“‘But, Franny,’ Sina said to me, ‘I must tell you because Bertha saw a ghost, too. And she thought she knew whose it was.’”

Then I related to them what Sina had said to me.

“When Bertha was dying she finally told Old Tom and me about the ghost. It began with Maria May, who lived with her parents on East Sooke Farm. You can find her gravestone in the Sooke Cemetery, with the dates 1798–1822. She was known as a local beauty, but her marriage prospects weren’t good. Her family hadn’t much money, scratching a living on the farm. Then she fell in love with Captain Hawkins, a merchant seaman who came from a long aristocratic line in England. His first wife had died in childbirth and he would not marry again until the woman in question proved that she could carry a child to term and birth it successfully. So Maria May allowed herself to get pregnant out of wedlock. Before she could have the baby, the captain’s father died and Captain Hawkins inherited the estate and returned to England to claim it, leaving a letter for Maria May saying that someday he would return for her. Maria May told her parents what had happened and begged her father to let her use her wish in the night garden to join Captain Hawkins and be happy. But her father forbade her any wish at all. He felt anyone who had gotten into the condition she had, hadn’t the sense to make a decent wish. He told her to bide her time and he would think of a useful wish for her. Her happiness must be in his keeping from then on. Then, because her father had no doubt that Captain Hawkins would never return, he used his wish to wish him dead. When word came to them of Captain Hawkins’s death, Maria May tried to use her wish to reverse her father’s. She wrote to Captain Hawkins after that, hoping her wish had worked and he would reply, but instead she received a letter from relatives saying he was dead. When she told her mother about her letter and her last hope, her mother explained that no wish can be used to undo another’s wish. It was the terrible finality of the night garden. The next morning Maria May’s body was found washed up at the bottom of the cliff at Beechey Head.

“Her father said she had clearly gone mad and refused to acknowledge that he had taken all hope from her when he had taken control of her happiness. He said from then on he had no daughter and wiped her name from the family Bible and refused to have her buried on the farm as her mother wished. Her mother, full of remorse for not helping her daughter when she could have, had a stone erected in the Sooke Cemetery, but the coffin she buried beneath it was empty. Instead, she gave her husband a sleeping draught and secretly, with the help of the dairy maid, buried Maria May in the night garden, where she could gaze at her grave from her bedroom window on all the many nights thereafter when she couldn’t sleep.