‘Thank you,’ said Tiffany sweetly.
‘Here’s the cart. Er . . . you don’t want to miss it.’
‘Thank you,’ said Tiffany, and curtsied again, because of the effect it had. It was a
little bit cruel, but sometimes you had to be.
Anyway, it would be very hard to miss the cart. If you ran fast, you could easily
overtake it. It was so slow that ‘stop’ never came as a surprise.
There were no seats. The carrier went around the villages every other day, picking up
packages and, sometimes, people. You just found a place where you could get
comfortable among the boxes of fruit and rolls of cloth.
Tiffany sat on the back of the cart, her old boots dangling over the edge, swaying
backwards and forwards as the cart lurched away on the rough road.
Miss Tick sat beside her, her black dress soon covered in chalk dust to the knees.
Tiffany noticed that Roland didn’t get back on his horse until the cart was nearly out
of sight.
And she knew Miss Tick. By now she would be just bursting to ask a question,
because witches hate not knowing things. And, sure enough, when the village was left
behind, Miss Tick said, after a lot of shifting and clearing her throat:
‘Aren’t you going to open it?’
‘Open what?’ said Tiffany, not looking at her.
‘He gave you a present,’ said Miss Tick.
‘I thought you were examining an interesting stone, Miss Tick,’ said Tiffany
accusingly.
‘Well, it was only fairly interesting,’ said Miss Tick, completely unembarrassed. ‘So . . .
are you?’
‘I’ll wait until later,’ said Tiffany. She didn’t want a discussion about Roland at
this point or, really, at all.
She didn’t actually dislike him. She’d found him in the land of the Queen of the Fairies
and had sort of rescued him, although he had been unconscious most of the time. A
sudden meeting with the Nac Mac Feegle when they’re feeling edgy can do that to a
person. Of course, without anyone actually lying, everyone at home had come to
believe that he had rescued her. A nine-year-old girl armed with a frying pan couldn’t possibly have rescued a thirteen-year-old boy who’d got a sword.
Tiffany hadn’t minded that. It stopped people asking too many questions she didn’t
want to answer or even know how to. But he’d taken to . . . hanging around. She kept
accidentally running into him on walks more often than was really possible, and he
always seemed to be at the same village events she went to. He was always polite, but
she couldn’t stand the way he kept looking like a spaniel that had been kicked.
Admittedly – and it took some admitting – he was a lot less of a twit than he had been.
On the other hand, there had been such of lot of twit to begin with.
And then she thought, Horse, and wondered why until she realized that her eyes had
been watching the landscape while her brain stared at the past. . .
‘I’ve never seen that before,’ said Miss Tick.
Tiffany welcomed it as an old friend. The Chalk rose out of the plains quite suddenly
on this side of the hills. There was a little valley cupped into the fall of the down, and
there was a carving in the curve it made. Turf had been cut away in long flowing lines
so that the bare chalk made the shape of an animal.
‘It’s the White Horse,’ said Tiffany.
‘Why do they call it that?’ said Miss Tick.
Tiffany looked at her. ‘Because the chalk is white?’ she suggested, trying not to suggest
that Miss Tick was being a bit dense.
‘No, I meant why do they call it a horse? It doesn’t look like a horse. It’s just. . . flowing lines .. .’
. . . that look as if they’re moving, Tiffany thought.
It had been cut out of the turf right back in the old days, people said, by the folk who’d
built the stone circles and buried their kind in big earth mounds. And they’d cut out the
Horse at one end of this little green valley, ten times bigger than a real horse and, if you
didn’t look at it with your mind right, the wrong shape, too. Yet they must have known
horses, owned horses, seen them every day, and they weren’t stupid people just because
they lived a long time ago.
Tiffany had once asked her father about the look of the Horse, when they’d come all
the way over here for a sheep fair, and he told her what Granny Aching had told him,
too, when he was a little boy. He passed on what she said word for word, and Tiffany
did the same now.
“Taint what a horse looks like,’ said Tiffany. It’s what a horse be.’
‘Oh,’ said Miss Tick. But because she was a teacher as well as a witch, and probably
couldn’t help herself, she added, The funny thing is, of course, that officially there is
no such thing as a white horse. They’re called grey.’ [She had to say that, because she was a
witch and a teacher and that’s a terrible combination. They want things to be right. They like things to be correct. If you want to upset a witch you don’t have to mess around with charms and spells, you just have to put her in a room with a picture that’s hung slightly crooked and watch her squirm.]
‘Yes, I know,’ said Tiffany. This one’s white,’ she added, flatly.
That quietened Miss Tick down, for a while, but she seemed to have something on
her mind.
‘I expect you’re upset about leaving the Chalk, aren’t you?’ she said as the cart
rattled on.
‘No,’ said Tiffany.
It’s OK to be,’ said Miss Tick.
Thank you, but I’m not really,’ said Tiffany.
‘If you want to have a bit of a cry, you don’t have to pretend you’ve got some grit in
your eye or anything-‘
I’m all right, actually,’ said Tiffany. ‘Honestly.’
‘You see, if you bottle that sort of thing up it can cause terrible damage later on.’
‘I’m not bottling, Miss Tick.’
In fact, Tiffany was a bit surprised at not crying, but she wasn’t going to tell Miss Tick
that. She left a sort of space in her head to burst into tears in, but it wasn’t filling up.
Perhaps it was because she’d wrapped up all those feelings and doubts and left them
up on the hill by the pot-bellied stove.
‘And if of course you were feeling a bit downcast at the moment, I’m sure you could
open the present he-‘ Miss Tick tried.
‘Tell me about Miss Level,’ Tiffany said quickly. The name and address was all she
knew about the lady she was going to stay with, but an address like ‘Miss Level, Cottage
in the Woods near the dead oak tree in Lost Man’s Lane, High Overhang, If Out Leave
Letters in Old Boot by Door’ sounded promising.
‘Miss Level, yes,’ said Miss Tick, defeated. ‘Er, yes.
She’s not really very old but she says she’ll be happy to have a third pair of hands
around the place.’
You couldn’t slip words past Tiffany, not even if you were Miss Tick.
‘So there’s someone else there already?’ she said.
‘Er . . . no. Not exactly,’ said Miss Tick.
‘Then she’s got four arms?’ said Tiffany. Miss Tick had sounded like someone trying to
avoid a subject.
Miss Tick sighed. It was difficult to talk to someone who paid attention all the time. It
put you off.
‘It’s best if you wait until you meet her,’ she said. ‘Anything I tell you will only give
you the wrong idea. I’m sure you’ll get along with her. She’s very good with people,
and in her spare time she’s a research witch. She keeps bees – and goats, the milk of
which, I believe, is very good indeed owing to homogenized fats.’
‘What does a research witch do?’ Tiffany asked.
‘Oh, it’s a very ancient craft. She tries to find new spells by learning how old ones
were really done. You know all that stuff about “ear of bat and toe of frog”? They never
work, but Miss Level thinks it’s because we don’t know exactly what kind of frog, or
which toe-‘
‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to help anyone chop up innocent frogs and bats,’ said
Tiffany firmly.
‘Oh, no, she never kills any!’ said Miss Tick hurriedly. ‘She only uses creatures that
have died naturally or been run over or committed suicide. Frogs can get quite
depressed at times.’
The cart rolled on, down the white, dusty road, until it was lost from view.
Nothing happened. Skylarks sang, so high up they were invisible. Grass seeds filled the
air. Sheep baa’d, high up on the Chalk.
And then something came along the road. It moved like a little slow whirlwind, so it could be