all.’
The Queen’s smile disappeared for a moment and came back all edgy and brittle.
‘Such rudeness, and you hardly know me,’ she said, sitting down on the leafy seat. She patted the space beside her. ‘Do sit down,’ she said. ‘Standing there like that is so confrontational. I will put your bad manners down to simple disorientation.’ She gave Tiffany a beautiful smile.
Look at the way her eyes move, said Tiffany’s Second Thoughts. I don’t think she’s using them to see you with. They’re just beautiful ornaments.
‘You have invaded my home, killed some of my creatures and generally acted in a mean and despicable way,’ said the Queen. This offends me. However, I understand that you have been badly led by disruptive elements—’
‘You stole my brother,’ said Tiffany, holding Wentworth tightly. ‘You steal all sorts of things.’ But her voice sounded weak and tinny in her ears.
‘He was wandering around lost,’ said the Queen calmly. ‘I brought him home and comforted him.’
And what there was about the Queen’s voice was this: It said, in a friendly, understanding way, that she was right and you were wrong. And this wasn’t your fault, exactly. It was probably the fault of your parents, or your food, or something so terrible you’ve completely forgotten about it. It wasn’t your fault, the Queen understood, because you were a nice person. It was just such a terrible thing that all these bad influences had made you make the wrong choices. If only you’d admit that, Tiffany, then the world would be a much happier place—
–this cold place, guarded by monsters, in a world where nothing grows older, or up, said her Second Thoughts. A world with the Queen in charge of everything. Don’t listen.
She managed to take a step backwards.
‘Am I a monster?’ said the Queen. ‘All I wanted was a little bit of company—’
And Tiffany’s Second Thoughts, quite swamped by the Queen’s wonderful voice, said: Miss Female Infant Robinson…
She’d come to work as a maid at one of the farms many years ago. They said that she’d been brought up in a Home for the Destitute in Yelp. They said she’d been born there after her mother had arrived during a terrible storm and the master had written in his big black diary: ‘To Miss Robinson, female infant’, and her young mother hadn’t been very bright and was dying in any case and had thought that was the baby’s name. After all, it had been written down in an official book.
Miss Robinson was quite old now, never said much, never ate much, but you never saw her not doing something. No one could scrub a floor like Miss Female Infant Robinson. She had a thin, wispy face with a pointed red nose, and thin, pale hands with red knuckles, which were always busy. Miss Robinson worked hard.
Tiffany hadn’t understood a lot of what was going on when the crime happened. The women talked about it in twos and threes at garden gates, their arms folded, and they’d stop and look indignant if a man walked past.
She picked up bits of conversation, though sometimes they seemed to be in a kind of code, like: ‘Never really had anyone of her own, poor old soul. Wasn’t her fault she was skinnier’n a rake,’ and ‘They say that when they found her she was cuddling it and said it was hers,’ and ‘The house was full of baby clothes she’d knitted!’ That last one had puzzled Tiffany at the time, because it was said in the same tone of voice that someone’d use to say ‘And the house was full of human skulls!’
But they all agreed on one thing: We can’t have this. A crime’s a crime. The Baron’s got to be told.
Miss Robinson had stolen a baby, Punctuality Riddle, who had been much loved by his young parents even though they’d named him ‘Punctuality’ (reasoning that if children could be named after virtues like Patience, Faith and Prudence, what was wrong with a little good timekeeping?).
He’d been left in his crib in the yard, and had vanished. And there had been all the usual searchings and weepings, and then someone had mentioned that Miss Robinson had been taking home extra milk…
It was kidnapping. There weren’t many fences on the Chalk, and very few doors with locks. Theft of all kinds was taken very seriously. If you couldn’t turn your back on what was yours for five minutes, where would it all end? The law’s the law. A crime’s a crime…
Tiffany had overheard bits of arguments all over the village, but the same phrases cropped up over and over again. Poor thing never meant no harm. She was a hard worker, never complained. She’s not right in the head. The law’s the law. A crime’s a crime.
And so the Baron was told, and he held a court in the Great Hall, and everyone who wasn’t wanted up on the hills turned up, including Mr and Mrs Riddle, she looking worried, he looking determined, and Miss Robinson, who just stared at the ground with her red knuckly hands on her knees.
It was hardly a trial. Miss Robinson was confused about what she was guilty of, and it seemed to Tiffany that so was everyone else. They weren’t certain why they were there, and they’d come to find out,
The Baron had been uneasy, too. The law was clear. Theft was a dreadful crime, and stealing a human being was much worse. There was a prison in Yelp, right beside the Home for the Destitute; some said there was even a connecting door. That was where thieves went.
And the Baron wasn’t a big thinker. His family had held the Chalk by not changing their mind about anything for hundreds of years. He sat and listened and drummed his fingers on the table and looked at people’s faces and acted like a man sitting on a very hot chair.
Tiffany was in the front row. She was there when the man started to give his verdict, ‘um ‘ing and ‘ah ‘ing, trying not to say the words he knew he’d have to say, when the door at the back of the hall opened and the sheepdogs Thunder and Lightning trotted in.
They came down the aisle between the rows of benches and sat down in front of the Baron, looking bright-eyed and alert.
Only Tiffany craned to see back up the aisle. The doors were still slightly ajar. They were far too heavy even for a strong dog to push them open. And she could just make out someone looking through the crack.
The Baron stopped, and stared. He, too, looked at the other end of the hall.
And then, after a few moments, he pushed the law book aside and said: ‘Perhaps we should do this a different way.’
