“Her duty?” Josiah Worthington, Bart., shook his head, as if to dislodge a strand of cobweb. “Your duty, ma’am, is to the graveyard, and to the commonality of those who form this population of discarnate spirits, revenants and suchlike wights, and your duty thus is to return the creature as soon as possible to its natural home—which is not here.”

“His mama gave the boy to me,” said Mrs. Owens, as if that was all that needed to be said.

“My dear woman…”

“I am not your dear woman,” said Mrs. Owens, getting to her feet. “Truth to tell, I don’t even see why I am even here, talking to you fiddle-pated old dunderheads, when this lad is going to wake up hungry soon enough—and where am I going to find food for him in this graveyard, I should like to know?”

“Which,” said Caius Pompeius, stiffly, “is precisely the point. What will you feed him? How can you care for him?”

Mrs. Owens’s eyes burned. “I can look after him,” she said, “as well as his own mama. She already gave him to me. Look: I’m holding him, aren’t I? I’m touching him.”

“Now, see reason, Betsy,” said Mother Slaughter, a tiny old thing, in the huge bonnet and cape that she had worn in life and been buried wearing. “Where would he live?”

“Here,” said Mrs. Owens. “We could give him the Freedom of the Graveyard.”

Mother Slaughter’s mouth became a tiny O. “But,” she said. Then she said, “But I never.”

“Well, why not? It en’t the first time we’d’ve given the Freedom of the Graveyard to an outsider.”

“That is true,” said Caius Pompeius. “But he wasn’t alive.”

And with that, the stranger realized that he was being drawn, like it or not, into the conversation and, reluctantly, he stepped out of the shadows, detaching from them like a patch of darkness. “No,” he agreed. “I am not. But I take Mrs. Owens’s point.”