The Telling

its back oriented towards the street and its face turned towards a wide open view of the valley. I stood on the doormat. It was made of thin strips of metal, laid on edge. They bit through the soles of my Converse, into my feet. Just facts. Just ask for the facts. If she knew who lived there, and when, and anything at all about them. Surnames, first names, a family called Williams, anything. Even in my own mind I refused to use the word haunted . The glass was rippled; I could see into a dim parqueted hall; there was a rectangle of light where a doorway opened into a brighter room. I pressed the bell, and it rang a little way off, in the hall, and there was silence, and I waited. Normal. Normal, normal, normal. There was a flurry of denim and navy blue, broken into ripples by the glass panes. The door opened.
    Miss Boyd was a small, sturdy woman in her sixties, dressed in jeans and an RSPB sweatshirt. She hustled me through to the living room and asked me to take a seat, offering me coffee, tea. She’d disappeared off to put the kettle on before I could refuse.
    Patio windows looked out on smooth lawns, a willow. The room had a precise kind of dryness to it. Spare green furniture, an upright piano backed up against a wall; a music stand and two dark curvaceous violin boxes propped up in a corner. I’d have thought she was giving music lessons to the village children, if the village hadn’t been singularly empty of children; empty of everyone but the elderly.
    She was clattering about in the kitchen. I couldn’t settle. I went over to her bookcase. Music, gardening, handicrafts, history. I recognized one of them; the local history book I’d bought. No use. Nothing specific. Except. Except. The photograph. Last of the Lune Valley Basket-weavers . The house had looked like Reading Room Cottage. And the name – Williams. The same family as was in the grave? I twitched the book off the shelf, was whisking through the pages. She bustled in with a tray, looked at me. I felt my cheeks flush up.
    ‘You can borrow it if you like.’
    ‘Sorry.’ I put it back. I came over towards her, standing awkwardly as she put the tray down on the pristine teak coffee table.
    ‘It’s really good of you to see me at such short notice.’
    She wafted the idea away with a weather-tanned hand. ‘More than happy. Please, have a seat.’
    I sat down on the edge of the sofa. She collapsed into an ancient green Parker Knoll armchair, sighing in relief.
    I leaned in to reach my coffee, took it in my left hand and sipped carefully at it. Everything was difficult: to smile, to drink, to hold anything steady, to make casual conversation. She was picking up sugar lumps and dropping them into her cup. She looked at me, smiled broadly and stirred her coffee.
    ‘So,’ she asked.
    ‘So.’ My voice creaked.
    ‘What can I do for you?’
    ‘It’s the cottage, Reading Room Cottage; we’re going to sell it, but I –’ I cleared my throat. ‘We don’t know anything about it, and I wanted to find out about the people who lived there. The family. I was wondering if you could help.’
    ‘Well, obviously there will have been lots of different families living there down the years. It was built as a labourers’ cottage, part of the Storrs Estate; they were still renting it out till the late seventies, when the estate was split up and sold. A lot of this’ll be on your deeds. The Huttons had it next: it was Jack’s place when the kids were small, and then the parents – Margaret and Charlie – retired there when Jack took over the farm. And then there were your –’ she hesitated, smiled cautiously. ‘Your parents. Is it a particular family you’re interested in?’
    She lifted her coffee, drank.
    ‘No, no, it’s just –’ I felt myself grow hot. ‘I don’t know anything, really, don’t know how to go about it. I wanted an overview, a sense of who might have been living there. Just to start with.’
    ‘That’s easy enough.’ Miss Boyd set down her cup. ‘Census records, parish records. That’s what you’ll need. Mind you, it’ll just be the bare bones.’
    ‘Bare bones?’
    Her expression was easy, open, suggested nothing out of the ordinary.
    ‘Of their lives, I mean; all you’ll get is their names, and their date of birth, marriage, death, and their occupation. If you’re lucky.’
    ‘Right. Of course. And how do you do that?’
    ‘You can get to a couple of the censuses online, but the parish records are held at