At length, finding that the question could not be
evaded, he proceeded with much hesitation as follows:--
"Safe as my Lord Cardinal at his prayers--she is dead though; for I
heard her wraith wailing and shrieking up the woods that night as I
stood in the priory close. It seemed like, as it were, making its way
through the air from Lathom, for the smell of consecration, I reckon."
"Go on," said De Poininges, whose wits were shrewdly beginning to gather
intelligence from these furtive attempts at concealment.
"Well-a-day," continued the clerk, draining an ample potation, "I've
heard strange noises thereabout; and the big building there, men say, is
haunted by the ghost."
"Where is the building thou speakest of?"
"The large granary beyond the postern leading from the prior's house
towards the mill. I have not passed thereby since St Mark's vigil, and
then it came." Here he looked round, stealing a whisper across the
bench--"I heard it: there was a moaning and a singing by turns; but the
wind was loud, so that I could scarcely hear, though when I spake of it
to old Geoffrey the gardener, he said the prior had laid a ghost, and it
was kept there upon prayer and penance for a long season.
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