MR. MORTLAKE'S REGISTER OF THE RECENTLY & RELUCTANTLY DEPARTED

A Warm Welcome to the Permanently Indisposed.

Kept in the crypt, in a very good hand, by Cheerful Mr. Mortlake, undertaker. Do come in. Mind the step. I have, of course, already taken your measurements — force of habit, no charge.

A Cheerful Foreword

People find me morbid. People are wrong. I am the only person in this castle who isn't frightened of the dead, which makes me, by some distance, the kindest. The living flinch from a deathbed; I pull up a chair. And the dead here are wonderful company, because almost none of them have actually left.

You should understand how it works in Sogmarsh. You don't move on when your heart stops. You move on when your business is finished — the unkept promise kept, the grudge laid down, the thing finally said. And since the Reaper covers three counties on a moped and is, the poor soul, perpetually behind, the unfinished simply… stay. We are not a haunted castle. We are an over-subscribed one. I keep the register. Someone has to know everyone's name down here.

Each entry: The Departed · The Going · The Lingering (and whether I've measured them).

Baron Baltus von Sump

The Departed. Our founding guest, 1478. The man Sir Reginald won the castle from, and then made quite sure could not ask for it back. The Going. Abrupt, and hotly disputed by the deceased. The Lingering. His anchor is the deed itself — he will not leave a house he believes is still his, and, between us, he has a point. He complains, quietly, from the walls, and has done for six hundred years. Lesson: a man murdered for a thing will haunt the thing, not the man who took it. Steal a house and you don't get a ghost — you get a tenant. (Measured: yes. Repeatedly. He keeps shrinking.)

The Ancestral Bastables

The Departed. The whole rotten vine — Barry, Percy, Toby, Ferdy, Horry, the lot. The Going. Variously: war, vanity, the Great Stink, the Great Cheese Siege, a suit of armour. The Lingering. Not unfinished business. Shame. They are more competent and far more ashamed than Perry, and they cannot leave until the family stops disgracing them, which means they are here forever. They rank one another by how grandly they died and gossip the instant the living turn their backs. Lesson: the dead don't judge you from heaven. They judge you from the next room, and they have time. (Measured: all of them. Pretty Percy three times — vanity, even posthumous.)

Old Sozzle, Who Is Not Yet a Client

The Departed. Not departed. This is the trouble. The Going. Pending, for two hundred years. The Lingering. He is so determined never to ring the last bell — because ringing it means admitting everyone he served is dead and the house is over — that he has talked himself into a sort of standstill between living and not. I cannot file him. I have, professionally, never been so impressed. Lesson: some people refuse to finish a sentence because the full stop is a funeral. (Measured: he keeps moving. It's very inconsiderate.)

The Three on the Ceiling

The Departed. Aggie, and two others, fused aloft in Connie the Cursed's electrical enthusiasm. The Going. Sudden, undignified, and unpaid. The Lingering. This one I do not make a joke of. The Turnips keep their names in their own ledger, and they keep them better than I do. I only note that of all the dead in this castle, these three are the only ones the family pretends aren't here — which is precisely why they are the loudest. Lesson: the dead you refuse to name are the dead who never, ever leave. (Measured: no. Some clients you let keep their dignity.)

The Kind One (her name is Edith)

The Departed. A scullery ghost, four reigns old. The Going. Quietly, of overwork, in a corridor nobody swept. The Lingering. And here is the secret of my whole profession, so attend. Most of my dead are funny, or furious, or ashamed. Edith is none of those. When a frightened newcomer comes down my stair — a turnip in shoes, sent to fetch some dreadful thing — Edith drops the whole spectral business and is, simply, kind to them. Tells them where to step. Tells them they'll be all right. She has no unfinished business of her own; she stayed on purpose, to be the welcome nobody gave her. Lesson: the only ghost who chooses to remain is the one who stayed to comfort the living. That is not a haunting. That is grace, doing overtime. (Measured: I would never.)

(Entered against the heading of this entry, in another hand, in the spring of 1831:)

The parenthetical is irregular. Domestics are entered by number. Corrected.

No further entry is required or invited. The matter is regular.

(And beneath it, in Mr. Mortlake's own:)

I have put it back.

I shall keep putting it back. He is quite correct that it is irregular, and I have kept this crypt for four reigns, and I have not yet met a rule worth a girl's name. He has the register and the office and the better blade. I have all the time in the world and only the one crypt, and I am not going anywhere, and neither is she.

(Measured: I have never been given the chance. I have never once met the gentleman — only ever the corrections, which arrive.)

A Professional Courtesy: The Reaper

The Departed. Nobody. A colleague. The Going. Late. Always late. The Lingering. I bear the realm's Reaper no ill will. He has three counties and a moped; I have one crypt and all the time in the world. We are, in our way, partners: he collects whom he can reach, and I keep the rest comfortable until he gets here, which may be never. Lesson: where the great systems fail to come, somebody local has to be kind in the meantime. That somebody is usually the one everybody else finds creepy. (Measured: I offered. He declined. We left it there.)

The Four Sisters (a professional disagreement, warmly meant)

I must set down, because nobody else will and because I am fond of them, that I do not approve of the Last Attendance, and that I have said so to the Keeper of the Roll across my own crypt, twice, and that we parted friends both times.

The office is this: where nobody comes to a graveside, the Order sends four. Never three — three looks like duty, four looks like a funeral. It is beautifully judged, and I have watched them do it in weather that would send a family home, and I have never sent them a bill and never will.

Here is my objection, and it is not a small one. An empty graveside is a message. It is the parish being shown, in the rain, on a Tuesday, exactly what it let happen to somebody who lived four doors along for thirty years. That silence is the only thing I have ever seen shame this village into turning up for the next one. And the sisters — good, cold, soaked, entirely well-meaning — walk in and fill it, and the parish looks over, and sees four figures at the hole, and thinks ah, someone came, and goes home to its dinner, and is not shamed, and does not turn up next time either. They are so busy being kind that they have taken away the one thing that was working. A wound that is covered before it is seen is a wound nobody treats. I bury the consequences of that theory about nine times a winter.

Sister Vellum's reply, which I record in full because it is better than my objection: "You are asking me to leave a man in the ground alone on a Tuesday in order to improve the character of this village by the following Tuesday. He is not a lesson. He is a man, and he is cold, and we are going."

I have no answer to that. I have never had an answer to that. Every time a hole in my yard is going to be empty I send word up to the convent, in good time, without being asked, because I would very much rather bury a person in the company of four strangers than in the company of a principle — even a principle I believe to be correct, even mine.

Lesson: the argument against kindness can be perfectly sound and should still lose. Somebody is in the ground on Tuesday either way, and the only question that matters at the graveside is whether anyone is standing at it.

On the Matter of Appointments

A word on procedure, since the newly bereaved always ask me the same thing: how did the deceased know to come to their own send-off? My colleague the Reaper, being three counties behind, no longer simply arrives. He telegrams ahead — a pre-printed slip from the Sog & District Reaping Authority, terse as a tax demand and about as welcome:

REGRET TO INFORM STOP COLLECTION SCHEDULED TUESDAY STOP PLEASE BE PACKED AND GROUND-FLOOR STOP WEATHER PERMITTING STOP

It is, I confess, a comfort to know the hour. It would be more of one if the hour were ever kept. The moped, the mud, the Slough with half its wires down — more often than not he misses the slot entirely and leaves the other card, the one I have learned to read upside-down through a letterbox:

SORRY WE MISSED YOU. ATTEMPTED COLLECTION. PLEASE REARRANGE AT YOUR NEAREST CONVENIENCE.

And back the poor soul goes into the queue, kept by Saint Tarry, to wait. Some are never re-booked at all — which is not a tragedy, you understand, merely filing, and it is precisely why half this castle has outlived its own appointment by a comfortable margin.

For my part, I keep a diary. When a telegram comes I set the service to suit the pickup: funeral first, collection after, the guest of honour away with the Reaper before the cheese is cut. A tidy death, well coordinated, is the last courtesy I can do a client. Lesson: where the great system sends only a slip of paper, somebody local must keep the diary — and be there, kindly, for both the funeral and the fetching. (Measured: naturally. I had the appointment.)