I Shall Wear Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sometimes people could stop the music by mending their ways; quite often they packed up and moved away before the third night.
    Petty would not have taken the hint; Petty would have come out swinging. And there would have been a fight, and someone would have done something stupid, that is to say even more stupid than what Petty would have done. And then the Baron would find out and people might lose their livelihood, which would mean they would have to leave the Chalk and go for perhaps as much as ten miles to find work and a new life among strangers.
    Tiffany’s father was a man of keen instinct and he gently opened the barn door a few minutes later when the music was dying down. She knew it was a bit embarrassing for him; he was a well-respected man, but somehow, now, his daughter was more important than he was. A witch did not take orders from anybody, and she knew that he got teased about it by the other men.
    She smiled and he sat down on the hay next to her while the wild music found nothing to beat, stone or hang. Mr Aching didn’t waste words at the best of times. He looked around and his gaze fell on the little bundle, hastily wrapped in straw and sacking, that Tiffany had put where the girl would not see it. ‘So it’s true, she was with child, then?’
    ‘Yes, Dad.’
    Tiffany’s father appeared to look at nothing at all. ‘Best if they don’t find him,’ he said after a decent interval.
    ‘Yes,’ said Tiffany.
    ‘Some of the lads were talking about stringing him up. We would have stopped them, of course, but it would have been a bad business, with people taking sides. It’s like poison in a village.’
    ‘Yes.’
    They sat in silence for a while. Then her father looked down at the sleeping girl. ‘What have you done for her?’ he asked.
    ‘Everything I can,’ said Tiffany.
    ‘And you did that taking-away-pain thingy you do?’
    She sighed. ‘Yes, but that’s not all I shall have to take away. I need to borrow a shovel, Dad. I’ll bury the poor little thing down in the woods, where no one will know.’
    He looked away. ‘I wish it wasn’t you doing this, Tiff. You’re not sixteen yet and I see you running around nursing people and bandaging people and who knows what chores. You shouldn’t have to be doing all of that.’
    ‘Yes, I know,’ said Tiffany.
    ‘ Why? ’ he asked again.
    ‘Because other people don’t, or won’t, or can’t, that’s why.’
    ‘But it’s not your business, is it?’
    ‘I make it my business. I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business,’ Tiffany said quickly.
    ‘Yes, but we all thought it was going to be about whizzing around on brooms and suchlike, not cutting old ladies’ toenails for them.’
    ‘But people don’t understand what’s needed,’ said Tiffany. ‘It’s not that they are bad; it’s just that they don’t think. Take old Mrs Stocking, who’s got nothing in the world except her cat and a whole lot of arthritis. People were getting her a bite to eat often enough, that is true, but no one was noticing that her toenails were so long they were tangling up inside her boots and so she’d not been able to take them off for a year! People around here are OK when it comes to food and the occasional bunch of flowers, but they are not around when things get a little on the messy side. Witches notice these things. Oh, there’s a certain amount of whizzing about, that’s true enough, but mostly it’s only to get quickly to somewhere there is a mess.’
    Her father shook his head. ‘And you like doing this?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘ Why? ’
    Tiffany had to think about this, her father’s eyes never leaving her face. ‘Well, Dad, you know how Granny Aching always used to say, “Feed them as is hungry, clothe them as is naked, and speak up for them as has no voices”? Well, I reckon there is room in there for “Grasp for them as can’t bend, reach for them as can’t stretch, wipe for them as