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 nought!”

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.”