I Shall Wear Midnight

back home. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Amber,’ she said hopelessly …
    Three quarters of an hour later, Tiffany flew her stick back down towards the village, the screams still ringing in her head. Amber wasn’t going back. She had, in fact, made her reluctance to leave the mound abundantly clear by bracing her arms and legs in the hole and staying there screaming at the top of her voice every time Tiffany gave a gentle pull; when she let go, the girl went back to sit next to the kelda. So that was that. You try to make plans for people, and the people make other plans.
    However you looked at it, Amber had parents; pretty awful parents, you might say, and you might add that that was giving themthe best of it. At least they had to know that she was safe … And in any case, what possible harm could come to Amber in the care of the kelda?
    Mrs Petty slammed the door shut when she saw that it was Tiffany on the step, then opened it again almost immediately, in a flood of tears. The place stank, not just of stale beer and bad cooking but also of helplessness and bewilderment. A cat, the mangiest that Tiffany had ever seen, was almost certainly another part of the problem.
    Mrs Petty was frightened out of whatever wits she had and dropped to her knees on the floor, pleading incoherently. Tiffany made her a cup of tea, which was no errand for the squeamish, given that such crockery as the cottage possessed was piled up in the stone sink, which was otherwise filled with slimy water that occasionally bubbled. Tiffany spent several minutes of heavy scrubbing before she had a cup she’d care to drink from, and even then something was rattling inside the kettle.
    Mrs Petty sat on the one chair that had all four legs and babbled about how her husband was really a good man provided his dinner was on time and Amber wasn’t naughty. Tiffany had grown used to that sort of desperate conversation when she was ‘going round the houses’ up in the mountains. They were generated by fear – fear of what would happen to the speaker when they were left alone again. Granny Weatherwax had a way of dealing with this, which was to put the fear of Granny Weatherwax into absolutely everyone, but Granny Weatherwax had had years of being, well, Granny Weatherwax.
    Careful non-aggressive questioning brought news that Mr Petty was asleep upstairs, and Tiffany simply told Mrs Petty that Amber was being looked after by a very kind lady while she healed . Mrs Petty started to cry again. The misery of the place was getting on Tiffany’s nerves too, and she tried to stop herself being cruel; buthow hard was it to slosh a bucket of cold water over a stone floor and swoosh it out of the door with a broom? How hard was it to make some soap? You could make quite a serviceable one out of wood ash and animal fat. And, as her mother had said once, ‘No one is too poor to wash a window,’ although her father, just to annoy her mother, occasionally changed it to, ‘No one is too poor to wash a widow.’ But where could you start with this family? And whatever it was that was in the kettle was still rattling, presumably trying to get out.
    Most of the women in the villages had grown up to be tough. You needed to be tough to bring up a family on a farm labourer’s wages. There was a local saying, a sort of recipe for dealing with a trouble-some husband. It was: ‘Tongue pie, cold barn and the copper stick.’ It meant that a troublesome husband got a nagging instead of his dinner, he would be shoved out to the barn to sleep, and if he raised his hand to his wife, he might get a good wallop from the long stick every cottage had for stirring the washing in the wash-tub. They usually learned the error of their ways before the rough music played.
    ‘Wouldn’t you like a short holiday away from Mr Petty?’ Tiffany suggested.
    The woman, pale as a slug and skinny as a broom, looked horrified. ‘Oh no!’ she gasped. ‘He wouldn’t know what to do without me!’
    And then … it all went wrong, or rather, a lot more wrong than it was already. And it was all so innocent, because the woman was so downcast. ‘Well, at least I can clean your kitchen for you,’ Tiffany said cheerfully. It would have been fine if she had simply grabbed a broom and got to work but, oh no, she had to go and look up at the grey, cobweb-filled ceiling and say, ‘All right, I know you’re here, you always follow me, so make yourself useful and clean this kitchen