“It’s the way it’s always been done,” I explained calmly. “At first apprentices can do little to help. Even after several years’ training, they rarely go out on jobs alone.”
Of course, all I actually knew was John Gregory’s way of doing things, but I wasn’t going to admit as much to this man.
“Why’s that, then?”
“Because it’s dangerous work, Mr. Calder,” I replied. “Some creatures from the dark can kill you—especially boggarts.”
“Boggarts!” he scoffed. “It’s a load o’ rubbish! Ghosts and boggarts—they’re just superstitious stories to frighten fools who’ll pay good money for what you pretend to do. Still, don’t get me wrong, if it makes you a living, I don’t blame you one bit. Folks are gullible, but what you do at least gives ’em peace of mind, I’ll say that for you.”
I didn’t see any point in arguing with him. Most folk were nervous about spooks, but you met the odd one who didn’t believe in the dark at all. It might be that they lacked sensitivity to the supernatural, but whatever caused them to adopt that attitude, they were sure they were right, and there was no point in trying to convince them otherwise.
“Your own pa must’ve been rich to afford twelve guineas,” Jenny’s dad grumbled.
I shook my head. “He wasn’t rich,” I explained. “He was just a hardworking farmer who had to support seven sons.”
‘Well, I’m not even a farmer. I just work for farmers, and a poor pittance they pay me. I can tell you that for nowt!”
There was a silence then, and Jenny looked like she wished the floor would open and swallow her up.
There was a long silence, which I broke with another question.
“Do your other daughters no longer live at home?” I asked.
“They were good girls!” piped up Jenny’s mam. “We’d no trouble marrying them off—no trouble at all. Now they both have children of their own.”
I nodded and forced a smile onto my face, but my heart sank. This contradicted Jenny’s claim to be a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. Had she lied to me, assuming that I wouldn’t pay a visit to her family?
“Both?” I asked. “What about your other daughters, Mrs. Calder?”
“We don’t have any other daughters. We would have liked more children, but two was all we could manage,” the woman told me. “That’s why we adopted Jenny.”
I was annoyed. I felt like walking out and heading straight back to Chipenden. But part of me did want to believe Jenny, and if she was adopted, then there was still a chance that she was telling the truth.
“Who were her parents?”
“If the Lord knows, he ain’t telling!” she replied. “I found Jenny abandoned in a nettle patch behind the big barn out there. She was screaming fit to wake the dead. Had stings all over her little bum! Even though we were getting on in years, being good-hearted folk and wanting another child, we took her in.”
I glanced at Jenny, who had blushed a bright red.
“Of course, she hasn’t turned out quite the way we expected,” the woman continued. “The nettle patch was right at the center of a big pixie circle made of the tallest and brightest yellow buttercups I’d ever seen. That’s supposed to bring good fortune to any who dare enter it. But we’ve seen precious little of that!”
Pixies and pixie circles were just superstitious nonsense, but I didn’t waste my breath explaining this to her. I’d had enough of the company of this couple. I knew that I was going to have to whistle for my guineas. In any case, they were probably too poor to make more than a token contribution to the cost of training Jenny.
“Well, I’ll have to consider the situation,” I said. “Jenny has to take a test first, to see if she’s fit to become my apprentice. If she passes, I might call back to see you again.”
That was the end of the conversation, and after bidding them farewell, I began to walk slowly away from the cottage, Jenny following behind.
“You lied to me,” I said accusingly. “Are you actually a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter?”
“Of course I am!” she protested.
“How can you make such a claim?” I snapped. “You don’t even know who your real parents were.”
“My real dad and mam are both dead. But I know who my mam was,” Jenny said, hanging her head. “And I know that I’ve six sisters.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you know who your mam is, but your foster parents don’t?”
“Yes. My real mother came to see me about three years ago. She explained why she’d abandoned me.”
I stared hard at Jenny. Was she telling the truth?
“So why did she?”
“Because my dad had died suddenly and she was living in poverty with too many mouths to feed and no hope of things getting better. She was too proud to ask anyone to adopt me. So she left me somewhere I’d be found.”
“Why did she seek you out after all that time?”
“Because she was dying. The doctor had given her only weeks to live. She came to tell me that I was a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. She did it so I’d be ready when I started to see the dead. She was a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter too, and she hadn’t been prepared for what had happened. It almost drove her insane, so she came to tell me what to expect.”
“I saw the dead from a very early age,” I told her. “You’re fifteen now, so you must have been twelve when your mother came to see you. All those years, and nothing unusual had happened?”
“I heard a few whispers in the dark, and once something touched me with a cold finger, but I just put it down to my imagination. My real mam said things don’t start to happen until you’re at least thirteen. Perhaps it’s different for a seventh son.”
I nodded. That was a possibility . . . but I still needed to be sure. If Jenny’s mother had died, maybe I could talk to her other daughters, to check that Jenny was telling the truth. I was finding this hard. I had nobody I could ask for advice. “So what was your mother’s name, and where did she live?”
“She wouldn’t tell me her name or where she lived.”
I sighed in exasperation. If the girl was telling the truth, then discovering the whereabouts of her blood sisters would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. The family home would now be occupied by someone else, and Jenny’s older sisters would no doubt have families of their own.