I waited expectantly for the sound of Jenny coming down the cellar steps.

But the whole house was silent.

Perhaps she had fallen asleep and hadn’t heard the chimes? I thought. Her terrible experience at the hands of the Kobalos had taken a lot out of her, after all. So I was patient. I waited for the next chime to mark the half hour. Then I climbed the steps.

The front room was empty. The door was wide open.

Jenny had fled into the night.

11

A Rare and Special Type

I started searching around for her. Perhaps she hadn’t gone far. . . . I walked up the hill, keeping to the main lane but checking each cobbled street to my right and left as I passed by.

Had she been lured into opening the door to the street ghast?

I didn’t think so. I’d warned Jenny about that. She was sensible and would have resisted, just as I had during my test.

It seemed likely that she had simply given in to her fear and run, meaning that she had failed the test.

After about an hour, I stood on the steep grassy slope that led up to the slag heaps and mine workings and looked down at the village. Nothing was moving below. But for the wind sighing across the hill, all was silent. Everybody who wasn’t down the mine working the night shift was safely tucked up in bed.

I gave up and walked through the night toward Chipenden. And as I did so, my doubts came rushing back. The truth is, I wasn’t ready to take on a trainee. Although a practicing spook, with a good number of successes under my belt, I was hardly more than an apprentice myself. I reckoned I needed at least five more years before I had the knowledge and experience to train someone properly.

Not only that. She was a girl, and as far as I knew there were no precedents for a female apprentice spook. It might cause all sorts of problems. And who knew what powers a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter possessed? I had been hasty in taking her on—perhaps I’d done so to make up for almost getting her killed by the Kobalos. I knew that she could hide and make herself difficult to detect, but did she have any immunity to witchcraft? Could she really hear the dead and talk to them, as she’d claimed?

To tell the truth, my feelings were mixed. Although I had no evidence that she really was a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, I had expected her to pass the test. In my mind I had gotten used to the idea of her being my apprentice. I was lonely—that came with the job, of course, but since my master died I’d been completely alone. Alice had left us and gone to the dark for good. I would have liked to have someone else living in the house again; someone to work with. I remembered something Alice had once said to me, back in the first year of my apprenticeship: “One day this house will belong to us, Tom. Don’t you feel it?”