Next morning, whilst waiting for Nanny to drop by, Tiffany went to the lean-to with some food. The boy was asleep. She coughed carefully and the boy jumped at the sound.
‘Very well, Geoffrey, now tell me the truth. Are you running away from somebody? Parents, perhaps?’
‘No, I’m not,’ said Geoffrey, taking a mouthful of the bread Tiffany had brought but pushing the slice of ham to one side.
You little fibber, thought Tiffany, like any witch good at spotting a lie.fn1 She sighed. ‘Are you just running away from home then?’
‘Well, you could say that, mistress, but I am sixteen and I just wanted to leave.’
‘Don’t get on with your father, do you?’ said Tiffany, and she saw the boy metaphorically jump, as if she’d hit a nerve.
‘How could you see that, mistress!’
Tiffany sighed. ‘It does say witch on the door, doesn’t it? I might not be much older than you, but you aren’t the first runaway I’ve dealt with, and I’m absolutely certain there will be many more. Although,’ she added, ‘never one as highborn as you are, Mister Geoffrey. Good coat, you see. Well now, of what use can you be to me and my steading, Geoffrey?’
‘Oh, quite a lot, mistress,’ he said, trying to sound definite but just seeming hopeful.
And at that moment Nanny Ogg came round the corner of the cottage, not there one minute and then suddenly there, which was, Tiffany knew, Nanny’s way. She looked at Geoffrey, made an instant judgement, then winked at Tiffany and said, ‘Anythin’ going on, Tiff?’ Tiffany saw a suggestive grin on Nanny’s wrinkled face, as if an apple was suddenly leering at her. Geoffrey looked as if he was going to flee.
‘It’s all right, Nanny. Meet Geoffrey here,’ Tiffany said sharply. ‘He wants to be a witch.’
‘Really?’ Nanny chortled. ‘You mean he wants to do magic. Send ’im to the wizards!’
Now Geoffrey looked like a little fawn about to dash away. Nanny Ogg could affect people like that.
‘No, he wants to be a witch, Nanny. Do you understand?’
Tiffany saw a naughty little gleam in Nanny’s eyes as she said, ‘So, he wants to be a witch, does he? Perhaps he should learn what us witches has to put up with before he decides proper like. I mean, he might still want to give them wizards a go if he’s got any magic in ’im. I know, make him a back-house boy.’ A backhouse boy was like a male scullery maid, doing all the odd, and usually dirty, jobs around the homestead. Things like killing chickens and stringing pheasants, cleaning shoes, peeling potatoes and any other task that was messy, and occasionally dangerous. There was usually one on Home Farm, gradually learning what farming was all about. ‘I tells you what,’ Nanny continued, looking at the trembling boy, ‘let’s try him out with Mr Nimlet. You knows what his toenails is like.’
Yes, like all old men’s toenails, Tiffany thought. She looked at the boy who was so terribly anxious to be helpful and took pity on him and said, ‘There’s more to being a witch than you think, Geoffrey, but if you’d like to be my back-house boy, we’ll see how you go. And first of all, I’d like you to do something about an old man’s horrible toenails.’
‘You may need a shield,’ said Nanny Ogg.
The boy looked at Tiffany questioningly.
‘Oh dear,’ said Tiffany. ‘Mr Nimlet’s toenails tend to be thick and strong and very, very difficult to deal with. You need really sharp secateurs, and even then the blessed things go pinging off around the room. You have to be careful about your eyes too.’ She studied the boy’s face; he looked determined to meet any obstacle, even flyaway toenails. Nanny was grinning, so Tiffany said, ‘I’ve got a birth to see to. Nanny, would you be kind enough to take Geoffrey to Mr Nimlet and see how he does. Oh, and tell him to remember to collect the clippings – Rob Anybody has a use for them, so he does.’
‘Can I take Mephistopheles with me?’ Geoffrey asked.
Nanny spun on her heels. ‘Mephiswhat?’ she said slowly.
‘My goat,’ Geoffrey said, pointing towards the paddock where Mephistopheles was investigating the remains of the dandelion patch. ‘Or rather, he is his own goat, but we travel together. He is a very clever companion.’
Nanny snorted.
‘See,’ Geoffrey added proudly as they watched Mephistopheles daintily cross the paddock and nose open the door of the little shed by the beech tree. ‘He has even learned to use the privy.’
And Nanny – for once in her life – was speechless.
fn1 Spotting the truth was much harder.
CHAPTER 10
Treasure
DEEP IN THE heart of Fairyland, the triumphant Peaseblossom surveyed his court.
Lord Lankin – tall, elegant, a tunic of moss and gorse slung casually over his darkened skin – lounged by his side, toying with a bronze dagger.
‘I am your king now,’ Peaseblossom declared.
There was silence in the great hall as the elves considered this development and their chances. And one bold elf said, ‘What about the King himself? Down in the barrow? What do you think he will say?’
‘Something like this,’ said Peaseblossom, hurling a feathered arrow at the elf, striking him down. Injured, but not dead. Good, Peaseblossom thought. More fun for me later. He gestured to his warriors and the stricken elf was dragged away. ‘To hell with the King!’ he said, and this time there was no argument.
Every elf knew that Peaseblossom wanted a showdown with the world of humans, of dwarfs and goblins and all the other peoples, wanted elves to run free and fierce through that world once again.
‘We have been elves since the dawn of time,’ Peaseblossom thundered. ‘Too long have humans had the upper hand. Upstart goblins will feel our wrath! The hootings of mechanical rubbish will be swept away! We will take back the world we have been denied!’ He smiled, and added softly, ‘Those who are not with us will suffer.’
In the world of the train and the swarf, iron could kill elves. But no elf wanted to be the one to feel the dreadful temper of Peaseblossom by gainsaying him. And they were very aware that he knew exactly how to make a short word like ‘suffer’ turn into a very long experience.
And as their new king’s glamour built and he stood tall and strong above them, they felt a sense of their world waking up once more.
‘What fools these mortals be!’ Peaseblossom roared. ‘They think they can stop us? They need us. They call to us. And we will come. We will make them want what they can’t have and we will give them nothing but our laughter. We will take everything!’
And the elves cheered.
Becky Pardon and Nancy Upright, dressed in their best, stood in trepidation in front of Miss Tick, who said, ‘It’s not all spells and broomsticks. It’s heavy work, sometimes. Sometimes quite nasty. Yes, Becky?’
‘I was there as my granddad died,’ said Becky, ‘and I watched all the things that had to be done. My dad said I shouldn’t, but my mother said, “Let the girl see. She’ll find out sooner or later how things are in the world.”’
‘What I want to know, girls, is that you can deal with magic. Both of you ought to have some basic magic, like blowing out a candle just by thought. What do you think we do with magic?’
Becky said, ‘You can cure warts. I know that one. My granny could do that. Magic can make you beautiful.’ Her tone was wistful, and Miss Tick looked a little more closely at her. Oh, a rather nasty birthmark on one cheek.
‘You can magic someone to be your best friend,’ Nancy added. ‘Or’ – with a bit of a blush – ‘make a boy like you.’
Miss Tick laughed. ‘Girls, I can tell you this, magic won’t make you beautiful if you are not. And it certainly won’t make you popular. It is not a toy.’
Her face even redder, Nancy said, ‘But about boys . . .’
Miss Tick’s face did not move a muscle, and then she said, ‘What about them?’ Nancy’s blush was now impressive – if she went any redder, Miss Tick thought, she would look like a lobster. Miss Tick continued, ‘You don’t have to use
spells to get boys, Nancy, and if you wish to know more about that, I daresay Mistress Tiffany will point you towards Nanny Ogg, or possibly your grandmother.’
‘Do you have a beau, mistress?’ asked Nancy.
‘No,’ said Miss Tick. ‘They get in the way. Now, let’s see if you can make a shamble. If you can’t do that you are very unlikely to be a witch. A shamble will give you focus.’ She flung her hand into the air and something was there. The very air seemed to be boiling. Dancing, fluttering . . . alive. And Miss Tick said, ‘See how the air moves, how it waits – it’s the place where my shamble could be. Where it could advise me.’ Suddenly, she had produced an egg in her hand, with some thread, twigs, a small nut. ‘These items I had about me could make that shamble,’ she said. She looked at the serious little faces, sighed and said, ‘But now it’s time for each of you to make your shamble, and it must have something living in it. Look, just shut your eyes and make a shamble out of anything you have with you.’
She watched them, their faces as solemn as a dirge as they pulled things out of their pockets. Miss Tick knew her witches, knew these girls had the innate magical talent, but to decide to train to be a witch was the kind of decision that took more than just a bit of talent. Hard work would have to come into it too. A lot of hard work. Even then it would not be easy, she knew. Apart from anything else, they had to have parents who would support their choice. A girl might be useful at home, helping with the younger children or working in a family business, for instance. That was before the question of grandchildren cropped up. And it always did, oh yes, always.
Miss Tick knew too that you can find out a lot about somebody from what’s in their pockets, and sometimes a lot about them from what they don’t have. She herself generally had a small cheese in one of her pockets – you couldn’t do good magic without a snack. Out loud, she said, ‘Even a worm is alive, so keeping one in a little box with some wet leaves will help.’
Nancy pulled off one of her boots, saying, ‘I’ve got a caterpillar in there.’
‘Well done,’ said Miss Tick. ‘You have been lucky, but being lucky is only part of being a witch.’
Becky looked rather glum. ‘I’ve got a hairpin – am I allowed to use that?’
Miss Tick sighed. ‘In your shamble? Of course, but you must still have something living. Butterflies or ants or things like that, but remember – you shouldn’t kill them. Let them fly free.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Becky. She rummaged around in the bushes behind them for a moment, then held up a large green hairy caterpillar.
‘Copycat!’ said Nancy.
Miss Tick laughed. ‘Part of being a witch is being clever. Using your eyes and learning from what you see. Well done, Becky.’ For Becky now had the caterpillar neatly trussed in a bit of old string, which also seemed to be knotted somehow around one of her fingers. Her other fingers were struggling to push the hairpin into the shamble.
Nancy pouted and held up her caterpillar, which appeared to be trying to burrow into a tuft of sheep’s wool.
There was a rumble of thunder and a strike of lightning and both girls said, ‘That was me, with my little shamble.’
Miss Tick smiled again. Why were people so keen to look at a sunrise, a rainbow, a flash of lightning or a dark cloud and feel responsible for it? She knew that if either girl really believed they could control a storm in the skies, they would be running home, screaming in terror – and their mothers would probably have to wash out the girls’ underclothing. Still, a bit of self-belief in a witch was a good start.
‘Miss, miss!’ said Becky and pointed. There was a hairpin now floating in the air alongside her caterpillar.
‘Well done,’ said Miss Tick. ‘Very well done indeed.’
‘Well, what about this, then?’ said Nancy, as her own shamble collapsed and the sheep’s wool floated to the ground, the little caterpillar perched on top like a witch on a broomstick. She raised her finger, and fire appeared to come out of the tip.
‘Excellent,’ said Miss Tick. ‘Both of you have got the hang of it. After that, it’s just a matter of learning, learning every day,’ she said sternly.
But what she thought was, Well, Mistress Tiffany will want to see you two and no mistake.
The music was playing in Fairyland – a harmonious melody, notes spiralling into the empty air, where a lazing elf perched on a slender branch near the top of a blossoming tree allowed himself the pleasure of turning each note into a colour, so that they danced above their heads, delighting the court. It doesn’t take much to delight an elf. Hurting something is usually top of their list, but music comes a close second.
The musician was a human, lured into the woods by the glamour of an elf’s harp, then snatched through to play, play, play for the Lord Peaseblossom. Elves were skilled at keeping their playthings alive, sometimes for weeks, and the man with the flute was a delightful new toy. Peaseblossom wondered idly how long the man would last.
But he was pleased. His warriors were making little sorties into the human world, bringing him back presents such as this. And he knew that with each successful incursion their confidence was growing. Soon they would be ready to make their move . . .
He frowned. He had to speak to Mustardseed. He needed to know that the elf had indeed thrown the wretched remains of the Queen out of Fairyland. He wanted no . . . complications.
Just as he loved to watch wildlife, so Geoffrey observed people. He found them fascinating, and he watched closely all the time, learning more and more from what he saw.
One thing he saw was that the old men seemed somehow in the way in their homes. It was so different from Geoffrey’s own home, where his father had decidedly ruled the roost. Here, where there were women in the old men’s lives, the women held all the power indoors – as they had for the years their men had been out working – and they had no intention of giving any of it away.
This thought was in his mind when he went to tidy up the nostril hairs of Sailor Makepeace, an errand which even Nanny Ogg disliked. Now Mrs Sally Makepeace – too shortsighted to be trusted with a pair of scissors near her husband’s nose, as an earlier attempt had proved – appeared to be a good woman, but Geoffrey had noticed that she treated her husband almost as part of the furniture, and that made Geoffrey sad – sad that a seafaring man who had seen so many interesting things now spent much of his time in the pub because his wife was always washing, cleaning, polishing and, when no alternative was around, dusting. She only just managed to avoid washing, cleaning and dusting her husband if he sat still for long enough.
Gradually it dawned on Geoffrey that the pub was both an entertainment and a refuge for the old boys. He joined them there one day and bought them all a pint, which got their attention. Then he had Mephistopheles do his counting trick. By the second pint the old boys had become quite avuncular and Geoffrey broached a subject which had been on his mind for a few days.
‘So, may I ask what you do, gentlemen?’
As it happened, he got laughter, and Reservoir Slump – a man whose grin, unlike his name, never slipped – said, ‘Bless you, sir, you could call us gentlemen of leisure.’
‘We are as kings,’ said Laughing Boy Sideways.
‘Though without the castles,’ Reservoir Slump added. ‘’Less’n I had one once and lost it somewhere.’
‘And do you like your leisure, gentlemen?’ said Geoffrey.
‘Not really,’ said Smack Tremble. ‘In fact, I hate it. Ever since my Judy died. We never had kids, neither.’ There was a tear in his eye and a break in his voice, which he covered up by taking another swig from his tankard.
‘She had a tortoise though, didn’t she?’ Wrinkled Joe, who had been built to a size big enough to pick up cows, put in.
‘Right enough,’ Smack said. ‘She said she liked it because it walked no faster ’n her. Still got the tortoise, but it ain’t the same. Not much good at conversation. My Judy would rattle on all day about this ’n’ that. The tortoise listens well enou
gh, mind you, which is more’n I could say for Judy sometimes.’ This got a laugh.
‘It’s a petticoat government, when you get old,’ said Stinky Jim Jones.
Geoffrey, now pleased to have got the ball rolling, said, ‘What do you mean by that?’
And then there was a kind of grumble from every man.
‘It’s like this, backhouse boy,’ said Wrinkled Joe. ‘My Betsy tells me what I am to eat and when and where, and if we are together, she fusses around me like an old hen. It’s like being a kid.’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Captain Makepeace. ‘My Sally is wonderful and I knows I would be lost without her but, well, put it like this: I was a man once in charge of many other men, and when the weather was fearsomely bad, I would be up there making sure that we didn’t founder because it was my job and I was the captain.’ He looked around, seeing nods from the others, and then said directly to Geoffrey, ‘And best of all, young man, I was a man. And now? My job is to lift my feet while she sweeps around me. It’s our home and I love her, but somehow I’m always in the way.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Stinky Jim. ‘You know me, I’m still a good carpenter, well known in the Guild, but my Milly frets about me handling all the tools and so on; and I tell you, when she’s got her eyes on me, my hands shake.’
‘Would you like them to stop shaking?’ asked Geoffrey, though he had in fact seen Stinky Jim lift a tankard to his lips with a hand as steady as a rock. ‘Because you gentlemen have given me an idea.’ He paused, hoping they would listen. ‘My maternal uncle came from Uberwald and his name was Heimlich Sheddenhausen – he was the first man known to have a “shed”.’
Stinky Jim said, ‘I’ve got a shed.’
‘No offence, you may think you have,’ said Geoffrey, ‘but what is in it? There are goat sheds and chicken sheds and cow sheds, but these sheds I’m proposing are for men. I reckon what we need around here is sheds for men. A man shed.’