I Shall Wear Midnight (5 page)

She almost admired him. There he was, with no friends in the world, covered in his own sick and – she sniffed: yes, there was urine dripping from the bottom of his nightshirt – yet he was stupid enough to talk back like that. ‘Not clever, Mr Petty, just cleverer than you. And that’s not hard.’

‘Yeah? But clever gets you into trouble. Slip of a gel like you, pokin’ about in other people’s business … What are you going to do when the music comes for
you
, eh?’

‘Run, Mr Petty. Get out of here. It’s your last chance,’ she said. And it probably was; she could hear individual voices now.

‘Well, would your majesty let a man put his boots on?’ he said sarcastically. He reached down for them beside the door, but you could read Mr Petty like a very small book, one with fingermarks on all the pages and a piece of bacon as a bookmark.

He came up with fists swinging.

She took one step backwards, caught his wrist and let the pain out. She felt it flow down her arm, leaving it tingling, into her cupped hand and into Petty: all his daughter’s pain in one second. It flung him clear across the kitchen and it must have burned away everything inside him except animal fear. He rushed at the rickety back door like a bull, broke through it and headed off into the darkness.

She staggered back into the barn, where a lamp was burning.
According to Granny Weatherwax, you did not feel the pain that you carried, but it was a lie. A necessary lie. You did feel the pain that you carried, and because it wasn’t
actually
your pain you could somehow bear it, but its departure left you feeling weak and shocked.

When the charging, clanging mob arrived, Tiffany was sitting quietly in the barn with the sleeping girl. The noise went all around the house but did not go inside; that was one of the unwritten rules. It was hard to believe that the anarchy of the rough music had rules, but it did; it might go on for three nights, or stop at one, and no one came out of the house when the music was in the air and no one came sneaking home and went back into the house either, unless it was to beg for forgiveness, understanding or ten minutes to pack their bags and run away. The rough music was never organized. It seemed to occur to everybody at once. It played when a village thought that a man had beaten his wife too hard, or his dog too savagely, or if a married man and a married woman forgot that they were married to somebody else. There were other, darker crimes against the music too, but they weren’t talked about openly. Sometimes people could stop the music by mending their ways; quite often they packed up and moved away before the third night.

Petty would not have taken the hint; Petty would have come out swinging. And there would have been a fight, and someone would have done something stupid, that is to say even more stupid than what Petty would have done. And then the Baron would find out and people might lose their livelihood, which would mean they would have to leave the Chalk and go for perhaps as much as ten miles to find work and a new life among strangers.

Tiffany’s father was a man of keen instinct and he gently opened the barn door a few minutes later when the music was dying down. She knew it was a bit embarrassing for him; he was a well-respected man, but somehow, now, his daughter was more important than he was. A witch did not take orders from anybody,
and she knew that he got teased about it by the other men.

She smiled and he sat down on the hay next to her while the wild music found nothing to beat, stone or hang. Mr Aching didn’t waste words at the best of times. He looked around and his gaze fell on the little bundle, hastily wrapped in straw and sacking, that Tiffany had put where the girl would not see it. ‘So it’s true, she was with child, then?’

‘Yes, Dad.’

Tiffany’s father appeared to look at nothing at all. ‘Best if they don’t find him,’ he said after a decent interval.

‘Yes,’ said Tiffany.

‘Some of the lads were talking about stringing him up. We would have stopped them, of course, but it would have been a bad business, with people taking sides. It’s like poison in a village.’

‘Yes.’

They sat in silence for a while. Then her father looked down at the sleeping girl. ‘What have you done for her?’ he asked.

‘Everything I can,’ said Tiffany.

‘And you did that taking-away-pain thingy you do?’

She sighed. ‘Yes, but that’s not all I shall have to take away. I need to borrow a shovel, Dad. I’ll bury the poor little thing down in the woods, where no one will know.’

He looked away. ‘I wish it wasn’t you doing this, Tiff. You’re not sixteen yet and I see you running around nursing people and bandaging people and who knows what chores. You shouldn’t have to be doing all of that.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Tiffany.

‘
Why?
’ he asked again.

‘Because other people don’t, or won’t, or can’t, that’s why.’

‘But it’s not
your
business, is it?’

‘I make it my business. I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s
my
business,’ Tiffany said quickly.

‘Yes, but we all thought it was going to be about whizzing around on brooms and suchlike, not cutting old ladies’ toenails for them.’

‘But people don’t understand what’s needed,’ said Tiffany. ‘It’s not that they are bad; it’s just that they don’t think. Take old Mrs Stocking, who’s got nothing in the world except her cat and a whole lot of arthritis. People were getting her a bite to eat often enough, that is true, but no one was noticing that her toenails were so long they were tangling up inside her boots and so she’d not been able to take them off for a year! People around here are OK when it comes to food and the occasional bunch of flowers, but they are not around when things get a little on the messy side. Witches notice these things. Oh, there’s a certain amount of whizzing about, that’s true enough, but mostly it’s only to get quickly to somewhere there is a mess.’

Her father shook his head. ‘And you like doing this?’

‘Yes.’

‘
Why?
’

Tiffany had to think about this, her father’s eyes never leaving her face. ‘Well, Dad, you know how Granny Aching always used to say, “Feed them as is hungry, clothe them as is naked, and speak up for them as has no voices”? Well, I reckon there is room in there for “Grasp for them as can’t bend, reach for them as can’t stretch, wipe for them as can’t twist”, don’t you? And because sometimes you get a good day that makes up for all the bad days and, just for a moment, you hear the world turning,’ said Tiffany. ‘I can’t put it any other way.’

Her father looked at her with a kind of proud puzzlement. ‘And you think that’s worth it, do you?’

‘Yes, Dad!’

‘Then I am proud of you, jiggit, you are doing a man’s job!’

He’d used the pet name only the family knew, and so she kissed him politely and did not tell him that he was unlikely to see a man doing the job that she did.

‘What are you all going to do about the Pettys?’ she asked.

‘Your mum and me could take Mrs Petty and her daughter in and …’ Mr Aching paused and gave her a strange look, as if she frightened him. ‘It’s never simple, my girl. Seth Petty was a decent enough lad when we were young. Not the brightest piggy in the litter, I’ll grant you that, but decent enough in his way. It was his dad who was a madman; I mean, things were a bit rough and ready in those days and you could expect a clip around the head if you disobeyed, but Seth’s dad had a thick leather belt with two buckles on it, and he would lay into Seth just for looking at him in a funny way. No word of a lie. Always used to say that he would teach him a lesson.’

‘It seems that he succeeded,’ Tiffany said, but her father held up a hand.

‘And then there was Molly,’ he went on. ‘You couldn’t say that Molly and Seth were made for one another, because in truth neither of them were rightly made for anybody, but I suppose they were sort of happy together. In those days, Seth was a drover, driving the flocks all the way to the big city sometimes. It wasn’t the kind of job you needed much learning for, and it might be that some of the sheep were a bit brighter than he was, but it was a job that needed doing, and he picked up a wage and no one thought the worse of him for that. The trouble was, that meant he left Molly alone for weeks at a time, and …’ Tiffany’s father paused here, looking embarrassed.

‘I know what you’re going to tell me,’ said Tiffany, to help him out, but he took care to ignore this.

‘It’s not that she was a bad girl,’ he said. ‘It’s just that she never really understood what it was all about, and there wasn’t anyone to tell her, and you got all kinds of strangers and travellers passing through all the time. Quite handsome chaps, some of them.’

Tiffany took pity on him, sitting there looking miserable, embarrassed about telling his little girl things his little girl shouldn’t know.

So she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek again. ‘I
know
, Dad,
I really do know
. Amber isn’t actually his daughter, right?’

‘Well, I never said that, did I? She might be,’ said her father awkwardly.

And that would be the trick, wouldn’t it, Tiffany thought. Maybe if Seth Petty had known one way or the other, he might have come to terms with the
perhaps
. Maybe. You never know.

But he didn’t know, either, and there would be some days when he thought he did know and some days when he thought the worst. And for a man like Petty, who was a stranger to thinking, the dark thoughts would roll around in his head until they tangled up his brain. And when the brain stops thinking, the fist steps in.

Her father was watching her very closely. ‘You know about this sort of thing?’ he said.

‘We call it going round the houses. Every witch does it. Please try and understand me, Dad. I have seen horrible things, and some of them all the more horrible because they were, well, normal. All the little secrets behind closed doors, Dad. Good things and nasty things I am not going to tell you about. It’s just part of being a witch! You learn to sense things.’

‘Well, you know, life is not exactly a bed of roses for any of us …’ her father began. ‘There was the time when—’

‘There was this old woman up near Slice,’ Tiffany interrupted him. ‘And she died in her bed. Nothing particularly bad about that, really: she had just run out of life. But she lay there for two months before anyone wondered what had happened. They are a bit strange over in Slice. The worst part of it was that her cats couldn’t get out and started eating her; I mean, she was cat-mad and probably would not have minded, but one of them had kittens in her bed. In her actual bed. It was really very difficult to find the kittens homes in places where people hadn’t already heard the story. They were beautiful kittens too, lovely blue eyes.’

‘Er,’ her father began. ‘When you say “in her bed”, you mean …’

‘With her still in it, yes,’ said Tiffany. ‘I’ve had to deal with dead people, yes. You throw up a bit first time, and then you just realize that death is, well, part of life. It is not so bad if you think of it as a list of things to do, and do them one at a time. You might have a bit of a cry as well, but that’s all part of it.’

‘Didn’t anyone help you?’

‘Oh, a couple of ladies helped me when I knocked on their doors, but really she was nobody’s business. It can happen like that. People disappear in the cracks.’ She paused. ‘Dad, we’re still not using the old stone barn, are we? Can you get some of the lads to clean it out for me?’

‘Of course,’ said her father. ‘Do you mind if I ask why?’

Tiffany heard his politeness; he was talking to a witch. ‘I think I’m having a kind of idea,’ she said. ‘And I think I can make good use of that barn. It’s only a thought, and it won’t do any harm to have it tidied up in any case.’

‘Well, I still feel mightily proud when I see you rushing all over the place on that broomstick of yours,’ said her father. ‘That’s magic, isn’t it?’

Everyone wants magic to exist, Tiffany thought to herself, and what can you say? No, there isn’t? Or: Yes, there is, but it’s not what you think? Everyone wants to believe that we can change the world by snapping our fingers. ‘The dwarfs make them,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a clue how they work. Staying on them, that’s the trick.’

The rough music had died down now, possibly because there was nothing for it to do, or perhaps because – and this was quite likely – if the rough musicians got back to the pub soon, there might be time for another drink before it closed.

Mr Aching stood up. ‘I think we should take this girl home, don’t you?’

‘Young woman,’ corrected Tiffany, leaning over her.

‘What?’

‘Young woman,’ said Tiffany. ‘She deserves that, at least. And I think I should take her somewhere else first. She needs more help than I can give her. Can you please go and scrounge some rope? I’ve got a leather strap on the broomstick, of course, but I don’t think it will be enough.’ She heard a rustling from the hayloft above, and smiled. Some friends could be so reliable.

But Mr Aching looked shocked. ‘You are taking her away?’

‘Not far. I have to. But look, don’t worry. If Mum makes up an extra bed I’ll soon have her back.’

Her father lowered his voice. ‘It’s them, isn’t it? Do they still follow you?’