Making Money - Terry Pratchett [3]
And thus, with the addition of one extremely large cotton print dress, a golem became female enough for Miss Maccalariat.
The odd thing was that Gladys was female now, somehow. It wasn’t just the dress. She tended to spend time around the counter girls, who seemed to accept her into the sisterhood despite the fact that she weighed half a ton. They even passed their fashion magazine on to her, although it was hard to imagine what winter skin-care tips would mean to someone a thousand years old, with eyes that glowed like holes into a furnace.
And now she was asking him if he was decent. How would she tell?
She’d brought him a cup of tea and the city edition of the Times, still damp from the press. Both were placed, with care, on the table.
And…oh gods, they’d printed his picture. His actual picture! Him and Vetinari and various notables last night, all looking up at the new chandelier! He’d managed to move slightly so that the picture blurred a little, but it was still the face that looked out at him from the shaving mirror every morning. All the way to Genua there were people who’d been duped, fooled, swindled, and cheated by that face. The only thing he hadn’t done was hornswoggle, and that was only because he hadn’t found out how to.
Okay, he did have the kind of all-purpose face that reminded you of lots of other faces, but it was a terrible thing to see it nailed down in print. Some people thought that pictures could steal your soul, but it was liberty that was on Moist’s mind.
Moist von Lipwig, pillar of the community. Hah…
Something made him look closer. Who was that man behind him? He seemed to be staring over Moist’s shoulder. Fat face, small beard which looked like Lord Vetinari’s, but whereas the Patrician’s was a goatee, the same style on that other man looked like the result of haphazard shaving. Someone from the bank, right? There’d been so many faces, so many hands to shake, and everyone wanted to get into the picture. The man looked hypnotized, but having your picture taken often did that to people. Just another guest at just another function…
And they’d only used the picture on page one because someone had decided that the main story, which was about another bank going bust and a mob of angry customers trying to hang the manager in the street, did not merit illustration. Did the editor have the common decency to print a picture of that and put a sparkle in everyone’s day? Oh no, it had to be a picture of Moist von bloody Lipwig!
And the gods, once they’ve got a man against the ropes, can’t resist one more thunderbolt. There, lower down the front page, was the headline “STAMP FORGER WILL HANG.” They were going to execute Owlswick Jenkins. And for what? For murder? For being a notorious banker? No, just for knocking out a few hundred sheets of stamps. Quality work, too; the Watch would never have had a case if they hadn’t burst into his attic and found half a dozen sheets of halfpenny reds hanging up to dry.
And Moist had testified, right there in the court. He’d had to. It was his civic duty. Forging stamps was held to be as bad as forging coins, and he couldn’t dodge. He was the postmaster general, after all, a respected figure in the community. He’d have felt a tiny bit better if the man had sworn or glared at him, but he’d just stood in the dock, a little figure with a wispy beard, looking lost and bewildered.
He’d forged halfpenny stamps, he really had. It broke your heart, it really did. Oh, he’d done higher values too, but what kind of person takes all that trouble for half a penny? Owlswick Jenkins was, and now he was in one of the condemned cells down in the Tanty, with a few days to ponder on the nature of cruel fate before he was taken out to dance on air.
Been there, done that, Moist thought. It all went black—and then I got a whole new life. But I never thought being an upstanding citizen was going to be this bad.
“Er…thank you,