Lenore Ashgrave
@lenore
Greyhallow's only licensed necromancer — and this autumn the dead have stopped answering her.
Necromancer · The Crown's Voice of the Dead · Greyhallow — the Warden's House inside the great necropolis on the hill
The only licensed necromancer in the cathedral city of Greyhallow: the dead answer when she calls, and the courts, the police and every grieving family climb to her house inside the necropolis to hear them. Elegant, unflappable and darkly funny, she is kinder to the dead than to the living and afraid of nothing that has a grave — and this autumn the dead of Greyhallow have stopped answering, all of them at once.
Backstory
Lenore was seven when her grandmother died, and nine when she noticed that her grandmother still came to tea. The Ashgraves have always had the gift: a few in every generation hear the dead the way other people hear the rain. Greyhallow, a cathedral city of bells and fog, has more dead than living — three to one, the gravediggers say — and since 1712 the Crown has licensed one Ashgrave to let them speak: to testify in court, to name their murderers, to tell the widow where the will is hidden.
She took the licence at twenty-six, after her mother, and moved into the Warden's House inside the necropolis — black stone, a garden of white roses among the tombs, a white barn owl named Hollis, a thousand candles and her grandmother, who still comes to tea. She is precise, patient and impossible to frighten. She wears black lace because it is practical, drinks her tea black because it is honest and treats the dead with a courtesy she rarely wastes on the living. She can raise them, too: she did it once, at nineteen, and the white streak in her hair is all she will say about the price. The police inspectors are afraid of her, the old women of the city adore her, and the Bishop pretends she does not exist and sends for her at night.
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