The Silver Witch(29)

The two manage a fitful sleep. Tilda is disturbed by the raucous wind, and unaccustomed to sharing her bed. Each time she moves, however minutely, Thistle adjusts her position so that the gap between them is closed. Tilda remembers how soundly Mat would sleep, scarcely stirring all night. She notices that the memory no longer causes her physical pain. The customary jolt that has, until this moment, accompanied each and every recollection of him is absent. The realization brings mixed feelings. There is relief, certainly, but also a strange sense of guilt, as if by not hurting she is allowing him to become less important to her.

And why now? With all this weird stuff going on … Don’t I need him now more than ever?

She is too sleepy to try to make sense of it all. When she did what she did to the boat motor; when she dared to harness and use the bewildering ability that has come to her seemingly from nowhere, Tilda was briefly frightened, but then, to her own astonishment, she felt exhilarated. Empowered.

Happy? For heaven’s sake, yes. Happy. Here. Like this.

She finds she is not fazed by living without electricity, though she knows that when her parents arrive for their promised visit they will be appalled, and that she will have to do something about a nonelectric kiln. The bizarre nature of what is happening to her unsettles her less than she might have expected it to. What does disturb her, however, the thing that does still cause her to jump at sudden noises, or make her heartbeat race when something on the periphery of her vision snags her attention, are the inexplicable things that she sees. As she lies beneath her warm bedding, Thistle snuggled close, the wind wailing around the chimney pots of the cottage, she forces herself to list those things. To name them. To face them.

The waking nightmares of Mat’s death.

She forms the thought calmly and acknowledges that the flashbacks to this terrible moment, though more vivid when she first moved to her new home, have now lessened. In fact, she cannot recall the last time she experienced one.

The people in the boat.

They had seemed so real at the time. Even now, though her recollection of the two men rowing with their backs to her is faint, she can clearly see the striking woman who looked straight at her. Who must have seen her.

But who was she? She looked young, and yet ancient at the same time. Was she a ghost then? Is the lake haunted?

The word brings with it the memory of the horrendous face that so shockingly filled her vision more recently. A face so different from the serene and beautiful features of the first. So close, so terrible, so raging. If ever Tilda harbored an idea of what a terrifying ghost might look like, that was it. She turns her head in the dark, instinctively trying to turn away from the image she has brought to mind, knowing that closing her eyes will make no difference. Instead she looks down at the sleeping dog by her side, letting her hand rest on its grizzled fur.

Do you see them, too, girl? Do you see the ghosts? Or is it just me?

She makes herself apply logic to the puzzle as best she can. The lake has been inhabited for centuries. What better place to be sprinkled with wandering souls? She has always been a little sensitive to eerie atmospheres in certain houses or places, and as a teenager was given to being easily spooked, but she never thought of herself as someone who actually saw ghosts. Since she moved to this house that sensitivity has significantly heightened, so that now she encounters the inexplicable. Here things are crucially different. True, the year spent at her parent’s house recovering from losing Mat had been filled with the singular visions of that fateful day, and she had felt herself at times unhinged by sadness. But she had not adversely affected the electricity supply whilst staying in Somerset. No machinery had failed to work in her presence. And she had not once seen apparitions. Had never encountered such apparently real people in her waking moments, all the time knowing that they were not real. No, the plain fact was, everything changed when she moved to Ty Gwyn. Everything inexplicable began when she came to live by the lake. So the ghosts, if ghosts they are, must somehow have their origins here too.

For even ghosts must surely have their beginnings in something real.

Outside, a doughty blackbird announces the start of a new day. Tilda sits up, fired with a determination to look for reason. For sense. For explanations. She believes the answers to the questions she has not yet properly formed lie with the lake, its history and its people. And luck, or something like it, has thrown in her path the perfect person to help her discover its past.

‘Come on,’ she nudges Thistle. ‘That feeble glimmer in the sky out there is what passes for sunrise in these parts. Best time of day for a run, so if you’re coming with me, shake a leg.’