Hogfather - Terry Pratchett [22]
He sighed again.
Then there was this business of deciding who’d been naughty or nice. He’d never had to think about that sort of thing before. Naughty or nice, it was ultimately all the same.
Still, it had to be done right. Otherwise it wouldn’t work.
The pigs pulled up alongside another chimney.
“Here we are, here we are,” said Albert. “James Riddle, aged eight.”
HAH, YES. HE ACTUALLY SAYS IN HIS LETTER, “I BET YOU DON’T EXIST ’COS EVERYONE KNOWS ITS YORE PARENTS.” OH, YES, said Death, with what almost sounded like sarcasm, I’M SURE HIS PARENTS ARE JUST IMPATIENT TO BANG THEIR ELBOWS IN TWELVE FEET OF NARROW UNSWEPT CHIMNEY, I DON’T THINK. I SHALL TREAD EXTRA SOOT INTO HIS CARPET.
“Right, sir. Good thinking. Speaking of which—down you go, sir.”
HOW ABOUT IF I DON’T GIVE HIM ANYTHING AS A PUNISHMENT FOR NOT BELIEVING?
“Yeah, but what’s that going to prove?”
Death sighed. I SUPPOSE YOU’RE RIGHT.
“Did you check the list?”
YES. TWICE. ARE YOU SURE THAT’S ENOUGH?
“Definitely.”
COULDN’T REALLY MAKE HEAD OR TAIL OF IT, TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH. HOW CAN I TELL IF HE’S BEEN NAUGHTY OR NICE, FOR EXAMPLE?
“Oh, well…I don’t know…Has he hung his clothes up, that sort of thing…”
AND IF HE HAS BEEN GOOD I MAY GIVE HIM THIS KLATCHIAN WAR CHARIOT WITH REAL SPINNING SWORD BLADES?
“That’s right.”
AND IF HE’S BEEN BAD?
Albert scratched his head. “When I was a lad, you got a bag of bones. ’s’mazing how kids got better behaved toward the end of the year.”
OH DEAR. AND NOW?
Albert held a package up to his ear and rustled it. “Sounds like socks.”
SOCKS.
“Could be a woolly vest.”
SERVE HIM RIGHT, IF I MAY VENTURE TO EXPRESS AN OPINION…
Albert looked across the snowy rooftops and sighed. This wasn’t right. He was helping because, well, Death was his master and that’s all there was to it, and if the master had a heart it would be in the right place. But…
“Are you sure we ought to be doing this, master?”
Death stopped, halfway out of the chimney.
CAN YOU THINK OF A BETTER ALTERNATIVE, ALBERT?
And that was it. Albert couldn’t.
Someone had to do it.
There were bears on the street again.
Susan ignored them and didn’t even make a point of not treading on the cracks.
They just stood around, looking a bit puzzled and slightly transparent, visible only to children and Susan. News like Susan gets around. The bears had heard about the poker. Nuts and berries, their expressions seemed to say. That’s what we’re here for. Big sharp teeth? What big shar—Oh, these big sharp teeth?…They’re just for, er, cracking nuts. And some of these berries can be really vicious.
The city’s clocks were striking six when she got back to the house. She was allowed her own key. It wasn’t as if she was a servant, exactly.
You couldn’t be a duchess and a servant. But it was all right to be a governess. It was understood that it wasn’t exactly what you were, it was merely a way of passing the time until you did what every girl, or gel, was supposed to do in life, i.e., marry some man. It was understood that you were playing.
The parents were in awe of her. She was the daughter of a duke, whereas Mr. Gaiter was a man to be reckoned with in the wholesale boots and shoes business. Mrs. Gaiter was bucking for a transfer into the Upper Classes, which she currently hoped to achieve by reading books on etiquette. She treated Susan with the kind of worried deference she thought was due to anyone who’d known the difference between a serviette and a napkin from birth.
Susan had never before come across the idea that you could rise in Society by, as it were, gaining marks, especially since such noblemen as she’d met in her father’s house had used neither serviette nor napkin but a state of mind, which was “Drop it on the floor, the dogs’ll eat it.”
When Mrs. Gaiter had tremulously asked her how one addressed the second cousin of a queen, Susan had replied without thinking, “We called him Jamie, usually,” and Mrs. Gaiter had had to go and have a headache in her room.
Mr. Gaiter just nodded when he met her in a passage and never said very much to