Hogfather

MAKE HEAD OR TAIL OF IT, TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH. HOW CAN I TELL IF HE’S BEEN NAUGHTY OR NICE, FOR EXAMPLE?
    “Oh, well…I don’t know…Has he hung his clothes up, that sort of thing…”
    AND IF HE HAS BEEN GOOD I MAY GIVE HIM THIS KLATCHIAN WAR CHARIOT WITH REAL SPINNING SWORD BLADES?
    “That’s right.”
    AND IF HE’S BEEN BAD?
    Albert scratched his head. “When I was a lad, you got a bag of bones. ’s’mazing how kids got better behaved toward the end of the year.”
    OH DEAR. AND NOW?
    Albert held a package up to his ear and rustled it. “Sounds like socks.”
    SOCKS.
    “Could be a woolly vest.”
    SERVE HIM RIGHT, IF I MAY VENTURE TO EXPRESS AN OPINION…
    Albert looked across the snowy rooftops and sighed. This wasn’t right. He was helping because, well, Death was his master and that’s all there was to it, and if the master had a heart it would be in the right place. But…
    “Are you sure we ought to be doing this, master?”
    Death stopped, halfway out of the chimney.
    CAN YOU THINK OF A BETTER ALTERNATIVE, ALBERT?
    And that was it. Albert couldn’t.
    Someone had to do it.

    There were bears on the street again.
    Susan ignored them and didn’t even make a point of not treading on the cracks.
    They just stood around, looking a bit puzzled and slightly transparent, visible only to children and Susan. News like Susan gets around. The bears had heard about the poker. Nuts and berries, their expressions seemed to say. That’s what we’re here for. Big sharp teeth? What big shar—Oh, these big sharp teeth?…They’re just for, er, cracking nuts. And some of these berries can be really vicious.
    The city’s clocks were striking six when she got back to the house. She was allowed her own key. It wasn’t as if she was a servant, exactly.
    You couldn’t be a duchess and a servant. But it was all right to be a governess. It was understood that it wasn’t exactly what you were, it was merely a way of passing the time until you did what every girl, or gel, was supposed to do in life, i.e., marry some man. It was understood that you were playing.
    The parents were in awe of her. She was the daughter of a duke, whereas Mr. Gaiter was a man to be reckoned with in the wholesale boots and shoes business. Mrs. Gaiter was bucking for a transfer into the Upper Classes, which she currently hoped to achieve by reading books on etiquette. She treated Susan with the kind of worried deference she thought was due to anyone who’d known the difference between a serviette and a napkin from birth.
    Susan had never before come across the idea that you could rise in Society by, as it were, gaining marks, especially since such noblemen as she’d met in her father’s house had used neither serviette nor napkin but a state of mind, which was “Drop it on the floor, the dogs’ll eat it.”
    When Mrs. Gaiter had tremulously asked her how one addressed the second cousin of a queen, Susan had replied without thinking, “We called him Jamie, usually,” and Mrs. Gaiter had had to go and have a headache in her room.
    Mr. Gaiter just nodded when he met her in a passage and never said very much to her. He was pretty sure he knew where he stood in boots and shoes and that was that.
    Gawain and Twyla, who’d been named by people who apparently loved them, had been put to bed by the time Susan got in, at their own insistence. It’s a widely held belief at a certain age that going to bed early makes tomorrow come faster.
    She went to tidy up the schoolroom and get things ready for the morning, and began to pick up the things the children had left lying around. Then something tapped at a window pane.
    She peered out at the darkness, and then opened the window. A drift of snow fell down outside.
    In the summer the window opened into the branches of a cherry tree. In the winter dark, they were little gray lines where the snow had settled on them.
    “Who’s that?” said Susan.
    Something hopped through the frozen branches.
    “Tweet tweet tweet, would you believe?” said the raven.
    “Not you again?”
    “You wanted maybe some dear little robin? Listen, your grand—”
    “Go away!”
    Susan slammed the window and pulled the curtains across. She put her back to them, to make sure, and tried to concentrate on the room. It helped to think about…normal things.
    There was the Hogswatch tree, a rather smaller version of the grand one in the hall. She’d helped the children to make paper decorations for it. Yes. Think