A Hat Full Of Sky

soothingly. “Was she clever at medicine?”
    Tiffany hesitated. “Um…only with sheep,” she said, calming down. “But she was very good. Especially if it involved turpentine. Mostly if it involved turpentine, actually. But always she…was…just…there. Even when she wasn’t actually there….”
    “Yes,” said Miss Level.
    “You know what I mean?” said Tiffany.
    “Oh, yes,” said Miss Level. “Your Granny Aching lived down on the uplands—”
    “No, up on the downland,” Tiffany corrected her.
    “Sorry, up on the downland, with the sheep, but people would look up sometimes, look up at the hills, knowing she was there somewhere, and say to themselves, ‘What would Granny Aching do?’ or ‘What would Granny Aching say if she found out?’ or ‘Is this the sort of thing Granny Aching would be angry about?’” said Miss Level. “Yes?”
    Tiffany narrowed her eyes. It was true. She remembered when Granny Aching had hit a peddler who’d overloaded his donkey and was beating it. Granny usually used only words, and not many of them. The man had been so frightened by her sudden rage that he’d stood there and taken it.
    It had frightened Tiffany, too. Granny, who seldom said anything without thinking about it for ten minutes beforehand, had struck the wretched man twice across the face in a brief blur of movement. And then news had got around, all along the Chalk. For a while, at least, people were a little more gentle with their animals. For months after that moment with the peddler, carters and drovers and farmers all across the downs would hesitate before raising a whip or a stick, and think: Suppose Granny Aching is watching?
    But—
    “How did you know that?” Tiffany asked.
    “Oh, I guessed. She sounds like a witch to me, whatever she thought she was. A good one, too.”
    Tiffany inflated with inherited pride.
    “Did she help people?” Miss Level added.
    The pride deflated a bit. The instant answer “yes” jumped onto her tongue, and yet…Granny Aching hardly ever came down off the hills, except for Hogswatch and the early lambing. You seldom saw her in the village unless the peddler who sold Jolly Sailor tobacco was late on his rounds, in which case she’d be down in a hurry and a flurry of greasy black skirts to cadge a pipeful off one of the old men.
    But there wasn’t a person on the Chalk, from the Baron down, who didn’t owe something to Granny. And what they owed to her, she made them pay to others. She always knew who was short of a favor or two.
    “She made them help one another,” she said. “She made them help themselves.”
    In the silence that followed, Tiffany heard the birds singing by the road. You got a lot of birds here, but she missed the high scream of the buzzards.
    Miss Level sighed. “Not many of us are that good,” she said. “If I was that good, we wouldn’t be going to visit old Mr. Weavall again.”
    Tiffany said “Oh dear” inside.
    Most days included a visit to Mr. Weavall. Tiffany dreaded them.
    Mr. Weavall’s skin was paper-thin and yellowish. He was always in the same old armchair, in a tiny room in a small cottage that smelled of old potatoes and was surrounded by a more or less overgrown garden. He’d be sitting bolt upright, his hands on two walking sticks, wearing a suit that was shiny with age, staring at the door.
    “I make sure he has something hot every day, although he eats like a bird,” Miss Level had said. “And old Widow Tussy down the lane does his laundry, such as it is. He’s ninety-one, you know.”
    Mr. Weavall had very bright eyes and chatted away to and at them as they tidied up the room. The first time Tiffany had met him, he’d called her Mary. Sometimes he still did so. And he’d grabbed her wrist with surprising force as she walked past…. It had been a real shock, that claw of a hand suddenly gripping her. You could see blue veins under the skin.
    “I shan’t be a burden on anyone,” he’d said urgently. “I got money put by for when I go. My boy, Toby, won’t have nothin’ to worry about. I can pay my way! I want the proper funeral show, right? With the black horses and the plumes and the mutes and a knife-and-fork tea for everyone afterward, I’ve written it all down, fair and square. Check in my box to make sure, will you? That witch woman’s always hanging around here!”
    Tiffany had given Miss Level a despairing look. She’d nodded and pointed to an old wooden box tucked under Mr.