Read Online Dead Man's Embers by Mari Strachan - Free Book Online Page B

ruffles his feathers, his beak pointing upwards in umbrage, and trundles out through the back door. Non does not know whether to laugh or cry.
    Behind her, Davey mutters. Then he screams, ‘Down, Ben, keep your head down’, and dives to the floor. It is to do with Ben every time, Non thinks, that much I know, but I feel as if I am circling the meaning without finding my way any nearer to its core.
    Davey’s eyes are closed and he seems to have fallen asleep. She is never there at the start of his attacks but she is never there at the end either; she does not know what his reaction is to finding himself lying under the table. Does it not puzzle him? It is not something she can ask him while the chill of that look is so fresh in her heart. She walks out through the back door, following Herman’s affronted footsteps, and along the path to the far end of the garden and her bad-tempered hens.

11
    On Wednesday, when they arrive outside a small terraced house in one of Portmadoc’s back streets at that awkward time just before dinner, Non’s first thought is, Whatever am I doing here? The house has a large number thirty painted on the door but the street’s nameplate is overgrown with ivy and impossible to read. It is a wonder they have arrived here at all. Catherine Davies took them in all directions to throw anyone who might be watching off the scent because she was so worried that someone would find out that she was in Port to consult a medium. In a séance. It is hard to believe that such a creature exists in Port, it is such a practical sort of place, full of shops and businesses and ships of all shapes and sizes coming and going in the harbour. Non wonders how Mrs Davies found out about the event, it is hardly the kind of service that is advertised in the
Cambrian News
. Go with her, Davey had said yesterday, she cannot go on her own, God knows what might happen to her. Go with her and keep an eye on her.
    She knows that Catherine Davies’s illness may be affecting what she thinks and says, so she had, dutifully – there is that word again – trotted down with her mother-in-law to catch the mid-morningtrain to Port, only to find on the way that Catherine was pretending that the visit to the medium was for the sake of poor Elsie Thomas, and that she had persuaded Elsie that she would find out exactly what happened to her Benjamin if she went along. So, when they reached the station, there was Elsie, sweltering in her best dress made of winter-weight black wool, waiting for them.
    Their first knock on the door of Number Thirty has produced no result.
    â€˜Knock harder, Rhiannon,’ Catherine Davies says. She prods Non with her parasol, black in respect to Billy. ‘I wrote a week ago – we are expected.’
    Expected! So this has been arranged, letters through the post back and forth, time taken. This has been on the knitting needles for some time. Non knocks sharply on the door. She does not know anything good about mediums nor these meetings they hold with the dead, these séances. She knows they are all the rage among the well-to-do and the gullible and the heartbroken people left behind without hope by the victims of the War, people who find it difficult to believe their husbands and sons and brothers are dead when they have no bodies to bury and grieve over. She knows they take advantage of desperate people like Elsie.
    The door creaks open. The hinges need a drop of oil – Davey would not have let them get into that state – but Non supposes it is intended to add to the atmosphere. A tiny girl dressed from head to foot in a white filmy costume, as if she has just arrived from the land of the fairy people, gestures them to enter without saying a word. Non wonders if she has the same problem as Osian, but the child allows Elsie Thomas to pat her on the head without screeching the way Osian would have done. The door creaks again as it is closed behind them, and