I know nothing about her. Just some books, and some stories she tried to tell me, and things I didn’t understand, and I remember big red soft hands and that smell. I never knew who she really was. I mean, she must have been nine too, once. She was Sarah Grizzel. She got married and had children, two of them in the shepherding hut. She must’ve done all sorts of things I don’t know about.
And into Tiffany’s mind, as it always did sooner or later, came the figure of the blue and white china shepherdess, swirling in red mists of shame . . .
Tiffany’s father took her to the fair at the town of Yelp one day not long before her seventh birthday, when the farm had some rams to sell. That was a ten-mile journey, the furthest she’d ever been. It was off the Chalk. Everything looked different. There were far more fenced fields and lots of cows and the buildings had tiled roofs instead of thatch. She considered that this was foreign travel.
Granny Aching had never been there, said her father on the way. She hated leaving the Chalk, he said. She said it made her dizzy.
It was a great day. Tiffany was sick on candyfloss, had her fortune told by a little old lady who said that many, many men would want to marry her, and won the shepherdess, which was made of china painted in white and blue.
She was the star prize on the hoop-la stall but Tiffany’s father had said that it was all cheating, because the base was so wide that not one throw in a million could ever drop the hoop right over it.
She’d thrown the ring any old how, and it had been the one in a million. The stallholder hadn’t been very happy about it landing over the shepherdess rather than the gimcrack rubbish on the rest of the stall. He handed it over when her father spoke sharply to him, though, and she’d hugged it all the way home on the cart, while the stars came out.
Next morning she’d proudly presented it to Granny Aching. The old woman had taken it very carefully in her wrinkled hands and stared at it for some time.
Tiffany was sure, now, that it had been a cruel thing to do.
Granny Aching had probably never heard of shepherdesses. People who cared for sheep on the Chalk were all called shepherds, and that was all there was to it. And this beautiful creature was as much unlike Granny Aching as anything could be.
The china shepherdess had an old-fashioned long dress, with the bulgy bits at the side that made it look as though she had saddlebags in her knickers. There were blue ribbons all over the dress, and all over the rather showy straw bonnet, and on the shepherd’s crook, which was a lot more curly than any crook Tiffany had ever seen.
There were even blue bows on the dainty foot poking out from the frilly hem of her dress.
This wasn’t a shepherdess who’d ever worn big old boots stuffed with wool, and tramped the hills in the howling wind with the sleet being driven along like nails. She’d never tried in that dress to pull out a ram who’d got his horns tangled in a thorn patch. This wasn’t a shepherdess who’d kept up with the champion shearer for seven hours, sheep for sheep, until the air was hazy with grease and wool and blue with cussing, and the champion gave up because he couldn’t cuss sheep as well as Granny Aching. No self-respecting sheepdog would ever ‘come by’ or ‘walk up’ for a simpering girl with saddlebags in her pants. It was a lovely thing but it was a joke of a shepherdess, made by someone who’d probably never seen a sheep up close.
What had Granny Aching thought about it? Tiffany couldn’t guess. She’d seemed happy, because it’s the job of grandmothers to be happy when grandchildren give them things. She’d put it up on her shelf, and then taken Tiffany on her knee and called her ‘my little jiggit’ in a nervous sort of way, which she did when she was trying to be grandmotherly.
Sometimes, in the rare times Granny was down at the farm, Tiffany would see her take down the statue and stare at it. But if she saw Tiffany watching she’d put it back quickly, and pretend she’d meant to pick up the sheep book.
Perhaps, Tiffany thought wretchedly, the old lady had seen it as a sort of insult. Perhaps she thought she was being told that this was what a shepherdess should look like. She shouldn’t be an old lady in a muddy dress and big boots, with an old sack around her shoulders to keep the rain off. A shepherdess should sparkle like a starry night. Tiffany hadn’t meant to, she’d never meant to, but perhaps she had been telling Granny that she wasn’t . . . right.
And then a few months after that Granny had died, and in the years since then everything had gone wrong. Wentworth had been born, and then the Baron’s son had vanished, and then there had been that bad winter when Mrs Snapperly died in the snow.
Tiffany kept worrying about the statue. She couldn’t talk about it. Everyone else was busy, or not interested. Everyone was edgy. They’d have said that worrying about a silly statue was . . . silly.
Several times she nearly smashed the shepherdess, but she didn’t because people would notice.
She wouldn’t have given something as wrong as that to Granny Aching now, of course. She’d grown up.
She remembered that the old lady would smile oddly, sometimes, when she looked at the statue. If only she’d said something. But Granny liked silence.
And now it turned out that she’d made friends with a lot of little blue men, who walked the hills looking after the sheep, because they liked her, too. Tiffany blinked.
It made a kind of sense. In memory of Granny Aching, the men left the tobacco. And in memory of Granny Aching, the Nac Mac Feegle minded the sheep. It all worked, even if it wasn’t magic. But it took Granny away.
‘Daft Wullie?’ she said, staring hard at the struggling pictsie and trying not to cry.
‘Mmph?’
‘Is it true what Rob Anybody told me?’
‘Mmph!’ Daft Wullie’s eyebrows went up and down furiously.
‘Mr Feegle, you can please take your hand away from his mouth,’ said Tiffany. Daft Wullie was released. Rob Anybody had looked worried, but Daft Wullie was terrified. He dragged his bonnet off and stood holding it in his hands, as if it was some kind of shield.
‘Is all that true, Daft Wullie?’ said Tiffany.
‘Oh waily waily—’
‘Just a simple yes or— A simple aye or nay, please.’
‘Aye! It is!’ blurted out Daft Wullie. ‘Oh waily waily—’
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Tiffany, sniffing and trying to blink the tears away. ‘All right. I understand.’
The Feegles eyed her cautiously.
‘Ye’re nae gonna get nasty aboot it?’ said Rob Anybody.
‘No. It all. . . works.’
She heard it echo around the cavern, the sound of hundreds of little men sighing with relief.
‘She dinnae turn me intae a pismire!’ said Daft Wullie, grinning happily at the rest of the pictsies. ‘Hey, lads, I talked wi’ the hag and she dinnae e’en look at me crosswise! She smiled at me!’ He beamed at Tiffany and went on: ‘An’ d’ye ken, mistress, that if’n you hold the baccy label upside-doon then part o’ the sailor’s bonnet and his ear became a lady wi’ nae mmph mmph . . .’
‘Ach, there I goes again, accidentally nearly throttlin’ ye,’ said Rob Anybody, his hand clamping over Wullie’s mouth.
Tiffany opened her mouth, but stopped when her ears tickled strangely.
In the roof of the cave, several bats woke up and hastily flew out of the smoke hole.
Some of the Feegles were busy on the far side of the chamber. What Tiffany had thought was a strange round stone was being rolled aside, revealing a large hole.
Now her ears squelched and felt as though all the wax was running out. The Feegles were forming up in two rows, leading to the hole.
Tiffany prodded the toad. ‘Do I want to know what a pismire is?’ she whispered.
‘It’s an ant,’ said the toad.
‘Oh? I’m . . . slightly surprised. And this sort of high-pitched noise?’
‘I’m a toad. We’re not good at ears. But it’s probably him over there.’
There was a Feegle walking out of the hole from which came, now that Tiffany’s eyes had become accustomed to the gloom, a faint golden light.
The newcomer’s hair was white instead of red and, while he was tall for a pictsie, he was as skinny as a twig. He was holding some sort of fat skin bag, bristling with pipes.