David looked at his watch and congratulated himself.
The meeting was running to time – still ten minutes to go and only AOB left on the agenda.
“Anything else?” he asked, in a tone that made it clear this would not be welcome. “Or shall we adjourn to the Green Man?”
There was a scraping of chairs and clearing of throats, but then Lisa spoke up.
“Sorry, yes. I know nobody is going to want to hear this, but Gregory Nicholls is back.”
There was a groan.
“Not again!”
“What is it this time?”
“I thought we’d seen the back of him for a while.”
David got to his feet and held his hands up. “Stop, everyone quiet, stop talking!” He banged on the table with his coffee cup. “Order! Order Order!”
There was a moment of silence, and he jumped into it before the moaning could start up again. “Grumbling won’t do us any good. Let’s talk about this properly. Lisa, what exactly did you see?”
“It was Gregory, in his funny helmet”, Lisa said, shrugging. “Yesterday when I was putting the green bin out.”
“Should have been blue not green yesterday,” Bal said, as if she’d won a point in a game. “The council changed the rota. I was in the newsletter and it's been on the notice board for weeks.”
“Bal!” said David. “Let her get to the point. What did you see, Lisa?”
“It was him. Standing in the road staring at me and looking glum. He was the same as he always is. You know, mostly solid, a bit see-through at the edges when he moved.”
“Did he say anything?” David asked. “Did he tell you what he wanted?”
“No,” Lisa said. “just looked at me, shook his head, turned round and went back into the churchyard.”
There was another burst of voices, all talking over each other.
“I can’t be doing with him clanking around again.”
“He’ll get worse – he always does.
“Not a minute’s peace.”
“You know, I think he enjoys it.”
“Maybe we should just ignore him,” someone said. “Perhaps if we didn’t give him any attention he’d go away.”
“We’ve tried that before, and it doesn’t work,” said David. “He escalates. Give him half a chance and he’s moaning at everyone from the church tower. Once he got chains from somewhere and took to rattling them all over the village like a pound-shop Marley. It went on for weeks. Bothered the hens no end. We had to buy eggs from Beckworth. You got to remember unlike us he’s not got anything better to do.”
“So, what shall we do?” Sally asked.
David shrugged at her. “Ask him what he wants and hope he gets to the point quickly.”
Although everyone kept an eye out, Gregory only appeared to Lisa.
She saw him the following day from her kitchen window while she was doing the washing up, standing in the same place she’d seen him first. It was raining, and he looked miserable. Lisa beckoned to him, but as soon as he’d got her attention, he shook his head mournfully and trudged off.
Lisa thought about following him, but it was raining very hard, and she decided it wasn’t worth it.
She knew he’d be back.
She saw him next in the early hours of Saturday night on the street in front of her house as her Uber pulled up. The driver didn’t notice him and drove straight through his slightly luminous body.
If the driver felt the split-second, ice-cold blast he didn’t mention it.
As the car left, Lisa walked towards Gregory, but, with head down and shoulders hunched, he was already sulking off.
“Oh, come on, Gregory!”, she called after him. “I’m sorry but that was hardly my fault – You were standing in the middle of the road. I didn’t see you until it was too late to say anything. Let me talk to you. Tell me what it is. Maybe I can help.”
Gregory paused, the light from a street lamp he was under glinting off his high-ridged helmet and backplate.
He stopped, then after a long moment, turned around.
“I’ve been robbed,” he said, in a low, sad voice, “and nobody cares.”
“Gregory if you’re a pain in the arse about this I’m going inside. I’ve got chips and they’re getting cold, plus some ridiculous man in the pub gave me this bunch of roses and they need to go in water before I go to bed. Why do men expect you to be grateful for giving you jobs you never asked for?” She paused and looked at him hard. “What’s going on?”
“I knew it. You don’t care. You haven’t even noticed.” Gregory said.
Lisa held up a finger. “Gregory, I swear to God I’m going inside right now if you don’t spit it out.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Gregory said, pointing at his chest.
“Gregory!” Lisa said, turning away from him and towards her house.
“My breastplate.” He exclaimed, pointing at himself. “Look!”
“What about it?” Lisa asked.
“It’s not there. It’s gone. It’s been stolen.”
“Are you sure? How do you know?”
“Because it’s gone. It’s not in the church where it’s supposed to be. That’s why I haven’t got it. My helmet’s there, and the backplate, but the breastplate isn’t. Come and look for yourself.”
“I can’t now,” said Lisa, lifting her takeaway bag and the flowers, “and there’s nothing we could do now anyway. I’m too drunk to look properly. Come back tomorrow,” she said, holding up a finger at him, “but not too early. You can show me then.”
“It’s bound to be sunny tomorrow,” said Gregory. “You won’t be able to see me.”
“Let’s meet at the church,” said Lisa. “I’ll be in the porch at ten and its shady there. Now leave me to my chips and sleep well.”
“I won’t sleep,” said Gregory, “I won’t be able to.”
And then he clanked off into the night.
The next day, hungover and irritable, Lisa looked everywhere in the church she could think of before accepting Gregory’s plate was really missing.
“I told you it was gone,” he said from the pulpit.
Lisa sighed. “Yes, OK,” she said. I’ll call another meeting.
…
“Did you really look everywhere?” Mauve asked. “Did you check the shelves at the back of the cleaning cupboard?”
“I looked everywhere,” Lisa replied. “He’s right. It is gone.”
“Does anyone have any ideas about where it might be?” David said to the group. “Surely someone must know where it is.”
“How did it end up in the church?” Lisa asked.
“It’s been there as long as anyone can remember but there’s nothing written down about it anywhere,” said Mauve. “It must have been in the church since the Civil War. My guess is someone brought it back from wherever the battle he was killed had been, then stashed all his stuff there and it’s been there ever since.”
“Until now,” Lisa said, “and it’s bothering him.”
“Yes,” said David, “but Gregory will look for any excuse to be up and about. Last time it was pigeons nesting in the church tower. The time before that it was because goths taking photos left bottles and dirty glasses in the graveyard.”
“Whether he’s making a meal of it or not, we have to find the bloody thing,” said Mauve. “If we don’t, he’ll never settle and none of us will have any peace. Someone in the village must have it. We’re the only people who knew it was there.”
Dan shifted in his seat uneasily and half raised his hand. “Um,” he said, “that’s not totally true.”
The meeting went quiet.
“Go on,” David said.
“Tristan, the last vicar knew,” Dan said, “the one who came to us once a month. He found Gregory’s stuff in the cupboard when he was looking for the chalice.”
“Dan!” Said Mauve. “Why didn’t you say anything then?”
“I didn’t think it was that important,” Dan said. “He didn’t make much of it. Just said it was part of history and that it was a shame it was hidden away, then went and did the service and left the same way he always did when nobody offered him lunch.”
“Man loved a roast,” said David, nodding, “Invited himself anywhere given half a chance. Anyway, that’s something. We must get hold of him and tell him we need it back. We’ll say we know he borrowed it and that’s fine, but it needs to be returned for some village exhibition or something.”
“It won’t be that easy,” Dan said. “He’s gone abroad on a mission, for a year. It was in the parish newsletter. I remember noticing because it said he was going to Spain, which I thought sounded a weird place to be going on a mission on.”
There was another collective groan, and again lots of voices all talking at one and over each other.
“Dan, this is your fault!”
“That aint Christian.”
“The dirty sneak! Who does he think he is?”
“Weasley little man. I knew he wouldn’t stay long. I never liked him.”
“A whole year? We can’t put up with this for a whole year!”
Once again, David silenced the room by banging on the table with his mug. “There’s no good everyone just shouting at each other. Someone will just have to talk to Gregory and explain things. Try to convince him to go to rest again. It won’t be easy but there’s no other way.”
“I suppose I’d better do it,” Lisa said, “as it seems I’m his current favourite.”
…
“So, I’m sorry, Gregory,” said Lisa, leaning against an obelisk in the June sunshine and to a rosebush, “I just don’t think we will be able to get it back. Dan feels really bad about it.”
“You didn’t even believe me it was missing when I first told you,” said a voice from just the faintest suggestion of a human-shaped outline. “You thought I was just moaning. I know everyone thinks I moan about everything.”
“You moan a lot,” said Lisa.
The outline slumped.
“I know,” Gregory said, then, after a short pause, “I wasn’t always like this. I didn’t moan much when I was alive. Lots of people thought I was funny – the life and soul.”
Lisa realised she knew very little about Gregory, or indeed about any of the Willerby village ghosts. They were so much part of the furniture – so present – it was easy to forget they’d been alive before they died.
She felt sorry for him – however dramatic he might have been in the past, this time there was no doubt he’d been wronged. He didn’t have much, and it wasn’t right something of what little he owned had been taken away from him.
It wasn’t fair, and it occurred to her maybe a lot of things hadn’t been fair to him.
She was sorry she knew so little.
“What were you like?”, she asked.
“Normal. Nothing special. Same as my mates really,” Gregory said, “worked in the fields unless I could get out of it. Enjoyed an ale or few when I could get one. Enjoyed a good joke, but most of all I liked spending time with my family, especially my brothers and sisters.”
“What were their names?”
Gregory smiled.
“I had eight – four living, four dead – but my special ones were the youngest two; Will and Mary. They cried when I had to go away. I did too but didn’t let them see me. I didn’t want to upset them and thought it would be for just a couple of weeks. If I’d known I wouldn’t be back I’d have sacked off the harvest and helped them with the animals. I’d have played with them, maybe carved them some little wooden animals - I was good at that. If I’d had just two more days, I’d have two more days of memories stashed away for now. It didn’t seem much then but now it feels like a lot. More than anything I wish I knew what happened to my two little ones.”
“How did you..,” Lisa asked, stumbling over the obvious question because it felt sensitive – like asking about a bereavement or divorce.
“Die?” Gregory replied, “I don’t mind you asking. I got shot – my armour didn’t fit together properly. It was off my dad, who’d had it from his dad, and it didn’t match - the backplate was different to the breast plate so there were gaps round the side. Nobody cared about that, and some boys had much less than me. I was a big lad, so they gave me a pike and put me at the front. First battle I was in, almost first shot, and the musket ball went in one of my gaps. Maybe I’d turned a bit or maybe it bounced off something. However it got in, it did and that was that. I died there on the field.”
“How did you end up here?” Lisa asked.
“I don’t know for sure, I just did,” said Gregory, “but there were some Willerby boys in my regiment. Maybe one of them brought my armour back here. It’s fine. There must be worse haunts. Sometimes I wish I was back in Beckworth but then other times I think that would be worse – being reminded all the time of home and what I missed.”
“I’m sorry the vicar took your plate,” Lisa said.
“It’s alright,” sighed Gregory. “You can tell everyone I won’t hang around for long this time. I can see it isn’t anyone’s fault. I’ll get over it.”
…
Gregory stayed around for a while but only Lisa saw him, and he seemed to be doing his best not to bother anyone.
There was no clanking of armour or chains, and he didn’t move far from the church.
Watching him made Lisa sad – he looked as if he were trying to find something he’d lost and wasn’t sure what – maybe, she thought, part of himself.
A few days later she had an idea.
She logged onto her computer and entered “buy civil war armour” into google. She scrolled past the first hits, which were all sites selling plastic costumes, and found a company selling authentic steel replicas. The prices were steep – running to thousands for a full suit - but she was able to use the descriptions of them to find what she was looking for at less than half the price second-hand on eBay.
It was still expensive, but it felt the right thing to do, so before she had a chance to think herself out of it, she clicked buy now.
She’d already closed the lid of her laptop when she had another idea.
She opened it back up, opened her web-browser and typed something else.
Her first hit led to another, which led to another and another.
She was at her computer for hours, but at the end of it she felt sure she’d be able to get what she was after.
…
“Gregory?” Lisa called into the church. “Are you here? I’ve got something for you.”
“I’m here,” he said, materialising in the pulpit.
“Come down,” Lisa said, “there’s a something in this box for you.”
Lisa opened the big cardboard box and used the scissors she’d brought with her to cut through the bubble-wrap to reveal the armour.
She held it up.
“I don’t know whether this is exactly the right thing, and sorry if it isn’t” she said, “but it’s a full set and it’s from your time – I got it in large. Helmet, backplate and breastplate. It even came with these glove things – I think they’re called gauntlets?”
For a moment Gregory didn’t say anything and Lisa worried she’d made an expensive mistake.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “Where did you get it from?”
Relieved, Lisa smiled. “There’s something we have called the internet,” she said. “It’s sort of a giant market. You can buy almost anything on it. I got the armour off that. But it isn’t just a market. It’s also a place where people share all sorts of other things on it. Records of births and weddings and deaths. Stuff about who owned what when. Court trials. All sorts. And there’s some people who get really interested in this sort of thing and they look way back to find people who lived long ago. I talked to some of them and found something else. I think it’ll be important to you.” She took a folded piece of paper from her pocket, then sat down on the front pew. “It’s on this – can I tell you what it says?”
Gregory nodded.
“I wasn’t sure exactly when you were born or died but your name and where you were from was enough for the people I’m talking about. Firstly, I’ve got some bad news. I’m sorry but your little brother, Will, he didn’t last much longer than you did. There’s a record of his funeral from records in Beckworth and there’s even a grave there. He was only ten. There was a lot of plague around then and it was probably that which carried him off. I’m so sorry.”
Gregory materialised next to her on the pew.
He bent over, put his hands over his face and began to weep.
Lisa tried to put an arm around him but there was nothing solid there – just a patch of intense cold.
Then, “Gregory,” she said. “There’s more, and you should know it. This bit isn’t bad.”
The ghost didn’t look up and continued to cry, but so quietly Lisa could speak over it and still be heard.
“Your sister, Mary, she lived a long life”, she said, “and did a lot with it.”
Gregory looked at her with intensity and hope, as if a path had opened up before him. For a moment it made Lisa breathless.
She spoke quickly and all in a rush.
“They have all the records in Beckworth,” Lisa said. “Mary Nicholls, then Mary Alderson after she got married to first husband, then Mary Smith after he died, and she married again. She lived to seventy-six and had twelve children. Not all of them lived to be adults but her first son did. Your nephew.” She paused for a moment. “Listen, they called him Gregory. And he lived. And had children, and they had children and so on. Some of your relations are still in Beckworth – ten years ago one of them was even mayor.”
Then the church bell, taken out thirty years before after a lightning strike, began ringing a funeral toll so loud it was heard in Beckworth and the villages all around.
As the last ring faded away the church was filled with the great whisper of a thousand prayers all at once.
Then Gregory was dissolving, the fuzziness at his edges moving in, folding and fading him into the cool gloom of the church.
A shape, and then just a shadow.
Just before he vanished completely, he raised an arm in a final salute.
Then he was gone, and Lisa was alone in the church with just an expensive box of armour for company.
…
Gregory was never seen again.
Not ever, by anyone.
Lisa told people about the armour. She allowed everyone to believe it was this that had done it, happily accepting approval and admiration over a sensible thing done well.
But she kept the rest to herself. It felt too private to talk about with others.
She thought this was the way Gregory would want it.
Perhaps she was right.
Perhaps that was why he came back one last time.
A late June morning the following year, Lisa sat against the obelisk reading a magazine and enjoying the perfume of the flowers on the bush opposite.
She’d been out late the night before and was drowsy, and because there was nothing else in her day to rush for, she put down her book and let herself sleep.
When she woke the ground all around her was blanketed in red and pink rose-petals. The petals were all over her too – in her hair and on her clothes.
Soon they would blow away – things that could only be enjoyed there, in the moment and where they were.
Sitting right on her book where she couldn’t miss it was a bunch of naked stalks tied together with an old piece of string.
She got the joke and laughed –it was a gift that asked for nothing in return.
“You’re very welcome, Gregory,” she said to the rosebush, as she picked up her magazine and the bunch of empty stalks. “You are very welcome.”