The Wee Free Men

secret places that she didn’t know about.
    But maybe there were magical doors. That’s what she’d make, if she had a magical school. There should be secret doorways everywhere, even hundreds of miles away. Look at a special rock by, say, moonlight, and there would be yet another door.
    But the school, now, the school. There would be lessons in broomstick riding and how to sharpen your hat to a point, and magical meals, and lots of new friends.
    “Is the bairn asleep?”
    “Aye, I canna hear her movin’.”
    Tiffany opened her eyes in the darkness. The voices under the bed had a slightly echoey edge. Thank goodness the guzunder was nice and clean.
    “Right, let’s get oot o’ this wee pot, then.”
    The voices moved off across the room. Tiffany’s ears tried to swivel to follow them.
    “Hey, see here, it’s a hoose! See, with wee chairies and things!”
    They’ve found the doll’s house, Tiffany thought.
    It was quite a large one, made by Mr. Block the farm carpenter when Tiffany’s oldest sister, who already had two babies of her own now, was a little girl. It wasn’t the most fragile of items. Mr. Block did not go in for delicate work. But over the years the girls had decorated it with bits of material and some rough-and-ready furniture.
    By the sound of it the owners of the voices thought it was a palace.
    “Hey, hey, hey, we’re in the cushy stuff noo! There’s a beid in this room. Wi’ pillows!”
    “Keep it doon—we don’t want any o’ them to wake up!”
    “Crivens, I’m as quiet as a wee moose! Aargh! There’s sojers!”
    “Whut d’ye mean, sojers?”
    “There’s redcoats in the room!”
    They’ve found the toy soldiers, thought Tiffany, trying not to breathe loudly.
    Strictly speaking, they had no place in the doll’s house, but Wentworth wasn’t old enough for them, and so they’d got used as innocent bystanders back in those days when Tiffany had made tea parties for her dolls. Well, what passed for dolls. Such toys as there were in the farmhouse had to be tough to survive intact through the generations and didn’t always manage it. Last time Tiffany had tried to arrange a party, the guests had been a rag doll with no head, two wooden soldiers, and three quarters of a small teddy bear.
    Thuds and bangs came from the direction of the doll’s house.
    “I got one! Hey, pal, can yer mammie sew? Stitch this! Aargh! He’s got a heid on him like a tree!”
    “Crivens! There’s a body here wi’ no heid at a’!”
    “Aye, nae wonder, ’cause here’s a bear! Feel ma boot, ye washoon!”
    It seemed to Tiffany that although the owners of the three voices were fighting things that couldn’t possibly fight back, including a teddy bear with only one leg, the fight still wasn’t going all one way.
    “I got ’im! I got ’im! I got ’im! Yer gonna get a gummer, ye wee hard disease!”
    “Someone bit ma leg! Someone bit ma leg!”
    “Come here! Ach, yer fightin’ yersels, ye eejits! Ah’m fed up wi’ the pairy yees!”
    Tiffany felt Ratbag stir. He might be fat and lazy, but he was lightning fast when it came to leaping on small creatures. She couldn’t let him get the…whatever they were, however bad they sounded.
    She coughed loudly.
    “See?” said a voice from the doll’s house. “Yer woked them up! Ah’m offski!”
    Silence fell again, and this time, Tiffany decided after a while, it was the silence of no one there rather than the silence of people being incredibly quiet. Ratbag went back to sleep, twitching occasionally as he disemboweled something in his fat cat dreams.
    Tiffany waited a little while and then got out of bed and crept toward the bedroom door, avoiding the two squeaky floorboards. She went downstairs in the dark, found a chair by moonlight, fished the book of fairy tales off Granny’s shelf, then lifted the latch on the back door and stepped out into the warm midsummer night.
    There was a lot of mist around, but a few stars were visible overhead and there was a gibbous moon in the sky. Tiffany knew it was gibbous because she’d read in the Almanack that gibbous meant what the moon looked like when it was just a bit fatter than half full, and so she made a point of paying attention to it around those times just so that she could say to herself: “Ah, I see the moon’s very gibbous tonight….”
    It’s possible that this tells you more about Tiffany than she would want you to know.
    Against the rising moon the downs were a black wall