I Shall Wear Midnight

ripe. They start to get all,well, manky after a while.’ She raised her voice. ‘It’s only me, Mavis, nothing to be frightened of!’
    With a sound like a sigh, the headless woman turned and began to walk back up the corridor.
    ‘The pumpkin was my idea,’ Letitia continued chattily. ‘She was just impossible to deal with before that. Looking for her head, you know? The pumpkin gives her some comfort, and frankly I don’t think she knows the difference, poor soul. She wasn’t executed, by the way. I think she wants everybody to know that. It was simply a freak accident involving a flight of stairs, a cat and a scythe.’
    And this is the girl who spends all her time in tears, thought Tiffany. But this is her place. Aloud, she said, ‘Any more ghosts to show me, just in case I want to wet myself again?’
    ‘Well, not now,’ said Letitia, setting off along the corridor. ‘The screaming skeleton stopped screaming when I gave him an old teddy bear, although I’m not certain why that worked and, oh yes, the ghost of the first duke now sticks to haunting the lavatory next to the dining room, which we don’t use very often. He has a habit of pulling the chain at inconvenient moments, but that’s better than the rains of blood we used to have.’
    ‘You are a witch.’ The words came out of Tiffany’s mouth all by themselves, unable to stay in the privacy of her mind.
    The girl looked at her in astonishment. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘We both know how it goes, don’t we? Long blonde hair, milk-white skin, noble – well, a reasonably noble birth – and rich, at least technically. I’m officially a lady.’
    ‘You know,’ said Tiffany, ‘maybe it’s wrong to base one’s future on a book of fairy stories. Normally, girls of the princess persuasion don’t help out distressed headless ghosts by giving them a pumpkin to carry. As for stopping the screaming skeleton screaming by giving it a teddy bear, I have to say I am impressed. That is what Granny Weatherwax calls headology. Most of the craft isheadology, when you get right down to it: headology and boffo.’
    Letitia looked flustered and gratified at the same time, making her face blotch white and pink. It was, Tiffany had to agree, the kind of face that peered out of tower windows, waiting for a knight with nothing better to do with his time than save its owner from dragons, monsters and, if all else failed, boredom.
    ‘You don’t have to do anything about it,’ Tiffany added. ‘The pointy hat is optional. But if Miss Tick was here, she would definitely suggest a career. It is not good to be a witch alone.’
    They had reached the end of the corridor. Letitia turned another creaky doorknob, which complained as the door opened, and so did the door. ‘I’ve certainly found that out,’ said Letitia. ‘And Miss Tick is … ?’
    ‘She travels around the country finding girls who have the talent for the craft,’ said Tiffany. ‘They say that you don’t find witchcraft, it finds you, and generally it’s Miss Tick who taps you on the shoulder. She’s a witchfinder, but I don’t suppose she goes into many big houses. They make witches nervous. Oh my!’ And this was because Letitia had lit an oil lamp. The room was full of bookcases, and the books on them gleamed. These weren’t cheap modern books; these were books bound in leather, and not just leather, but leather from clever cows who had given their lives for literature after a happy existence in the very best pastures. The books gleamed as Letitia moved around the large room lighting other lamps. She hauled them up towards the ceiling on their long chains, which swung gently as she pulled so that the shine from the books mixed with the gleam from the brasswork until the room seemed to be full of rich, ripe gold.
    Letitia was clearly pleased by the way Tiffany stood and stared. ‘My great-grandfather was a huge collector,’ she said. ‘Do you see all the polished brass? That’s not for show, that’s for the point-three-0-three bookworm, which can move so fast that it can bore a hole all the way through an entire shelf of books in a fraction of asecond. Hah, but not when they run into solid brass at the speed of sound! The library used to be bigger, but my uncle Charlie ran away with all the books on … I think it was called erotica? I’m not sure, but I can’t find it on any map. I may be the only one who comes in here now, anyway. Mother thinks that reading makes