I Shall Wear Midnight (Discworld 38)

‘My dad beat me up, didn’t he?’ said Amber in a matter-of-fact voice as they walked towards the grey towers. ‘Did my baby die?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh,’ said Amber in the same flat voice.

‘Yes,’ said Tiffany. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I can sort of remember, but not exactly,’ said Amber. ‘It’s all a bit … fuzzy.’

‘That’s the soothings working. Jeannie has been helping you.’

‘I understand,’ said the girl.

‘You do?’ said Tiffany.

‘Yes,’ said Amber. ‘But my dad, is he going to get into trouble?’

He would if I told how I found you, Tiffany thought. The wives would see to it. The village people had a robust attitude to the punishing of boys, who almost by definition were imps of mischief and needed to be tamed, but hitting a girl that hard? Not good. ‘Tell me about your young man,’ she said aloud instead. ‘He is a tailor, isn’t he?’

Amber beamed, and Amber could light up the world with a smile.

‘Oh yes! His grandad lear

ned him a lot before he died. He can make just about anything out of cloth, can my William. Everyone around here says he should be put to an apprenticeship and he’d be a master himself in a few years.’ Then she shrugged. ‘But masters want paying for the learning of the knowing, and his mum is never going to find the money to buy him an indenture. Oh, but my William has wonderful fine fingers, and he helps his mum with the sewing of her corsets and making beautiful wedding dresses. That means working with satins and suchlike,’ said the girl proudly. ‘And William’s mum is much complimented on the fineness of the stitching!’ Amber beamed with second-hand pride. Tiffany looked at the glowing face, where the bruises, despite the kelda’s soothing touch, were still quite plain.

So the boyfriend is a tailor, she thought. To big beefy men like Mr Petty, a tailor was hardly a man at all, with his soft hands and indoor work. And if he stitched clothes for ladies too, well, that was even more shame that the daughter would be bringing to the unhappy little family.

‘What do you want to do now, Amber?’ she said.

‘I’d like to see my mum,’ said the girl promptly.

‘But supposing you meet your dad?’

Amber turned to her. ‘Then I’ll understand … please don’t do anything nasty to him, like turn him into a pig or something?’

A day as a pig might help him mend his ways, thought Tiffany. But there was something of the kelda in the way that Amber had said, ‘I’ll understand.’ A shining light in a dark world.

Tiffany had never seen the gates of the castle closed shut except at night. By day it was a mixture of the village hall, a place for the carpenter and the blacksmith to set up shop, a space for the children to play in when it rained and, for that matter, for temporarily storing the harvests of hay and wheat, at those times when the barns alone could not cope. There wasn’t much room in even the biggest cottage; if you wanted a bit of peace and quiet, or somewhere to think, or somebody to talk to, you wandered over to the castle. It always worked.

At least by now the shock of the new Baron’s return had worn off, but the place was still humming with activity when Tiffany entered, but it was rather subdued and people were not talking very much. Possibly the reason for this was the Duchess, Roland’s mother-in-law-to-be, who was striding around in the great hall and occasionally prodding people with a stick. Tiffany didn’t believe it the first time that she saw it, but there it was again – a shiny black stick with a silver knob on the end with which she prodded a maid carrying a basket of laundry. It was only at this point that Tiffany noticed, too, the future bride trailing behind her mother as if she was too embarrassed to go much closer to somebody who prodded people with sticks.

Tiffany was going to protest, and then felt curious as she glanced around. She stepped back a few paces and let herself disappear. It was a knack and a knack that she was good at. It wasn’t invisibility, just that people didn’t notice you. All unseen, she drifted close enough to hear what the pair of them were saying, or at least what the mother was saying and the daughter was listening to.

The Duchess was complaining. ‘Been allowed to go to rack and ruin. Really, it needs a thorough overhaul! You cannot afford to be lax in a place like this! Firmness is everything! Heaven knows what this family thought it was doing!’

Her speech was punctuated by the whack of the stick on the back of another maid who was hurrying, but clearly not hurrying fast enough, under the weight of a basket full of laundry.

‘You must be rigorous in your duty to see that they are equally rigorous in theirs,’ the Duchess went on, scanning the hall for another target. ‘The laxity will stop. You see? You see? They do learn. You must never relax your guard in your pursuit of slovenliness, both in deed and manner. Do not suffer any undue familiarity! And that, of course, includes smiles. Oh, you may think, what could be so bad about a happy smile? But the innocent smile can so easily become a knowing smirk, and suggests perhaps the sharing of a joke. Are you listening to what I’m telling you?’

Tiffany was astonished. Single-handedly the Duchess had made her do something that she never thought she would do, which was to feel sorry for the bride-to-be, who at this point was standing in front of her mother like a naughty child.

Her hobby, and quite possibly one activity in life, was painting in watercolours, and although Tiffany was trying, against the worst of her instincts, to be generous to the girl, there was no denying that she looked like a watercolour – and not just a watercolour, but a watercolour painted by someone who had not much colour but large supplies of water, giving her the impression of not only being colourless but also rather damp. You could add, too, that there was so little of her that in a storm it might be quite possible that she would snap. Unseen as she was, Tiffany felt just the tiniest pang of guilt and stopped inventing other nasty things to think. Besides, compassion was setting in, blast it!

‘Now, Letitia, recite again the little poem that I taught you,’ said the Duchess.

The bride-to-be, not just blushing but melting in embarrassment and shame, looked around like a stranded mouse on a great wide floor, uncertain of which way to run.

‘If you,’ her mother prompted irritably, and gave her a prod with the stick.