because she was shaking when she lowered them. ‘No -1 -1 wouldn’t dream of it,’ she
said in a more normal voice, trying to smile. ‘You’ve had a long day. I’ll show you to
your room and where things are, and I’ll bring you
up some stew, and you can be an apprentice tomorrow. No rush.’
Tiffany looked at the bubbling pot on the iron stove, and the loaf on the table. It
was fresh baked bread, she could smell that.
The trouble with Tiffany was her Third Thoughts.[First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts.
Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves.
They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.]
They thought: She lives by herself. Who lit the fire? A bubbling pot needs stirring
from time to time. Who stirred it? And someone lit the candles. Who?
‘Is there anyone else staying here, Miss Level?’ she said.
Miss Level looked desperately at the pot and the loaf and back to Tiffany.
‘No, there’s only me,’ she said, and somehow Tiffany knew she was telling the
truth. Or a truth, anyway.
‘In the morning?’ said Miss Level, almost pleading. She looked so forlorn that Tiffany
actually felt sorry for her.
She smiled. ‘Of course, Miss Level,’ she said.
There was a brief tour by candlelight. There was a privy not far from the cottage; it
was a two-holer, which Tiffany thought was a bit odd but, of course, maybe other
people had lived here once. There was also a room just for a bath, a terrible waste of
space by the standards of Home Farm. It had its own pump and a big boiler for heating
the water. This was definitely posh.
Her bedroom was a . . . nice room. Nice was a very good word. Everything had frills.
Anything that could have a cover on it was covered. Some attempt had been made to
make the room. . . jolly, as if being a bedroom was a jolly wonderful thing to be.
Tiffany’s room back on the farm had a rag rug on the floor, a water jug and basin on a
stand, a big wooden box for clothes, an ancient dolls’ house and some old calico curtains
and that was pretty much it. On the farm, bedrooms were for shutting your eyes in.
This room had a chest of drawers. The contents of Tiffany’s suitcase filled one drawer
easily.
The bed made no sound when Tiffany sat on it. Her old bed had a mattress so old
that it had a comfy hollow in it, and the springs all made different noises; if she
couldn’t sleep she could move various parts of her body and play The Bells of St Ungulants
on the springs – cling twing glong, gling ping bloyinnng, dlink plang dyonnng, ding
ploink.
This room smelled different, too. It smelled of spare rooms, and other people’s
soap.
At the bottom of her suitcase was a small box that Mr Block the farm’s carpenter had
made for her. He did not go in for delicate work, and it was quite heavy. In it, she
kept.. . keepsakes. There was a piece of chalk with a fossil in it, which was quite rare,
and
her personal butter stamp (which showed a witch on a broomstick) in case she got a
chance to make butter here, and a dobby stone, which was supposed to be lucky
because it had a hole in it. (She’d been told that when she was seven, and had picked it
up. She couldn’t quite see how the hole made it lucky, but since it had spent a lot of
time in her pocket, and then safe and sound in the box, it probably was more fortunate
than most stones, which got kicked around and run over by carts and so on.)
There was also a blue-and-yellow wrapper from an old packet of Jolly Sailor tobacco,
and a buzzard feather, and an ancient flint arrowhead wrapped up carefully in a piece
of sheep’s wool. There were plenty of these on the Chalk. The Nac Mac Feegle used
them for spear points.
She lined these up neatly on the top of the chest of drawers, alongside her diary, but
they didn’t make the place look more homely. They just looked lonely.
Tiffany picked up the old wrapper and the sheep’s wool and sniffed them. They
weren’t quite the smell of the shepherding hut, but they were close enough to it to bring
tears to her eyes.
She had never spent a night away from the Chalk before. She knew the word
‘homesickness’ and wondered whether this cold, thin feeling growing inside her was
what it felt like-
Someone knocked at the door.
‘It’s me,’ said a muffled voice.
Tiffany jumped off the bed and opened the door.
Miss Level came in with a tray that held a bowl of beef stew and some bread. She put
it down on the little table by the bed.
‘If you put it outside the door when you’re finished, I’ll take it down later,’ she
said.
‘Thank you very much,’ said Tiffany.
Miss Level paused at the door. ‘It’s going to be so nice having someone to talk to,
apart from myself,’ she said. ‘I do hope you won’t want to leave, Tiffany.’
Tiffany gave her a happy little smile, then waited until the door had shut and she’d
heard Miss Level’s footsteps go downstairs before tiptoeing to the window and
checking there were no bars in it.
There had been something scary about Miss Level’s expression. It was sort of
hungry and hopeful and pleading and frightened, all at once.
Tiffany also checked that she could bolt the bedroom door on the inside.
The beef stew tasted, indeed, just like beef stew and not, just to take an example
completely and totally at random, stew made out of the last poor girl who’d worked here.
To be a witch, you have to have a very good imagination. Just now, Tiffany was
wishing that hers wasn’t quite so good. But Mistress Weatherwax and Miss Tick
wouldn’t have let her come here if it was dangerous, would they? Well, would they?
They might. They just might. Witches didn’t believe in making things too easy.
They assumed you used your brains. If you didn’t use your brains, you had no
business being a witch. The world doesn’t make things easy, they’d say. Learn how
to learn fast.
But . . . they’d give her a chance, wouldn’t they?
Of course they would.
Probably.
She’d nearly finished the not-made-of-people-at-all-honestly stew when something
tried to take the bowl out of her hand. It was the gentlest of tugs, and when she
automatically pulled it back, the tugging stopped immediately.
O-K, she thought. Another strange thing. Well, this is a witch’s cottage.
Something pulled at the spoon but, again, stopped as soon as she tugged back.
Tiffany put the empty bowl and spoon back on the tray.
‘All right,’ she said, hoping she sounded not scared at all. I’ve finished.’
The tray rose into the air and drifted gently towards the door where it landed with
a faint tinkle.
Up on the door, the bolt slid back.
The door opened.
The tray rose up and sailed through the doorway.
The door shut.
The bolt slid across.
Tiffany heard the rattle of the spoon as, somewhere on the dark landing, the tray
moved on.
It seemed to Tiffany that it was vitally important that she thought before doing
anything. And so she
thought: It would be stupid to run around screaming because your tray had been
taken away. After all, whatever had done it had even had the decency to bolt
the door after itself, which meant that it respected her privacy, even while it ignored
it.
She cleaned her teeth at the washstand, got into her night-gown and slid into the
bed. She blew out the candle.
After a moment she got up, re-lit the candle and with some effort dragged the chest
of drawers in front of the door. She wasn’t quite certain why, but she felt better for
doing it.
She lay back in the dark again.
Tiffany was used to sleeping while, outside on the downland, sheep baa’d and sheep
bells occasionally went tonk.
Up here, there were no sheep to baa and no bells to tonk and, every time one
didn’t, she woke up thinking, What was that?
But she did get to sleep eventually, because she remembered waking up in the middle
of the night to hear the chest of drawers very slowly slide back to its original position.
Tiffany woke up, still alive and not chopped up, when the dawn was just turning
grey. Unfamiliar birds were singing.
There were no sounds in the cottage, and she thought: I’m the apprentice, aren’t