Page 21 of A Gathering Storm

“No,” he bit out. “No, I don’t want to. Not at all.”

The silence that greeted those words was profound. After a minute, Sir Edward said, slowly, “That’s all right. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

Nick laughed at that.

“I mean it,” Sir Edward said. His harsh voice could never soothe, but it was at least reassuringly devoid of tone. No hint of disappointment or disapproval, or indeed anything else, at Nick’s refusal.

“Perhaps you could tell me about her instead,” he said. “She could speak to the spirits, you said.”

“Ididn’t say that.” Nick sounded surprisingly petulant to his own ears.

A pause. “I’m sorry. Was it the other man who said so? Hammett?”

“Yes. Jed.”

“Andcouldshe speak to spirits?”

Nick was silent for a long pause, then he bit out, “I don’t know. She never did so in front of me.”

Surprised silence.

“Do you want to talk about something else?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Can you tell me about the ghost you saw when you were a boy? The Plague Ghost.”

“Doctor,” Nick said, and his voice was strangled. “It was the PlagueDoctor.”

“Sorry, yes. Plague Doctor. Did you really see him?”

Nick opened his mouth to scoff. To say, no, of course not, it had just been his imagination. Instead a whisper came out of him. “Yes.”

The Plague Doctor was vivid in Nick’s memory in that moment, as clear as he had once appeared before his childish eyes. The ghost’s old-fashioned clothes—long waistcoat, cassock coat, wide-brimmed hat, and square-toed buckled shoes—had been enough in themselves to mark out the shadowy figure as something strange. But it was the leather birdlike mask the ghost wore over its face—the round glass-covered eyeholes and long “beak” Nick had later learned would have been packed with aromatic herbs to keep out the putrid air—that had caused the creep of rising gooseflesh on the back of his neck and made him realise he was looking at someone, something, that . . . did notlive.

The worst moment though, had been when the ghost had seemed to become aware of Nick, turning to look directly at him, with that blank, inhuman face. Those empty, soulless glass-lens eyes.

That was when Nick had begun to scream. When he’d run away, bawling at the top of his lungs with Gid Paget and Jed Hammett on his heels, calling his name.

“Tell me about him,” Sir Edward murmured.

“He knew I was there,” Nick said. “He looked at me.” Impossible to convey how terrifying that had been.

“Were you frightened?”

“Yes. I was very young—I think I would be frightened even now, though. Seeing him felt . . . wrong.”

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?”

“Wrong like . . . that two-headed calf born on Yellow Cove Farm that lived but an hour.”

“Unnatural, you mean?”

“I . . . suppose.” He wasn’t sure that was what he meant. He meant a wrongness that reached right into his gut and twisted him up inside. Perhaps a better word washorror. But he didn’t say so.

“Have you ever seen another ghost?” Sir Edward asked.

Nick shook his head slowly. “Just that one time. I ran home to Ma, and by the time I got there, I was feverish. She put me to bed and I stayed there three days. I remember in my fever state . . .”