I Shall Wear Midnight - Terry Pratchett [88]
Deftly, Tiffany reached across and snatched it from his fingers, and was back in her chair before the guards could react. ‘How dare you talk like that without looking me in the eye!’ But she knew what the words meant. Her father was a tenant of the farm. He had rights. She did not. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you can’t just turn me out. I’ve done nothing wrong.’
Roland sighed. ‘I really hoped that you would see reason, Miss Aching, but since you assert total innocence, I must spell out the following facts. Item: you admit that you took the child Amber Petty away from her parents and lodged her with the fairy folk who live in holes in the ground. Did you think this was the right place for a young girl? According to my men, there seemed to be a lot of snails in the vicinity.’
‘Now just hold on, Roland—’
‘You will address my future son-in-law as “my lord”,’ snapped the Duchess.
‘And if I don’t, will you hit me with your stick, your grace? Will you grasp the nettle firmly?’
‘How dare you!’ the Duchess said, her eyes blazing. ‘Is this how you like your guests to be addressed, Roland?’
At least his bewilderment seemed genuine. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what is being talked about here,’ he said.
Tiffany pointed her finger at the Duchess, causing the Duchess’s bodyguards to reach for their weapons, thus causing the castle guards to draw theirs too, so as not to be left out. By the time swords were safely disentangled and put where they belonged, the Duchess was already launching a counter-attack. ‘You should not put up with this insubordination, young man! You are the Baron, and you have given this … this creature notice to leave your lands. She is not conducive to public order, and if she still wilfully insists on not leaving, do I need to remind you that her parents are your tenants?’
Tiffany was already seething because of ‘creature’, but to her surprise the young Baron shook his head and said, ‘No, I cannot punish good tenants for having a wayward daughter.’
‘Wayward’? That was worse than ‘creature’! How dare he …! And her thoughts ran together. He wouldn’t dare. He never had dared, not in all the time they’d known each other, all the time when she had been just Tiffany and he had been just Roland. It had been a strange relationship, mostly because it wasn’t a relationship at all. They hadn’t been drawn to one another: they had been pushed towards one another by the way the world worked. She was a witch, which meant that she was automatically different from the village kids, and he was the Baron’s son, which automatically meant he was different from the village kids.
And where they had gone wrong was in believing, somewhere in their minds, that because two things were different, they must therefore be alike. Slowly finding out that this wasn’t true hadn’t been nice for either of them and there had been a certain number of things that both of them wished hadn’t been said. And then it wasn’t over, because it had never begun, not really, of course. And so it was best for both of them. Of course. Certainly. Yes.
And in all that time he’d never been like this, never so cold, never so stupid in such a meticulous kind of way that you couldn’t blame it all on the wretched Duchess, although Tiffany would have loved to. No, there were other things happening. She had to be on her guard. And there, watching them watching her, she realized how a person could be both stupid and clever.
She picked up her chair, placed it neatly in front of the desk, sat down on it, folded her hands and said, ‘I am very sorry, my lord.’ She turned to the Duchess, bowed her head and said, ‘And to you too, your grace. I temporarily forgot my place. It will not happen again. Thank you.’
The Duchess grunted. It would have been impossible for Tiffany to have thought any less of her but, well, a