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.

Could I trust her? I wondered.

I shrugged. I was about to find out. We’d go and do the test now. If Jenny truly was a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, she would pass the haunted-house test. While some who entered that house might just feel uneasy, thinking they were being watched or hearing a few raps, a seventh son of a seventh son would be receptive to the full ghast experience there. If she really did have similar powers, it would be the same for her.