I Shall Wear Midnight

limited amount of slopping. He put them down quickly and turned to go.
    ‘No, stay here, Preston,’ she commanded. ‘I want you to see what I do, so that if anyone asks, you can tell them the truth.’
    The guard nodded mutely. She was impressed. She placed one of the buckets beside the slab and knelt down by it, put one hand in the chilly bucket, pressed the other hand against the stone of the slab and whispered to herself, ‘Balance is everything.’
    Anger helped. It was amazing how useful it could be, if you saved it up until it could do some good, just as she had told Letitia. She heard the young guard gasp as the water in the bucket began to steam, and then to bubble.
    He jumped to his feet. ‘I understand, miss! I’ll take the boiling bucket away and bring you another cold one, yes?’
    Three buckets of boiling water had been tipped away by the time the air in the crypt once again had the chill of the midwinter. Tiffany walked up the steps with her teeth very nearly chattering. ‘My granny would have loved to be able to do something like that,’ Preston whispered. ‘She always said the dead don’t like the heat. You put cold into the stone, right?’
    ‘Actually, I moved heat out of the slab and the air and put it in the bucket of water,’ said Tiffany. ‘It’s not exactly magic. It’s just a … a skill. You just have to be a witch to do it, that’s all.’
    Preston sighed. ‘I cured my granny’s chickens of fowl crop. I had to cut them open to clean up the mess, and then I sewed them up again. Not one of them died. And then when my mum’s dog got run over by a wagon, I cleaned him up, pushed all the bits back and he ended up right as rain except for the leg I couldn’t save, but I carved him a wooden one, with a leather harness and everything, and he still chases wagons!’
    Tiffany tried not to look doubtful. ‘Cutting into chickens to cure fowl crop hardly ever works,’ she said. ‘I know a pig witch who treats chickens when necessary, and she said it never worked for her.’
    ‘Ah, but maybe she didn’t have the knowin’ of twister root,’ said Preston cheerfully. ‘If you mix the juice with a little pennyroyal, they heal really well. My granny had the knowing of the roots and she passed it on to me.’
    ‘Well,’ said Tiffany, ‘if you can sew up a chicken’s gizzard then you could mend a broken heart. Listen, Preston, why don’t you get yourself apprenticed to be a doctor?’
    They had reached the door to the Baron’s study. Preston knocked on it and then opened it for Tiffany. ‘It’s them letters you get to put after your name,’ he whispered. ‘They are very expensive letters! It might not cost money to become a witch, miss, but when you need them letters, oh, don’t you need that money!’
    Roland was standing facing the door when Tiffany stepped in, and his mouth was full of spill words, tumbling over themselves not to be said. He did manage to say, ‘Er, Miss Aching … I mean, Tiffany, my fiancée assures me that we are all the victim of a magical plot aimed at your good self. I do hope you will forgive any misunderstanding on our part, and I trust that we have not inconvenienced you too much, and may I add that I take some heart from the fact that you were clearly able to escape from our little dungeon. Er …’
    Tiffany wanted to shout, ‘Roland, do you remember that we first met when I was four years old and you were seven, running around in the dust with only our vests on? I liked you better when you didn’t talk like some old lawyer with a broomstick stuck up his bum. You sound as if you are addressing a public meeting.’ But instead, she said, ‘Did Letitia tell you everything?’
    Roland looked sheepish. ‘I rather suspect that she did not, Tiffany, but she was very forthright. I may go so far as to say that she was emphatic.’ Tiffany tried not to smile. He looked like a man who was beginning to understand some of the facts of married life. He cleared his throat. ‘She tells me that we have been a victim of some kind of magical disease, which is currently trapped inside a book in Keepsake Hall?’ It certainly sounded like a question, and she wasn’t surprised he was puzzled.
    ‘Yes, that’s true.’
    ‘And … apparently, everything is all right now she has taken your head out of a bucket of sand.’ He looked truly lost at this point, and Tiffany didn’t blame him.
    ‘I think things may have got a bit garbled,’ she said