I Shall Wear Midnight

Letitia looked at Tiffany and the crowd with something like fear and said, ‘Do let’s get going, can we please? Mother is getting vexed.’

And so the coach left and the hurdy-gurdy man thankfully left and the sun left, and in the warm shadows of the twilight some people stayed. But Tiffany flew home alone, up high where only bats and owls could see her face.

Chapter 2 ROUGH MUSIC

She got one hour’s sleep before the nightmare began.

What she remembered most of all about that evening was the thumping of Mr Petty’s head against the wall and the banisters as she hauled him bodily out of his bed and dragged him by his filthy nightshirt down the stairs. He was a heavy man and half asleep, the other half of him being dead drunk.

The important thing was not to give him any time to think, even for one moment, as she towed him behind her like a sack. He was three times her weight, but she knew about leverage. You couldn’t be a witch if you couldn’t manoeuvre someone who was heavier than you. You would never be able to change an invalid’s sheets otherwise. And now he slithered down the last few steps into the cottage’s tiny kitchen, and threw up on the floor.

She was quite glad about that; lying in stinking vomit was the very least the man deserved, but she had to be quick to take charge, before he had time to compose himself.

The terrified Mrs Petty, a mouse of a woman, had run screaming along the lanes to the village pub as soon as the beating had begun, and Tiffany’s father had sent a lad to wake Tiffany up. Mr Aching was a man with considerable foresight and must have known that the beery cheerfulness after a day at the fair could be the undoing of everybody, and as Tiffany sped towards the cottage on her broom-stick, she had heard the rough music begin.

She slapped Petty’s face. ‘Can you hear that?’ she demanded, waving her hand towards the darkened window. ‘Can you hear it? That’s the sound of the rough music, and they are playing it for you, Mister Petty, for you. And they have sticks! And they have stones! They have everything they can pick up, and they have their fists and your daughter’s baby died, Mister Petty. You beat your daughter so hard, Mister Petty, that the baby died, and your wife is being comforted by some of the women and everybody knows that you have done it, everybody knows.’

She stared into his bloodshot eyes. His hands had closed automatically into fists because he had always been a man who thought with them. Soon he would try to use them; she knew it, because it was easier to punch than think. Mr Petty had punched his way through life.

The rough music was getting nearer slowly, because it’s hard to walk across fields on a dark night when you’ve had a skinful of beer, no matter how righteous you are currently feeling. She had to hope that they did not go into the barn first, because they would hang him there and then. If he was lucky, they would just hang him. When she had looked into the barn and seen that murder had been done, she knew that, without her, it would be done again. She had put a charm on the girl to take her pain away, holding it just above her own shoulder. It was invisible, of course, but in her mind’s eye it burned a fiery orange.

‘It was that boy,’ mumbled the man, with vomit trickling down his chest. ‘Coming round here, turning her head so as she wouldn’t listen to her mum or me. And her being only thirteen. It’s a scandal.’

‘William is thirteen too,’ said Tiffany, trying to keep her voice level. It was difficult; the rage was bursting to get out. ‘Are you trying to tell me that she was too young for a bit of romance, but young enough to be beaten so hard that she bled from places where no one should bleed?’

She couldn’t tell if he had really come to his senses, because the man had so few of them at the best of times, it was hard to know if he had any at all.

‘It wasn’t right, what they were doing,’ he said. ‘A man’s got to have discipline in his own house, after all, ain’t that right?’

Tiffany could imagine the fiery language in the pub as the overture to the music got wound up. There were not very many weapons in the villages of the Chalk, but there were such things as reaping hooks and scythes and thatching knives and big, big hammers. They weren’t weapons — until you hit somebody with them. And everyone knew about old Petty’s temper, and the number of times his wife told the neighbours that she had got her black eye by walking into a door.