I Shall Wear Midnight

Careful non-aggressive questioning brought news that Mr Petty was asleep upstairs, and Tiffany simply told Mrs Petty that Amber was being looked after by a very kind lady while she healed. Mrs Petty started to cry again. The misery of the place was getting on Tiffany’s nerves too, and she tried to stop herself being cruel; but how hard was it to slosh a bucket of cold water over a stone floor and swoosh it out of the door with a broom? How hard was it to make some soap? You could make quite a serviceable one out of wood ash and animal fat. And, as her mother had said once, ‘No one is too poor to wash a window,’ although her father, just to annoy her mother, occasionally changed it to, ‘No one is too poor to wash a widow.’ But where could you start with this family? And whatever it was that was in the kettle was still rattling, presumably trying to get out.

Most of the women in the villages had grown up to be tough. You needed to be tough to bring up a family on a farm labourer’s wages. There was a local saying, a sort of recipe for dealing with a troublesome husband. It was: ‘Tongue pie, cold barn and the copper stick.’ It meant that a troublesome husband got a nagging instead of his dinner, he would be shoved out to the barn to sleep, and if he raised his hand to his wife, he might get a good wallop from the long stick every cottage had for stirring the washing in the wash-tub. They usually learned the error of their ways before the rough music played.

‘Wouldn’t you like a short holiday away from Mr Petty?’ Tiffany suggested.

The woman, pale as a slug and skinny as a broom, looked horrified. ‘Oh no!’ she gasped. ‘He wouldn’t know what to do without me!’

And then … it all went wrong, or rather, a lot more wrong than it was already. And it was all so innocent, because the woman was so downcast. ‘Well, at least I can clean your kitchen for you,’ Tiffany said cheerfully. It would have been fine if she had simply grabbed a broom and got to work but, oh no, she had to go and look up at the grey, cobweb-filled ceiling and say, ‘All right, I know you’re here, you always follow me, so make yourself useful and clean this kitchen thoroughly!’ Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then she heard, because she was listening for it, a muffled conversation from up near the ceiling.

‘Did ye no’ hear that? She kens we is here! How come she always gets it right?’

A slightly different Feegle voice said, ‘It’s because we always follow her, ye wee dafty!’

‘Oh aye, I ken that well enough, but my point is, did we not promise faithfully not to follow her around any more?’

‘Aye, it was a solemn oath.’

‘Exactly, and so I cannae but be a wee bit disappointed that the big wee hag will nae take heed of a solemn promise. It’s a wee bit hurtful to the feelings.’

‘But we have broken the solemn oath; it’s a Feegle thing.’

A third voice said, ‘Look lively, ye scunners, it’s the tapping o’ the feets!’

A whirlwind hit the grubby little kitchen.[16] Foaming water swirled across Tiffany’s boots, which had indeed been tapping. It has to be said that no one could create a mess more quickly than a party of Feegles, but strangely, they could clean one up as well, without even the help of bluebirds and miscellaneous woodland creatures.

The sink emptied in an instant and filled again with soap suds. Wooden plates and tin mugs hummed through the air as the fire burst into life. With a bang bang bang the log box filled. After that, things speeded up, and a fork shuddered in the wall beside Tiffany’s ear. Steam rose like a fog, with strange noises coming out of it; the sunlight flooded in through the suddenly clean window, filling the room with rainbows; a broom shot past pushing the last of the water in front of it; the kettle boiled; a vase of flowers appeared on the table — some of them, admittedly, upside down — and suddenly the room was fresh and clean and no longer smelled of rotted potatoes.

Tiffany looked up at the ceiling. The cat was holding onto it by all four paws. It gave her what was definitely a look. Even a witch can be out-looked by a cat that has had it up to here, and is still up here.

Tiffany finally located Mrs Petty under the table, with her hands over her head. When she had finally been persuaded to come out and sit down on a nice clean chair in front of a cup of tea from a wonderfully clean mug, she was very keen to agree that there had been a great improvement, although later on Tiffany couldn’t help but admit that Mrs Petty would probably have agreed to absolutely anything if only Tiffany would go away.

Not a success, then, but at least the place was a whole lot cleaner and Mrs Petty was bound to be grateful when she’d had time to think about it. A snarl and a thump that Tiffany heard as she was leaving the ragged garden was probably the cat, parting company with the ceiling.

Halfway back to the farm, carrying her broomstick over her shoulder, she thought aloud, ‘Perhaps that was a bit stupid.’