But there was no answer. The little round boat had disappeared in the reeds.
Probably not, Tiffany decided.
Then, to her dark delight, there was a susurrus. There was no wind, but the leaves on the alder bushes by the riverbank began to shake and rustle. So did the reeds. They didn’t bend, they just blurred. Everything blurred, as if something had picked up the world and was shaking it. The air fizzed. People whispered behind closed doors….
The water began to bubble, just under the bank. It wasn’t very deep here—it would only have reached Tiffany’s knees if she’d waded—but it was suddenly darker and greener and, somehow, much deeper….
She stood and took a couple of steps backward just before long skinny arms fountained out of the water and clawed madly at the bank where she had been. For a moment she saw a thin face with long sharp teeth, huge round eyes, and dripping green hair like waterweed, and then the thing plunged back into the depths.
By the time the water closed over it, Tiffany was already running along the bank to the little beach where Wentworth was making frog pies. She snatched up the child just as a stream of bubbles came around the curve in the bank. Once again the water boiled, the green-haired creature shot up, and the long arms clawed at the mud. Then it screamed and dropped back into the water.
“I wanna go-a toy-lut!” screamed Wentworth.
Tiffany ignored him. She was watching the river with a thoughtful expression.
I’m not scared at all, she thought. How strange. I ought to be scared, but I’m just angry. I mean, I can feel the scared, like a red-hot ball, but the angry isn’t letting it out….
“Wenny wanna wanna wanna go-a toy-lut!” Wentworth shrieked.
“Go on, then,” said Tiffany absentmindedly. The ripples were still sloshing against the bank.
There was no point in telling anyone about this. Everyone would just say, “What an imagination the child has,” if they were feeling in a good mood, or, “Don’t tell stories!” if they weren’t.
She was still very angry. How dare a monster turn up in the river? Especially one so…so…ridiculous! Who did it think she was?
This is Tiffany, walking back home. Start with the boots. They are big and heavy boots, much repaired by her father, and they belonged to various sisters before her; she wears several pairs of socks to keep them on. They are big. Tiffany sometimes feels she is nothing more than a way of moving boots around.
Then there is the dress. It has been owned by many sisters as well and has been taken up, taken out, taken down, and taken in by her mother so many times that it really ought to have been taken away. But Tiffany rather likes it. It comes down to her ankles and, whatever color it had been to start with, is now a milky blue that is, incidentally, exactly the same color as the butterflies skittering beside the path.
Then there is Tiffany’s face. Light pink, with brown eyes, and brown hair. Nothing special. Her head might strike anyone watching—in a saucer of black water, for example—as being just slightly too big for the rest of her, but perhaps she’ll grow into it.
And then go farther up, and farther, until the track becomes a ribbon and Tiffany and her brother two little dots, and there is her country.
They call it the Chalk. Green downlands roll under the hot midsummer sun. From up here the flocks of sheep, moving slowly, drift over the short turf like clouds on a green sky. Here and there sheepdogs speed over the grass like shooting stars.
And then, as the eyes pull back, it is a long green mound, lying like a great whale on the world…
…surrounded by the inky rainwater in the saucer.
Miss Tick looked up.
“That little creature in the boat was a Nac Mac Feegle!” she said. “The most feared of all the fairy races! Even trolls run away from the Wee Free Men! And one of them warned her!”
“She’s the witch, then, is she?” said the voice.
“At that age? Impossible!” said Miss Tick. “There’s been no one to teach her! There’re no witches on the Chalk! It’s too soft. And yet…she wasn’t scared….”
The rain had stopped. Miss Tick looked up at the Chalk, rising above the low, wrung-out clouds. It was about five miles away.
“This child needs watching,” she said. “But chalk’s too soft to grow a witch on….”
Only the mountains were higher than the Chalk. They stood sharp and purple and gray, streaming long trails of snow from their tops even in summer. “Brides o’ the sky,” Granny Aching had called them once, and it was so rare that she ever said anything at all, let alone anything that didn’t have to do with sheep, that Tiffany had remembered it. Besides, it was exactly right. That’s what the mountains looked like in the winter, when they were all in white and the snow streams blew like veils.
Granny used old words and came out with odd, old sayings. She didn’t call the downland the Chalk, she called it “the wold.” Up on the wold the wind blows cold, Tiffany had thought, and the word had stuck that way.
She arrived at the farm.
People tended to leave Tiffany alone. There was nothing particularly cruel or unpleasant about this, but the farm was big and everyone had their jobs to do, and she did hers very well and so she became, in a way, invisible. She was the dairymaid, and good at it. She made better butter than her mother did, and people commented about how good she was with cheese. It was a talent. Sometimes, when the wandering teachers came to the village, she went and got a bit of education. But mostly she worked in the dairy, which was dark and cool. She enjoyed it. It meant she was doing something for the farm.