Maskerade

loud. “‘Bye A Lancre Witch.’ Hah! Why dint you put your own name on it, eh? Books’ve got to have a name on ’em so’s everyone knows who’s guilty.”
    “It’s my gnome de plum ,” said Nanny. “Mr. Goatberger the Almanac man said it’d make it sound more mysterious.”
    Granny cast her gimlet gaze to the bottom of the crowded cover, where it said, in very small lettering, “CXXviith Printyng. More Than Twenty Thoufand Solde! One half dollar.”
    “You sent them some money to get it all printed?” she said.
    “Only a couple of dollars,” said Nanny. “Damn good job they made of it, too. And then they sent the money back afterward, only they got it wrong and sent three dollars extra.”
    Granny Weatherwax was grudgingly literate but keenly numerate. She assumed that anything written down was probably a lie, and that applied to numbers, too. Numbers were used only by people who wanted to put one over on you.
    Her lips moved silently as she thought about numbers.
    “Oh,” she said, quietly. “And that was it, was it? You never wrote to him again?”
    “Not on your life. Three dollars, mind. I dint want him saying he wanted ’em back.”
    “I can see that,” said Granny, still dwelling in the world of numbers. She wondered how much it cost to do a book. It couldn’t be a lot: they had sort of printing mills to do the actual work.
    “After all, there’s a lot you can do with three dollars,” said Nanny.
    “Right enough,” said Granny. “You ain’t got a pencil about you, have you? You being a literary type and all?”
    “I got a slate,” said Nanny.
    “Pass it over, then.”
    “I bin keeping it by me in case I wake up in the night and I get an idea for a recipe, see,” said Nanny.
    “Good,” said Granny vaguely. The slate pencil squeaked across the gray tablet. The paper must cost something. And you’d probably have to tip someone a couple of pennies to sell it… Angular figures danced from column to column.
    “I’ll make another cup of tea, shall I?” said Nanny, relieved that the conversation appeared to be coming to a peaceful end.
    “Hmm?” said Granny. She stared at the result and drew two lines under it. “But you enjoyed it, did you?” she called out. “The writin’?”
    Nanny Ogg poked her head around the scullery door. “Oh, yes. The money dint matter,” she said.
    “You’ve never been very good at numbers, have you?” said Granny. Now she drew a circle around the final figure.
    “Oh, you know me, Esme,” said Nanny cheerfully. “I couldn’t subtract a fart from a plate of beans.”
    “That’s good, ’cos I reckon this Master Goatberger owes you a bit more than you got, if there’s any justice in the world,” said Granny.
    “Money ain’t everything, Esme. What I say is, if you’ve got your health—”
    “I reckon, if there’s any justice, it’s about four or five thousand dollars,” said Granny quietly.
    There was a crash from the scullery.
    “So it’s a good job the money don’t matter,” Granny Weatherwax went on. “It’d be a terrible thing otherwise. All that money, matterin’.”
    Nanny Ogg’s white face appeared around the edge of the door. “He never!”
    “Could be a bit more,” said Granny.
    “It never!”
    “You just adds up and divides and that.”
    Nanny Ogg stared in horrified fascination at her own fingers.
    “But that’s a—” She stopped. The only word she could think of was “fortune” and that wasn’t adequate. Witches didn’t operate in a cash economy. The whole of the Ramtops, by and large, got by without the complications of capital. Fifty dollars was a fortune. A hundred dollars was a, was a, was…well, it was two fortunes, that was what it was.
    “It’s a lot of money,” she said weakly. “What couldn’t I do with money like that?”
    “Dunno,” said Granny Weatherwax. “What did you do with the three dollars?”
    “Got it in a tin up the chimney,” said Nanny Ogg.
    Granny nodded approvingly. This was the kind of good fiscal practice she liked to see.
    “Beats me why people’d fall over themselves to read a cookery book, though,” she added. “I mean, it’s not the sort of thing that—”
    The room fell silent. Nanny Ogg shuffled her boots.
    Granny said, in a voice laden with a suspicion that was all the worse because it wasn’t yet quite sure what it was suspicious of: “It is a cookery book, isn’t it?”
    “Oh, yes,” said Nanny hurriedly, avoiding Granny’s gaze.