Edith shook her head and handed him the little box. He made a move to take hold of her but Edith was faster and before he had opened the door wide she was gone. He had to admit he was too drunk to go after her. Anyway, he told himself as a mouse scuttled across the floor, best she doesn’t see the house in this state.

He took the box into the kitchen and cleared a space on the table with the back of his hand. He poured himself a plum brandy, wondering if it was a piece of embroidery she had given him as a thank you for the clock. He opened the box. The ring and the broken cuckoo lay there, a metal hairpin stabbed through them. He gasped for air. Only then did he realise what a fool he was, that this marriage was an old man’s fantasy. He looked up to see the ghost of his mother sitting at the table.

‘She will never love you,’ said the ghost of his mother.

‘Go away and leave me be,’ said the butcher.

‘You know what you want to do,’ said the ghost. ‘What you would love to do. It would be so easy.’ She put her long fingers to her neck. ‘Just press here.’

‘Mother, go,’ said the butcher.

A graveyard grin crossed her features. ‘All I am saying, son, is you’d better make sure she doesn’t run away before the wedding or you will never have your little pleasure.’

His mother was right. She knew what it was he wanted, always understood the devil within him. He shuddered at the thought of the untold satisfaction it would give him to strangle the life out of Edith just after he’d taken her virginity.

‘And the devil,’ he said, throwing his glass across the room at the ghost, ‘the devil can bear the weight of the consequences.’

Chapter Seventeen

A Different Pair of Shoes

Demetrius stood at the end of Edith’s bed.

‘We can travel in these hours of sleep to the realm of otherness.’

‘Then take me there.’

In the yard the walnut tree was in blossom. Demetrius was beside her, which was strange as this had happened a long time ago when her grandmother was alive and she had been small. It was in this tree that she had first seen one of the bloodless, an old woman with a shawl wrapped round her head. Her hands were big, her nails long, her eyes black. In the midnight hour she used to call to Edith to come to her.

She sat in the branches now among the walnut blossom, saying the same words as she had before, words that frightened the child in Edith because she hadn’t understood them.