I Shall Wear Midnight Read online

  It had the coat of arms of the Keepsake family on the side. A young man stepped out. Quite handsome in his way, but also so stiff in his way that you could have ironed sheets on him. This was Roland. He hadn’t gone more than a step when a rather unpleasant voice from inside the coach told him that he should have waited for the footman to open the door for him, and to hurry up, because they didn’t have all day.

  The young man hurried towards the crowd and there was a general smartening-up because, after all, here came the son of the Baron, who owned most of the Chalk and nearly all their houses, and although he was a decent old boy, as old boys go, a little politeness to his family was definitely a wise move …

  ‘What happened here? Is everybody all right?’ he said.

  Life on the Chalk was generally pleasant and the relationship between master and man was one of mutual respect; but nevertheless, the farm workers had inherited the idea that it could be unwise to have too many words with powerful people, in case any of those words turned out to be a word out of place. After all, there was still a torture chamber in the castle and even though it hadn’t been used for hundreds of years … well, best to be on the safe side, best to stand back and let the witch do the talking. If she got into trouble, she could fly away.

  ‘One of those accidents that was bound to happen, I’m afraid,’ said Tiffany, well aware that she was the only woman present who had not curtsied. ‘Some broken bones that will mend and a few red faces. All sorted out, thank you.’

  ‘So I see, so I see! Very well done, young lady!’

  For a moment Tiffany thought she could taste her teeth. Young lady, from … him? It was almost, but not entirely, insulting. But no one else seemed to have noticed. It was, after all, the kind of language that nobs use when they are trying to be friendly and jolly. He’s trying to talk to them like his father does, she thought, but his father did it by instinct and was good at it. You can’t talk to people as though they are a public meeting. She said, ‘Thank you kindly, sir.’

  Well, not too bad so far, except that now the coach door opened again and one dainty white foot touched the flint. It was her: Angelica or Letitia or something else out of the garden; in fact Tiffany knew full well it was Letitia, but surely she could be excused just a tiny touch of nasty in the privacy of her own head? Letitia! What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze. Besides, who was Letitia to keep Roland away from the scouring fair? He should have been there! His father would have been there if the old man possibly could! And look! Tiny white shoes! How long would they last on somebody who had to do a job of work? She stopped herself there: a bit of nasty was enough.

  Letitia looked at Tiffany and the crowd with something like fear and said, ‘Do let’s get going, can we please? Mother is getting vexed.’

  And so the coach left and the hurdy-gurdy man thankfully left and the sun left, and in the warm shadows of the twilight some people stayed. But Tiffany flew home alone, up high where only bats and owls could see her face.

  1 This was done blindfolded.

  2 Speaking as a witch, she knew them very well.

  3 Later on, Tiffany realized that all the witches had probably flown across the giant, especially since you could hardly miss him if you were flying from the mountains to the big city. He kind of stood out, in any case. But in Nanny Ogg’s case, she would probably turn round to look at him again.

  4 Obviously, Tiffany thought, when jumping over a fire together, one ought to be concerned about wearing protective clothing and having people with a bucket of water to hand, just in case. Witches may be a lot of things, but first and foremost, they are practical.

  5 Possibly Petulia’s romantic ambitions had been helped by the mysterious way the young man’s pigs were forever getting sick and required treating for the scours, the blind heaves, brass neck, floating teeth, scribbling eyeball, grunge, the smarts, the twisting screws, swivelling and gone knees. This was a terrible misfortune, since more than half of those ailments are normally never found in pigs, and one of them is a disease known only in freshwater fish. But the neighbours were impressed at the amount of work Petulia put in to relieve their stress. Her broomstick was coming and going at all hours of the day and night. Being a witch, after all, was about dedication.

  6 First Sight means that you can see what really is there, and Second Thoughts mean thinking about what you are thinking. And in Tiffany’s case, there were sometimes Third Thoughts and Fourth Thoughts, although these were quite difficult to manage and sometimes led her to walk into doors.

  7 The forget-me-lots is a pretty red and white flower usually given by young ladies to signal to their young men that they never wanted to see them again ever, or at least until they’d learned to wash properly and got a job.

  8 If you do not yet know who the Nac Mac Feegles are: 1) be grateful for your uneventful life; and 2) be prepared to beat a retreat if you hear anyone about as high as your ankles shout ‘Crivens!’ They are, strictly speaking, one of the faerie folk, but it is probably not a good idea to tell them this if you are looking forward to a future in which you still have your teeth.

  Chapter 2

  ROUGH MUSIC

  SHE GOT ONE hour’s sleep before the nightmare began.

  What she remembered most of all about that evening was the thumping of Mr Petty’s head against the wall and the banisters as she hauled him bodily out of his bed and dragged him by his filthy nightshirt down the stairs. He was a heavy man and half asleep, the other half of him being dead drunk.

  The important thing was not to give him any time to think, even for one moment, as she towed him behind her like a sack. He was three times her weight, but she knew about leverage. You couldn’t be a witch if you couldn’t manoeuvre someone who was heavier than you. You would never be able to change an invalid’s sheets otherwise. And now he slithered down the last few steps into the cottage’s tiny kitchen, and threw up on the floor.

  She was quite glad about that; lying in stinking vomit was the very least the man deserved, but she had to be quick to take charge, before he had time to compose himself.

  The terrified Mrs Petty, a mouse of a woman, had run screaming along the lanes to the village pub as soon as the beating had begun, and Tiffany’s father had sent a lad to wake Tiffany up. Mr Aching was a man with considerable foresight and must have known that the beery cheerfulness after a day at the fair could be the undoing of everybody, and as Tiffany sped towards the cottage on her broom-stick, she had heard the rough music begin.

  She slapped Petty’s face. ‘Can you hear that?’ she demanded, waving her hand towards the darkened window. ‘Can you hear it? That’s the sound of the rough music, and they are playing it for you, Mister Petty, for you. And they have sticks! And they have stones! They have everything they can pick up, and they have their fists and your daughter’s baby died, Mister Petty. You beat your daughter so hard, Mister Petty, that the baby died, and your wife is being comforted by some of the women and everybody knows that you have done it, everybody knows.’

  She stared into his bloodshot eyes. His hands had closed automatically into fists because he had always been a man who thought with them. Soon he would try to use them; she knew it, because it was easier to punch than think. Mr Petty had punched his way through life.

  The rough music was getting nearer slowly, because it’s hard to walk across fields on a dark night when you’ve had a skinful of beer, no matter how righteous you are currently feeling. She had to hope that they did not go into the barn first, because they would hang him there and then. If he was lucky, they would just hang him. When she had looked into the barn and seen that murder had been done, she knew that, without her, it would be done again. She had put a charm on the girl to take her pain away, holding it just above her own shoulder. It was invisible, of course, but in her mind’s eye it burned a fiery orange.

  ‘It was that boy,’ mumbled the man, with vomit trickling down his chest. ‘Coming round here, turning her head so as she wouldn’t listen to her
mum or me. And her being only thirteen. It’s a scandal.’

  ‘William is thirteen too,’ said Tiffany, trying to keep her voice level. It was difficult; the rage was bursting to get out. ‘Are you trying to tell me that she was too young for a bit of romance, but young enough to be beaten so hard that she bled from places where no one should bleed?’

  She couldn’t tell if he had really come to his senses, because the man had so few of them at the best of times, it was hard to know if he had any at all.

  ‘It wasn’t right, what they were doing,’ he said. ‘A man’s got to have discipline in his own house, after all, ain’t that right?’

  Tiffany could imagine the fiery language in the pub as the overture to the music got wound up. There were not very many weapons in the villages of the Chalk, but there were such things as reaping hooks and scythes and thatching knives and big, big hammers. They weren’t weapons – until you hit somebody with them. And everyone knew about old Petty’s temper, and the number of times his wife told the neighbours that she had got her black eye by walking into a door.

  Oh, yes – she could imagine the conversation in the pub, with the beer joining in and people remembering where all those things that weren’t weapons were hanging in their sheds. Every man was king in his little castle. Everyone knew about that – well, at least every man – and so you minded your own business when it came to another man’s castle until the castle began to stink, and then you had to do something about it lest all castles should fall. Mr Petty was one of the neighbourhood’s sullen little secrets, but it was not a secret any more.

  ‘I am your only chance, Mr Petty,’ she said. ‘Run away. Grab what you can and run away right now. Run away to where they’ve never heard of you, and then run a bit further, just to be on the safe side, because I will not be able to stop them, do you understand? Personally, I could not care less what happens to your miserable frame but I do not wish to see good people get turned into bad people by doing a murder, so you just leg it across the fields and I won’t remember which way you went.’

  ‘You can’t turn me out of my own house,’ he mumbled, finding some drunken defiance.

  ‘You’ve lost your house, your wife, your daughter … and your grandson, Mr Petty. You will find no friends here this night. I am just offering you your life.’

  ‘It was the drink what done it!’ Petty burst out. ‘It was done in drink, miss!’

  ‘But you drank the drink, and then you drank another drink, and another drink,’ she said. ‘You drank the drink all day at the fair and you only came back because the drink wanted to go to bed.’ Tiffany could feel only coldness in her heart.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not good enough, Mr Petty, not good enough at all. Go away and become a better person and then, maybe, when you come back as a changed man, people here might find it in their hearts to say hello to you, or at least to nod.’

  She had been watching his eyes, and she knew the man. Something inside him was boiling up. He was ashamed, bewildered and resentful, and in those circumstances the Pettys of the world struck out.

  ‘Please don’t, Mr Petty,’ she said. ‘Do you have any idea what would happen to you if you hit a witch?’

  She thought to herself, With those fists, you could probably kill me with a punch and that is why I intend to keep you scared.

  ‘You set the rough music on me, didn’t ya?’

  She sighed. ‘No one controls the music, Mr Petty, you know that. It just turns up when people have had enough. No one knows where it starts. People look around, and catch one another’s eye, and give each other a little nod, and other people see that. Other people catch their eye and so, very slowly, the music starts and somebody picks up a spoon and bangs it on a plate, and then somebody else bangs a jug on the table and boots start to stamp on the floor, louder and louder. It is the sound of anger, it is the sound of people who have had enough. Do you want to face the music?’

  ‘You think you’re so clever, don’t ya?’ Petty snarled. ‘With your broomstick and your black magic, ordering ordin-ery folks about.’

  She almost admired him. There he was, with no friends in the world, covered in his own sick and – she sniffed: yes, there was urine dripping from the bottom of his nightshirt – yet he was stupid enough to talk back like that. ‘Not clever, Mr Petty, just cleverer than you. And that’s not hard.’

  ‘Yeah? But clever gets you into trouble. Slip of a gel like you, pokin’ about in other people’s business … What are you going to do when the music comes for you, eh?’

  ‘Run, Mr Petty. Get out of here. It’s your last chance,’ she said. And it probably was; she could hear individual voices now.

  ‘Well, would your majesty let a man put his boots on?’ he said sarcastically. He reached down for them beside the door, but you could read Mr Petty like a very small book, one with fingermarks on all the pages and a piece of bacon as a bookmark.

  He came up with fists swinging.

  She took one step backwards, caught his wrist and let the pain out. She felt it flow down her arm, leaving it tingling, into her cupped hand and into Petty: all his daughter’s pain in one second. It flung him clear across the kitchen and it must have burned away everything inside him except animal fear. He rushed at the rickety back door like a bull, broke through it and headed off into the darkness.

  She staggered back into the barn, where a lamp was burning. According to Granny Weatherwax, you did not feel the pain that you carried, but it was a lie. A necessary lie. You did feel the pain that you carried, and because it wasn’t actually your pain you could somehow bear it, but its departure left you feeling weak and shocked.

  When the charging, clanging mob arrived, Tiffany was sitting quietly in the barn with the sleeping girl. The noise went all around the house but did not go inside; that was one of the unwritten rules. It was hard to believe that the anarchy of the rough music had rules, but it did; it might go on for three nights, or stop at one, and no one came out of the house when the music was in the air and no one came sneaking home and went back into the house either, unless it was to beg for forgiveness, understanding or ten minutes to pack their bags and run away. The rough music was never organized. It seemed to occur to everybody at once. It played when a village thought that a man had beaten his wife too hard, or his dog too savagely, or if a married man and a married woman forgot that they were married to somebody else. There were other, darker crimes against the music too, but they weren’t talked about openly. Sometimes people could stop the music by mending their ways; quite often they packed up and moved away before the third night.

  Petty would not have taken the hint; Petty would have come out swinging. And there would have been a fight, and someone would have done something stupid, that is to say even more stupid than what Petty would have done. And then the Baron would find out and people might lose their livelihood, which would mean they would have to leave the Chalk and go for perhaps as much as ten miles to find work and a new life among strangers.

  Tiffany’s father was a man of keen instinct and he gently opened the barn door a few minutes later when the music was dying down. She knew it was a bit embarrassing for him; he was a well-respected man, but somehow, now, his daughter was more important than he was. A witch did not take orders from anybody, and she knew that he got teased about it by the other men.

  She smiled and he sat down on the hay next to her while the wild music found nothing to beat, stone or hang. Mr Aching didn’t waste words at the best of times. He looked around and his gaze fell on the little bundle, hastily wrapped in straw and sacking, that Tiffany had put where the girl would not see it. ‘So it’s true, she was with child, then?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  Tiffany’s father appeared to look at nothing at all. ‘Best if they don’t find him,’ he said after a decent interval.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tiffany.

  ‘Some of the lads were talking about stringing him up. We would have stopped them, of course, but it wo
uld have been a bad business, with people taking sides. It’s like poison in a village.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They sat in silence for a while. Then her father looked down at the sleeping girl. ‘What have you done for her?’ he asked.

  ‘Everything I can,’ said Tiffany.

  ‘And you did that taking-away-pain thingy you do?’

  She sighed. ‘Yes, but that’s not all I shall have to take away. I need to borrow a shovel, Dad. I’ll bury the poor little thing down in the woods, where no one will know.’

  He looked away. ‘I wish it wasn’t you doing this, Tiff. You’re not sixteen yet and I see you running around nursing people and bandaging people and who knows what chores. You shouldn’t have to be doing all of that.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Tiffany.

  ‘Why? ’ he asked again.

  ‘Because other people don’t, or won’t, or can’t, that’s why.’

  ‘But it’s not your business, is it?’

  ‘I make it my business. I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business,’ Tiffany said quickly.

  ‘Yes, but we all thought it was going to be about whizzing around on brooms and suchlike, not cutting old ladies’ toenails for them.’

  ‘But people don’t understand what’s needed,’ said Tiffany. ‘It’s not that they are bad; it’s just that they don’t think. Take old Mrs Stocking, who’s got nothing in the world except her cat and a whole lot of arthritis. People were getting her a bite to eat often enough, that is true, but no one was noticing that her toenails were so long they were tangling up inside her boots and so she’d not been able to take them off for a year! People around here are OK when it comes to food and the occasional bunch of flowers, but they are not around when things get a little on the messy side. Witches notice these things. Oh, there’s a certain amount of whizzing about, that’s true enough, but mostly it’s only to get quickly to somewhere there is a mess.’