I Shall Wear Midnight

And with that Nanny Ogg grabbed a passing waiter by the shoulder, took a full flagon from his tray, jumped up onto a table, as lively as a girl, and shouted for silence in a voice as brisk as a sergeant-major. ‘Ladies and gentlemen! To celebrate the good life and easeful passing of our late friend and Baron, I have been asked to sing his favourite song. Do join in with me if you’ve got the breath!’

Tiffany listened, enthralled. Nanny Ogg was a one-woman masterclass, or rather mistressclass, in people. She treated perfect strangers as if she had known them for years, and somehow they acted as if she really had. Dragged along, as it were, by an extremely good singing voice for one old woman with one tooth, perplexed people were raising their voices beyond a mumble by the second line, and by the end of the first verse were harmonizing like a choir, and she had them in her hand. Tiffany wept, and saw through the tears a little boy in his new tweed jacket that smelled of wee, walking with his father under different stars.

And then she saw the glisten of tears on the faces, including the faces of Pastor Egg and even the Duchess. The echoes were of loss and remembrance, and the hall itself breathed.

I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people. I should have learned how not to sing like a turkey …

The song had finished, and people were looking around sheepishly at one another, but Nanny Ogg’s boot was already making the table rock. ‘Dance, dance, the shaking of the sheets. Dance, dance, when you hear the piper playing,’ she sang.

Tiffany thought, Is this the right song for a funeral? And then she thought, Of course it is! It’s a wonderful tune and it tells us that one day all of us will die but – and this is the important thing – we are not dead yet.

And now Nanny Ogg had jumped off the table, grabbed a hold of Pastor Egg, and as she spun him round, she sang, ‘Be assured no preacher can keep death away from any man,’ and he had the grace to smile and dance with her.

People applauded – not something Tiffany would ever have expected at a funeral. She wished, oh how she wished, to be like Nanny Ogg who understood things and knew how to hammer silence into laughter.

And then, as the applause died away, a male voice sang, ‘Down in the valley, the valley so low, hang your head easy, hear the wind blow …’ And silence stood aside in the face of the unexpectedly silver voice of the sergeant.

Nanny Ogg drifted to where Tiffany was standing. ‘Well, it looks like I’ve warmed them up. Hear them clearing their throats? I reckon the pastor will be singing by the end of the evening! And I could do with another drink. It’s thirsty work, singing.’ There was a wink, then she said to Tiffany, ‘Human being first, witch second; hard to remember, easy to do.’

It was magic; magic had turned a hall full of people who mostly did not know very many of the other people there into human beings who knew they were among other human beings and, right now, that was all that needed to matter. At which point Preston tapped her on the shoulder. He had a curious kind of worried smile on his face.

‘Sorry, miss, but I’m on duty, worst luck, and I think you ought to know we have three more visitors.’

‘Can’t you just show them in?’ said Tiffany.

‘I would like to do that, miss, only they are stuck on the roof at the moment. The sound made by three witches is a lot of swearing, miss.’

* * *

If there had been swearing, the new arrivals had apparently run out of breath by the time Tiffany located the right window and crawled out onto the lead roof of the castle. There wasn’t very much to hold onto and it was pretty misty, but she carefully made her way out there on her hands and knees and headed towards the grumbling.

‘Are there any witches up here?’ she said.

And out of the gloom came the voice of somebody not even trying to keep their temper. ‘And what in the seven hells would you do if I said no, Miss Tiffany Aching?’

‘Mrs Proust? What are you doing here?’

‘Holding onto a gargoyle! Get us down right now, my dear, because these are not my stones and Mrs Happenstance needs the privy.’

Tiffany crawled a little further, well aware of the sheer drop an inch away from her hand. ‘Preston has gone to fetch a rope. Do you have a broomstick?’

‘A sheep crashed into it,’ said Mrs Proust.

Tiffany could just make her out now. ‘You crashed into a sheep in the air?’

‘Maybe it was a cow, or something. What are those things that go snuffle snuffle ?’

‘You ran into a flying hedgehog?’