I Shall Wear Midnight

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.

Careful non-aggressive questioning brought news that Mr Petty was asleep upstairs, and Tiffany simply told Mrs Petty that Amber was being looked after by a very kind lady while she healed. Mrs Petty started to cry again. The misery of the place was getting on Tiffany’s nerves too, and she tried to stop herself being cruel; but how hard was it to slosh a bucket of cold water over a stone floor and swoosh it out of the door with a broom? How hard was it to make some soap? You could make quite a serviceable one out of wood ash and animal fat. And, as her mother had said once, ‘No one is too poor to wash a window,’ although her father, just to annoy her mother, occasionally changed it to, ‘No one is too poor to wash a widow.’ But where could you start with this family? And whatever it was that was in the kettle was still rattling, presumably trying to get out.

Most of the women in the villages had grown up to be tough. You needed to be tough to bring up a family on a farm labourer’s wages. There was a local saying, a sort of recipe for dealing with a trouble-some husband. It was: ‘Tongue pie, cold barn and the copper stick.’ It meant that a troublesome husband got a nagging instead of his dinner, he would be shoved out to the barn to sleep, and if he raised his hand to his wife, he might get a good wallop from the long stick every cottage had for stirring the washing in the wash-tub. They usually learned the error of their ways before the rough music played.

‘Wouldn’t you like a short holiday away from Mr Petty?’ Tiffany suggested.

The woman, pale as a slug and skinny as a broom, looked horrified. ‘Oh no!’ she gasped. ‘He wouldn’t know what to do without me!’

And then … it all went wrong, or rather, a lot more wrong than it was already. And it was all so innocent, because the woman was so downcast. ‘Well, at least I can clean your kitchen for you,’ Tiffany said cheerfully. It would have been fine if she had simply grabbed a broom and got to work but, oh no, she had to go and look up at the grey, cobweb-filled ceiling and say, ‘All right, I know you’re here, you always follow me, so make yourself useful and clean this kitchen thoroughly!’ Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then she heard, because she was listening for it, a muffled conversation from up near the ceiling.

‘Did ye no’ hear that? She kens we is here! How come she always gets it right?’

A slightly different Feegle voice said, ‘It’s because we always follow her, ye wee dafty!’

‘Oh aye, I ken that well enough, but my point is, did we not promise faithfully not to follow her around any more?’

‘Aye, it was a solemn oath.’

‘Exactly, and so I cannae but be a wee bit disappointed that the big wee hag will nae take heed of a solemn promise. It’s a wee bit hurtful to the feelings.’

‘But we have broken the solemn oath; it’s a Feegle thing.’

A third voice said, ‘Look lively, ye scunners, it’s the tapping o’ the feets!’

A whirlwind hit the grubby little kitchen.¹⁶ Foaming water swirled across Tiffany’s boots, which had indeed been tapping. It has to be said that no one could create a mess more quickly than a party of Feegles, but strangely, they could clean one up as well, without even the help of bluebirds and miscellaneous woodland creatures.

The sink emptied in an instant and filled again with soap suds. Wooden plates and tin mugs hummed through the air as the fire burst into life. With a bang bang bang the log box filled. After that, things speeded up, and a fork shuddered in the wall beside Tiffany’s ear. Steam rose like a fog, with strange noises coming out of it; the sunlight flooded in through the suddenly clean window, filling the room with rainbows; a broom shot past pushing the last of the water in front of it; the kettle boiled; a vase of flowers appeared on the table — some of them, admittedly, upside down — and suddenly the room was fresh and clean and no longer smelled of rotted potatoes.

Tiffany looked up at the ceiling. The cat was holding onto it by all four paws. It gave her what was definitely a look. Even a witch can be out-looked by a cat that has had it up to here, and is still up here.

Tiffany finally located Mrs Petty under the table, with her hands over her head. When she had finally been persuaded to come out and sit down on a nice clean chair in front of a cup of tea from a wonderfully clean mug, she was very keen to agree that there had been a great improvement, although later on Tiffany couldn’t help but admit that Mrs Petty would probably have agreed to absolutely anything if only Tiffany would go away.

Not a success, then, but at least the place was a whole lot cleaner and Mrs Petty was bound to be grateful when she’d had time to think about it. A snarl and a thump that Tiffany heard as she was leaving the ragged garden was probably the cat, parting company with the ceiling.

Halfway back to the farm, carrying her broomstick over her shoulder, she thought aloud, ‘Perhaps that was a bit stupid.’

‘Dinnae fash yourself,’ said a voice. ‘If we had had the time we could have made some bread as well.’ Tiffany looked down, and there was Rob Anybody, along with half a dozen others known variously as the Nac Mac Feegle, the Wee Free Men and, sometimes, the Defendants, the Culprits, people wanted by the police to help them with their enquiries and sometimes as ‘that one, second on the left, I swear it was him.’

‘You keep on following me!’ she complained. ‘You always promise not to and you always do!’

‘Ah, but ye dinnae take into account the geas that is laid on us, ye ken. Ye are the hag o’ the hills and we must always be ready to protect ye and help ye, no matter what ye say,’ said Rob Anybody stoutly. There was a rapid shaking of heads among the other Feegles, causing a fallout of bits of pencil, rats’ teeth, last night’s dinner, interesting stones with holes in, beetles, promising bits of snot tucked away for leisurely examination later, and snails.

‘Look,’ said Tiffany, ‘you can’t just go around helping people whether they want you to or not!’

Rob Anybody scratched his head, put back the snail that had fallen out and said, ‘Why not, miss? You do.’

‘I don’t!’ she said aloud, but inside an arrow struck her heart. I wasn’t kind to Mrs Petty, was I? she thought. Yes, it was true that the woman seemed to have the brains as well as the demeanour of a mouse, but filthy though it was, the stinking house was Mrs Petty’s house, and Tiffany had burst in with a lot of, well, not to put too fine a point on it, Nac Mac Feegles, and just messed it up, even if it was less of a mess than it had been before. I was brusque and bossy and self-righteous. My mother could have handled it better. If it comes to that, probably any other woman in the village could have handled it better, but I am the witch and I blundered in and blundered about and scared the wits out of her. Me, a slip of a girl with a pointy hat.

And the other thing she thought about herself was that if she didn’t actually lie down very soon, she was going to fall over. The kelda was right; she couldn’t remember when she’d last slept in a proper bed, and there was one waiting for her at the farm. And, she thought suddenly and guiltily, she still had to let her own parents know that Amber Petty was back with the Feegles …

There’s always something, she thought, and then there’s another something on top of the something, and then there is no end to the somethings. No wonder witches were given broomsticks. Feet just couldn’t do it by themselves.

* * *

Her mother was tending to Tiffany’s brother Wentworth, who had a black eye.

‘He’s been fighting the big boys,’ her mother complained. ‘Got a black eye, didn’t we, Wentworth?’

‘Yes, but I did kick Billy Teller in the fork.’

Tiffany tried to starve a yawn. ‘What have you been fighting for, Went? I thought you were more