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The rest of the hut had been burned on the day she’d been buried. No shepherd would have dared to use it, let alone spend the night there. Granny Aching had been too big in people’s minds, too hard to replace. Night and day, in all seasons, she was the Chalk country: its best shepherd, its wisest woman, and its memory. It was as if the green downland had a soul that walked about in old boots and a sacking apron and smoked a foul old pipe and dosed sheep with turpentine.
The shepherds said that Granny Aching had cussed the sky blue. They called the fluffy little white clouds of summer "Granny Aching’s little lambs." And although they laughed when they said these things, part of them was not joking.
No shepherd would have dared presume to live in that hut, no shepherd at all.
So they had cut the turf and buried Granny Aching in the chalk, watered the turf afterward to leave no mark, then burned her hut.
Sheep wool, Jolly Sailor tobacco, and turpentine . . .
. . . had been the smells of the shepherding hut, and the smell of Granny Aching. Such things have a hold on people that goes right to the heart. Tiffany only had to smell them now to be back there, in the warmth and silence and safety of the hut. It was the place she had gone to when she was upset, and the place she had gone to when she was happy. And Granny Aching would always smile and make tea and say nothing. And nothing bad could happen in the shepherding hut. It was a fort against the world. Even now, after Granny had gone, Tiffany still liked to go up there.
Tiffany stood there, while the wind blew over the turf and sheep bells clonked in the distance.
"I’ve got . . ." She cleared her throat. "I’ve got to go away. I . . . I’ve got to learn proper witching, and there’s no one here now to teach me, you see. I’ve got to . . . to look after the hills like you did. I can . . . do things but I don’t know things, and Miss Tick says what you don’t know can kill you. I want to be as good as you were. I will come back! I will come back soon! I promise I will come back, better than I went!"
A blue butterfly, blown off course by a gust, settled on Tiffany’s shoulder, opened and shut its wings once or twice, then fluttered away.
Granny Aching had never been at home with words. She collected silence like other people collected string. But she had a way of saying nothing that said it all.
Tiffany stayed for a while, until her tears had dried, and then went off back down the hill, leaving the everlasting wind to curl around the wheels and whistle down the chimney of the potbellied stove. Life went on.
It wasn’t unusual for girls as young as Tiffany to go "into service." It meant working as a maid somewhere. Traditionally, you started by helping an old lady who lived by herself; she wouldn’t be able to pay much, but since this was your first job, you probably weren’t worth much either.
In fact Tiffany practically ran Home Farm’s dairy by herself, if someone helped her lift the big milk churns, and her parents had been surprised she wanted to go into service at all. But as Tiffany said, it was something everyone did. You got out into the world a little bit. You met new people. You never knew what it could lead to.
That, rather cunningly, got her mother on her side. Her mother’s rich aunt had gone off to be a scullery maid, and then a parlor maid, and had worked her way up until she was a housekeeper and married to a butler and lived in a fine house. It wasn’t her fine house, and she only lived in a bit of it, but she was practically a lady.
Tiffany didn’t intend to be a lady. This was all a ruse, anyway. And Miss Tick was in on it.
You weren’t allowed to charge money for the witching, so all witches did some other job as well. Miss Tick was basically a witch disguised as a teacher. She traveled around with the other wandering teachers who went in bands from place to place teaching anything to anybody in exchange for food or old clothes.
From A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett. Copyright © 2004 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Harper Collins Publishers.
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