Nanny Ogg appreciated fine wine in her very own way. It would never have occurred to Casanunda that anyone would top up white wine with port merely because she'd reached the end of the bottle.
As for the food . . . well, she enjoyed that, too. Casanunda had never seen that elbow action before. Show Nanny Ogg a good dinner and she went at it with knife, fork, and rammer. Watching her eat a lobster was a particular experience he would not forget in a hurry. They'd be picking bits of claw out of the woodwork for weeks.
And the asparagus . . . he might actually try to forget Nanny Ogg putting away asparagus, but he suspected the memory would come creeping back.
It must be a witch thing, he told himself. They're always very clear about what they want. If you climbed cliffs and braved rivers and skied down mountains to bring a box of chocolates to Gytha Ogg, she'd have the nougat centres out of the bottom layer even before you got your crampons off. That's it. Whatever a witch does, she does one hundred percent.
Hubba, hubba!
“Ain't you going to eat all those prawns? Just push the plate this way, then.”
He had tried a little footsie to keep his hand in, as it were, but an accidental blow on the ankle from one of Nanny's heavy iron-nailed boots had put a stop to that.
And then there had been the gypsy violinist. At first Nanny had complained about people playin' the fiddle while she was trying to concentrate on her eatin', but between courses she'd snatched it off the man, thrown the bow into a bowl of camellias, retuned the instrument to something approaching a banjo, and had given Casanunda three rousing verses of what, him being foreign, she chose to call Il Porcupine Nil Sodomy Est.
Then she'd drunk more wine.
What also captivated Casanunda was the way Nanny Ogg's face became a mass of cheerful horizontal lines when she laughed, and Nanny Ogg laughed a lot.
In fact Casanunda was finding, through the faint haze of wine, that he was actually having fun.
“I take it there is no Mr. Ogg?” he said, eventually.
“Oh, yes, there's a Mr. Ogg,” said Nanny. “We buried him years ago. Well, we had to. He was dead.”
“It must be very hard for a woman living all alone?”
“Dreadful,” said Nanny Ogg, who had never prepared a meal or wielded a duster since her eldest daughter had been old enough to do it for her, and who had at least four meals cooked for her every day by various terrified daughters-in-law.
“It must be especially lonely at night,” said Casanunda, out of habit as much as anything else.
“Well, there's Greebo,” said Nanny “He keeps my feet warm.”
“Greebo-”
“The cat. I say, do you think there's any pudding?”
Later, she asked for a doggy bottle.
Mr. Brooks the beekeeper ladled some greenish, foul smelling liquid out of the saucepan that was always simmering in his secret hut, and filled his squirter.
There was a wasps' nest in the garden wall. It'd be a mortuary by morning.
That was the thing about bees. They always guarded the entrance to the hive, with their lives if necessary. But wasps were adept at finding the odd chink in the woodwork around the back somewhere and the sleek little devils'd be in and robbing the hive before you knew it. Funny. The bees in the hive'd let them do it, too. They guarded the entrance, but if a wasp found another way in, they didn't know what to do.
He gave the plunger a push. A stream of liquid bubbled out and left a smoking streak on the floor.
Wasps looked pretty enough. But if you were for bees, you had to be against wasps.
There seemed to be some sort of party going on in the hall. He vaguely remembered getting an invitation but, on the whole, that sort of thing never really caught his imagination. And especially now. Things were wrong. None of the hives showed any signs of swarming. Not one.
As he passed the hives in the dusk he heard the humming. You got that, on a warm night. Battalions of bees stood at the hive entrance, fanning the air with their wings to keep the brood cool. But there was also the roar of bees circling the hive.
They were angry, and on guard.
There was a series of small weirs just on the borders of Lancre. Granny Weatherwax hauled herself up on to the damp woodwork, and squelched to the bank where she emptied her boots.
After a while a pointy wizard's hat drifted downriver, and rose to reveal a pointy wizard underneath it. Granny lent a hand to help Ridcully out of the water.