Papa having been a narrow-minded martinet, with a very heavy hand, nobody much mourned him when he died of ill-temper three days before his fiftieth birthday.
Grandmother seemed to shrink even further into her black clothes as the household that was once so quiet and regimented filled with noise and laughter.
She payed a famous necromancer to reanimate his portrait, and it mouthed platitudes and moralities daily.
When Buggy discovered this was computing rather than magic, it was the work of but an hour to reprogram the simulacrum so that it called grandmother ‘scrawny tits’ and swore sulphurously.
Jane Jago’s Drabbles – Five Hundred and Two
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