A Hat Full Of Sky (6 page)

T
here was a cottage, but Tiffany couldn’t see much in the gloom. Apple trees crowded in around it. Something hanging from a branch brushed against her as, walking unsteadily, she followed Miss Level. It swung away with a tinkling sound. There was the sound of rushing water, too, some way away.

Miss Level was opening a door. It led into a small, brightly lit, and amazingly tidy kitchen. A fire was burning briskly in the iron stove.

“Um…I’m supposed to be the apprentice,” said Tiffany, still groggy from the flight. “I’ll make something to drink if you show me where things are—”

“No!” Miss Level burst out, raising her hands. The shout seemed to have shocked her, because she was shaking when she lowered them. “No, I, I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said in a more
normal voice, trying to smile. “You’ve had a long day. I’ll show you to your room and where things are, and I’ll bring you up some stew, and you can be an apprentice tomorrow. No rush.”

Tiffany looked at the bubbling pot on the iron stove, and the loaf on the table. It was freshly baked bread, she could smell that.

The trouble with Tiffany was her Third Thoughts.
*
They thought: She lives by herself. Who lit the fire? A bubbling pot needs stirring from time to time. Who stirred it? And someone lit the candles. Who?

“Is there anyone else staying here, Miss Level?” she said.

Miss Level looked desperately at the pot and the loaf and back to Tiffany.

“No, there’s only me,” she said, and somehow Tiffany knew she was telling the truth. Or
a
truth, anyway.

“In the morning?” said Miss Level, almost pleading. She looked so forlorn that Tiffany actually felt sorry for her.

She smiled. “Of course, Miss Level,” she said.

There was a brief tour by candlelight. There was a privy not far from the cottage; it was a two-holer, which Tiffany thought was a bit odd—but of course maybe other people had lived here once. There was also a room just for a bath, a terrible waste of space by the standards of Home Farm. It had its own pump and a big boiler for heating the water. This was definitely posh.

Her bedroom was a…nice room.
Nice
was a very good word. Everything had frills. Anything that could have a cover on it was covered. Some attempt had been made to make the room…jolly, as if being a bedroom was a jolly wonderful thing to be. Tiffany’s room back on the farm had a rag rug on the floor, a water jug and basin on a stand, a big wooden box for clothes, an ancient dolls’ house, and some old calico curtains, and that was pretty much it. On the farm, bedrooms were for shutting your eyes in.

The room had a chest of drawers. The contents of Tiffany’s suitcase filled one drawer easily.

The bed made no sound when Tiffany sat on it. Her bed at home had a mattress so old that it had a comfy hollow in it, and the springs all made different noises; if she couldn’t sleep, she could move various parts of her body and play
“The Bells of St. Ungulants” on the springs—
cling twing glong, gling ping bloyinnng, dlink plang dyonnng, ding
ploink.

This room smelled different too. It smelled of spare rooms and other people’s soap.

At the bottom of her suitcase was a small box that Mr. Block, the farm’s carpenter, had made for her. He did not go in for delicate work, and it was quite heavy. In it, she kept…keepsakes. There was a piece of chalk with a fossil in it, which was quite rare, and her personal butter stamp (which showed a witch on a broomstick) in case she got a chance to make butter here, and a dobby stone, which was supposed to be lucky because it had a hole in it. (She’d been told that when she was seven, and had picked it up. She couldn’t quite see how the hole made it lucky, but since it had spent a lot of time in her pocket, and then safe and sound in the box, it probably
was
more fortunate than most stones, which got kicked around and run over by carts and so on.)

There was also a blue-and-yellow wrapper from an old packet of Jolly Sailor tobacco, and a buzzard feather, and an ancient flint arrowhead wrapped up carefully in a piece of sheep’s wool. There were plenty of these on the Chalk. The Nac Mac Feegle used them for spear points.

She lined these up neatly on the top of the chest of drawers, alongside her diary, but they didn’t make the place look more homey. They just looked lonely.

Tiffany picked up the old wrapper and the sheep wool and sniffed them. They weren’t
quite
the smell of the shepherding hut, but they were close enough to it to bring tears to her eyes.

She had never spent a night away from the Chalk before. She knew the word
homesickness
and wondered whether this cold, thin feeling growing inside her was what it felt like—

Someone knocked at the door.

“It’s me,” said a muffled voice.

Tiffany jumped off the bed and opened the door. Miss Level came in with a tray that held a bowl of beef stew and some bread. She put it down on the little table by the bed.

“If you put it outside the door when you’re finished, I’ll take it down later,” she said.

“Thank you very much,” said Tiffany.

Miss Level paused at the door. “It’s going to be so nice having someone to talk to, apart from myself,” she said. “I do hope you won’t want to leave, Tiffany.”

Tiffany gave her a happy little smile, then waited until the door had shut and she’d heard
Miss Level’s footsteps go downstairs before tiptoeing to the window and checking there were no bars in it.

There had been something scary about Miss Level’s expression. It was sort of hungry and hopeful and pleading and frightened, all at once.

Tiffany also checked that she could bolt the bedroom door on the inside.

The beef stew tasted, indeed, just like beef stew and not, just to take an example
completely
and
totally
at random, stew made out of the last poor girl who’d worked here.

To be a witch, you have to have a very good imagination. Just now, Tiffany was wishing that hers wasn’t
quite
so good. But Mistress Weatherwax and Miss Tick wouldn’t have let her come here if it was dangerous, would they? Well, would they?

They might. They just might. Witches didn’t believe in making things too easy. They assumed you used your brains. If you didn’t use your brains, you had no business being a witch. The world doesn’t make things easy, they’d say. Learn how to learn fast.

But…they’d give her a chance, wouldn’t they?

Of course they would.

Probably.

She’d nearly finished the not-made-of-people-at-all-honestly stew when something tried to take the bowl out of her hand. It was the gentlest of tugs, and when she automatically pulled it back, the tugging stopped immediately.

O-kay, she thought. Another strange thing. Well, this
is
a witch’s cottage.

Something pulled at the spoon but, again, stopped as soon as she tugged back.

Tiffany put the empty bowl and spoon back on the tray.

“All right,” she said, hoping she sounded not scared at all. “I’ve finished.”

The tray rose into the air and drifted gently toward the door, where it landed on the floor with a faint tinkle.

Up on the door, the bolt slid back.

The door opened.

The tray rose up and sailed through the doorway.

The door shut.

The bolt slid across.

Tiffany heard the rattle of the spoon as, somewhere on the dark landing, the tray moved on.

It seemed to Tiffany that it was vitally important that she
thought
before doing anything. And
so she thought: It would be stupid to run around screaming because your tray had been taken away. After all, whatever had done it had even had the decency to bolt the door after itself, which meant that it respected her privacy, even while it ignored it.

She cleaned her teeth at the washstand, got into her nightgown, and slid into the bed. She blew out the candle.

After a moment she got up, relit the candle, and with some effort dragged the chest of drawers in front of the door. She wasn’t quite certain why, but she felt better for doing it.

She lay back in the dark again.

Tiffany was used to sleeping while, outside on the downland, sheep
baa
ed and sheep bells occasionally went
tonk
.

Up here, there were no sheep to
baa
and no bells to
tonk
, and every time one didn’t, she woke up thinking, What was that?

But she did get to sleep eventually, because she remembered waking up in the middle of the night to hear the chest of drawers very slowly slide back to its original position.

Tiffany woke up, still alive and not chopped up, when the dawn was just turning gray. Unfamiliar
birds were singing.

There were no sounds in the cottage, and she thought: I’m the apprentice, aren’t I?
I’m
the one who should be cleaning up and getting the fire lit. I know how this is supposed to go.

She sat up and looked around the room.

Her old clothes had been neatly folded on top of the chest of drawers. The fossil and the lucky stone and the other things had gone, and it was only after a frantic search that she found them back in the box in her suitcase.

“Now
look
,” she said to the room in general. “I
am
a hag, you know. If there are any Nac Mac Feegle here, step out this minute!”

Nothing happened. She hadn’t expected anything to happen. The Nac Mac Feegle weren’t particularly interested in tidying things up, anyway.

As an experiment she took the candlestick off the bedside table, put it on the chest of drawers, and stood back. More nothing happened.

She turned to look out of the window and, as she did so, there was a faint
blint
noise.

When she spun around, the candlestick was back on the table.

Well…today was going to be a day when she got
answers
. Tiffany enjoyed the slightly angry
feeling. It stopped her thinking about how much she wanted to go home.

She went to put her dress on and realized that there was something soft yet crackly in a pocket.

Oh, how could she have forgotten? But it had been a busy day, a very busy day, and maybe she’d wanted to forget, anyway.

She pulled out Roland’s present and opened the white tissue paper carefully.

It was a necklace.

It was the Horse.

Tiffany stared at it.

Not what a horse looks like, but what a horse
be…. It had been carved in the turf back before history began, by people who had managed to convey in a few flowing lines everything a horse was: strength, grace, beauty, and speed, straining to break free of the hill.

And now someone—someone clever and, therefore, probably also someone expensive—had made it out of silver. It was flat, just like it was on the hillside, and just like the Horse on the hillside, some parts of it were not joined to the rest of the body. The craftsman, though, had joined these carefully together with tiny silver chain, so when Tiffany held it up in astonishment, it was all there, moving-while-standing-
still in the morning light.

She had to put it on. And…there was no mirror, not even a tiny hand one. Oh, well…

“See me,” said Tiffany.

And far away, down on the plains, something that had lost the trail awoke. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the mist on the fields parted as something invisible started to move, making a noise like a swarm of flies….

Tiffany shut her eyes, took a couple of small steps sideways and a few steps forward, turned around, and carefully opened her eyes again. There she stood, in front of her, as still as a picture. The Horse looked very good on the new dress, silver against green.

She wondered how much it must have cost Roland. She wondered
why
.

“See me not,” she said. Slowly she took the necklace off, wrapped it up again in its tissue paper, and put it in the box with the other things from home. Then she found one of the postcards from Twoshirts and a pencil, and with care and attention, she wrote Roland a short thank-you note. After a flash of guilt she carefully used the other postcard to tell her parents that she was completely still alive.

Then, thoughtfully, she went downstairs.

It had been dark last night, so she hadn’t noticed the posters stuck up all down the stairs. They were from circuses, and were covered with clowns and animals and that old-fashioned poster lettering where no two lines of type are the same.

They said things like:

T
HRILLS
G
ALORE
! H
URRY
! H
URRY
! H
URRY
!

P
ROFESSOR
M
ONTY
B
LADDER’S
T
HREE-
R
ING
C
IRCUS AND
C
ABINET OF
C
URIOSITIES
!!

S
EE THE
H
ORSE
W
ITH
H
IS
H
EAD
W
HERE
H
IS
T
AIL
S
HOULD
B
E
!

S
EE THE
A
MAZING
D
ISLOCATING
J
ACK
P
UT A
L
ION’S
H
EAD IN
H
IS
A
CTUAL
M
OUTH
!!!