“Louisa is shivering,” she said. “Louisa is always cold.”

“Well, goodness, let’s build the fire up at once,” Phyllis exclaimed. “This place is never properly warm. What did Sergeant Lind say—the ghosts will leave if they get warm enough!”

Practical, well-behaved Phyllis suddenly leaped to her feet and slammed peat bricks into the fire. She grabbed the bellows and fanned the flames. Jane tried to reach around her with the poker and banged it on the hearth, not doing much but making a great noise. Phyllis shoved more peats on. Flames licked around the corners of the blocks and grew taller.

It was wonderful.

In a minute it became the biggest, brightest blaze we ever had in that house. It filled the room with rosy light and threw streamers of gold up the chimney. As it burned higher, light caught on the rows of copper and silver pressed into the wood, dull and burnished and shining.

“Build it up—”

I couldn’t in a million years work out who to blame for what happened next.

It was Jane urging us on. She was the one who kept saying, “More fuel! Another log!” But it was me who took the poker from Jane’s frail grasp and stirred up the embers and turned over the flaming blocks of peat. Phyllis was the one who kept putting more of them in the fire. And Nan Campbell didn’t ever tell us to stop.

In the blazing heat, something fell gleaming like a raindrop full of sunlight and hit the stone hearth with a clink.

Then there was another. Clink. Clink—another. Then half a dozen all at once, clinkclinkclinketyclinketyclink—as if someone had thrown a handful of coins into the fireplace.

We all fell still, listening and staring.

The heat of our inferno was sucking moisture out of the mantel, shrinking it as it dried, and the old wood was letting go of its wishing coins.

One by one they popped out of the black oak beam and plinked on the hearth, pennies and tuppences and silver threepenny bits put there by generations of fishermen and crofters, and by the young men who died in the first Great War.

Alan Anderson. Ben Knox. Cammy McBride.

The fire was warming them up, and the coins and the ghosts were leaping from the thick walls.

Duncan Campbell.

With a great sob, Mrs. Campbell grabbed her heather broom and tried to sweep the coins from the hearth into the fire. But they fell out of the mantel faster than she could sweep.

Clinkclinkclinkety clink-clink-clink.

It was like Morse code spelling the names of dead men.

In a frenzy, Nan accidentally swept the bundle of dried heather into the fire too. The broom flared up in her hands like an incendiary bomb.

She yelped and dropped it. Her apron was on fire as well. She ripped it off, threw it into the blaze, and leaped away from the hearth.

Then the mantel caught fire.