as straight through her. Abi felt a tremor of unease. She stood up and took a step towards her. ‘I’m Abi. I’ve come to stay for a while.’
The woman turned away. She walked towards the arch and out of sight behind it without a word. Abi followed her and stood staring round. The shrubbery opened out into another area of lawn and more flowerbeds. The woman had vanished. With a shrug Abi went back to the bench. It wasn’t compulsory to be friendly. She didn’t feel much like talking herself, but it was odd that Cal hadn’t mentioned anyone else being there. She shivered. Seconds later she was startled to see a girl standing in almost the same place as the woman had earlier. She too had picked some flowers; a spray of blooms hung from her hand. ‘Where are you?’ the girl called towards the archway. ‘Mama?’ She moved away and Abi saw she was limping badly. Her face was pale and even from that distance she could see the child was unwell and in pain. She was about to stand up when a man ran past. He was dressed in rough trousers and a loose tunic. ‘Petronilla! Come in at once. You will catch cold! Mora is here. She has brought your medicine.’
‘I was looking for Mama!’ The girl stopped. She turned to face him and smiled. Abi felt a lump in her throat as she saw the girl hold out her arms to him. ‘Let me collect some more flowers, Papa. I’m not cold.’ But he swept her off her feet, carrying her as though she was much smaller than she actually was, and infinitely precious, and turning, he walked with her towards the hedge. Abi stared after them, puzzled, watching the girl’s head droop on her father’s shoulder as another woman appeared. Younger, with coppery hair, she also held a basket over her arm. Her dress too was long. Beside her a boy of about thirteen was gazing up at her adoringly.
‘Mora!’ The girl had raised her head from her father’s shoulder. ‘Thank you for coming.’ The younger woman smiled. She seemed to radiate kindness as she reached out to the girl and touched her head lightly. And then they had gone, the boy running after them as they disappeared through the hedge.
Where was it they were going? Abi didn’t attempt to stand up and go after them this time. The small family group seemed so close, so warm together in their affection and she felt suddenly excluded. Swallowing the wave of loneliness which swept over her as they disappeared she stood up and turned sadly back towards the house. It would soon be seven and she could join the others in the kitchen.
‘I don’t believe it!’ Mat pressed a glass of wine into her hand and urged her towards an old wooden rocking chair beside the fire. ‘You’ve only been here about ten minutes and already you’ve met our ghosts!’
Apparently Cal had been the first to see them when she had visited the house shortly after she and Mat were married. Mat’s grandfather lived there then, an irascible old man, long widowed, whose only condescension when anyone visited was to allow them to cook him a meal. Cal and Ben’s wife, Janet, took it in turns, stoically producing a roast and two veg week after week for years. Their prize, their husbands had declared later, was the inheritance of Woodley Manor. Millstone Hall as Mat and Cal’s eldest son, Rory, called it. Cal had been in the garden picking mint and parsley and, straightening up with her bowl in her hand, had found herself looking at a slim tall dark-haired woman dressed in a blue floor-length gown standing only yards from her. The woman was looking past her, focusing on something in the distance. Inevitably Cal had turned to see what she was looking at with such concentration. When she turned back the woman had gone. Cal was puzzled, even indignant. As if Grandfather hadn’t got enough problems living here alone, spaced out trespassers were visitors he just did not need. A few weeks later she saw the woman again, from the house this time. She was standing staring out of the kitchen window, lost in her own thoughts when she saw the same woman walking – drifting – across the lawn. This time she was not alone. A boy was following her and they looked as though they were arguing. Cal tapped sharply on the glass. They took no notice. She ran to the back door but when she emerged on the grass they were nowhere to be seen.
‘There are some gypsies parked down on the other side of Wookey,’ Mat said when she told him about it. ‘I expect they come from there. They’ve probably come to nick something from the vegetable garden.’
The next time she had seen them was after she and Mat had moved in and were living here. The family were standing in the ruins which formed the base of the rockery and the archway which she and Mat reckoned was an eighteenth-century folly. They were with a man and when Cal accosted the group they disappeared in front of her eyes, one moment there, the next vanished without trace. When she had got over her shock she had studied the ground where they had been standing, muddy, rain-puddled earth, and there were no foot-prints and it was only then that she realised that though she was wet through as the rain beat down on the garden, the three visitors had been bone dry and she had had the distinct impression that where they were, wherever that was, the sun had been shining.
Mat’s younger brother Justin had been staying in the house then and he saw the figures the next day. ‘Don’t worry, Cal. They are harmless. Just stuck between worlds. They can’t see you. I’ll see if I can talk to them, find out why they are still here, help them to move on.’
But the next day he had had one of his monumental rows with Mat and packed his gear and left. They had no idea where he had gone. They hadn’t heard from him in months. But that was Justin all over. And it meant that no- one had tried to talk to the ghosts. She had seen them again only a few weeks ago. This time she had tiptoed away and told no-one, not even Mat. Better that way.
‘The ruins out at the back there are part of a Roman villa,’ Mat went on, squatting down opposite Abi to throw a couple of logs onto the fire. ‘We thought it was a folly dating from the time when some ancestors of ours had pretensions to grandeur a couple of hundred or so years ago, but apparently not. A local archaeologist came up and showed us how it all worked. There has been a settlement here for a couple of thousand years at least, probably longer – since the Iron Age. We’ve dug up all sorts of bits of pottery and coins in the flowerbeds, most of them Roman or medieval, but some of the pot-sherds were even older. They match up with stuff found in the Lake Villages out there on the levels.’ He waved an arm vaguely towards Glastonbury. ‘Exciting, really.’ He grinned. ‘I’ve no idea when our ghosts lived here, but we’re pretty sure they were Roman or Romano-British. Their clothes seem to fit into that era, according to Cal.’ He glanced up at Abi and she saw his eyes narrow briefly as though he were trying to make up his mind whether to confide in her. ‘I’ve discovered the clergy fall into two more or less distinct groups,’ he went on cautiously. ‘Those who believe in ghosts and those who don’t. Ben does, but doesn’t believe in interfering, I’m glad to say. If any exorcisms are needed in his parish he will go and pray with people but if anything more complicated is needed he passes it over to the relevant authorities who have health and safety clearance and follow EU guidelines on spirit disposal and recycling.’ He smiled again. ‘Do you have strong views on any of this?’
Abi grinned. She thought for a minute. ‘Up to a few weeks ago I had never knowingly seen a ghost. I think I have always been aware of them. I’ve sensed them, maybe glimpsed them, but never enough to be sure. Then I saw a whole church full of them in my last parish.’ Her last parish! It made her sound as though she had had dozens of parishes. ‘I don’t really know what I think, to be honest. None of them looked as though they needed exorcising. And neither did the lady and the little girl here. They just looked as though they were getting on with doing their own thing.’
Cal turned away from the stove on the far side of the room and nodded. ‘I think that is exactly what is happening. They mind their own business and we mind ours. They have never done us any harm.’
‘Do you see them often?’ Abi cupped her glass of wine in her hands and stared down into it thoughtfully.
Cal shook her head. ‘Every few months perhaps. When I am busy and concentrating on what I am doing either I don’t notice them or perhaps they aren’t there, I don’t know. When I have seen them it has been when I have been standing with my mind a blank.’ She chortled. ‘I do that less now. There is so much to get on with all the time.’ She turned back to the cooker and lifted off a heavy pan, taking it to the sink to drain. ‘Mat has never seen them.’
‘Why do I take that as being a criticism?’ Mat said mildly.
‘It’s not meant that way,’ Cal called. She had dropped a lump of butter into the pan with some creamy milk and was energetically beginning to mash the potatoes.
‘They spoke English,’ Abi said after a moment. ‘It sounded like normal English to me. The little girl with the limp was called Petronilla.’
Mat and Cal stared at her. ‘You spoke to them?’ Cal said after a minute. Her voice had dropped to an awed whisper.
Abi shook her head. ‘No. Or at least I did but they didn’t seem to hear me. I just listened to what they were saying. The little girl was calling her mother.’
‘I never saw a little girl,’ Cal said. She had abandoned her potatoes. She pulled a chair away from the table and dragged it over to Abi. Sitting down she stared at Abi’s face with such intense concentration that Abi looked away
