“I found a reference in a book to a woman encountering the ghost of Catherine Catesby in the orchards at Gunpowder Cottage in the 1940s,” she said, slightly at random. “It interested me because—” She paused. She’d been about to say it was because she had seen Catherine too but this wasn’t about her; she wanted to hear Maud’s experience without prejudice. “Because I’m involved with the dig at Gunpowder Cottage,” she said, “and we think there may be some connection between the Tudor gardens and Catherine’s ghost.” Put like that it sounded odd, she realized, but Maud simply smiled.

“I see,” she said.

Janet arrived with the drinks and a plate of muffins at the moment, but when her daughter had gone out, Maud added: “How did you know that I was the one who had seen Catherine?”

“My aunt Verity told me,” Lucy said. “I’m not sure how she knew—is it common knowledge hereabouts?”

Maud spread her hands. “Who knows? Most things are in a village. But as I say, no one has seemed particularly interested for many years. It was one of those things that was a flash in the pan—all very sensational at the time and then quickly forgotten.”

“What happened?” Lucy said. “I know it was a long time ago...”

“But I remember it clearly.” Maud took a sip of her tea. Her hands were old and knotted with arthritis but still looked strong. “It was the summer of ’46 and I was twenty years old and I had lost my sweetie less than a year before. Henry. He’d been in the RAF. Shot down in the very last days of the war.”

Sweetie, Lucy thought, thinking of Finn. That sounded warm and lovely but the grief of losing him would surely have been devastating.

“I’m very sorry,” she said.

Maud’s smile had an edge of sadness. “He was my first love. Our parents thought we were too young to marry, too young even to get engaged, especially with a war on, but I knew he was for me. It was our anniversary—the anniversary of the first time we’d made love—and I went to the orchard to be alone and think about him.”

Lucy almost spat out her lemonade. She’d had very chaste ideas of Maud’s romance up until that point but of course even old ladies of ninety plus had their past.

“I was a little bit happy and a lot sad,” Maud said softly, and Lucy’s heart ached for her. “I sat down under one of the apple trees and had a good cry. It’s very cathartic to cry when you need to—I don’t hold with this ‘buck up and get on’ philosophy. For a lost glove, perhaps, but not when someone’s died. Give them the respect their loss deserves, I say. And then I saw her—Catherine. She was crying too.”

Lucy felt her heart start to speed up. Grief calls to grief, she thought. There had been Maud and Johnny and now her, and perhaps there had been others...