‘I didn’t mean it to get that bad,’ said Letitia, blowing her nose like a hunting horn. ‘I just wanted Roland not to like you so much. You can’t imagine what it’s like, being me! The most I’m allowed to do is paint pictures, and only watercolours at that. Not even charcoal sketches!’
‘I wondered about that,’ said Tiffany absent-mindedly. ‘Roland once used to write to Lord Diver’s daughter, Iodine, and she used to paint watercolours all the time too. I wondered if it was some kind of punishment.’
But Letitia wasn’t listening. ‘You don’t have to just sit and paint pictures. You can fly around all the time,’ she was saying. ‘Order people about, do interesting things. Hah, I wanted to be a witch when I was little. But just my luck, I had long blonde hair and a pale complexion and a very rich father. What good was that? Girls like that can’t be witches!’
Tiffany smiled. They were getting to the truth, and it was important to stay helpful and friendly before the dam broke again and they were all flooded. ‘Did you have a book of fairy stories when you were young?’
Letitia blew her nose again. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘Was it the one with a very frightening picture of the goblin on page seven by any chance? I used to shut my eyes when I came to that page.’
‘I scribbled all over him with a black crayon,’ said Letitia in a low voice, as if it was a relief to tell somebody.
‘You didn’t like me. And so you decided to do some magic against me …’ Tiffany said it very quietly, because there was something brittle about Letitia. In fact the girl did reach for some more tissue but appeared to have run out of sobs for a moment – as it turned out, only for a moment.
‘I am so sorry! If only I had known, I would never have—’
‘Perhaps I should tell you,’ Tiffany went on, ‘that Roland and I were … well, friends. More or less the only friend the other one had. But in a way, it was the wrong kind of friendship. We didn’t come together; things happened that pushed us together. And we didn’t realize that. He was the Baron’s son, and once you know that you’re the Baron’s son and all the kids have been told how to act towards the Baron’s son, then you don’t have many people you can talk to. And then there was me. I was the girl smart enough to be a witch and I have to say that this is not a job which allows you to have that much of a social life. If you like, two people who were left out thought they were the same kind of person. I know that now. Unfortunately Roland was the first to realize that. And that’s the truth of it. I am the witch, and he is the Baron. And you will be the Baroness, and you should not worry if the witch and the Baron – for the benefit of everybody – are on good terms. And that is all there is to is, and in fact there isn’t even an it, just the ghost of an it.’
She saw relief travel across Letitia’s face like the rising sun.
‘And that’s the truth from me, miss, so I would like the truth from you. Look, can we get out of here? I’m afraid that some guards might rush in at any moment and try and put me in a place I can’t get out of.’
Tiffany managed to get Letitia onto the broomstick with her. The girl fidgeted, but simply gasped as the stick sailed down gently from the castle battlements, drifted over the village and touched down in a field.
‘Did you see those bats?’ said Letitia.
‘Oh, they often fly around the stick if you don’t move very fast,’ said Tiffany. ‘You’d think they would avoid it, really. And now, miss, now we’re both far from any help, tell me what you did that made people hate me.’
Panic filled Letitia’s face.
‘No, I’m not going to hurt you,’ said Tiffany. ‘If I was going to, I would have done it a long time ago. But I want to clean up my life. Tell me what you did.’
‘I used the ostrich trick,’ said Letitia promptly. ‘You know, it’s called unsympathetic magic: you make a model of the person and stick them upside down in a bucket of sand. I really am very, very sorry …’
‘Yes, you already said so,’ said Tiffany, ‘but I’ve never heard of this trick. I can’t see how it could work. It doesn’t make sense.’
But it worked on me, she thought. This girl isn’t a witch, and whatever she tried wasn’t a real spell, but it worked on me.
‘It doesn’t have to make sense if it’s magic,’ said Letitia hopefully.
‘It has to make some sense somewhere,’ said Tiffany, staring up at the stars that were coming out.
‘Well,’ said Letitia, ‘I got it out of Spells for Lovers by Anathema Bugloss, if that’s any help.’
‘That’s the one with the picture of the author sitting on a broomstick, isn’t it?’ said Tiffany. ‘Sitting on it the wrong way round, I might add. And it hasn’t got a safety strap. And no witch I’ve ever met wears goggles. And as for having a cat on it with you, that doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s a made-up name too. I’ve seen the book in the Boffo catalogue. It’s rubbish. It’s for soppy girls who think all you need to do to make magic is buy a very expensive stick with a semiprecious stone glued on the end, no offence meant. You might as well pick a stick out of the hedge and call it a wand.’
Without saying anything, Letitia walked a little way down to the hedge that lay between the field and the road. There’s always a useful stick under a hedge if you poke around enough. She waved it vaguely in the air, and it left a light blue line after it.
‘Like this?’ she said. For quite a while, there was no sound apart from the occasional hoot of an owl and, for the really good of hearing, the rustling of the ba
ts.
‘I think it’s time we had a proper little chat, don’t you?’ said Tiffany.
Chapter 11
THE BONFIRE OF THE WITCHES