I Shall Wear Midnight (12 page)

The nurse raised a hand. ‘I could
slap
you!’

‘No,’ said Tiffany firmly. ‘You couldn’t.’

The hand stayed where it was. ‘I have never been so insulted before in my life!’ screamed the enraged nurse.

‘Really?’ said Tiffany. ‘I’m genuinely surprised.’ She turned on her heel, left the nurse standing and marched over to a young guard who had just come into the hall. ‘I’ve seen you around. I don’t think I know who you are. What’s your name, please?’

The trainee guard gave what he probably thought was a salute. ‘Preston, miss.’

‘Has the Baron been taken down to the crypt, Preston?’

‘Yes, miss, and I’ve took down some lanterns and some cloths and a bucket of warm water, miss.’ He grinned when he saw her expression. ‘My grandma used to do the laying out when I was a little boy, miss. I could help, if you wanted.’

‘Did your
grandma
let you help?’

‘No, miss,’ said the young man. ‘She said men weren’t allowed to do that sort of thing unless they had a certificate in doctrine.’

Tiffany looked puzzled for a moment. ‘Doctrine?’

‘You know, miss. Doctrine: pills and potions and sawing off legs and similar.’

Light dawned. ‘Oh, you mean doctoring. I should hope not. This isn’t about making the poor soul better. I will do it by myself, but thank you for asking, anyway. This is women’s work.’

Exactly
why
it is women’s work I don’t know, she said to herself as she arrived in the crypt and rolled up her sleeves. The young guard had even thought to bring down a dish of soil and a dish of salt.
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Well done, your granny, she thought. At last someone had taught a boy something useful!

She cried as she made the old man ‘presentable’ as Granny Weatherwax called it. She always cried. It was a needful thing. But you didn’t do it where anyone else could see, not if you were a witch. People wouldn’t expect that. It would make them uneasy.

She stood back. Well, the old boy looked better than he had done yesterday, she had to admit. As a final touch, she took two pennies out of her pocket and laid them gently over his eyelids.

Those were the old customs, taught to her by Nanny Ogg, but now there was a new custom, known only to her. She leaned on the edge of the marble slab with one hand and held the bucket of water in the other. She stayed there, motionless, until the water in the bucket began to boil and ice was forming on the slab. She took the bucket outside and tipped its contents down the drain.

The castle was bustling when she had finished, and she left people to get on with things. She hesitated as she stepped out of the castle and stopped to think. People often didn’t stop to think. They thought as they went along. Sometimes it was a good idea. Just to stop moving, in case you moved the wrong way.

Roland was the Baron’s only son and, as far as Tiffany knew, his only relative, or at least his only relative who was allowed to come anywhere near the castle; after some horrible and expensive legal fighting, Roland had succeeded in banishing the dreadful aunts, the Baron’s sisters who, frankly, even the old Baron thought were as nasty a pair of old ferrets as any man should find down the trousers of his life. But there was another person who should know, who was in no conceivable way at all kin to the Baron, but was nevertheless, well, someone who should know something as important as this, as soon as possible. Tiffany headed up to the Feegle mound to see the kelda.

Amber was sitting outside when Tiffany arrived, doing some sewing in the sunlight.

‘Hello, miss,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’ll just go and tell Mrs Kelda
that you’re here.’ And with that she disappeared down the hole as easily as a snake, just as Tiffany had once been able to do.

Why had Amber gone back there? Tiffany wondered. She had taken her to the Aching farm to be safe. Why had the girl walked up the Chalk to the mound? How had she even remembered where it was?

‘Very interesting child, that,’ said a voice, and the Toad
¹²
stuck his head out from under a leaf. ‘I must say you look extremely flustered, miss.’

‘The old Baron is dead,’ said Tiffany.

‘Well, only to be expected. Long live the Baron,’ said the Toad.

‘He’s not going to live long,’ said Tiffany. ‘He’s dead.’

‘No,’ croaked the Toad. ‘It’s what you’re supposed to say. When a king dies, you have to immediately announce that there is another king. It’s important. I wonder what the new one will be like. Rob Anybody says that he’s a wet nelly who is not fit to lick your boots. And has scorned you very badly.’

Whatever the circumstances of the past, Tiffany was not going to let that go by unchallenged. ‘I don’t need anybody to lick anything for me, thank you very much. Anyway,’ she added, ‘he’s not
their
baron, is he? The Feegles pride themselves on not having a lord.’

‘You are correct in your submission,’ said the Toad ponderously, ‘but you must remember that they also pride themselves on having as much as possible to drink at the slightest possible excuse, which leaves them of an uncertain temper, and that the Baron quite definitely believes that he is,
de facto
, the owner of all the property hereabouts. A claim that stands up in law. Although I am sorry to say
that I can no longer do the same. But the girl, now, she is something strange. Haven’t you noticed?’

Haven’t I noticed? Tiffany thought quickly. What should I have noticed? Amber was just a kid;
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she had seen her around – not so quiet as to be worrying, not so noisy as to be annoying. And that was it. But then she thought, The chickens. That was strange.

‘She can speak Feegle!’ said the Toad. ‘And I don’t mean all that crivens business; that’s just the patois. I mean the serious old-fashioned stuff that the kelda speaks, the language they spoke from wherever it was they came from before they came from there. I am sorry, with preparation I am sure I could have made a better sentence.’ He paused. ‘I don’t understand a word of Feegle myself, but the girl seems to have just picked it up. And another thing, I’ll swear she’s been trying to talk to me in Toad. I’m not much good at it myself, but a little bit of understanding did come with the … shape change, as it were.’

‘Are you saying that she understands unusual words?’ said Tiffany.

‘I’m not certain,’ said the Toad. ‘I think she understands meaning.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Tiffany. ‘I’ve always thought she was a bit simple.’

‘Simple?’ said the Toad, who seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘Well, as a lawyer I can tell you that something that looks very simple indeed can be incredibly complicated, especially if I’m being paid by the hour. The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated.’

Amber poked her head out of the hole. ‘Mrs Kelda says to meet her in the chalk pit,’ she said excitedly.

There was a faint cheering coming from the chalk pit as Tiffany lowered herself gingerly through the careful camouflage.

She liked the pit. It seemed impossible to be truly unhappy there, with the damp white walls cradling her and the light of the blue day pricking through the briars. Sometimes, when she was much younger, she had seen the ancient fish swimming in and out of the chalk pit, ancient fish from the time when the Chalk was the land under the waves. The water had gone long ago, but the souls of the ghost fish hadn’t noticed. They were as armoured as knights and ancient as the chalk. But she didn’t see them any more. Perhaps your eyesight changes as you get older, she thought.

There was a strong smell of garlic. A large part of the bottom of the pit was full of snails. Feegles were walking carefully among them, painting numbers on their shells. Amber was sitting next to the kelda, with her hands clasped round her knees. Seen from above, it looked for all the world like a sheepdog trials, but with less barking and a lot more stickiness.

The kelda spotted Tiffany, and raised a tiny finger to her lips, followed by a brief nod at Amber, who was now engrossed in the proceedings. Jeannie patted the space on the other side of her, and said, ‘We are watching the lads putting our brand on the livestock, ye ken.’ There was a slight touch of strangeness to her voice. It was the kind of voice a grown-up uses when it tells a child ‘We are having fun,
aren’t we
?’, in case the child hasn’t reached that conclusion yet. But Amber really did look as if she was enjoying herself. It occurred to Tiffany that being around the Feegles seemed to make Amber happy.

She got the impression that the kelda wanted to keep the conversation light, so she simply asked, ‘Why mark them? Who’s going to try to steal them?’

‘Other Feegles, of course. My Rob reckons they will be queuing up to steal our snails while they are left unprotected, ye ken.’

Tiffany was mystified. ‘Why would they be unprotected?’

‘Because my lads, ye ken, will be away stealing
their
livestock. It’s
an old Feegle tradition, it means everyone gets in lots of fighting, rustling and stealing and, of course, the all-time favourite, boozing.’ The kelda winked at Tiffany. ‘Well, it keeps the lads happy, and stops them fretting and getting under our feet, ye ken.’

She winked at Tiffany again and patted Amber on the leg, and said something to her in the language that sounded like a very old version of Feegle. Amber answered in the same language. The kelda nodded meaningfully at Tiffany and pointed to the other end of the pit.

‘What did you just say to her?’ said Tiffany, looking back at the girl, who was still watching the Feegles with the same smiling interest.

‘I told her that you and I were going to have a conversation for grown-ups,’ said the kelda, ‘and she just said the boys were very funny, and I don’t know how, but she has picked up the Mother of Tongues. Tiffany, I only use it to a daughter and the gonnagle,
¹⁴
ye ken, and I was talking to him on the mound last night when she joined in! She picked it up just by listening! That shouldn’t happen! That’s a rare gift she has, and no mistake. She must ken the meanings in her head, and that’s magic, missy, it’s the pure quill and no mistake.’

‘How could it happen?’

‘Who knows?’ said the kelda. ‘It’s a gift. And if ye take my advice, ye will set this girl to training.’

‘Isn’t she a bit too old to be starting?’ said Tiffany.

‘Put her to the craft, or find some channel for her gift. Believe me, my girl, I wouldnae want ye to believe that beating a girl nigh on to death is a good thing, but who kens how our paths are chosen? And so she ended up here, with me. She has the gift of understandin’. Would she have found it else? Ye know full well that the meaning of
life is to find your gift. To find your gift is happiness. Never tae find it is misery. Ye said she’s a bit simple: find her a teacher who can bring out the complicated in her. The girl learned a difficult language just by listening to it. The world sore needs folk that can do that.’

It made sense. Everything the kelda said made sense.

Jeannie paused and then said, ‘I am very sorry the Baron is dead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tiffany said. ‘I meant to tell you.’

The kelda smiled at her. ‘Do you think a kelda would need to be told something like that, my girl? He was a decent man, and ye did right by him.’

‘I’ve got to go and find the new Baron,’ said Tiffany. ‘And I’ll need the boys to help me find him. There’s thousands of people in the city, and the lads are very good at finding things.’
¹⁵
She glanced up at the sky. Tiffany had never flown all the way to the big city before and didn’t much fancy flying there in the darkness. ‘I shall leave at first light. But first of all, Jeannie, I think I’d better take Amber back home. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Amber,’ she said hopelessly …

Three quarters of an hour later, Tiffany flew her stick back down towards the village, the screams still ringing in her head. Amber wasn’t going back. She had, in fact, made her reluctance to leave the mound abundantly clear by bracing her arms and legs in the hole and staying there screaming at the top of her voice every time Tiffany gave a gentle pull; when she let go, the girl went back to sit next to the kelda. So that was that. You try to make plans for people, and the people make other plans.

However you looked at it, Amber had parents; pretty awful parents, you might say, and you might add that that was giving them
the best of it. At least they had to know that she was safe … And in any case, what possible harm could come to Amber in the care of the kelda?

Mrs Petty slammed the door shut when she saw that it was Tiffany on the step, then opened it again almost immediately, in a flood of tears. The place stank, not just of stale beer and bad cooking but also of helplessness and bewilderment. A cat, the mangiest that Tiffany had ever seen, was almost certainly another part of the problem.

Mrs Petty was frightened out of whatever wits she had and dropped to her knees on the floor, pleading incoherently. Tiffany made her a cup of tea, which was no errand for the squeamish, given that such crockery as the cottage possessed was piled up in the stone sink, which was otherwise filled with slimy water that occasionally bubbled. Tiffany spent several minutes of heavy scrubbing before she had a cup she’d care to drink from, and even then something was rattling inside the kettle.

Mrs Petty sat on the one chair that had all four legs and babbled about how her husband was really a good man provided his dinner was on time and Amber wasn’t naughty. Tiffany had grown used to that sort of desperate conversation when she was ‘going round the houses’ up in the mountains. They were generated by fear – fear of what would happen to the speaker when they were left alone again. Granny Weatherwax had a way of dealing with this, which was to put the fear of Granny Weatherwax into absolutely everyone, but Granny Weatherwax had had years of being, well, Granny Weatherwax.