Chapter One
THAT VERY NIGHT, I planned to raise Bredon Havers from the dead. He was the oldest corpse in the cemetery, and I’ve always liked a challenge. I knelt in the damp grass of the graveyard and sprinkled a generous circle of salt around the headstone. A wide margin is crucial. Tree roots and moles move things around and it’s always disappointing when your zombie comes up missing a limb. Or a head. I really hate that.
Me: Lavington Windsor, estate agent by day, necromancer by night. I’ve never found a way of making my hobby pay, alas. There isn’t much demand for mouldering corpses in the corporate world. And while poking around people’s homes isn’t as much fun as raising the dead, it’s an OK way to make a living. Professional necromancer though? I’d certainly like that on my passport.
I sealed the circle with a perfume atomiser, spraying over the white line until it was damp. My grandfather used stout in a plant mister, but Robert Windsor lived in a time when no one raised an eyebrow if you travelled with an emergency beer supply. If I ever got caught out, I’d be packing Chanel.
I added a few drops of blood even though I probably didn’t need them. Practice makes perfect, they say, and I’d done this almost every day since I turned eight. I have to: it’s a Compulsion, and I don’t think I’ll ever be free of it. But then, I’d never raised a man who’d died more than two and a half centuries before. I’d summoned every other corpse in the graveyard—four hundred and twenty-three of them, to be exact. Bredon would be the last and by far the oldest, so this warm August night marked a rather special occasion. I had my pin ready just in case.
They started burying people here about three hundred years ago and stopped shortly after the Second World War. Many of the names on the tombstones read like a roster of unlikely vintage film stars. John Doo, Ashby Rainecourt, Bailey Culpepper… No matter; old and new, I’d raised them all. Or nearly all.
I stepped out of the circle, taking care not to disturb the moist salt, and opened my rucksack. I’d packed four family-sized packets of crisps and an entire loaf of white sliced bread made into ham sandwiches. Take it from me: a raised zombie is a hungry zombie. I opened the crisp packets and poured them onto paper plates, then arrayed them inside the circle, adding a final one with the teetering pile of sandwiches on it. Good to go, Toni.
No eye of newt, no toe of frog. People yearning for arcane ceremonies with candles and entrails would be disappointed by the real thing, because I’d never needed to sacrifice so much as a wasp. Salt, perfume, snacks, occasionally a drop of blood, and end of story. That’s all I’ve ever needed. I suppose I’m just a natural.
“Bredon Havers, in peace I call you. I summon you this night. Come to me.”
The words weren’t necessary, but they gave me a little oomph, probably not a million miles from a weightlifter grunting as they hefted the bar. Words or not, Bredon Havers came.
He stepped out of the earth with a firm stride, nothing tentative about him, and looked around with a watchful air. I could have cheered. He was beautifully intact, not a digit missing, not a mouldering limb in sight. My first thought was how perfect he was for a zombie, and my second just how tall he must have been amongst my short English ancestors back in the 1750s. He had curly dark hair, big brown eyes and a cheerful smile. He was wearing some kind of wide trousers and a long coat embroidered with peacocks.
Sometimes, when I summon, there’s nothing in there, no soul—just a body, compliant but empty. I let them go straight away. Nature abhors a vacuum, they say, but demons love one, and a nice unoccupied body walking about… that would be irresistible. Mostly there’s at least a wisp of character left. But not one of my resurrected corpses had strode into the world like they were ready to ask for my vote. I beamed at Bredon.
“Hi, I’m Lavington.”
He looked just a tad taken aback, and bowed very slightly.
“Havers, Bredon Havers. Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mistress Lavington.”
His voice was a pleasing baritone and his English accent could have cut glass. He was in perfect nick, as though he hadn’t spent three minutes in a mouldering tomb, let alone three centuries. Such a shame I couldn’t show him off to the world. I wanted to ask him to show me his hands, to check each and every cuticle… but that might have been rude, so I just beamed a bit more.
“So, you’re a necromancer,” Bredon said.
Startled, I nodded. “Since I was a little girl. How did you know?”
“I am a man of intelligence, dear lady. I died, yet here I stand in a graveyard with you…” He gestured around the moonlit hill. “It seems the obvious deduction.”
“Ten out of ten, Sherlock,” I said.
He looked confused and I found myself wondering how long ago the detective books had been penned. Clearly after Bredon had shuffled off this mortal coil… No, not shuffled. Bredon clearly wasn’t a shuffler. Believe me—I’ve raised a lot of zombies. There’s nothing I don’t know about shuffling.
“I’m a necromancer, yes. And before you ask, the food is for you. I know you’re hungry.”
That’s the trick. Get them munching right away, before they go crazed with hunger and you can’t get anything sensible out of them. I had almost forgotten with Bredon because he seemed so… so civilised.
“I thank you, Mistress Lavington. I am, I admit, more than peckish.”
He picked up the plate of sandwiches and perched on the edge of his gravestone. He devoured about six of them in quick succession before pausing and looking up at me.
“Would you like one, Mistress Lavington?”
“Oh, please call me Toni. Everyone does. And no, thank you, I brought them just for you.”
“It seems a little uncivil, um, Toni, to be eating like a wild beast while you stand there without so much as a goblet of wine.”
Goblet. I was absolutely certain I had never heard anyone actually say that word out loud before. Goblet. What a splendid, unappreciated, underused word. But before I could interrupt, he continued:
“And goodness gracious, you have no chair. Where are my manners? Would you like to have my,” he frowned at the lichen-flecked headstone, “my settle?”
Goodness gracious? He said that too? He drew a white handkerchief from his pocket and began to rather futilely scrub at the surface.
“Oh, don’t do that,” I said. “Really, don’t bother.”
But he looked a little wounded, so—rather against my own judgement—I stepped carefully over the perimeter of salt and sat next to him, helping myself to a butty.
“These are quite excellent, I must say, Mistress Toni. Such soft bread.”
Ah, yes. The seventeen hundreds were probably not renowned for the availability of sliced white. Actually, I had absolutely no idea what they were renowned for. Infant death, no electricity and a distinct lack of female emancipation seemed likely, but beyond that I drew a blank. Bredon, meanwhile, had moved on to the crisps.
“Delicious,” he pronounced, inhaling a couple of packets worth. “Most tasty—can these be potatoes?”
“Um, yes. I believe they are. Probably with about a zillion E-numbers.”
“So many graves.”
That threw me.