She glared at me hard then and didn’t speak for a long time. I thought at one point that she was going to hiss at me through her teeth. I stared back at her, trying not to blink, until at last a faint smile lit up her face and she spoke again.
‘Then I’ll have to settle for a promise.’
‘A promise?’ I asked, wondering what she meant.
‘A promise to help me just as I helped you. I don’t need any help right now, but perhaps one day I might.’
‘That’s fine,’ I told her. ‘If you ever need any help in the future then just ask.’
‘What’s your name?’ she asked, giving me a really broad smile.
‘Tom Ward.’
‘Well, my name’s Alice and I live yonder,’ she said, pointing back through the trees. ‘I’m Bony Lizzie’s favourite niece.’
Bony Lizzie was a strange name but it would have been rude to mention it. Whoever she was, her name had been enough to scare the village lads.
That was the end of our conversation. We both turned then to go our separate ways, but as we walked away, Alice called over her shoulder, ‘Take care now. You don’t want to end up like Old Gregory’s last apprentice.’
‘What happened to him?’ I asked.
‘Better ask Old Gregory!’ she shouted, as she disappeared back into the trees. When I got back, the Spook checked the contents of the sack carefully, ticking things off from a list.
‘Did you have any trouble down in the village?’ he asked, when he’d finally finished.
‘Some lads followed me up the hill and asked me to open the sack but I told them no,’ I said.
‘That was very brave of you,’ said the Spook. ‘Next time it won’t do any harm to let them have a few apples and cakes. Life’s hard enough as it is, but some of them come from very poor families. I always order extra in case they ask for some.’
I felt annoyed then. If only he’d told me that in advance! ‘I didn’t like to do it without asking you first,’
I said.
The Spook raised his eyebrows. ‘Did you want to give them a few apples and cakes?’
‘I don’t like being bullied,’ I said, ‘but some of them did look really hungry.’
‘Then next time trust your instincts and use your initiative,’ said the Spook. ‘Trust the voice inside you. It’s rarely wrong. A spook depends a lot on that because it can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. So that’s another thing we need to find out about you. Whether or not your instincts can be relied on.’
He paused, staring at me hard, his green eyes searching my face. ‘Any trouble with girls?’ he asked suddenly.
It was because I was still annoyed that I didn’t give a straight answer to his question.
‘No trouble at all,’ I answered.
It wasn’t a lie because Alice had helped me, which was the opposite of trouble. Still, I knew he really meant had I met any girls and I knew I should have told him about her. Especially with her wearing pointy shoes.
I made lots of mistakes as an apprentice and that was my second serious one - not telling the Spook the whole truth.
The first, even more serious one was making the promise to Alice.
Chapter Seven
Someone Has To Do It
After that my life settled into a busy routine. The Spook taught me fast and made me write until my wrist ached and my eyes stung.
One afternoon he took me to the far end of the village, beyond the last stone cottage to a small circle of willow trees, which are called ‘withy trees’ in the County. It was a gloomy spot and there, hanging from a branch, was a rope. I looked up and saw a big brass bell.
‘When somebody needs help,’ said the Spook, ‘they don’t come up to the house. Nobody comes unless they’re invited. I’m strict about that. They come down here and ring that bell. Then we go to them.’
The trouble was that even after weeks had gone by, nobody came to ring the bell, and I only ever got to go further than the western garden when it was time to fetch the weekly provisions from the village. I was lonely too, missing my family, so it was a good job the Spook kept me busy - that meant I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I always went to bed tired and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. The lessons were the most interesting part of each day but I didn’t learn much about ghasts, ghosts and witches. The Spook had told me that the main topic in an apprentice’s first year was boggarts, together with such subjects as botany, which meant learning all about plants, some of which were really useful as medicines or could be eaten if you had no other food. But my lessons weren’t just writing. Some of the work was just as hard and physical as anything I’d done back home on our farm. It started on a warm, sunny morning, when the Spook told me to put away my notebook and led the way towards his southern garden. He gave me two things to carry: a spade and a long measuring rod.
‘Free boggarts travel down leys,’ he explained. ‘But sometimes something goes wrong. It can be the result of a storm or maybe even an earthquake. In the County there hasn’t been a serious earthquake in living memory but that doesn’t matter, because leys are all interconnected and something happening to one, even a thousand miles away, can disturb all the others. Then boggarts get stuck in the same place for years and we call them "naturally bound". Often they can’t move more than a few dozen paces in any direction and they cause little trouble. Not unless you happen to get too close to one. Sometimes, though, they can be stuck in awkward places, close to a house or even inside one. Then you might need to move the boggart from there and artificially bind it elsewhere.’
‘What’s a ley?’ I asked.
‘Not everybody agrees, lad,’ he told me. ‘Some think they’re just ancient paths that crisscross the land, the paths our forefathers walked in ancient times when men were real men and darkness knew its place. Health was better, lives were longer and everyone was happy and content.’
‘What happened?’
‘Ice moved down from the north and the earth grew cold for thousands of years,’ the Spook explained. ‘It was so difficult to survive that men forgot everything they’d learned. The old knowledge was unimportant. Keeping warm and eating was all that mattered. When the ice finally pulled back, the survivors were hunters dressed in animal skins. They’d forgotten how to grow crops and husband animals. Darkness was all-powerful.