The Wee Free Men Read online

Page 7

 

  “So they canna be a hag if they’re sleepin’, then?”

  “Hello?” whispered Tiffany.

  There was silence, embroidered with the breathing of her sisters. But in a way Tiffany couldn’t quite describe, it was the silence of people trying hard not to make any noise.

  She leaned down and looked under the bed. There was nothing there but the guzunder.

  The little man in the river had talked just like that.

  She lay back in the moonlight, listening until her ears ached.

  Then she wondered what the school for witches would be like and why she hadn’t seen it yet.

  She knew every inch of the country for two miles around. She liked the river best, with the backwaters where striped pike sun-bathed just above the weeds and the banks where kingfishers nested. There was a heronry a mile or so upriver, and she liked to creep up on the birds when they came down here to fish in the reeds, because there’s nothing funnier than a heron trying to get airborne in a hurry.

  She drifted off to sleep again, thinking about the land around the farm. She knew all of it. There were no secret places that she didn’t know about.

  But maybe there were magical doors. That’s what she’d make, if she had a magical school. There should be secret doorways everywhere, even hundreds of miles away. Look at a special rock by, say, moonlight, and there would be yet another door.

  But the school, now, the school. There would be lessons in broomstick riding and how to sharpen your hat to a point, and magical meals, and lots of new friends.

  “Is the bairn asleep?”

  “Aye, I canna hear her movin’. ”

  Tiffany opened her eyes in the darkness. The voices under the bed had a slightly echoey edge. Thank goodness the guzunder was nice and clean.

  “Right, let’s get oot o’ this wee pot, then. ”

  The voices moved off across the room. Tiffany’s ears tried to swivel to follow them.

  “Hey, see here, it’s a hoose! See, with wee chairies and things!”

  They’ve found the doll’s house, Tiffany thought.

  It was quite a large one, made by Mr. Block the farm carpenter when Tiffany’s oldest sister, who already had two babies of her own now, was a little girl. It wasn’t the most fragile of items. Mr. Block did not go in for 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 disemboweled something in his fat cat dreams.

  Tiffany waited a little while and then got out of bed and crept toward the bedroom door, avoiding the two squeaky floorboards. She went downstairs in the dark, found a chair by moonlight, fished the book of fairy 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 fairy 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 picture. Because although the stories made her angry, the pictures, ah, the pictures were the most wonderful 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 colors 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.

  And the odd thing was that, alone of all the fairy pictures in the book, this one looked as if it had been done by an artist who had painted what was in front of him. The other pictures, the ballet girls and the romper-suit babies, had a made-up, syrupy look. This one didn’t. This one said that the artist had been there…

  …at least in his head, Tiffany thought.

  She concentrated on the bottom left-hand corner, and there it was. She’d seen it before, but you had to know where to look. It was definitely a little red-haired man, naked except for a kilt and a skinny vest, scowling out of the picture. He looked very angry. And…Tiffany moved the candle to see more clearly…he was definitely making a gesture with his hand.

  Even if you didn’t know it was a rude one, it was easy to guess.

  She heard voices. She pushed the door open with her foot to hear them better, because a witch always listens to other people’s conversations.

  The sound was coming from the other side of the hedge, where there was a field that should have been full of nothing but sheep waiting to go to market. Sheep are not known for their conversation. She snuck out carefully in the misty dawn and found a small gap that had been made by rabbits, which just gave her a good enough view.

  There was a ram grazing near the hedge, and the conversation was coming from it or, rather, somewhere in the long grass underneath it. There seemed to be at least four speakers, who sounded bad-tempered.

  “Crivens! We wanna coo beastie, no’ a ship beastie!”

  “Ach, one’s as goo’ as t’other! C’mon, lads, a’ grab aholt o’ a leg!”

  “Aye, all the coos are inna shed, we tak what we can!”

  “Keep it doon, keep it doon, will ya!”

  “Ach, who’s listenin’? Okay, lads—yan…tan…teth’ra!”

  The sheep rose a little in the air, and bleated in alarm as it started to go across the field backward. Tiffany thought she saw a hint of red hair in the grass around its legs, but that vanished as the ram was carried away into the mist.

  She pushed her way through the hedge, ignoring the twigs that scratched at her. Granny Aching wouldn’t have let anyone get away with stealing a sheep, even if they were invisible.

  But the mist was thick, and now Tiffany heard noises from the henhouse.

  The disappearing-backward sheep could wait. Now the hens needed her. A fox had got in twice in the last two weeks, and the hens that hadn’t been taken were barely laying.

  Tiffany ran through the garden, catching her nightdress on pea sticks and gooseberry bushes, and flung open the henhouse door.