Roland nodded like a judge. ‘That is a very important point, Miss Aching, but regrettably you have no rights at all. You are not a leaseholder, you are not a tenant and you own no land. In short, you have nothing on which rights are based.’ He said all this without looking up from the foolscap paper in front of him.
Deftly, Tiffany reached across and snatched it from his fingers, and was back in her chair before the guards could react. ‘How dare you talk like that without looking me in the eye!’ But she knew what the words meant. Her father was a tenant of the farm. He had rights. She did not. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you can’t just turn me out. I’ve done nothing wrong.’
Roland sighed. ‘I really hoped that you would see reason, Miss Aching, but since you assert total innocence, I must spell out the following facts. Item: you admit that you took the child Amber Petty away from her parents and lodged her with the fairy folk who live in holes in the ground. Did you think this was the right place for a young girl? According to my men, there seemed to be a lot of snails in the vicinity.’
‘Now just hold on, Roland—’
‘You will address my future son-in-law as “my lord”,’ snapped the Duchess.
‘And if I don’t, will you hit me with your stick, your grace? Will you grasp the nettle firmly?’
‘How dare you!’ the Duchess said, her eyes blazing. ‘Is this how you like your guests to be addressed, Roland?’
At least his bewilderment seemed genuine. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what is being talked about here,’ he said.
Tiffany pointed her finger at the Duchess, causing the Duchess’s bodyguards to reach for their weapons, thus causing the castle guards to draw theirs too, so as not to be left out. By the time swords were safely disentangled and put where they belonged, the Duchess was already launching a counter-attack. ‘You should not put up with this insubordination, young man! You are the Baron, and you have given this … this cre
ature notice to leave your lands. She is not conducive to public order, and if she still wilfully insists on not leaving, do I need to remind you that her parents are your tenants?’
Tiffany was already seething because of ‘creature’, but to her surprise the young Baron shook his head and said, ‘No, I cannot punish good tenants for having a wayward daughter.’
‘Wayward’? That was worse than ‘creature’! How dare he …! And her thoughts ran together. He wouldn’t dare. He never had dared, not in all the time they’d known each other, all the time when she had been just Tiffany and he had been just Roland. It had been a strange relationship, mostly because it wasn’t a relationship at all. They hadn’t been drawn to one another: they had been pushed towards one another by the way the world worked. She was a witch, which meant that she was automatically different from the village kids, and he was the Baron’s son, which automatically meant he was different from the village kids.
And where they had gone wrong was in believing, somewhere in their minds, that because two things were different, they must therefore be alike. Slowly finding out that this wasn’t true hadn’t been nice for either of them and there had been a certain number of things that both of them wished hadn’t been said. And then it wasn’t over, because it had never begun, not really, of course. And so it was best for both of them. Of course. Certainly. Yes.
And in all that time he’d never been like this, never so cold, never so stupid in such a meticulous kind of way that you couldn’t blame it all on the wretched Duchess, although Tiffany would have loved to. No, there were other things happening. She had to be on her guard. And there, watching them watching her, she realized how a person could be both stupid and clever.
She picked up her chair, placed it neatly in front of the desk, sat down on it, folded her hands and said, ‘I am very sorry, my lord.’ She turned to the Duchess, bowed her head and said, ‘And to you too, your grace. I temporarily forgot my place. It will not happen again. Thank you.’
The Duchess grunted. It would have been impossible for Tiffany to have thought any less of her but, well, a grunt? After a climb-down like that? Humbling an uppity young witch deserved a lot better than that – some remark so cutting that it blunted on the bone. Honestly, she might have made an effort.
Roland was staring at Tiffany, so nonplussed he was nearly minused. She confused him a little more by handing him the now-crumpled sheet of paper and saying, ‘Do you want to deal with the other matters, my lord?’
He struggled for a moment, managed to flatten the paper on the desk to his satisfaction, smoothed it out and said, ‘There is the matter of the death of my father and the theft of money from his strongbox.’
Tiffany fixed him with a helpful smile, which made him nervous. ‘Anything else, my lord? I am anxious that everything should be dealt with.’
‘Roland, she is up to something,’ said the Duchess. ‘Be on your guard.’ She waved a hand towards the guards. ‘And you guards should be on your guard as well, mind!’
The guards, having some difficulty with the idea of being even more on their guard when they were already – through nervousness – much further on their guard in any case than they had ever been before, strained to look a bit taller.
Roland cleared his throat. ‘Ahem, then there is the matter of the late cook, who fell to her death almost coincidentally with, I believe, insulting you. Do you understand these charges?’
‘No,’ said Tiffany.
There was a moment of silence before Roland said, ‘Er, why not?’
‘Because they aren’t charges, my lord. You are not declaring outright that you think I stole the money and killed your father and the cook. You are simply sort of waving the idea in front of me in the hope that I will burst into tears, I suppose. Witches don’t cry, and I want something that probably no other witch has ever asked for before. I want a hearing. A proper hearing. And that means evidence. And that means witnesses, and that means that the people who say have to say it in front of everybody. And that means a jury of my peers, which means people like me, and that means habeas corpus, thank you very much.’ She stood up and turned towards the doorway, which was blocked by a struggling crowd of guards. Now she looked at Roland, and bobbed a little curtsy. ‘Unless you feel entirely confident enough to have me arrested, my lord, I am leaving.’
They watched with open mouths as she walked up to the guards.
‘Good evening, Sergeant, good evening, Preston, good evening, gentlemen. This won’t take a minute. If you would just excuse me, I am leaving.’ She saw Preston wink at her as she pushed past his sword, and then she heard the guards suddenly collapse in a heap.
She walked along the corridor to the hall. There was a huge fire in the even bigger fireplace, which was large enough to be a room all by itself. The fire was peat. It couldn’t do much to heat most of the hall, which never got warm even in the heart of summer, but it was cosy to be close to, and if you have to breathe smoke, then you can’t do better than peat smoke, which rose up to the chimney and drifted like a warm mist around the sides of bacon, which were hung up there to smoke.
It was all going to get complicated again, but for the moment Tiffany sat there simply for a rest and, while she was about it, to shout at herself for being so stupid. How much poison can he seep into their heads? How much does he need to?
That was the problem with witchcraft: it was as if everybody needed the witches, but hated the fact that they did, and somehow the hatred of the fact could become the hatred of the person. People then started thinking: Who are you to have these skills? Who are you to know these things? Who are you to think you’re better than us? But Tiffany didn’t think she was better than them. She was better than them at witchcraft, that was true, but she couldn’t knit a sock, she didn’t know how to shoe a horse, and while she was pretty good at making cheese, she had to have three tries to bake a loaf that you could actually bite into with your teeth. Everybody was good at something. The only wicked thing was not finding out in time.