Tiffany waited until the sound of his boots indicated that the sergeant had decided quite correctly that it might be a good idea to have a plausible distance between the cell and himself that evening, and also perhaps a little think about his future. Besides, the Feegles began to appear from every crevice, and they had a wonderful instinct for not getting spotted.
‘You shouldn’t have pick-pocketed his keys,’ she said as Rob Anybody spat out a piece of straw.
‘Aye? He wants to keep you locked up!’
‘Well, yes, but he’s a decent person.’ She knew that sounded stupid, and Rob Anybody must have known that too.
‘Oh aye, sure, a decent person who will lock you up at the bidding of that snotty old carlin?’ he snarled. ‘And what about that big wee strip o’ dribbling in the white dress? I was reckoning we’d have to build guttering in front of her.’
‘Was she one o’ them water nymphs?’ said Daft Wullie, but the majority view was that the girl was somehow made of ice and had been melting away. Lower down the steps, a mouse was swimming to safety.
Almost without her knowing it, Tiffany’s left hand slid into her pocket and pulled out a piece of string, which was temporarily dropped onto Rob Anybody’s head. The hand went back into her pocket and came back out with one interesting small key she had picked up by the side of the road three weeks ago, an empty packet that had once contained flower seeds, and a small stone with a hole in it. Tiffany always picked up small stones with holes in them, because they were lucky; she kept them in her pocket until the stone wore through the cloth and fell out, leaving only the hole. That was enough to make an emergency shamble, except that you usually needed something alive, of course. The Toad’s dinner of beetles had entirely disappeared, mostly into the Toad, so she picked him up and tied him gently into the pattern, paying no attention to his threats of legal action.
‘I don’t know why you don’t use one of the Feegles,’ he said. ‘They like this sort of thing!’
‘Yes, but half the time the shamble ends up pointing me to the nearest pub. Now, just hang on, will you?’
The goats carried on chewing as she moved the shamble this way and that, searching for a clue. Letitia had been sorry, deeply damply sorry. And that last set of spill words was a set of words she wasn’t brave enough to say but not quick enough to stop. They were: ‘I didn’t mean it!’
No one knew how a shamble worked. Everybody knew that it did. Perhaps all it did do was make you think. Maybe what it did do was give your eyes something to look at while you thought, and Tiffany thought: Someone else in this building is magical. The shamble twisted, the Toad complained and the silver thread of a conclusion floated across Tiffany’s Second Sight. She turned her eyes towards the ceiling. The silver thread glittered, and she thought: Someone in this building is using magic. Someone who is very sorry that they did.
Was it possible that the permanently pale, permanently damp and irrevocably watercolouring Letitia was actually a witch? It seemed unthinkable. Well, there was no sense in wondering what was happening when you could simply go and find out for yourself.
It was nice to think that the barons of the Chalk had got along with so many people over the years that they’d forgotten how to lock anybody up. The dungeon had become a goat shed, and the difference between a dungeon and a goat shed is that you don’t need a fire in a goat shed, because goats are pretty good at keeping themselves warm. You do need one in a dungeon, however, if you want to keep your prisoners nice and warm, and if you really don’t like your prisoners then you’ll need a fire to get them nasty and warm. Terminally hot. Granny Aching had told Tiffany once that when she was a girl there had been all kinds of horrible metal things in the dungeon, mostly for taking people apart a little bit at a time, but as it turned out there was never a pr
isoner bad enough to use them on. And, if it came to that, no one in the castle wanted to use any of the things, which often trapped your fingers if you weren’t careful, so they were all sent down to the blacksmith for turning into more sensible things like shovels and knives, except for the Iron Maiden, which had been used as a turnip clamp until the top fell off.
And so, because nobody in the castle had ever been very enthusiastic about the dungeon, everybody had forgotten that it had a chimney. And that is why Tiffany looked up and saw, high above her, that little patch of blue which a prisoner calls the sky, but which she, as soon as it was dark enough, intended to call the exit.
It turned out to be a little more tricky to use than she had hoped; it was too narrow for her to go up sitting on the stick, so she had to hang onto the bristles and let the broomstick drag her up while she fended herself off the walls with her boots.
At least she knew her way around up there. All the kids did. There probably wasn’t a boy growing up in the Chalk who hadn’t scratched his name in the lead on the roof, quite probably alongside the names of his father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and even great-great-grandfathers, until the names got lost in the scratches.
The whole point about a castle is that nobody should get in if you don’t want them to, and so there were no windows until you got nearly to the top, where the best rooms were. Roland had long ago moved into his father’s room – she knew that because she had helped him move his stuff in when the old Baron had finally accepted that he was too sick to manage the stairs any longer. The Duchess would be in the big guestroom, halfway between that room and the Maiden Tower – which really was its name – where Letitia would be sleeping. No one would draw attention to this, but the arrangement meant that the bride’s mother would be sleeping in the room between the groom and the bride, possibly with her ears highly tuned at all times for any sound of hanky or even panky.
Tiffany crept quietly through the gloom and stepped neatly into an alcove when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs. They belonged to a maid, carrying a jug on a tray, which she very nearly spilled when the door to the Duchess’s room was flung open and the Duchess herself was glaring at her, just to check nothing was going on. When the maid moved on again, Tiffany followed her, silently and, as she had the trick of it, invisibly too. The guard sitting by the door looked up hopefully when the tray arrived, and was told sharply to go downstairs and get his own supper; then the maid stepped into the room, the tray was placed beside the big bed, and the maid left, wondering for a moment whether her eyes had been playing tricks on her.
Letitia looked as though she was sleeping under freshly fallen snow, and it rather spoiled the effect when you realized that mostly it was screwed-up tissue paper. Used tissue paper, at that. It was very rare indeed on the Chalk, because it was quite expensive, and if you had any, it was not considered bad manners to dry it out in front of the fire for re-use later on. Tiffany’s father said that when he was a little boy he had to blow his nose on mice, but this was probably said in order to make her squeal.
Right now, Letitia blew her nose with an unladylike honking noise and, to Tiffany’s surprise, looked suspiciously around the room. She even said, ‘Hello? Is there anybody there?’ – a question which, considered sensibly, is never going to get you anywhere.
Tiffany pulled herself further into a shadow. She could sometimes fool Granny Weatherwax on a good day, and a soppy princess had no business sensing her presence.
‘I can scream, you know,’ said Letitia, looking around. ‘There’s a guard right outside my door!’
‘Actually, he’s gone down to get his dinner,’ said Tiffany, ‘which frankly I call very unprofessional. He should have waited to be relieved by another guard. Personally, I think your mother is more worried about how her guards look than about how they think. Even young Preston guards better than they do. Sometimes people never know he’s there until he taps them on the shoulder. Did you know that people very seldom start screaming while someone is still talking to them? I don’t know why. I suppose it’s because we are brought up to be polite. And if you think you’re going to do so now, I would like to point out that if I was planning to do anything nasty I would have done so already, don’t you think?’
The pause was rather longer than Tiffany liked. Then Letitia said, ‘You have every right to be angry. You are angry, aren’t you?’
‘Not at the moment. By the way, aren’t you going to drink your milk before it gets cold?’
‘Actually, I always tip it down the privy. I know that it’s a wicked waste of good food and that there are a lot of poor children who would love a nightcap of warm milk, but they don’t deserve mine because my mother makes the maids put a medicine in it to help me sleep.’
‘Why?’ said Tiffany incredulously.
‘She thinks I need it. I don’t, really. You have no idea what it’s like. It’s like being in prison.’
‘Well, I think I know what that’s like now,’ said Tiffany. The girl in the bed started to cry again, and Tiffany hushed her into silence.