The Shepherd's Crown (3 page)

With his tutor gone, Geoffrey wandered about the place, learning new things, hanging around a lot with McTavish, the stable-lad who was as old as the hills but somehow still was known as a ‘lad’. He knew all the bird songs in the world and could imitate them too.

And McTavish was there when Geoffrey found Mephistopheles.
One of the old nanny goats had given birth, and while she had two healthy kids, there was a third kid hidden in the straw, a little runt which its mother had rejected.

‘I’m going to try and save this little goat,’ Geoffrey declared. And he spent all night labouring to keep the newborn alive, squeezing milk from its mother and letting the little kid lick it off his finger until it slept peacefully
beside him in a broken-up bale of hay, which kept them both warm.

He is such a small thing, Geoffrey thought, looking into the kid’s letterbox eyes. I must give him a chance.

And the kid responded, and grew into a strong young goat with a devilish kick. He would follow Geoffrey everywhere, and lower his head and prepare to charge anyone he thought threatened his young master. Since this often
meant anyone within reach, many a servant or visitor found themselves skipping rather smartly out of the way when faced with the goat’s lowered horns.

‘Why did thee call that hell-goat Mephistopheles?’ asked McTavish one day.

‘I read it in a book.
^fn6
You can tell it is a very good name for a goat,’ Geoffrey replied.

Geoffrey grew older, turning from a little boy into a young lad and then a
bigger lad, wisely catching his father’s eye only occasionally.

Then one day McTavish saddled a horse for him and they rode over to the fields at the edge of Lord Swivel’s estate and crept quietly to a fox’s earth in the woods. There, as they had done many times before, they watched the vixen play with her cubs.

‘Nice to see ’un like so,’ whispered McTavish. ‘A fox mun eat and feed yon cubs.
But they has too much of a taste for me chickens for my liking. They kill things as matter to us, an’ so we kill them. ’Tis the way of the world.’

‘It shouldn’t be,’ said Geoffrey, sorrow in his voice as his heart went out to the vixen.

‘But we needs the hens and mun protect ’em. That’s why we hunts foxes,’ said McTavish. ‘I brings you here today, Geoffrey, for the time is coming when your father
will want you to join the hunt. Of yon vixen mebbe.’

‘I understand,’ Geoffrey said. He knew about the hunt, of course, as he had been made to watch them ride out every year since he was a baby. ‘We must protect our hens, and the world can be cruel and merciless. But making a
game
of it is not right. That’s terrible! It’s just execution. Must we kill everything? Kill a mother who is feeding her
cubs? We take so much and we give back nothing.’ He rose to his feet and went back to his horse. ‘I do not want to hunt, McTavish. My word, I do not like to hate – I don’t even hate my father – but the hunt I would like to see put in a dark place.’

McTavish looked worried. ‘I think thee needs to be careful, young Geoffrey. You knows what your father is like. He’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud.’

‘My father is not a stick-in-the-mud; he is the mud!’ Geoffrey said bitterly.

‘Well then, if you tries talking to him – or your mother – mebbe he might understand that you are not ready to join the hunt?’

‘No point,’ said Geoffrey. ‘When he has made up his mind, you cannot get through to him. I hear my mother crying sometimes – she doesn’t like to be seen crying, but I know she cries.’

Then
it was, as he looked up to watch a hawk hovering, that he thought to himself: There is freedom. Freedom is what I want.

‘I would like to fly, McTavish,’ he said, adding, ‘Like the birds. Like Langas.’
^fn7

And almost immediately, he saw a witch flying overhead on a stick, following the hawk, and he pointed up and said, ‘I want one of those. I want to be a witch.’

But the old man said, ‘It’s not
for thee, boy. Everybody knows men can’t be witches.’

‘Why not?’ asked Geoffrey.

The old man shrugged and said, ‘Nobody knows.’

And Geoffrey said, ‘I want to know.’

On the day of Geoffrey’s first hunt he trotted out with the rest, pale-faced but determined, and thought, This is the day I must try to stand up for myself.

Soon the local gentry were galloping across the countryside, some taking
it to the extreme by careering into ditches, through hedges or over gates, often minus their mounts, while Geoffrey carefully held his position well to the back of the throng, until he could slip away unnoticed. He circled the woods in the opposite direction to the hunt, his heart aching, especially when the baying of the hounds turned to joyous yelps as the prey was brought down.

Then it was
time to return to the house. There, everyone was at that happy stage of a hunt where ‘tomorrow’ is a word that still means something and you have a mug of hot beverage that is liberally laced with something not too dissimilar to Tiffany’s grandmother’s Special Sheep Liniment. A reward for the returning heroes! They had survived the hunt.
Huzzah!
They swigged and swilled and the drink ran over
their non-existent chins.

But Lord Swivel looked at Geoffrey’s horse – the only animal not to be lathered in sweat with its legs besplattered in mud – and his wrath was unquenchable.

Geoffrey’s brothers held him while his mother looked on imploringly, but to no avail. She averted her face as Lord Swivel smeared vixen’s blood on Geoffrey’s face.

His lordship was almost incandescent in his rage.
‘Where
were
you? You should have
been
there at the kill!’ he roared. ‘You will do this, young man – and like it! I had to do it when I was young, and so did my father before me. And so will you. It is a tradition. Do you understand? Every male member of our family has been blooded at your age. Who are you to say it’s wrong? I’m ashamed of you!’

There it came, the swish of the crop, across Geoffrey’s
back.

Geoffrey, his face dripping with the vixen’s blood, looked to his mother. ‘She was a beautiful thing! Why kill her in such a way? For fun?’

‘Please don’t upset your father,’ his mother pleaded.

‘I see them in the woods, and you just hunt them. Can you eat them? No. We – the unspeakable – chase and kill what we cannot eat, just for the blood. For fun.’

Swish.

It hurt. But Geoffrey was
suddenly full of . . . what? All at once he had the amazing feeling that things could be
made
right, and he told himself, I could do it. I know I can. He drew himself up to his full height and shook himself free of his brothers’ grasp.

‘I must thank you, Father,’ he said with unexpected vigour. ‘I have learned something important today. But I won’t let you hit me again – never – and nor will
you see me again unless you can change. Do you understand me?’ His tone was oddly formal now, as if befitting the occasion.

Harry and Hugh looked at Geoffrey with a kind of awe and waited for the explosion, while the rest of the hunt, which had given Lord Swivel space in which to deal with his son, stopped pretending that they weren’t watching. The world of the hunt was out of kilter, the air
frozen but somehow contriving also to seem to hold its breath.

In the charged silence, Geoffrey led his horse off to the stables, leaving Lord Swivel standing there like a stone.

He gave the horse some hay, took off its saddle and bridle, and was rubbing the beast down when McTavish walked up to him and said, ‘Well done, young Geoffrey.’ Then, surprisingly outspoken, the stable-lad added under
his breath, ‘You stood up for yourself, right enough. Don’t let that bastard grind thee down.’

‘If you talk like that, McTavish, my father could turn you out,’ Geoffrey warned. ‘And you like it here, don’t you?’

‘Well, lad, you’re right there. I’m too old to be changing my ways now, I reckon,’ McTavish replied. ‘But you stood your ground and no man could do better nor that. I expect thee’ll
be leaving us now, Master Geoffrey?’

‘Alas, yes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But thank you, McTavish. I hope my father doesn’t take it out on you for talking to me.’

And the oldest stable-lad in the world said, ‘He won’t do that, no, never, not while I’m still useful like. Anyways, after all these years, I know him – like one of them volcanee things, he is. Powerful dangerous explosions for a while, and
no care for who gets caught by the red-hot boulders spewing every which way, but it still blows out in the end. Smart folks just keep out of sight until it’s over. You’ve been very pleasant and respectful to me, Master Geoffrey. I reckons you take after your mother. A lovely lady, always so good to me and so helpful when my Molly was dying. I remember that. And I’ll remember you too.’

‘Thank
you,’ said Geoffrey. ‘And I will remember you.’

McTavish lit up a most enormous pipe and the smoke billowed. ‘I reckon you’ll be wanting to take away that dratted goat of yourn.’

‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But I don’t think I have any say in the matter – Mephistopheles will make up his own mind. He usually does.’

McTavish gave him a sideways look. ‘Got any food, Master Geoffrey? Got any money?
I reckon you won’t want to go into the house now. I tell you what, I’ll loan thee a bit o’ cash till you finds out where you wants to be.’

‘No!’ said Geoffrey. ‘I can’t possibly!’

‘I’m your friend, Master Geoffrey. Like I said, your mother has been good to me and I owes her a lot. You come back and see her sometime. And when you do that, just make sure you look up old McTavish.’

Geoffrey went
to fetch Mephistopheles and hitched him up to the little cart McTavish had made for him. He loaded a few things into the cart, picked up the reins, clicked his tongue and they set off out of the stable yard.

As the goat’s dainty hooves echoed down the drive, McTavish said to himself, ‘How does the boy do it? That hell-goat kicks the arse of everybody who comes here. But not Geoffrey.’

If Geoffrey
had looked back, he would have seen his mother’s beseeching look as she sobbed, while his father still stood there like a statue, amazed at such defiance. His brothers made as if to follow, but halted when they saw the rage in their father’s eyes.

And so Geoffrey and his goat went off to find a new life. Now, he thought, as they rounded the first of the drive’s many bends and he rode into his
future, I’ve got nowhere to go.

But the wind whispered, ‘Lancre.’

In Lancre, it hadn’t been a good day for Granny Weatherwax. A young lumberjack at work higher up in the Ramtop mountains had nearly severed his own foot. And on a day when the resident Igor was elsewhere so unable to patch him up. When Granny arrived at the camp on her rickety old broomstick she immediately saw that the lad was
in an even worse mess than she had expected. He had been doing his best to look brave in front of his mates, who were clustered around him trying to cheer him up, but she could see the pain in his face.

As she examined the damage, he cried out for his mother.

‘You, lad,’ Granny said sharply, turning a piercing look on the nearest of his mates. ‘You know where this lad’s family live?’ And at
the boy’s scared nod – a witch’s pointy hat often seemed to make young lads suddenly very scared – she went on, ‘Go then. Run. Tell the lady I’m bringing her son back and she’ll need hot water on and a clean bed.
Clean
, mind.’ And as the boy raced off, Granny glared at the others standing sheepishly around. ‘You others,’ she said sharply, ‘don’t just stand around. Make a stretcher from some of
that there wood lying about so’s I can take your friend there.’

The lad’s foot was all but hanging off and his boot was full of blood. Granny gritted her teeth, and set to with everything in her armoury and all the knowledge accumulated over many years, quietly, gently, taking his pain away from him, drawing it into herself to hold until she could release it.

His face came alive and his eyes
sparkled and he started chatting to the witch like an old friend. She cleaned and she stitched, all the while telling the lad what she was doing in a cheerful and calm voice before giving him what she called ‘a little tincture’. To the onlookers it looked like the boy was almost himself again when they brought to her a rather makeshift stretcher and found the lad dreamily telling Granny how to get
to his home.

The habitations of the lumberjacks up in the mountains were often no better than sheds and it turned out the boy – a lad by the name of Jack Abbott – and his mother lived in one of these. It was a rickety little hut held together more with dirt than with anything else, and when Granny Weatherwax arrived outside with the stretcher lashed underneath her broomstick, she frowned, wondering
how this lad’s injury could possibly be kept clean in such surroundings. The mother ran out to her boy and flapped around as the lad who had run down to her with the news helped Granny carry the stretcher inside and move the boy onto a pallet onto which the mother had heaped blankets to create a bed fit for an invalid.

Granny Weatherwax said quietly to the injured boy, ‘You lie right there and
don’t get up.’ And to the distraught mother, who was wringing her hands and making noises about paying something, she said, ‘No payment necessary, mistress – that’s not how we witches work – and I’ll come back to see him in a few days, and if I can’t make it then send for Mrs Ogg. I know boys, and your son’ll want to be up and doing as soon as possible, but mark my words, bed rest is the thing for
him now.’

The boy’s mother stared at Granny and said, ‘Thank you so much, Mrs . . . um . . . well, I ain’t never had need to call on a witch before, and I’ve heard some folks round here say witches do nasty things. But I can tell ’em now as I ain’t seen nothing of that sort.’

‘Really?’ said Granny, struggling to keep her temper. ‘Well, I would like to do some nasty things to the overseer for
not keeping an eye on these lads, and don’t you let that man tell your boy to get up until I do. If he does, tell him that Granny Weatherwax will be after him for using these young men who don’t really know how to climb trees. I’m a good witch, as it happens, but if I find your boy working before that foot is healed there will be a reckoning.’