“But your love for me,” he went on, “is the reason why you’ll tell me all about yourself and Blackwood Farm. Start with the family history and then go into your own.”

I sighed. I pondered. I took the plunge.

CHAPTER 7

7

“CHILDHOOD FOR ME INVOLVED two distinct polarities—being with Goblin, and listening to adults talk.

“Goblin and I were the only children here at Blackwood Manor because the tourists who came almost never brought children with them, and so I soon learned the vocabulary of adults and that it was fun to play in the kitchen and listen to their endless storytelling and arguing, or to tag after the tour guides—my great-grandfather Gravier and later my grandfather Pops—as they went through the house detailing its riches and its legends, including the gloomy tale of Manfred, the Great Old Man.

“Great-grandfather Gravier was truly the very best at this, having a deep sonorous voice and being a dignified man in a black suit with a white silk tie to match his white shirt, but he was very old when I was little and he went away to a hospital and died there, before I was five I think, and I have no clear memory of his funeral. I don’t think I went to his funeral. But he had made an indelible impression upon me.

“And he at once became a famous family ghost apparently, on the sole authority of my having come down the stairs one morning and seen him standing by the front door, smiling at me placidly and waving his right hand. He was gone in an instant.

“Everybody told me to stop telling such stories, Great-grandfather Gravier was in Heaven, and I must certainly know that, and we ought to light a candle for him before the Blessed Virgin on the little altar in the kitchen, which we did—which made a total of ten-odd candles burning on the little altar for various ancestors, rather like the altars one sometimes sees in Chinese laundries. And furthermore, it was said I shouldn’t try to scare people.

“Nevertheless, during every house tour ever given by anyone at Blackwood Manor, the whole world of our paying guests was told about my having seen Great-grandfather Gravier.

“Pops, Gravier’s only son and my grandfather, took up the job of guide with gusto after Gravier’s death, and though Pops was far more plain-spoken and rough at the edges, he was a grand storyteller, nevertheless.

“Gravier had been a man of considerable accomplishment, in that he had practiced law for years and even served on the bench as a local judge. But Pops was a rural man who had no ambition beyond Blackwood Manor, and if that meant he had to talk to the guests, he did it.