“Rattle his bones

Over the stones

It’s only a pauper

Who nobody owns.”

The novel’s epigraph derives from a traditional nursery rhyme. With it, the essence of the story about a boy who lives in a graveyard, unknown and unwanted—except by the cemetery’s ghosts—is captured. The novel contains the words of several songs, especially those sung by the ghost Mrs. Owens to her adoptive son, Bod. Each contains a lesson for the boy, couched in the love and affection of his unusual family.

“Mrs. Owens bent down to the baby and extended her arms. ‘Come now,’ she said, warmly. ‘Come to Mama.’ To the man Jack, walking through the graveyard towards them on a path, his knife already in his hand, it seemed as if a swirl of mist had curled around the child, in the moonlight, and that the boy was no longer there: just damp mist and moonlight and swaying grass.”

Mrs. Owens accepts the living child from his recently deceased mother and whisks him away into their misty world just before the man Jack can kill him. The mist becomes a protective element around the baby, foreshadowing the security he is to find in the world that cannot be seen.

“‘But,’ expostulated Josiah Worthington. ‘But. A human child. A living child. I mean. I mean, I mean. This is a graveyard, not a nursery, blast it.’”

Baronet Josiah Worthington protests that it’s not appropriate for a graveyard full of ghosts to raise a live human child. His protests, while valid, are quickly lost and show the inevitability of Bod’s path in life. The unexpected family relationship that arises between the ghosts and the little boy will change all of them.