I Shall Wear Midnight

is.’ And before Tiffany could say a word, the girl hurried off among the bookshelves. She came back within a minute, much to Tiffany’s relief, and she was carrying a large, shiny leather volume which was suddenly dropped into Tiffany’s hands.
    ‘It’s a present. You’ve been kinder to me than I was to you.’
    ‘You can’t give me that! It’s part of the library! It’ll leave a gap!’
    ‘No, I insist,’ said Letitia. ‘I’m the only one who comes in here now, in any case. My mother keeps all the books of family history, genealogy and heraldry in her own room, and she’s the only one who is interested in them. Apart from me, the only other person who ever comes in here these days is Mr Tyler, and I think I hear him now, making his last round of the night. Well,’ she added, ‘he’s very old and very slow and it takes him about a week to go about his night watching, bearing in mind he sleeps through the day. Let’s go. He’ll have a heart attack if he actually finds anybody.’
    There was indeed a creaking sound of a distant doorknob.
    Letitia lowered her voice. ‘Do you mind if we sneak out the other way? He might have a nasty turn if he actually discovers anybody.’
    A light was coming down the long corridor, although you needed to watch it for quite some time to see that it was moving. Letitia opened the door to the outer world and they hurried onto what would have been the lawn if anyone had mown it in the past ten years. Tiffany got the impression that lawn mowing here went at the same decrepit speed as Mr Tyler. There was dew on the grass, and a certain sense that daylight was a distinct possibility sometime in the future. As soon as they reached the broomstick, Letitia made yet another muttered apology and hurried back into the sleeping house via another door, coming out again five minutes later carrying a large bag. ‘My mourning clothes,’ she said as the broomstick rose into the soft air. ‘It will be the old Baron’s funeral tomorrow, the poor man. My mother always travels with her funeral clothes. She says you never know when someone is going to drop down dead.’
    ‘That is a very interesting point of view, Letitia, but when you get back to the castle I would like you to tell Roland what you did, please. I don’t care about anything else, but please tell him about the spell you did.’ Tiffany waited. Letitia was sitting behind her and, right now, silent. Very silent. So much silence that you could hear it.
    Tiffany spent the time looking at the landscape as it wound past.Here and there smoke rose from kitchen fires, even though the sun was still below the horizon. Generally speaking, women in the villages raced to be the first to show smoke; it proved you were a busy housewife. She sighed. The thing about the broomstick was that when you rode it you looked down on people. You couldn’t help it, however much you tried. Human beings seemed to be nothing but a lot of scurrying dots. And when you started thinking like that, it was time you found the company of some other witches, to get your head straight. You shall not be a witch alone , the saying went. It wasn’t so much advice as a demand.
    Behind her, Letitia said, in a voice that sounded as though she had weighed out every word very carefully before deciding to speak, ‘Why aren’t you angrier with me?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘You know! After what I did! You are just being dreadfully … nice!’
    Tiffany was glad the girl couldn’t see her face and for that matter, she couldn’t see hers.
    ‘Witches don’t often get angry. All that shouting business never really gets anybody anywhere.’
    After another pause Letitia said, ‘If that is true, then maybe I’m not cut out to be a witch. I feel very angry sometimes.’
    ‘Oh, I feel very angry a lot of the time,’ said Tiffany, ‘but I just put it away somewhere until I can do something useful with it. That’s the thing about witchcraft – and wizardry, come to that. We don’t do much magic at the best of times, and when we do, we generally do it on ourselves. Now, look, the castle’s right ahead. I’ll drop you off on the roof, and frankly I’m looking forward to seeing how comfortable the straw is going to be.’
    ‘Look, I really am very, very—’
    ‘I know. You said. There’s no hard feelings, but you have to clear up your own mess. That’s another part of witchcraft, that is.’ And she added to herself: And don’t I know it!



Chapter