I Shall Wear Midnight (32 page)

‘I am
so
sorry! If only I had known, I would never have—’

‘Perhaps I should tell you,’ Tiffany went on, ‘that Roland and I
were … well, friends. More or less the only friend the other one had. But in a way, it was the wrong kind of friendship. We didn’t come together; things happened that pushed us together. And we didn’t realize that. He was the Baron’s son, and once you know that you’re the Baron’s son and all the kids have been told how to act towards the Baron’s son, then you don’t have many people you can talk to. And then there was me. I was the girl smart enough to be a witch and I have to say that this is not a job which allows you to have that much of a social life. If you like, two people who were left out thought they were the same kind of person. I know that now. Unfortunately Roland was the first to realize that. And that’s the truth of it. I am the witch, and he is the Baron. And you will be the Baroness, and you should not worry if the witch and the Baron – for the benefit of everybody – are on good terms. And that is all there is to is, and in fact there isn’t even an it, just the ghost of an it.’

She saw relief travel across Letitia’s face like the rising sun.

‘And that’s the truth from me, miss, so I would like the truth from you. Look, can we get out of here? I’m afraid that some guards might rush in at any moment and try and put me in a place I can’t get out of.’

Tiffany managed to get Letitia onto the broomstick with her. The girl fidgeted, but simply gasped as the stick sailed down gently from the castle battlements, drifted over the village and touched down in a field.

‘Did you see those bats?’ said Letitia.

‘Oh, they often fly around the stick if you don’t move very fast,’ said Tiffany. ‘You’d think they would avoid it, really. And now, miss, now we’re both far from any help, tell me what you did that made people hate me.’

Panic filled Letitia’s face.

‘No, I’m not going to hurt you,’ said Tiffany. ‘If I was going to,
I would have done it a long time ago. But I want to clean up my life. Tell me what you did.’

‘I used the ostrich trick,’ said Letitia promptly. ‘You know, it’s called unsympathetic magic: you make a model of the person and stick them upside down in a bucket of sand. I really am very, very sorry …’

‘Yes, you already said so,’ said Tiffany, ‘but I’ve never heard of this trick. I can’t see how it could work. It doesn’t make sense.’

But it worked on me, she thought. This girl isn’t a witch, and whatever she tried wasn’t a real spell, but it worked on me.

‘It doesn’t have to make sense if it’s magic,’ said Letitia hopefully.

‘It has to make some sense somewhere,’ said Tiffany, staring up at the stars that were coming out.

‘Well,’ said Letitia, ‘I got it out of
Spells for Lovers
by Anathema Bugloss, if that’s any help.’

‘That’s the one with the picture of the author sitting on a broomstick, isn’t it?’ said Tiffany. ‘Sitting on it the wrong way round, I might add. And it hasn’t got a safety strap. And no witch I’ve ever met wears goggles. And as for having a cat on it with you, that doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s a made-up name too. I’ve seen the book in the Boffo catalogue. It’s rubbish. It’s for soppy girls who think all you need to do to make magic is buy a very expensive stick with a semiprecious stone glued on the end, no offence meant. You might as well pick a stick out of the hedge and call it a wand.’

Without saying anything, Letitia walked a little way down to the hedge that lay between the field and the road. There’s always a useful stick under a hedge if you poke around enough. She waved it vaguely in the air, and it left a light blue line after it.

‘Like this?’ she said. For quite a while, there was no sound apart from the occasional hoot of an owl and, for the really good of hearing, the rustling of the bats.

‘I think it’s time we had a
proper
little chat, don’t you?’ said Tiffany.

THE BONFIRE OF THE WITCHES

‘I
TOLD YOU I ALWAYS
wanted to be a witch,’ said Letitia. ‘You don’t know how hard that can be when your family lives in a great big mansion and is so old that the coat of arms has even got a few legs on it as well. All that gets in the way and, if you excuse me, I really wish that I had been born with your disadvantages. I only found out about the Boffo catalogue when I heard two of the maids giggling over it when I went into the kitchen one day. They ran away, still giggling, I might add, but they left it behind. I can’t order as much stuff as I would want to, because my maid spies on me and tells Mother. But the cook is a decent sort, so I give her money and the catalogue numbers and they get delivered to her sister in Ham-on-Rye. I can’t order anything very big, though, because the maids are always dusting and cleaning everywhere. I would really like one of the cauldrons that bubble green, but from what you tell me it’s just a joke.’

Letitia had taken a couple of other sticks from the hedge and stuck them in the ground in front of her. There was a blue glow on the tip of each one.

‘Well, for everybody else it’s a joke,’ Tiffany said, ‘but for you I expect it would produce fried chickens.’

‘Do you really think so?’ said Letitia eagerly.

‘I’m not sure I can think at all if I am upside down with my head in a bucket of sand,’ said Tiffany. ‘You know that sounds a bit like wizard magic. This trick … it was in Mistress Bugloss’s book, you say. Look, I’m sorry, but that really is boffo stuff. It’s not real. It’s just for people who think that witchcraft is all about flowers and love potions and dancing around without your drawers on – something I can’t imagine any real witch doing …’ Tiffany hesitated, because she was naturally honest, and went on, ‘Well, maybe Nanny Ogg, when the mood takes her. It’s witchcraft with all the crusts cut off, and real witchcraft is
all
crusts. But you took one of her silly spells for giggling housemaids and used it on me and it’s worked! Is there a real witch in your family?’

Letitia shook her head and her long blonde hair sparkled even in the moonlight. ‘I’ve never heard of one. My grandfather was an alchemist – not professionally, of course. He was the reason why the hall has no east wing any more. My mother … I can’t imagine her doing magic, can you?’

‘Her? Absolutely!’

‘Well, I’ve never seen her do any and she does mean well. She says that all she wants is the best for me. She lost all her family in a fire, don’t you know. Lost everything,’ said Letitia.

Tiffany couldn’t dislike the girl. It would be like disliking a rather baffled puppy, but she couldn’t help saying, ‘And did you mean well? You know, when you made a model of me and put it upside down in a bucket of sand?’

There must have been reservoirs in Letitia. She was never more than a teacup away from a tear.

‘Look,’ Tiffany said, ‘I don’t mind, honestly. Though frankly I wish I believed that it was just a spell! Just take it out again then, and we
can forget all about it. Please don’t start crying again, it makes everything so soggy.’

Letitia sniffed. ‘Oh, it’s just that, well, I didn’t do it here. I left it at home. It’s in the library.’

The last word in that sentence tinkled in Tiffany’s head. ‘A library? With books?’ Witches were not supposed to be particularly bothered about books, but Tiffany had read every one she could. You never knew what you could get out of a book. ‘It’s a very warm night for the time of year,’ she said, ‘and your place is not too far, is it? You could be back in the tower and in bed in a couple of hours.’

For the first time since Tiffany had met her, Letitia smiled, genuinely smiled. ‘Can I go on the front this time then?’ she said.

Tiffany flew low over the downs.

The moon was well on the way to full, and it was a real harvest moon, the copper colour of blood. That was the smoke from the stubble-burning, hanging in the air. How the blue smoke from burning wheat stalks made the moon go red, she didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to fly all that way to find out.

And Letitia seemed to be in some kind of personal heaven. She chattered the whole time, which was admittedly better than the sobbing. The girl was only eight days younger than herself. Tiffany knew that, because she had taken great care to find out. But that was just numbers. It didn’t
feel
like that. In fact she felt old enough to be the girl’s mother. It was strange, but Petulia and Annagramma and the rest of them back in the mountains had all told her the same thing: witches grew old inside. You had to do things that needed doing but which turned your stomach like a spinning wheel. You saw things sometimes that no one should have to see. And, usually alone and often in darkness, you needed to do the things that had to be done. Out in distant villages, when a new mother was giving birth and things had run into serious trouble, you hoped that there was an
old local midwife who might at least give you some moral support; but still, when it came down to it and the life-or-death decision had to be made, then it was made by you, because you were the witch. And sometimes it wasn’t a decision between a good thing and a bad thing, but a decision between two bad things: no right choices, just … choices.

And now she saw something speeding over the moonlit turf and easily keeping up with the stick. It kept pace for several minutes and then, with a spinning jump, headed back into the moon-light shadows.

The hare runs into the fire
, Tiffany thought, and I have a feeling that I do too.

Keepsake Hall was at the far end of the Chalk, and it was
truly
the far end of the Chalk because there the chalk gave way to clay and gravel. There was parkland here, and tall trees – forests of them – and fountains in front of the house itself, which stretched the word ‘hall’ to breaking point, since it looked like half a dozen mansions stuck together. There were outbuildings, wings, a large ornamental lake, and a weathervane in the shape of a heron, which Tiffany nearly ran into. ‘How many people live here?’ she managed to say as she steadied the stick and landed on what she had expected to be a lawn but turned out to be dried grass almost five feet deep. Rabbits scattered, alarmed at the aerial intrusion.

‘Just me and Mother now,’ said Letitia, the dead grass crackling under her feet as she jumped down, ‘and the servants, of course. We have quite a lot of them. Don’t worry, they will all be in bed by now.’

‘How many servants do you need for two people?’ Tiffany asked.

‘About two hundred and fifty.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

Letitia turned as she led the way to a distant door. ‘Well, including families, there’s about forty on the farm and another twenty in the dairy, and another twenty-four for working in the woodlands, and
seventy-five for the gardens, which include the banana house, the pineapple pit, the melon house, the water-lily house and the trout fishery. The rest work in the house and the pension rooms.’

‘What are they?’

Letitia stopped with her hand on the corroded brass doorknob. ‘You think my mother is a very rude and bossy person, don’t you?’

Tiffany couldn’t see any alternative to telling the truth, even at the risk of midnight tears. She said, ‘Yes, I do.’

‘And you are right,’ said Letitia, turning the doorknob. ‘But she is loyal to people who are loyal to us. We always have been. No one is ever sacked for being too old or too ill or too confused. If they can’t manage in their cottages, they live in one of the wings. In fact, most of the servants are looking after the old servants! We may be oldfashioned and a bit snobbish and behind the times, but no one who works for the Keepsakes will ever need to beg for their food at the end of their life.’

At last the cranky doorknob turned, opening into a long corridor that smelled of … that smelled of … that smelled of
old
. That was the only way to describe it, but if you had enough time to think, you would say it was a mix of dry fungi, damp wood, dust, mice, dead time and old books, which have an intriguing smell of their own. That was it, Tiffany decided. Days and hours had died quietly in here while nobody noticed.

Letitia fumbled on a shelf inside the door, and lit a lamp. ‘No one ever comes in here these days except me,’ she said, ‘because it’s haunted.’

‘Yes,’ said Tiffany, trying to keep her voice matter-of-fact. ‘By a headless lady with a pumpkin under her arm. She is walking towards us right now.’

Had she expected shock? Or tears? Tiffany certainly hadn’t expected Letitia to say, ‘That would be Mavis. I shall have to change her pumpkin as soon as the new ones are ripe. They start to get all,
well, manky after a while.’ She raised her voice. ‘It’s only me, Mavis, nothing to be frightened of!’