I Shall Wear Midnight Read Online Free PDF

Petty, not good enough at all. Go away and become a better person and then, maybe, when you come back as a changed man, people here might find it in their hearts to say hello to you, or at least to nod.’
    She had been watching his eyes, and she knew the man. Something inside him was boiling up. He was ashamed, bewildered and resentful, and in those circumstances the Pettys of the world struck out.
    ‘Please don’t, Mr Petty,’ she said. ‘Do you have any idea what would happen to you if you hit a witch?’
    She thought to herself, With those fists, you could probably kill me with a punch and that is why I intend to keep you scared.
    ‘You set the rough music on me, didn’t ya?’
    She sighed. ‘No one controls the music, Mr Petty, you know that. It just turns up when people have had enough. No one knows where it starts. People look around, and catch one another’s eye, and give each other a little nod, and other people see that. Other people catch their eye and so, very slowly, the music starts and somebody picks up a spoon and bangs it on a plate, and then somebody else bangs a jug on the table and boots start to stamp on the floor, louder and louder. It is the sound of anger, it is the sound of people who have had enough. Do you want to face the music?’
    ‘You think you’re so clever, don’t ya?’ Petty snarled. ‘With your broomstick and your black magic, ordering ordin-ery folks about.’
    She almost admired him. There he was, with no friends in the world, covered in his own sick and – she sniffed: yes, there was urine dripping from the bottom of his nightshirt – yet he was stupid enough to talk back like that. ‘Not clever, Mr Petty, just cleverer than you. And that’s not hard.’
    ‘Yeah? But clever gets you into trouble. Slip of a gel like you, pokin’ about in other people’s business … What are you going to do when the music comes for you , eh?’
    ‘Run, Mr Petty. Get out of here. It’s your last chance,’ she said. And it probably was; she could hear individual voices now.
    ‘Well, would your majesty let a man put his boots on?’ he said sarcastically. He reached down for them beside the door, but you could read Mr Petty like a very small book, one with fingermarks on all the pages and a piece of bacon as a bookmark.
    He came up with fists swinging.
    She took one step backwards, caught his wrist and let the pain out. She felt it flow down her arm, leaving it tingling, into her cupped hand and into Petty: all his daughter’s pain in one second. It flung him clear across the kitchen and it must have burned away everything inside him except animal fear. He rushed at the rickety back door like a bull, broke through it and headed off into the darkness.
    She staggered back into the barn, where a lamp was burning. According to Granny Weatherwax, you did not feel the pain that you carried, but it was a lie. A necessary lie. You did feel the pain that you carried, and because it wasn’t actually your pain you could somehow bear it, but its departure left you feeling weak and shocked.
    When the charging, clanging mob arrived, Tiffany was sitting quietly in the barn with the sleeping girl. The noise went all around the house but did not go inside; that was one of the unwritten rules. It was hard to believe that the anarchy of the rough music had rules, but it did; it might go on for three nights, or stop at one, and no one came out of the house when the music was in the air and no one came sneaking home and went back into the house either, unless it was to beg for forgiveness, understanding or ten minutes to pack their bags and run away. The rough music was never organized. It seemed to occur to everybody at once. It played when a village thought that a man had beaten his wife too hard, or his dog too savagely, or if a married man and a married woman forgot that they were married to somebody else. There were other, darker crimes against the music too, but they weren’t talked about openly.