The Shepherd's Crown (17 page)

In the world of the train and the swarf, iron could kill elves. But no elf wanted to be the one to feel the dreadful temper of Peaseblossom by gainsaying him. And they were very aware that he knew
exactly
how to make a short word like ‘suffer’ turn into a very
long experience.

And as their new king’s glamour built and he stood tall and strong above them, they felt a sense of their world waking up once more.

‘What fools these mortals be!’ Peaseblossom roared. ‘They think they can stop us? They
need
us. They
call
to us. And we will come. We will make them want what they can’t have and we will give them nothing but our laughter. We will take everything!’

And the elves cheered.

Becky Pardon and Nancy Upright, dressed in their best, stood in trepidation in front of Miss Tick, who said, ‘It’s not all spells and broomsticks. It’s heavy work, sometimes. Sometimes quite nasty. Yes, Becky?’

‘I was there as my granddad died,’ said Becky, ‘and I watched all the things that had to be done. My dad said I shouldn’t, but my mother said, “Let the girl see.
She’ll find out sooner or later how things are in the world.”’

‘What I want to know, girls, is that you can deal with magic. Both of you ought to have some basic magic, like blowing out a candle just by thought. What do you think we do with magic?’

Becky said, ‘You can cure warts. I know that one. My granny could do that. Magic can make you
beautiful
.’ Her tone was wistful, and Miss Tick looked
a little more closely at her. Oh, a rather nasty birthmark on one cheek.

‘You can magic someone to be your best friend,’ Nancy added. ‘Or’ – with a bit of a blush – ‘make a boy like you.’

Miss Tick laughed. ‘Girls, I can tell you this, magic won’t make you beautiful if you are not. And it certainly won’t make you popular. It is not a toy.’

Her face even redder, Nancy said, ‘But about boys .
 . .’

Miss Tick’s face did not move a muscle, and then she said, ‘What about them?’ Nancy’s blush was now impressive – if she went any redder, Miss Tick thought, she would look like a lobster. Miss Tick continued, ‘You don’t have to use spells to get boys, Nancy, and if you wish to know more about that, I daresay Mistress Tiffany will point you towards Nanny Ogg, or possibly your grandmother.’

‘Do you have a beau, mistress?’ asked Nancy.

‘No,’ said Miss Tick. ‘They get in the way. Now, let’s see if you can make a shamble. If you can’t do that you are very unlikely to be a witch. A shamble will give you
focus
.’ She flung her hand into the air and something was there. The very air seemed to be boiling. Dancing, fluttering . . . alive. And Miss Tick said, ‘See how the air moves, how it
waits – it’s the place where my shamble could be. Where it could advise me.’ Suddenly, she had produced an egg in her hand, with some thread, twigs, a small nut. ‘These items I had about me could make that shamble,’ she said. She looked at the serious little faces, sighed and said, ‘But now it’s time for each of you to make
your
shamble, and it must have something living in it. Look, just shut
your eyes and make a shamble out of anything you have with you.’

She watched them, their faces as solemn as a dirge as they pulled things out of their pockets. Miss Tick knew her witches, knew these girls had the innate magical talent, but to decide to train to be a witch was the kind of decision that took more than just a bit of talent. Hard work would have to come into it too. A lot of hard
work. Even then it would not be easy, she knew. Apart from anything else, they had to have parents who would support their choice. A girl might be useful at home, helping with the younger children or working in a family business, for instance. That was
before
the question of grandchildren cropped up. And it always did, oh yes, always.

Miss Tick knew too that you can find out a lot about somebody
from what’s in their pockets, and sometimes a lot about them from what they
don’t
have. She herself generally had a small cheese in one of her pockets – you couldn’t do good magic without a snack. Out loud, she said, ‘Even a worm is alive, so keeping one in a little box with some wet leaves will help.’

Nancy pulled off one of her boots, saying, ‘I’ve got a caterpillar in there.’

‘Well done,’
said Miss Tick. ‘You have been lucky, but being lucky is only part of being a witch.’

Becky looked rather glum. ‘I’ve got a hairpin – am I allowed to use that?’

Miss Tick sighed. ‘In your shamble? Of course, but you must still have something living. Butterflies or ants or things like that, but remember – you shouldn’t kill them. Let them fly free.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Becky. She rummaged
around in the bushes behind them for a moment, then held up a large green hairy caterpillar.

‘Copycat!’ said Nancy.

Miss Tick laughed. ‘Part of being a witch is being clever. Using your eyes and learning from what you see. Well done, Becky.’ For Becky now had the caterpillar neatly trussed in a bit of old string, which also seemed to be knotted somehow around one of her fingers. Her other fingers
were struggling to push the hairpin into the shamble.

Nancy pouted and held up
her
caterpillar, which appeared to be trying to burrow into a tuft of sheep’s wool.

There was a rumble of thunder and a strike of lightning and both girls said, ‘That was me, with my little shamble.’

Miss Tick smiled again. Why were people so keen to look at a sunrise, a rainbow, a flash of lightning or a dark cloud
and feel
responsible
for it? She knew that if either girl really believed they could control a storm in the skies, they would be running home, screaming in terror – and their mothers would probably have to wash out the girls’ underclothing. Still, a bit of self-belief in a witch was a good start.

‘Miss, miss!’ said Becky and pointed. There was a hairpin now floating in the air alongside her caterpillar.

‘Well done,’ said Miss Tick. ‘Very well done indeed.’

‘Well, what about this, then?’ said Nancy, as her own shamble collapsed and the sheep’s wool floated to the ground, the little caterpillar perched on top like a witch on a broomstick. She raised her finger, and fire appeared to come out of the tip.

‘Excellent,’ said Miss Tick. ‘Both of you have got the hang of it. After that, it’s just a
matter of learning, learning every day,’ she said sternly.

But what she thought was, Well, Mistress Tiffany will want to see you two and no mistake.

The music was playing in Fairyland – a harmonious melody, notes spiralling into the empty air, where a lazing elf perched on a slender branch near the top of a blossoming tree allowed himself the pleasure of turning each note into a colour, so that
they danced above their heads, delighting the court. It doesn’t take much to delight an elf. Hurting something is usually top of their list, but music comes a close second.

The musician was a human, lured into the woods by the glamour of an elf’s harp, then snatched through to play, play, play for the Lord Peaseblossom. Elves were skilled at keeping their playthings alive, sometimes for weeks,
and the man with the flute was a delightful new toy. Peaseblossom wondered idly how long the man would last.

But he was pleased. His warriors were making little sorties into the human world, bringing him back presents such as this. And he knew that with each successful incursion their confidence was growing. Soon they would be ready to make their move . . .

He frowned. He had to speak to Mustardseed.
He needed to know that the elf had indeed thrown the wretched remains of the Queen out of Fairyland. He wanted no . . . complications.

Just as he loved to watch wildlife, so Geoffrey observed people. He found them fascinating, and he watched closely all the time, learning more and more from what he saw.

One thing he saw was that the old men seemed somehow
in the way
in their homes. It was so
different from Geoffrey’s own home, where his father had decidedly ruled the roost. Here, where there were women in the old men’s lives, the women held all the power indoors – as they had for the years their men had been out working – and they had no intention of giving any of it away.

This thought was in his mind when he went to tidy up the nostril hairs of Sailor Makepeace, an errand which
even Nanny Ogg disliked. Now Mrs Sally Makepeace – too shortsighted to be trusted with a pair of scissors near her husband’s nose, as an earlier attempt had proved – appeared to be a good woman, but Geoffrey had noticed that she treated her husband almost as part of the furniture, and that made Geoffrey sad – sad that a seafaring man who had seen so many interesting things now spent much of his time
in the pub because his wife was always washing, cleaning, polishing and, when no alternative was around, dusting. She only
just
managed to avoid washing, cleaning and dusting her husband if he sat still for long enough.

Gradually it dawned on Geoffrey that the pub was both an entertainment and a refuge for the old boys. He joined them there one day and bought them all a pint, which got their
attention. Then he had Mephistopheles do his counting trick. By the second pint the old boys had become quite avuncular and Geoffrey broached a subject which had been on his mind for a few days.

‘So, may I ask what you do, gentlemen?’

As it happened, he got laughter, and Reservoir Slump – a man whose grin, unlike his name, never slipped – said, ‘Bless you, sir, you could call us gentlemen of
leisure.’

‘We are as kings,’ said Laughing Boy Sideways.

‘Though without the castles,’ Reservoir Slump added. ‘’Less’n I had one once and lost it somewhere.’

‘And do you like your leisure, gentlemen?’ said Geoffrey.

‘Not really,’ said Smack Tremble. ‘In fact, I hate it. Ever since my Judy died. We never had kids, neither.’ There was a tear in his eye and a break in his voice, which he covered
up by taking another swig from his tankard.

‘She had a tortoise though, didn’t she?’ Wrinkled Joe, who had been built to a size big enough to pick up cows, put in.

‘Right enough,’ Smack said. ‘She said she liked it because it walked no faster ’n her. Still got the tortoise, but it ain’t the same. Not much good at conversation. My Judy would rattle on all day about this ’n’ that. The tortoise
listens well enough, mind you, which is more’n I could say for Judy sometimes.’ This got a laugh.

‘It’s a petticoat government, when you get old,’ said Stinky Jim Jones.

Geoffrey, now pleased to have got the ball rolling, said, ‘What do you mean by that?’

And then there was a kind of grumble from every man.

‘It’s like this, backhouse boy,’ said Wrinkled Joe. ‘My Betsy tells me what I am to
eat and when and where, and if we are together, she fusses around me like an old hen. It’s like being a kid.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Captain Makepeace. ‘My Sally is wonderful and I knows I would be lost without her but, well, put it like this: I was a man once in charge of many other men, and when the weather was fearsomely bad, I would be up there making sure that we didn’t founder because it was
my job and I was the captain.’ He looked around, seeing nods from the others, and then said directly to Geoffrey, ‘And best of all, young man, I was a
man
. And now? My job is to lift my feet while she sweeps around me. It’s our home and I love her, but somehow I’m always in the way.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Stinky Jim. ‘You know me, I’m still a good carpenter, well known in the Guild, but
my Milly frets about me handling all the tools and so on; and I tell you, when she’s got her eyes on me, my hands shake.’

‘Would you like them to stop shaking?’ asked Geoffrey, though he had in fact seen Stinky Jim lift a tankard to his lips with a hand as steady as a rock. ‘Because you gentlemen have given me an idea.’ He paused, hoping they would listen. ‘My maternal uncle came from Uberwald
and his name was Heimlich Sheddenhausen – he was the first man known to have a “shed”.’

Stinky Jim said, ‘I’ve got a shed.’

‘No offence, you may
think
you have,’ said Geoffrey, ‘but what is in it? There are goat sheds and chicken sheds and cow sheds, but these sheds I’m proposing are for
men
. I reckon what we need around here is sheds for men. A
man
shed.’

And now he did have their attention.
Especially when he hailed the landlord with a ‘Let’s drink to that, gentlemen! Another pint all round, please!’

The ladies in the villages had taken Geoffrey to their hearts, too. It was astonishing. There was something about his willingness to stop and talk, his gentle smile and pleasant manner, that made them immediately warm to him.

‘Mister Geoffrey is so calm, all the time. He never gets
in a tizz, oh no, and he speaks wonderful! A real educated man,’ old Betsy Hopper said to Tiffany one day.

‘And that goat of his!’ Mrs Whistler added, folding her impressive arms under her even more impressive chest. ‘Looks a testy animal to me, but that Geoffrey has him trotting along all peaceful like.’

‘Wish he could do the same to my Joe!’ Betsy cackled, and she and Mrs Whistler chortled
together as they headed off down the street.

Tiffany watched them go, and began thinking about her backhouse boy, wondering how he made things settle down so well, and she thought, I’ve seen those people before – the ones who seem to know everybody. They hold the ring, stop the fighting. I think I shall let him go round the houses with me now, and see what he does.

And so Geoffrey went out the
next day with Tiffany, hanging on behind her on the broomstick, his face lighting up with sheer joy as Tiffany awkwardly steered the much heavier stick into the mountains; and the houses lit up as soon as he came in, so cheerfully alive. He could be funny, he could sing songs, and somehow he made everything . . . a bit better. Crying babies began to gurgle instead of howl, grown-ups stopped arguing,
and the mothers became more peaceful and took his advice.

He was good with animals too. A young heifer would stand for him, rather than skitter off in fright at a stranger, while cats would stroll in and immediately decide that Geoffrey’s lap was the place to be. Tiffany once saw him leaning up against a woodland cottage wall with a family of rabbits resting at his feet –
at the same time as
the farm dog was by his side.