Mavis actually spent some time pacing back and forth around her family’s graves, looking up at the sky with increasingly anxious eyes. It remained overcast. No rays of sunlight pierced the gloom, no differentiation in shadow, no patch of blue greeted her eyes. By the time she forced herself to return to the spirits (who she had been hoping had been dispersed in the mean time, and feeling guilty for that hope), they were all well aware of the circumstances. A couple of expectant faces suggested that they were relying on her to come up with a solution.

  The others had their own plans:

  “There’s absolutely no way I will be haunting this graveyard: my reputation will not stand for it!” Hazel made her pronouncement with sheer force of will, as if daring reality to disagree with her. She did not immediate vanish, reality being famously stubborn, but her plan had a second part. “I will simply claim that I am Constance Miller! She was a woman who was no better than she ought to be! It’d surprise nobody if she ended up as a ghost!”

  Hazel looked around triumphantly. At first, Mavis thought she was expecting applause, but after a while she decided that it was actually a check that Constance Miller wasn’t already haunting the graveyard. If there was one thing that Mavis had learned about her great great great grandmother over the past hour (and she had in fact learned a lot of things) it was that she believed there was no depth to which a person could stoop that they wouldn’t find Constance Miller there before them, lowering the tone. If there was a second thing, it was that Hazel believed Constance Miller delighted in thwarting her plans: she would probably be haunting the graveyard just so Hazel couldn’t use her as an alias.

  Stanley saw a different problem with this plan, which he pointed out to his wife with a tone of barely suppressed amusement.

  “So, you’re happy with people thinking you’re Constance Miller, my darling? And that she looks like you?” He gestured vaguely in his wife’s direction with his arm. She immediately frowned, and looked down at herself.

  “No! You’re quite right, Stanley, people wouldn’t be convinced that I could possibly be Constance Miller!”

  “Of course not, Grandmama Hazel,” although Mavis knew there was no way that any other living person in the town except herself had any clue who either of the two women were. It wasn’t as if...

  But her tongue had escaped from the restrictions of her mind, and raced ahead to speak the thought before Mavis had even finished thinking it.

  “...you look nothing like her statue, after all.” Mavis could have swallowed her tongue in surprise at the words coming out of her mouth. Others reacted before she’d fully grasped what she’d said.

  “A statue!? Constance Miller! Why, of all the...”

  “Oh, it’s true what Mavis says, Grandmama Hazel. Right in the middle of the town square: ‘Greatest woman who ever lived here,’ it says, don’t it, pet?” Behind Sally, Deirdre had turned around and placed her head into a yew tree’s trunk to muffle her laughter, but Mavis could see her shoulders shaking. Stanley’s eyes were shining and his smile grew ever wider as Sally continued:

  “...I’m shocked myself at how long it took me to realise you were talking about her. Why, your stories are nothing like the pageants of her life...” Sally gabbled cheerfully on, spouting out nonsense. A living Hazel would by now have undoubtedly turned a very interesting colour, but her spirit merely remained the pale blue of the candle flame. The moving lights which made up her form did seem to speed up, however, making Hazel seem, if anything, more solid than ever in her apoplexy.

  “Well! I can’t be having with this! This charade of her virtue, her goodness: people must be told! It’s a good job I’m here, Mavis, I’ll soon set you youngsters straight on what a lazy, good-for-nothing strumpet Constance Miller ever was!” All thoughts of shame at being a ghost fled in the front of Hazel’s indignation.

  Stanley had his own plans for what to do.

  “While you do that, my love, I think I’ll make my way to the tavern, see how things have changed around here.”

  Mavis’ panic returned, now heightened by an awareness that as time passed more and more people would be out and about.

  “Pops, you can’t go to the Fox and Goose!”

  “Why not, don’t they serve spirits no more?” He waggled his eyebrows at Mavis, smile huge on his face. But all she could think of were her neighbours seeing her ancestors floating around town. Unlike her great great great grandfather’s face, hers did not carry even the ghost of a smile.

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  It took a little time, much of which was spent first placating Hazel, telling her that there was, in fact, no statue or pageants in Constance Miller’s memory, then having to persuade her that it would be more ‘fitting’ to await sunbeams at Mavis’ house than in a graveyard. The deciding factor was Deirdre’s proclamation that if she had to wait however many days for the weather to change, then she would do it indoors and not ‘skulking’ in a graveyard. From that point on, Hazel was eager to leave, reiterating that everybody else was wasting time.

  Stanley was much easier to persuade to leave the tavern alone.

  “I suppose it wouldn’t be open yet anyway. I’ll just have to wait to visit.” And he smiled with a glint in his eye that left Mavis unsure whether he was joking or not. “You know, my dear, that its real name isn’t the Fox and Goose, but the ‘Fox, Goose and Bag of Corn that You Need to Take Across the River, but Your Boat May Only Carry One at a Time...’ There was a travelling logician at the Midsummer Fayre one year and Old Walter was quite taken by him.” With that, he turned to join Deirdre in cajoling his wife.

  Mavis looked at Sally in bewilderment.

  “That can’t be true, can it?”

  “I... don’t know, pet. I suppose it would explain why the sign is incredibly complicated and painted really carefully. I always thought it was a trick of the eye thing. Your mum always used to claim that she could see a fox and goose in the sign if she screwed up her eyes really tightly. Never managed it my own self."

  The mechanics of travelling to Mavis’ home were tricky. The spirits were less visible in daylight, but the day was overcast and the blue light which made up their forms did give off a noticeable glow. There was an abortive attempt by Mavis to smuggle them under her cloak, but although Mavis and a spirit could occupy the same place at the same time, this was not the case for two spirits, let alone four.

  It was Sally who pointed out that the wall adjoining the graveyards was both old and rather thick, and ran almost all the way to Mavis’ home. The four spirits could walk along the inside of the wall. There would be just a short dash for the spirits across the street, and then down the small lane that led to Mavis’ house. Sally would lead the way, as the most familiar with the town’s current layout, sticking her fingers out to the left to hold Mavis’ own hand for extra guidance. Each spirit would follow behind, hands atop the shoulders in front.

  When it came time for her to leave the graveyard, all the nerves which had been building up inside Mavis came to a head. She stood in the shadow of the wall, hearing every footstep, every good morning from the passers-by as a nail hammered into her heart. She wrapped the cloak around herself and hoped it hid the shaking.

  The more nervous she got, the harder it became to start moving.

  Yet, the longer she waited, the more people there would be.

  The more people there would be, the more likely the spirits would be spotted.

  What would happen after that, Mavis didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. It was merely Catastrophe.

  Then she saw her aunt’s hand emerge from the wall, and wiggle its fingers at her. Mavis drew a deep breath, dropped the hood from her face, grabbed at the hand (feeling a little numb as her own hand passed through) and set off.

  There were people around. Not quite as many as she feared, a small handful of shopkeepers and their apprentices opening up the fronts of their shops, an occasional labourer or carpenter making their way to the rebuilding work around the town’s east gate, a lone servant from the coaching inn sent off on a quest for who knew what necessity, but enough to make every step Mavis took feel like she was falling into mud. She knew about half of them by sight, greeted them with her own good morning or demure dip of the head, and kept going. Fortunately, none knew her well enough to want to stop her for a chat: at that time in the morning anybody already out and about were so for a reason.

  If any of them wondered what Mavis’ reason was, or why she walked so close to the graveyard wall, they did not ask. Although she could feel a hundred eyes boring into her back, she knew there just weren’t that many people around. Stopping and looking behind her would simply attract attention.

  They reached the mouth of the lane which contained Mavis’ house. The lane itself was blessedly quiet, none of the houses along its length showing any sign of opening up as yet. It couldn’t remain that way for long.

  One squeeze of (or rather ‘into’) Sally’s hand warned her aunt where they were. Mavis forced herself to count to three slowly whilst the ghosts oriented themselves within the wall. She looked to her left and right. Nobody was looking. She glanced down at her hand where it held the pale blue of her aunt’s. Her knuckles had scraped against the graveyard wall and taken off the top layer of skin. Only now she’d seen it did she feel the sting. Once more, Mavis looked around her, squeezed Sally’s hand twice more, and set off across the street.

  Behind her, the four spirits burst from the wall, and raced towards Mavis’ home.

  At least, two of them did. Stanley and her Aunty Sal had shot past Mavis and were into the lane before the living woman had taken three steps. Deirdre was a little slower, but moving at a brisk enough pace that Mavis was confident the three had reached the cover of her neighbour’s houses before they could be seen.

  Mavis was less confident about Hazel. She felt the now familiar pressures of the touch of a ghost, the uncomfortable numbness where her ancestor occupied the same place as she did. At least, it had been an uncomfortable numbness when her hand had passed through Sally’s. Hazel’s body in the same place was of a different order of magnitude. Her stomach was twisting, her spine crawling, her legs cramping as they moved in and out of Hazel’s form. Mavis clenched her jaw, adjusted her cloak so that it would billow more the better to hide her companion, and forced her legs to continue moving.

  Ahead of her, perhaps forty yards away, she saw Sally look back at her from outside her own front door. She indicated it uncertainly, and upon receiving Mavis’ nod, she, Stanley and Deirdre slipped through the door. Mavis would be seconds behind them.

  If her neighbour hadn’t chosen that moment to step out into the lane.