The Wee Free Men

carefully out of a piece of apple wood that Mr Block the carpenter had given her.

She stamped it onto the butter, and took it off carefully.

There, glistening on the oily, rich yellow surface, was a gibbous moon and, sailing in front of the moon, a witch on a broomstick.

She smiled again, and it was Granny Aching’s smile. Things would be different one day.

But you had to start small, like oak trees.

Then she made cheese…

…in the dairy, on the farm, and the fields unrolling, and becoming the downlands sleeping under the hot midsummer sun, where the flocks of sheep, moving slowly, drift over the short turf like clouds on a green sky, and here and there sheepdogs speed over the grass like shooting stars. For ever and ever, wold without end.

Author’s Note

The painting that Tiffany ‘enters’ in this book really exists. It’s called The Fairy Fellers’ Master-Stroke, by Richard Dadd, and is in the Tate Gallery in London. It is only about 21 inches by 15 inches. It took the artist nine years to complete, in the middle of the nineteenth century. I cannot think of a more famous ‘fairy’ painting. It is, indeed, very strange. Summer heat leaks out of it.

What people ‘know’ about Richard Dadd is that ‘he went mad, killed his father, was locked up in a lunatic asylum for the rest of his life and painted a weird picture’. Crudely, that’s all true, but it’s a dreadful summary of the life of a skilled and talented artist who developed a serious mental illness.

A Nac Mac Feegle does not appear anywhere in the painting, but I suppose it’s always possible that one was removed for making an obscene gesture. It’s the sort of thing they’d do.

Oh, and the tradition of burying a shepherd with a piece of raw wool in the coffin was true, too. Even gods understand that a shepherd can’t neglect the sheep. A god who didn’t understand would not be worth believing in.

There is no such word as ‘noonlight’, but it would be nice if there was.

,

1. People say things like ‘listen to your heart’, but witches learn to listen to other things too. It’s amazing what your kidneys can tell you.

2. Ordinary fortune-tellers tell you what you want to happen; witches tell you what’s going to happen whether you want it to or not. Strangely enough, witches tend to be more accurate but less popular.

3. Tiffany had read lots of words in the dictionary that she’d never heard spoken, so she had to guess at how they were pronounced.

4. No words could describe what a Feegle in a kilt looks like upside down, so they won’t try.

5. Probably about eleven inches across. Tiffany didn’t measure them this time.