The Empty Frame. Ann Pilling

gentle. This was the foster child, the boy whose father had walked out, never to be heard of again, and whose mother had lost her mind, the child who’d never had a childhood. “Wait there,” he said, and he limped off after Floss and Sam. “I just have to oil a lock,” he called after them. “Make your way down to the buttery. We’ll be with you in a jiffy.”

      Coming back to Magnus he picked up his keys, unlocked the door of the Council Chamber and steered him into the room. “See for yourself,” he said, “go on, investigate. Climb up the chimney and pull up the floor boards. It’s all been done before, you know.” His voice, no longer brisk and soldierly, was wavering, that of a tired old man. It was almost as if he wanted to cry now.

      Magnus stared into the room though he knew perfectly well that he would not see the woman in white. She belonged to another time, to a time when the floor of the Council Chamber had been lower. She had been walking on that floor which was why she had seemed to him to have no feet. These were the simple mechanics of ghosts. Magnus knew all about them from old Father Robert, whose church had once been inhabited by an unhappy spirit which he had laid to rest with his prayers. The mechanics were not what scared him, they were just about two kinds of time getting muddled up. What was frightening was how he felt about the two women – the one who had cried in the night and the one he had just seen gliding across this room. Each spectre had brought the awful coldness with her, a cold that went into his very marrow and felt like death. And the coldness was part of her pain, of the grief which troubled her so. In a way he didn’t fully understand, it was as if her pain had joined itself to his. He was suffering as well, which was why he’d had to stop the noise of the crying.

      Were there two women or were they one and the same person – the woman in the night, who he believed must have been Lady Alice, because her frame had stood empty, and now this other woman, all in white? Magnus could not begin to work out what was happening. He felt as if the top of his head was coming off, through too much thinking.

      A hand descended on to his shoulder. “As you see,” Colonel Stickley informed him, “the room really is empty. There is nothing going on here and there never has been. All this talk of ghosts is all silly rumour, put about by people who are trying to ruin my business because they want to get this place from me. Do you understand, boy… what’s your name?”