Wintersmith - Terry Pratchett [44]
“We were going to have the rest and potatoes for supper,” said Tiffany angrily, but with a certain amount of interest. She’d met Nanny Ogg before and quite liked her, but Miss Treason had said, darkly, that Nanny Ogg was “a disgusting old baggage.” That sort of comment attracts your attention.
“Fair enough,” said Nanny Ogg as Tiffany placed her hand on the meat. “You did a good job here today, Tiff. People notice that.”
She was gone before Tiffany could recover. One of them had very nearly said thank you! Amazing!
Petulia helped her bring the big table indoors and finish the tidying up. She hesitated, though, before she left.
“Um…you will be all right, will you?” she said. “It’s all a bit…strange.”
“We’re supposed to be no strangers to strangeness,” said Tiffany primly. “Anyway, you’ve sat up with the dead and dying, haven’t you?”
“Oh, yes. Mostly pigs, though. Some humans. Um…I don’t mind staying, if you like,” Petulia added in a leaving-as-soon-as-possible voice.
“Thank you. But after all, what’s the worst that can happen?”
Petulia stared at her and then said, “Well, let me think…a thousand vampire demons, each one with enormous—”
“I’ll be fine,” said Tiffany quickly. “Don’t you worry at all. Good night.”
Tiffany shut the door and then leaned on it with her hand over her mouth until she heard the gate click. She counted to ten to make sure that Petulia had got some distance and then risked taking her hand away. By then the scream that had been patiently waiting to come out had dwindled to something like “Unk!”
This was going to be a very strange night.
People died. It was sad, but they did. What did you do next? People expected the local witch to know. So you washed the body and did a few secret and squelchy things and dressed them in their best clothes and laid them out with bowls of earth and salt beside them (no one knew why you did this bit, not even Miss Treason, but it had always been done) and you put two pennies on their eyes “for the ferryman” and you sat with them the night before they were buried, because they shouldn’t be left alone.
Exactly why was never properly explained, although everyone got told the story of the old man who was slightly less dead than everybody thought and got up off the spare bed in the middle of the night and got back into bed with his wife.
The real reason was probably a lot darker than that. The start and finish of things was always dangerous, lives most of all.
But Miss Treason was a wicked ol’ witch. Who knew what might happen? Hang on, Tiffany told herself; don’t you believe the Boffo. She’s really just a clever old lady with a catalogue!
In the other room Miss Treason’s loom stopped.
It often did. But this evening the sudden silence it made was louder than usual.
Miss Treason called out: “What do we have in the larder that needs eating up?”
Yes, this is going to be a very odd night, Tiffany told herself.
Miss Treason went to bed early. It was the first time Tiffany had ever known her not to sleep in a chair. She’d put on a long white nightdress, too, the first time Tiffany had seen her not in black.
There was a lot still to do. It was traditional that the cottage should be left sparkling clean for the next witch, and although it was hard to make black sparkle, Tiffany did her best. Actually, the cottage was always pretty clean, but Tiffany scraped and scrubbed and polished because it put off the moment when she’d have to go and talk to Miss Treason. She even took down the fake spiderwebs and threw them on the fire, where they burned with a nasty blue flame. She wasn’t sure what to do with the skulls. Finally, she wrote down everything she could remember about the local villages: when babies were due, who was very ill and what with, who was feuding, who was “difficult,” and just about every other local detail she thought might be helpful to Annagramma. Anything to just put off the moment….
At last there was nothing for it but to climb the narrow stairs and say: “Is everything all right, Miss Treason?”
The old woman