The Wee Free Men

delicate work. But over the years the girls had decorated it with bits of material and some rough and ready furniture.

By the sound of it the owners of the voices thought it was a palace.

‘Hey, hey, hey, we’re in the cushy stuff noo! There’s a beid in this room. Wi’ pillows!’

‘Keep it doon, we don’t want any o’ them to wake up!’

‘Crivens, I’m as quiet as a wee moose! Aargh! There’s sojers!’

‘Whut d’ye mean, sojers?’

‘There’s redcoats in the room!’

They’ve found the toy soldiers, thought Tiffany, trying not to breathe loudly.

Strictly speaking, they had no place in the doll’s house, but Wentworth wasn’t old enough for them and so they’d got used as innocent bystanders back in those days when Tiffany had made tea parties for her dolls. Well, what passed for dolls. Such toys as there were in the farmhouse had to be tough to survive intact through the generations and didn’t always manage it. Last time Tiffany had tried to arrange a party, the guests had been a rag doll with no head, two wooden soldiers and three-quarters of a small teddy bear.

Thuds and bangs came from the direction of the doll’s house.

‘I got one! Hey, pal, can yer mammie sew? Stitch this! Aargh! He’s got a heid on him like a tree!’

‘Crivens! There’s a body here wi’ no heid at a’!’

‘Aye, nae wonder, ‘cause here’s a bear! Feel ma boot, ye washoon!’

It seemed to Tiffany that although the owners of the three voices were fighting things that couldn’t possibly fight back, including a teddy bear with only one leg, the fight still wasn’t going all one way.

‘I got ‘im! I got ‘im! I got ‘im! Yer gonna get a gummer, ye wee hard disease!’

‘Someone bit ma leg! Someone bit ma leg!’

‘Come here! Ach, yer fightin’ yersels, ye eejits! Ah ‘m fed up wi’ the pairy yees!’

Tiffany felt Ratbag stir. He might be fat and lazy, but he was lightning fast when it came to leaping on small creatures. She couldn’t let him get the… whatever they were, however bad they sounded.

She coughed loudly.

‘See?’ said a voice from the doll’s house. ‘Yer woked them up! Ah‘m offski!’

Silence fell again and this time, Tiffany decided after a while, it was the silence of no one there rather than the silence of people being incredibly quiet. Ratbag went back to sleep, twitching occasionally as he disembowelled something in his fat cat dreams.

Tiffany waited a little while and then got out of bed and crept towards the bedroom door, avoiding the two squeaky floorboards. She went downstairs in the dark, found a chair by moonlight, fished the book of Faerie Tales off Granny’s shelf, then lifted the latch on the back door and stepped out into the warm midsummer night.

There was a lot of mist around, but a few stars were visible overhead and there was a gibbous moon in the sky. Tiffany knew it was gibbous because she’d read in the Almanack that ‘gibbous’ meant what the moon looked like when it was just a bit fatter than half full, and so she made a point of paying attention to it around those times just so that she could say to herself: ‘Ah, I see the moon’s very gibbous tonight…’

It’s possible that this tells you more about Tiffany than she would want you to know.

Against the rising moon the downs were a black wall that filled half the sky. For a moment she looked for the light of Granny Aching’s lantern…

Granny never lost a lamb. That was one of Tiffany’s first memories: of being held by her mother at the window one frosty night in early spring, with a million brilliant stars glinting over the mountains and, on the darkness of the downs, the one yellow star in the constellation of Granny Aching zigzagging through the night. She wouldn’t go to bed while a lamb was lost, however bad the weather…

There was only one place where it was possible for someone in a large family to be private, and that was in the privy. It was a three-holer, and it was where everyone went if they wanted to be alone for a while. There was a candle in there, and last year’s Almanack hanging on a string. The printers knew their readership, and printed the Almanack on soft thin paper.

Tiffany lit the candle, made herself comfortable, and looked at the book of Faerie Tales. The moon gibbous’d at her through the crescent-shaped hole cut in the door.

She’d never really liked the book. It seemed to her that it tried to tell her what to do and what to think. Don’t stray from the path, don’t open that door, but hate the wicked witch because she is wicked. Oh, and believe that shoe size is a good way of choosing a wife.

A lot of the stories were highly suspicious, in her opinion. There was the one that ended when the two good children pushed the wicked witch into her own oven. Tiffany had worried about that after all that trouble with Mrs Snapperly. Stories like this stopped people thinking properly, she was sure. She’d read that one and thought, Excuse me? No one has an oven big enough to get a whole person in, and what made the children think they could just walk around eating people’s houses in any case? And why does some boy too stupid to know a cow is worth a lot more than five beans have the right to murder a giant and steal all his gold? Not to mention commit an act of ecological vandalism? And some girl who can’t tell the difference between a wolf and her grandmother must either have been as dense as teak or come from an extremely ugly family. The stories weren‘t real. But Mrs Snapperly had died because of stories.

She flicked past page after page, looking for the right pictures. Because, although the stories made her angry, the pictures, ah, the pictures were the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.

She turned a page and there it was.

Most of the pictures of fairies were not very impressive. Frankly, they looked like a small girls’ ballet class that’d just had to run through a bramble patch. But this one… was different. The colours were strange, and there were no shadows. Giant grasses and daisies grew everywhere, so the fairies must have been quite small, but they looked big. They looked like rather strange humans. They certainly didn’t look much like fairies. Hardly any of them had wings. They were odd shapes, in fact. In fact, some of them looked like monsters. The girls in the tutus wouldn’t have stood much chance.