The Foundryman

Matthew 'The Goldsmith' Kemp, Foundryman Matthew Kemp was thirty years old on the night of 28 February 1846, a skilled foundryman at the Eagle Foundry on Market Hill, his skin permanently tinted bronze and gold from the metal dust and furnace heat. Loss had been his companion since childhood. His mother had died bringing his sister Mary into the world and their father had followed within a few years. Matt had raised Mary alone from infancy, working the foundry to keep them both fed. He made tiny metal figures for her, from foundry scarps and love. On that night she was twenty-three, beautiful, spirited in ways that frightened him - he knew she had caught the eye of someone unsuitable, someone he'd forbidden her to see. When the alarm of fire broke out between eleven and twelve that night, Matt was inside the foundry. He rushed out immediately with the other men, helping to fight the blaze that consumed the buildings and raged for three hours. It was only later - much later, in the chaos after - that he learned Mary had come to bring him his docky but had simply vanished. Had she died in the fire, or had she taken her chance - the chaos, the night, the opportunity - to finally escape with her lover? Matt never stopped searching for her. He continued to make the tiny figures and left them around the town: in gutters where she might see them, on windowsills of places she might pass, in the shadows where lost things gather. Searching the backstreets became his true work, the bronze-dusted figure crouching in shadows. On a night heavy with rain, in his sixties, Matt knelt in the street near the site of the old foundry. Rain had washed something from the soil - a small locket, tarnished but unmistakably hers, the one he'd given her years before. For the first time in decades, he felt something like hope. He knelt there in the darkness, cradling the locket, and in that moment of kneeling unseen in the shadows, a passing horse kicked him in the head. He died alone and unnoticed, but at least he died hopeful. Those who keep Matthew's ghost occasionally report the passing aroma of sulphurous woodsmoke and more than a few have found girls' lockets when out in the Market Hill area... Every ghost is hand-made and unique - yours will be similar to the image shown but will vary in intensity and amount of streaking or other markings making it just as beautiful, but different.