The Shepherd's Crown (Discworld #41)(26)

‘Well, dear, if you think it’s a good idea. What are his clothes like?’ asked Mrs Dove.

‘Pretty good,’ said Mr Dove. ‘And he talks like a toff. I wonder if he is running away from something. Best not to ask any questions, I reckon. I tell you what, though: between him and his goat, we won’t have any trouble in the bar.’

And indeed Geoffrey stayed at The Star for two days, simply because Mr Dove liked him hanging around the place. And Mrs Dove said she was sad when he told her husband that he had to move on. ‘A strange boy, young Geoffrey. He kind of gives me the idea that everything is all right, even if I don’t know what it is that is right. A sort of rightness, floating in the air. I’m really sorry that he’s going,’ she said.

‘Yes, dear,’ said Mr Dove. ‘I asked him to stay, I really did, but he said he must go to Lancre.’

‘That’s where they have the witches,’ said his wife. She made a face.

‘Well,’ Mr Dove said, ‘that’s where he wants to go.’ He paused, and added, ‘He said the wind is blowing him there.’

Battling into a bitter headwind on her long journey back to her parents’ farm, Tiffany felt that there was altogether too much wind in and around Lancre. Still, at least it wasn’t raining, she told herself. Yesterday’s rain had been awful – the kind of joyous rain where every cloud had decided to join the party once one cloud had cracked open the first deluge.

She had felt proud of having the two steadings at first, flying between Lancre and the Chalk every few days, but broomsticks are not very fast. Or warm.fn2 It was good that she could go back home to where her mother did the cooking, but even back home there was no time to rest, and being away in Lancre for half the week meant she was facing a plethora of demands from the Chalk. People weren’t getting nasty about it – after all, she was a witch, and Lancre had more people than the Chalk – but there were these little strains beginning to develop. A few mutters. And she had a horrible feeling that some of the muttering was coming from other witches – witches who were finding queues at their doors, people who had gone to find Granny Weatherwax and just found an empty cottage.

Some of the problem in both steadings was with the old men left behind when their wives had died; a lot of them didn’t know how to cook. Occasionally some of the old ladies would help and you would see them carrying a pot of stew round for the old man next door. But the witch part of Tiffany couldn’t help but notice that this happened more often if the old lady was a widow and the old man had a nice cottage and a bit of money put by . . .

There was always something that had to be done – and some days it seemed mostly to be about toenails. There was one old man in Lancre – a decent old boy – whose toenails were as sharp as a lethal weapon, and Tiffany had to ask Jason Ogg, a blacksmith, to make her a pair of secateurs tough enough to break through them. She always closed her eyes until she heard the patter of his toenails banging off the ceiling, but the old man called her his lovely lady and tried to give her money. And at least she now knew that the Feegles had a use for the toenail clippings.

Witches liked useful things, Tiffany mused, as she tried to take her mind off the chill wind whipping around her. A witch would never have to ask for anything – oh no, no one wanted to owe a witch anything – and a witch didn’t take money either. Instead she accepted things she could make use of: food, and old clothing, and bits of cloth for bandages, and spare boots.

Boots. She had tripped over Granny Weatherwax’s boots again that very day. She had put them in the corner of the room now, and there they sat, almost staring at her when she was too weary to think. You’re not good enough yet to fill these boots, they seemed to say. You’ll have to do a lot more first.

Of course, there always was such a lot to do. So many people never seemed to think about the consequences of their everyday actions. And then a witch on her broom would have to set out from her bed in the rain at the dead of night because of ‘I only’ and its little friends ‘I didn’t know’ and ‘It’s not my fault’.

I only wanted to see if the copper was hot . . .

I didn’t know a boiling pot was dangerous . . .

It’s not my fault – no one told me dogs that bark might also bite.

And, her favourite, I didn’t know it would go off bang – when it said ‘goes bang’ on the box it came in. That had been when little Ted Cooper had put an explosive bangerfn3 into the carcass of a chicken after his mum’s birthday party and nearly killed everybody around the table. Yes, she had bandaged and treated everybody, even the joker, but she hoped very much his dad had kicked his arse afterwards.

And when the witch wasn’t there, well, what harm was there in trying out a few things for yourself? Most people knew about using plants to cure things. They were certain about that. But the thing about plants is that many of them look like all the others, and so Mistress Holland, wife of the miller of the Chalk, had treated her husband’s unfortunate skin condition with Love Lies Oozing rather than with Merryday Root and now his skin had turned purple.

Tiffany had treated the man, but then it had been time for her to go back to Lancre, and she was up, up and away again on her stick, hoping that they had both learned their lesson.

She was very thankful that Nanny Ogg was not too far away from Granny’s . . . no, her cottage. There were a lot of things that Tiffany was good at, but cookery wasn’t one of them, and so just as she relied on her mum and dad for meals in the Chalk, in Lancre she relied on Nanny. Strictly speaking, this meant she was relying on Nanny’s army of daughters-in-law, who couldn’t do enough for their old Nanny.fn4