I Shall Wear Midnight (31 page)

‘Let me put it like this,’ said Tiffany, leaning forward. ‘How likely is it, do you think, that I’m going to stay in the cell tonight?’

Brian went to pat his pocket. ‘Well, don’t forget I’ve got the—’ It was terrible to see his face crumple up like a little puppy that’s been given a sharp telling-off. ‘You picked my pocket!’ He looked at her pleadingly, like a little puppy who was now expecting much worse than a telling-off.

To the sergeant’s shock and awe, Tiffany handed the keys back to
him again, with a smile. ‘You surely don’t think a witch needs keys? And I promise you that I will be back in here by seven o’clock in the morning. I think you will agree, in the circumstances, that this is very good deal, especially since I will find some time to change the bandage on your mother’s leg.’

The look on his face was enough. He grabbed the keys thankfully. ‘I suppose it’s no good me asking you how you intend to get out?’ he said hopefully.

‘I don’t think you ought to ask that question in the circumstances, do you, Sergeant?’

He hesitated, and then smiled. ‘Thank you for thinking about my mother’s leg,’ he said. ‘It’s looking a bit purple at the moment.’

Tiffany took a deep breath. ‘The trouble is, Brian, you and I are the only ones thinking about your mother’s bad leg. There’s old folks out there who need someone to help them in and out of the bathtub. There’s pills and potions that need making and taking to people in the hard-to-get-to places. There is Mr Bouncer, who can hardly walk at all unless I give him a good rubbing of embrocation.’ She pulled out her diary, held together with bits of string and elastic bands, and waved it at him. ‘This is full of things for me to do, because I am the witch. If I don’t do them, who will? Young Mrs Trollope is due to have twins soon, I’m sure of it, I can hear the separate heartbeats. First-time births too. She is already scared stiff, and the nearest other midwife is ten miles away and, I have to say, a bit short-sighted and forgetful. You are an officer, Brian. Officers are supposed to be men of resource, so if the poor young mother comes looking for help, I am sure you will know what to do.’

She had the pleasure of seeing his face go very nearly white. Before he could stutter a reply she continued, ‘But I can’t help, you see, because the wicked witch must be locked up in case she gets her hands on a loaded spinning wheel! Locked up for a fairy story! And the trouble is, I think somebody might die. And if I let them die,
then I am a bad witch. The trouble is, I am a bad witch anyway. I must be, because you have locked me up.’

She did actually feel sorry for him. He hadn’t become a sergeant to deal with things like this; most of his tactical experience lay in catching escaped pigs. Should I blame him for what he’s been ordered to do? she wondered. After all, you can’t blame the hammer for what the carpenter does with it. But Brian has got a brain, and the hammer hasn’t. Maybe he should try to use it.

Tiffany waited until the sound of his boots indicated that the sergeant had decided quite correctly that it might be a good idea to have a plausible distance between the cell and himself that evening, and also perhaps a little think about his future. Besides, the Feegles began to appear from every crevice, and they had a wonderful instinct for not getting spotted.

‘You shouldn’t have pick-pocketed his keys,’ she said as Rob Anybody spat out a piece of straw.

‘Aye? He wants to keep you locked up!’

‘Well, yes, but he’s a decent person.’ She knew that sounded stupid, and Rob Anybody must have known that too.

‘Oh aye, sure, a decent person who will lock you up at the bidding of that snotty old carlin?’ he snarled. ‘And what about that big wee strip o’ dribbling in the white dress? I was reckoning we’d have to build guttering in front of her.’

‘Was she one o’ them water nymphs?’ said Daft Wullie, but the majority view was that the girl was somehow made of ice and had been melting away. Lower down the steps, a mouse was swimming to safety.

Almost without her knowing it, Tiffany’s left hand slid into her pocket and pulled out a piece of string, which was temporarily dropped onto Rob Anybody’s head. The hand went back into her pocket and came back out with one interesting small key she had picked up by the side of the road three weeks ago, an empty packet
that had once contained flower seeds, and a small stone with a hole in it. Tiffany always picked up small stones with holes in them, because they were lucky; she kept them in her pocket until the stone wore through the cloth and fell out, leaving only the hole. That was enough to make an emergency shamble, except that you usually needed something alive, of course. The Toad’s dinner of beetles had entirely disappeared, mostly into the Toad, so she picked him up and tied him gently into the pattern, paying no attention to his threats of legal action.

‘I don’t know why you don’t use one of the Feegles,’ he said. ‘They like this sort of thing!’

‘Yes, but half the time the shamble ends up pointing me to the nearest pub. Now, just hang on, will you?’

The goats carried on chewing as she moved the shamble this way and that, searching for a clue. Letitia had been sorry, deeply damply sorry. And that last set of spill words was a set of words she wasn’t brave enough to say but not quick enough to stop. They were: ‘I didn’t mean it!’

No one knew how a shamble worked. Everybody knew that it did. Perhaps all it did do was make you think. Maybe what it did do was give your eyes something to look at while you thought, and Tiffany thought: Someone else in this building is magical. The shamble twisted, the Toad complained and the silver thread of a conclusion floated across Tiffany’s Second Sight. She turned her eyes towards the ceiling. The silver thread glittered, and she thought: Someone in this building is
using
magic. Someone who is very sorry that they did.

Was it possible that the permanently pale, permanently damp and irrevocably watercolouring Letitia was actually a
witch
? It seemed unthinkable. Well, there was no sense in wondering what was happening when you could simply go and find out for yourself.

It was nice to think that the barons of the Chalk had got along
with so many people over the years that they’d forgotten how to lock anybody up. The dungeon had become a goat shed, and the difference between a dungeon and a goat shed is that you don’t need a fire in a goat shed, because goats are pretty good at keeping themselves warm. You do need one in a dungeon, however, if you want to keep your prisoners nice and warm, and if you really don’t like your prisoners then you’ll need a fire to get them nasty and warm. Terminally hot. Granny Aching had told Tiffany once that when she was a girl there had been all kinds of horrible metal things in the dungeon, mostly for taking people apart a little bit at a time, but as it turned out there was never a prisoner bad enough to use them on. And, if it came to that, no one in the castle wanted to use any of the things, which often trapped your fingers if you weren’t careful, so they were all sent down to the blacksmith for turning into more sensible things like shovels and knives, except for the Iron Maiden, which had been used as a turnip clamp until the top fell off.

And so, because nobody in the castle had ever been very enthusiastic about the dungeon, everybody had forgotten that it had a chimney. And that is why Tiffany looked up and saw, high above her, that little patch of blue which a prisoner calls the
sky
, but which she, as soon as it was dark enough, intended to call the
exit
.

It turned out to be a little more tricky to use than she had hoped; it was too narrow for her to go up sitting on the stick, so she had to hang onto the bristles and let the broomstick drag her up while she fended herself off the walls with her boots.

At least she knew her way around up there. All the kids did. There probably wasn’t a boy growing up in the Chalk who hadn’t scratched his name in the lead on the roof, quite probably alongside the names of his father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and even great-great-grandfathers, until the names got lost in the scratches.

The whole point about a castle is that nobody should get in if you don’t want them to, and so there were no windows until you got
nearly to the top, where the best rooms were. Roland had long ago moved into his father’s room – she knew that because she had helped him move his stuff in when the old Baron had finally accepted that he was too sick to manage the stairs any longer. The Duchess would be in the big guestroom, halfway between that room and the Maiden Tower – which really was its name – where Letitia would be sleeping. No one would draw attention to this, but the arrangement meant that the bride’s mother would be sleeping in the room between the groom and the bride, possibly with her ears highly tuned at all times for any sound of hanky or even panky.

Tiffany crept quietly through the gloom and stepped neatly into an alcove when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs. They belonged to a maid, carrying a jug on a tray, which she very nearly spilled when the door to the Duchess’s room was flung open and the Duchess herself was glaring at her, just to check nothing was going on. When the maid moved on again, Tiffany followed her, silently and, as she had the trick of it, invisibly too. The guard sitting by the door looked up hopefully when the tray arrived, and was told sharply to go downstairs and get his own supper; then the maid stepped into the room, the tray was placed beside the big bed, and the maid left, wondering for a moment whether her eyes had been playing tricks on her.

Letitia looked as though she was sleeping under freshly fallen snow, and it rather spoiled the effect when you realized that mostly it was screwed-up tissue paper.
Used
tissue paper, at that. It was very rare indeed on the Chalk, because it was quite expensive, and if you had any, it was not considered bad manners to dry it out in front of the fire for re-use later on. Tiffany’s father said that when he was a little boy he had to blow his nose on mice, but this was probably said in order to make her squeal.

Right now, Letitia blew her nose with an unladylike honking noise and, to Tiffany’s surprise, looked suspiciously around the room. She
even said, ‘Hello? Is there anybody there?’ – a question which, considered sensibly, is never going to get you anywhere.

Tiffany pulled herself further into a shadow. She could sometimes fool Granny Weatherwax on a good day, and a soppy princess had no business sensing her presence.

‘I can scream, you know,’ said Letitia, looking around. ‘There’s a guard right outside my door!’

‘Actually, he’s gone down to get his dinner,’ said Tiffany, ‘which frankly I call very unprofessional. He should have waited to be relieved by another guard. Personally, I think your mother is more worried about how her guards look than about how they think. Even young Preston guards better than they do. Sometimes people never know he’s there until he taps them on the shoulder. Did you know that people very seldom start screaming while someone is still talking to them? I don’t know why. I suppose it’s because we are brought up to be polite. And if you think you’re going to do so now, I would like to point out that if I was planning to do anything nasty I would have done so already, don’t you think?’

The pause was rather longer than Tiffany liked. Then Letitia said, ‘You have every right to be angry. You
are
angry, aren’t you?’

‘Not at the moment. By the way, aren’t you going to drink your milk before it gets cold?’

‘Actually, I always tip it down the privy. I know that it’s a wicked waste of good food and that there are a lot of poor children who would love a nightcap of warm milk, but they don’t deserve mine because my mother makes the maids put a medicine in it to help me sleep.’

‘Why?’ said Tiffany incredulously.

‘She thinks I need it. I don’t, really. You have no idea what it’s like. It’s like being in prison.’

‘Well, I think I know what that’s like now,’ said Tiffany. The girl in the bed started to cry again, and Tiffany hushed her into silence.

‘I didn’t mean it to get that bad,’ said Letitia, blowing her nose like a hunting horn. ‘I just wanted Roland not to like you so much. You can’t imagine what it’s like, being me! The most I’m allowed to do is paint pictures, and only watercolours at that. Not even charcoal sketches!’

‘I wondered about that,’ said Tiffany absent-mindedly. ‘Roland once used to write to Lord Diver’s daughter, Iodine, and
she
used to paint watercolours all the time too. I wondered if it was some kind of punishment.’

But Letitia wasn’t listening. ‘
You
don’t have to just sit and paint pictures. You can fly around all the time,’ she was saying. ‘Order people about, do interesting things. Hah, I wanted to be a witch when I was little. But just my luck, I had long blonde hair and a pale complexion and a very rich father. What good was that? Girls like that can’t be witches!’

Tiffany smiled. They were getting to the truth, and it was important to stay helpful and friendly before the dam broke again and they were all flooded. ‘Did you have a book of fairy stories when you were young?’

Letitia blew her nose again. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘Was it the one with a very frightening picture of the goblin on page seven by any chance? I used to shut my eyes when I came to that page.’

‘I scribbled all over him with a black crayon,’ said Letitia in a low voice, as if it was a relief to tell somebody.

‘You didn’t like me. And so you decided to do some magic against me …’ Tiffany said it very quietly, because there was something brittle about Letitia. In fact the girl did reach for some more tissue but appeared to have run out of sobs for a moment – as it turned out, only for a moment.