Broken Voices (Kindle Single) Read Online Free PDF Page A

with
you, George,’ said Mrs Veal. ‘Save it for later. I need to clear the table and
these boys need to get back or Mr Ratcliffe will be wondering where they are.’
    ‘He knows about
it, all right,’ Mr Veal says.
    ‘Who does,
dear?’
    ‘Mr Ratcliffe.
He knows about the stories.’

5
    In the evening of Christmas Day, we made
mugs of cocoa together and sat around the fire in the sitting room at the
Sacrist’s Lodging. Like Mr Veal, Mr Ratcliffe had drunk a few glasses of wine
with his dinner and was unusually expansive.
    Mordred
condescended to join us. He sat on the chair nearest the fire, head erect, with
his back to us. It was Mordred who started Mr Ratcliffe on ghosts.
    ‘I am afraid
he’s a little stand-offish today. You wouldn’t think it but he doesn’t like being
left alone in the house. We abandoned him for most of the day and now he’s
sulking.’
    ‘He doesn’t
look as if he’d notice if he was alone or not.’ My scratches still rankled. ‘I
don’t think he likes people.’
    ‘You may be
right,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, patting his pockets for his oilskin tobacco pouch.
‘But he finds us convenient, and not just for food and warmth. Perhaps we help
to ward off the ghosts.’
    ‘Ghosts?’
Faraday said. ‘What ghosts?’ In those three words his voice modulated from a
rumble to a squeak.
    ‘Do you know
any stories about them, sir?’ I said. ‘Will you tell us one?’
    ‘Mordred used
to see the ghost next door,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, nodding towards the party wall
that divided this part of the Sacrist’s Lodging from the other. ‘Of course he
was just a kitten then, and he didn’t know what to make of it. In fact, that’s
why he lives with me. He kept coming over here to get away from the ghost, and
in the end the Precentor said I might as well keep him.’
    ‘Have you seen
it, sir?’ I asked. By this stage of my life I had my doubts about the existence
of God but I was more than willing to keep an open mind about ghosts.
    ‘Yes, several
times over the years.’ Mr Ratcliffe had given up on his pockets. Still talking,
he rose from his chair and eventually discovered the pouch wedged between the
seat and the arm. ‘Of course I didn’t realize it was a ghost at first.’
    ‘What did it
look like?’ Faraday said.
    ‘Like a cat.’
    ‘A cat?’
    ‘Yes, a little
grey cat. One used to see it in the corner of the big room upstairs occasionally.
Quite harmless. It’s probably still there, for all I know. It comes and goes.’
    ‘What did it
do?’ I said.
    ‘Nothing very
much. It just sat there. Sometimes you saw it moving across the room. You
always glimpsed it out of the corner of your eye, if you know what I mean. But
Mordred was different — he saw it directly. He behaved as if it was another
cat, arching his back and so on. But then it simply terrified him, and he
wouldn’t stay in the same house. So he moved here, next door. But it was odd,
really — the grey cat never seemed to notice his existence at all.’
    ‘Perhaps it
thought Mordred was the ghost,’ Faraday suggested with a giggle. ‘Perhaps he
was trying to pretend Mordred wasn’t there.’
    Mr Ratcliffe
struck a match and paused, considering the remark, the flame flickering over
the bowl of the pipe.
    ‘Anything is
possible, I suppose,’ he said at last, and sucked the flame deep into the pipe.
‘We may haunt ghosts as much as the other way round.’
    ‘Or they may
not even know we’re there,’ I put in, feeling that Faraday was having too much
of the limelight.
    ‘Some of the
time they certainly know we’re there.’ The light was dim and Mr Ratcliffe’s
features disintegrated in a cloud of smoke. ‘Or some of them do. That was
certainly the case with the blue lady. She always behaved very cordially to me.
Of course one should not generalize from the particular.’ He must have seen our
expressions for he added hastily, ‘I mean that one ghost who behaves like that
does not necessarily mean that they