Snuff

and the big front door firmly shut, Sybil said, ‘Well, Sam, I understand, I really do, but they were our guests.’
    ‘I know, and I’m sorry, but it’s as if they don’t think. I just wanted to shake their ideas up a bit.’
    Lady Sybil examined a sherry bottle and topped up her glass. ‘Surely you don’t think that the blacksmith really had the right to fight you for this house?’
    Sam wished that he could drink, right now. ‘No, of course not. I mean, there wouldn’t be an end to it. People have been winning and losing on the old roulette wheel of fate for thousands of years. I know that, but you know that I think that if you’re going to stop the wheel then you have to spare some thought for the poor buggers who’re sitting on zero.’
    His wife gently took his hand. ‘But we endowed the hospital, Sam. You know how expensive that is. Dr Lawn will train up anyone who shows an aptitude for medicine, even if they, in his words, turn up with the arse hanging out of their trousers. He’s even letting girls train! As doctors ! He even employs Igorinas! We’re changing things, Sam, a bit at a time, by helping people help themselves. And look at the Watch! These days a kid is proud to say that his father or even his mother is a watchman. And people need pride.’
    Vimes grasped her hand. He said, ‘Thank you for being kind to the boy from Cockbill Street.’
    She laughed this away. ‘I waited a long time for you to turn up, Samuel Vimes, and I don’t intend to let you go to waste!’
    This seemed to Sam Vimes a good time to say, ‘You don’t mind if Willikins and I take a little stroll to Dead Man’s Copse before I go to bed?’
    Lady Sybil gave him the smile women give to husbands and small boys. ‘Well, I can hardly say no, and there is a strange atmosphere. I’m glad Willikins is involved. And it’s very pleasant up there. Perhaps you’ll hear the nightingale.’
    Vimes gave her a little kiss before going up to change and said, ‘Actually, dear, I’m hoping to hear a canary.’
    Probably no duke or even Commander of the City Watch had found in their dressing room anything like that which lay on the bed of Sam Vimes right now. Pride of place was for a billhook, which was a useful agricultural implement. He had seen a couple of them being carried earlier in the day. He reminded himself that ‘agricultural implement’ did not mean ‘not a weapon’. They turned up sometimes among the street gangs and were almost as much to be feared as a troll with a headache.
    Then there was a truncheon. Vimes’s own truncheon, which his manservant had thoughtfully brought along. Of course, it had silver-work on it because it was the ceremonial truncheon of the Commander of the Watch, and wasn’t a weapon at all, oh dear me, no. On the other hand, Vimes knew himself not to be a cheese monger and therefore it would be somewhat difficult to explain why he had a foot of cheesewire about his person. That was going to stay here, but he’d take the billhook. It was a pretty poor lookout if a man walking on his own land couldn’t take the opportunity to trim a branch or two. But what to make of the pile of bamboo which resolved itself into a breastplate of articulated sections and a most unfetching bamboo helmet? There was a small note on the bed. It said, in Willikins’ handwriting, The gamekeeper’s friend, commander. Yours too!!!
    Vimes grunted and hit the breastplate with his truncheon. It flexed like a living thing and the truncheon bounced across the room.
    Well, we live and learn, Vimes thought, or perhaps more importantly, we learn and live. He crept downstairs and let himself out into the night … which was a chequerboard of black and white. He’d forgotten that outside the city, where the smogs, smokes and steams rendered the world into a thousand shades of grey, out in places like this there was black and white, and, if you were looking for a metaphor, there was one, right there.
    He knew the way to the hill, you couldn’t miss it. The moon illuminated the way as if it had wanted to make things easier for him. Actual agriculture ran out around here. The fields gave way to furze, and to turf nibbled by rabbits into something resembling the baize of a snooker table … although given that rabbits did other things than just eat grass, he would play snooker with a lot of very small balls. Bunnies scattered as he climbed and he worried that he was making too much noise, but it was his land and