A Hat Full Of Sky

tried, wouldn’t stop thinking. And it thought: That cheerfulness has got cracks around the edges. Something isn’t right here…

Chapter Three A Single-Minded Lady

There was a cottage, but Tiffany couldn’t see much in the gloom. Apple trees crowded in around it. Something hanging from a branch brushed against her as, walking unsteadily, she followed Miss Level. It swung away with a tinkling sound. There was the sound of rushing water, too, some way away.

Miss Level was opening a door. It led into a small, brightly lit and amazingly tidy kitchen. A fire was burning briskly in the iron stove.

‘Um… I’m supposed to be the apprentice,’ said Tiffany, still groggy from the flight. ‘I’ll make something to drink if you show me where things are—’

‘No!’ Miss Level burst out, raising her hands. The shout seemed to have shocked her, because she was shaking when she lowered them. ‘No—I—I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she said in a more normal voice, trying to smile. ‘You’ve had a long day. I’ll show you to your room and where things are, and I’ll bring you up some stew, and you can be an apprentice tomorrow. No rush.’

Tiffany looked at the bubbling pot on the iron stove, and the loaf on the table. It was fresh baked bread, she could smell that.

The trouble with Tiffany was her Third Thoughts.2 They thought: She lives by herself. Who lit the fire? A bubbling pot needs stirring from time to time. Who stirred it? And someone lit the candles. Who?

‘Is there anyone else staying here, Miss Level?’ she said.

Miss Level looked desperately at the pot and the loaf and back to Tiffany.

‘No, there’s only me,’ she said, and somehow Tiffany knew she was telling the truth. Or a truth, anyway.

‘In the morning?’ said Miss Level, almost pleading. She looked so forlorn that Tiffany actually felt sorry for her.

She smiled. ‘Of course, Miss Level,’ she said.

There was a brief tour by candlelight. There was a privy not far from the cottage; it was a two-holer, which Tiffany thought was a bit odd but, of course, maybe other people had lived here once. There was also a room just for a bath, a terrible waste of space by the standards of Home Farm. It had its own pump and a big boiler for heating the water. This was definitely posh.

Her bedroom was a… nice room. Nice was a very good word. Everything had frills. Anything that could have a cover on it was covered. Some attempt had been made to make the room… jolly, as if being a bedroom was a jolly wonderful thing to be. Tiffany’s room back on the farm had a rag rug on the floor, a water jug and basin on a stand, a big wooden box for clothes, an ancient dolls’ house and some old calico curtains and that was pretty much it. On the farm, bedrooms were for shutting your eyes in.

This room had a chest of drawers. The contents of Tiffany’s suitcase filled one drawer easily.

The bed made no sound when Tiffany sat on it. Her old bed had a mattress so old that it had a comfy hollow in it, and the springs all made different noises; if she couldn’t sleep she could move various parts of her body and play The Bells of St. Ungulants on the springs—cling twing glong, gling ping bloyinnng, drink plang dyonnng, ding ploink.

This room smelled different, too. It smelled of spare rooms, and other people’s soap.

At the bottom of her suitcase was a small box that Mr Block the farm’s carpenter had made for her. He did not go in for delicate work, and it was quite heavy. In it, she kept… keepsakes. There was a piece of chalk with a fossil in it, which was quite rare, and her personal butter stamp (which showed a witch on a broomstick) in case she got a chance to make butter here, and a dobby stone, which was supposed to be lucky because it had a hole in it. (She’d been told that when she was seven, and had picked it up. She couldn’t quite see how the hole made it lucky, but since it had spent a lot of time in her pocket, and then safe and sound in the box, it probably was more fortunate than most stones, which got kicked around and run over by carts and so on.)

There was also a blue-and-yellow wrapper from an old packet of Jolly Sailor tobacco, and a buzzard feather, and an ancient flint arrowhead wrapped up carefully in a piece of sheep’s wool. There were plenty of these on the Chalk. The Nac Mac Feegle used them for spear points.

She lined these up neatly on the top of the chest of drawers, alongside her diary, but they didn’t make the place look more homely. They just looked lonely.

Tiffany picked up the old wrapper and the sheep’s wool and sniffed them. They weren’t quite the smell of the shepherding hut, but they were close enough to it to bring tears to her eyes.

She had never spent a night away from the Chalk before. She knew the word ‘homesickness’ and wondered whether this cold, thin feeling growing inside her was what it felt like—

Someone knocked at the door.

‘It’s me,’ said a muffled voice.

Tiffany jumped off the bed and opened the door.

Miss Level came in with a tray that held a bowl of beef stew and some bread. She put it down on the little table by the bed.

‘If you put it outside the door when you’re finished, I’ll take it down later,’ she said.

‘Thank you very much,’ said Tiffany.

Miss Level paused at the door. ‘It’s going to be so nice having someone to talk to, apart from myself,’ she said. ‘I do hope you won’t want to leave, Tiffany.’

Tiffany gave her a happy little smile, then waited until the door had shut and she’d heard Miss Level’s footsteps go downstairs before tiptoeing to the window and checking there were no bars in it.

There had been something scary about Miss Level’s expression. It was sort of hungry and hopeful and pleading and frightened, all at once.

Tiffany also checked that she could bolt the bedroom door on the inside.

The beef stew tasted, indeed, just like beef stew and not, just to take an example completely and totally at random, stew made out of the last poor girl who’d worked here.

To be a witch, you have to have a very good imagination. Just now, Tiffany was wishing that hers wasn’t quite so good. But Mistress Weatherwax and Miss Tick wouldn’t have let her come here if it was dangerous, would they? Well, would they?

They might. They just might. Witches didn’t believe in making things too easy. They assumed you used your brains. If you didn’t use your brains, you had no business being a witch. The world doesn’t make things easy, they’d say. Learn how to learn fast.

But… they’d give her a chance, wouldn’t they?

Of course they would.

Probably.

She’d nearly finished the not-made-of-people-at-all-honestly stew when something tried to take the bowl out of her hand. It was the gentlest of tugs, and when she automatically pulled it back, the tugging stopped immediately.