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It was a good way to get around, because people in the Chalk country didn’t trust witches. They thought they danced around on moonlit nights without their drawers on. (Tiffany had made inquiries about this, and had been slightly relieved to find out that you didn’t have to do this to be a witch. You could if you wanted to, but only if you were certain where all the nettles, thistles, and hedgehogs were.)
But if it came to it, people were a bit wary of the wandering teachers too. They were said to pinch chickens and steal away children (which was true, in a way), and they went from village to village with their gaudy carts and wore long robes with leather pads on the sleeves and strange flat hats and talked among themselves in some heathen lingo no one could understand, like "alea jacta est" and "quid pro quo." It was quite easy for Miss Tick to lurk among them. Her pointy hat was a stealth version, which looked just like a black straw hat with paper flowers on it until you pressed the secret spring.
Over the last year or so Tiffany’s mother had been quite surprised, and a little worried, at Tiffany’s sudden thirst for education, which people in the village thought was a good thing in moderation but if taken unwisely could lead to restlessness.
Then a month ago the message had come: Be ready.
Miss Tick, in her flowery hat, had visited the farm and had explained to Mr. and Mrs. Aching that an elderly lady up in the mountains had heard of Tiffany’s excellent prowess with cheese and was willing to offer her the post of maid at four dollars a month, one day off a week, her own bed, and a week’s vacation at Hogswatch.
Tiffany knew her parents. Three dollars a month was a bit low, and five dollars would be suspiciously high, but prowess with cheese was worth the extra dollar. And a bed all to yourself was a very nice perk. Before most of Tiffany’s sisters had left home, sleeping two sisters to a bed had been normal. It was a good offer.
Her parents had been impressed and slightly scared of Miss Tick, but they had been brought up to believe that people who knew more than you and used long words were quite important, so they’d agreed.
Tiffany accidentally heard them discussing it after she had gone to bed that night. It’s quite easy to accidentally overhear people talking downstairs if you hold an upturned glass to the floorboards and accidentally put your ear to it.
She heard her father say that Tiffany didn’t have to go away at all.
She heard her mother say that all girls wondered what was out there in the world, so it was best to get it out of her system. Besides, she was a very capable girl with a good head on her shoulders. Why, with hard work there was no reason why one day she couldn’t be a servant to someone quite important, like Aunt Hetty had been, and live in a house with an inside privy.
Her father said she’d find that scrubbing floors was the same everywhere.
Her mother said, well, in that case she’d get bored and come back home after the year was up and, by the way, what did prowess mean?
Superior skill, said Tiffany to herself. They did have an old dictionary in the house, but her mother never opened it because the sight of all those words upset her. Tiffany had read it all the way through.
And that was it, and suddenly here she was, a month later, wrapping her old boots, which had been worn by all her sisters before her, in a piece of clean rag and putting them in the secondhand suitcase her mother had bought her, which looked as if it was made of bad cardboard or pressed grape pips mixed with ear wax, and had to be held together with string.
There were good-byes. She cried a bit, and her mother cried a lot, and her little brother, Wentworth, cried as well just in case he would get a sweet for doing so. Tiffany’s father didn’t cry but gave her a silver dollar and rather gruffly told her to be sure to write home every week, which is a man’s way of crying. She said good-bye to the cheeses in the dairy and the sheep in the paddock and even to Ratbag the cat.
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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