‘How’s the old cottage?’
‘There’s a lot of mice,’ said Agnes.
‘I know. I used to feed them. Don’t tell Granny. She’s here, isn’t she?’
‘Haven’t seen her yet,’ said Agnes.
‘Ah, she’ll be waiting for a dramatic moment,’ said Magrat. ‘And you know what? I’ve never caught her actually waiting for a dramatic moment, not in all the, well, things we’ve been involved in. I mean, if it was you or me, we’d be hanging around in the hall or something, but she just walks in and it’s the right time.’
‘She says you make your own right time,’ said Agnes.
‘Yes,’ said Magrat.
‘Yes,’ said Agnes.
‘And you say she’s not here yet? It was the first card we did!’ Magrat leaned closer. ‘Verence got them to put extra gold leaf on it. I’m amazed it doesn’t go clang when she puts it down. How are you at making the tea?’
‘They always complain,’ said Agnes.
‘They do, don’t they? Three lumps of sugar for Nanny Ogg, right?’
‘It’s not as if they even give me tea money,’ said Agnes. She sniffed. There was a slight mustiness to the air.
‘It’s not worth baking biscuits, I can tell you that,’ said Magrat. ‘I used to spend hours doing fancy ones with crescent moons and so on. You might just as well get them from the shop.’
She sniffed too. ‘That’s not the baby,’ she said. ‘I’m sure Shawn Ogg’s been so busy arranging things he hasn’t had time to clean up the privy pit the last two weeks. The smell comes right up the garderobe in the Gong Tower when the wind gusts. I’ve tried hanging up fragrant herbs but they sort of dissolve.’
She looked uncertain, as if a worse prospect than lax castle sanitation had crossed her mind. ‘Er … she must’ve got the invitation, mustn’t she?’
‘Shawn says he delivered it,’ said Agnes. ‘And she probably said,’ and here her voice changed, becoming clipped and harsh, ‘“I can’t be havin’ with that at my time of life. I’ve never bin one to put meself forward, no one could ever say I’m one to put meself forward.”’
Magrat’s mouth was an O of amazement.
‘That’s so like her it’s frightening!’ she said.
‘It’s one of the few things I’m good at,’ said Agnes, in her normal voice. ‘Big hair, a wonderful personality, and an ear for sounds.’ And two minds, Perdita added. ‘She’ll come anyway,’ Agnes went on, ignoring the inner voice.
‘But it’s gone half eleven … Good grief, I’d better get dressed! Can you give me a hand?’
She hurried into the dressing room with Agnes tagging along behind.
‘I even wrote a bit underneath asking her to be a godmother,’ she said, sitting down in front of the mirror and scrabbling among the debris of makeup. ‘She’s always secretly wanted to be one.’
‘That’s something to wish on a child,’ said Agnes, without thinking.
Magrat’s hand stopped halfway to her face, in a little cloud of powder, and Agnes saw her horrified look in the mirror. Then the jaw tightened, and for a moment the Queen had just the same expression that Granny sometimes employed.
‘Well, if it was a choice of wishing a child health, wealth and happiness, or Granny Weatherwax being on her side, I know which I’d choose,’ said Magrat. ‘You must have seen her in action.’
‘Once or twice, yes,’ Agnes conceded.
‘She’ll never be beaten,’ said Magrat. ‘You wait till you see her when she’s in a tight corner. She’s got that way of … putting part of herself somewhere safe. It’s as if … as if she gives herself to someone else to keep hidden for a while. It’s all part of that Borrowing stuff she does.’
Agnes nodded. Nanny had warned her about it but, even so, it was unnerving to turn up at Granny’s cottage and find her stretched out on the floor as stiff as a stick and holding, in fingers that were almost blue, a card with the words: I ATE’NT DEAD.[5] It just meant that she was out in the world somewhere, seeing life through the eyes of a badger or a pigeon, riding as an unheeded passenger in its mind.
‘And you know what?’ Magrat went on. ‘It’s just like those magicians in Howondaland who keep their heart hidden in a jar somewhere, for safety, so they can’t be killed. There’s something about it in a book at the cottage.’
‘Wouldn’t have to be a big jar,’ said Agnes.
‘That wasn’t fair,’ said Magrat. She paused. ‘Well … not fair for most of the time. Often, anyway. Sometimes, at least. Can you help me with this bloody ruff?’
There was a gurgle from the cradle.
‘What name are you giving her?’ said Agnes.
‘You’ll have to wait,’ said Magrat.
It made some sort of sense, Agnes admitted, as she followed Magrat and the maids to the hall. In Lancre you named children at midnight so that they started a day with a new name. She didn’t know why it made sense. It just felt as though, once, someone had found that it worked. Lancrastians never threw away anything that worked. The trouble was, they seldom changed anything that worked, either.
She’d heard that this was depressing King Verence, who was teaching himself kinging out of books. His plans for better irrigation and agriculture were warmly applauded by the people of Lancre, who then did nothing about them. Nor did they take any notice of his scheme for sanitation, i.e., that there should be some, since the Lancrastian idea of posh sanitation was a non-slippery path to the privy and a mailorder catalogue with really soft pages. They’d agreed to the idea of a Royal Society for the Betterment of Mankind, but since this largely consisted of as much time as Shawn Ogg had to spare on Thursday afternoons Mankind was safe from too much Betterment for a while, although Shawn had invented draught excluders for some of the windier parts of the castle, for which the King had awarded him a small medal.
The people of Lancre wouldn’t dream of living in anything other than a monarchy. They’d done so for thousands of years and knew that it worked. But they’d also found that it didn’t do to pay too much attention to what the King wanted, because there was bound to be another king along in forty years or so and he’d be certain to want something different and so they’d have gone to all that trouble for nothing. In the meantime, his job as they saw it was to mostly stay in the palace, practise the waving, have enough sense to face the right way on coins and let them get on with the ploughing, sowing, growing and harvesting. It was, as they saw it, a social contract. They did what they always did, and he let them.
But sometimes, he kinged …
In Lancre Castle, King Verence looked at himself in the mirror and sighed.
‘Mrs Ogg,’ he said, adjusting his crown, ‘I have, as you know, a great respect for the witches of Lancre but this is, with respect, broadly a matter of general policy which, I respectfully submit, is a matter for the King.’ He adjusted the crown again, while Spriggins the butler brushed his robe. ‘We must be tolerant. Really, Mrs Ogg, I haven’t seen you in a state like this before—’
‘They go round setting fire to people!’ said Nanny, annoyed at all the respect.
‘Used to, I believe,’ said Verence.
‘And it was witches they burned!’
Verence removed his crown and polished it with his sleeve in an infuriatingly reasonable manner.
‘I’ve always understood they set fire to practically everybody,’ he said, ‘but that was some time ago, wasn’t it?’
‘Our Jason heard ’em preaching once down in Ohulan and they was saying some very nasty things about witches,’ said Nanny.
‘Sadly, not everyone knows witches like we do,’ said Verence, with what Nanny in her overheated state thought was unnecessary diplomacy.
5
When there was nothing much else to occupy her time Granny Weatherwax sent her mind Borrowing, letting it piggyback inside the heads of other creatures. She was widely accepted as the most skilled exponent of the art that the Ramtops had seen for centuries, being practically able to get inside the minds of things that didn’t even have minds. The practice meant, among other things, that Lancre people were less inclined towards the casual cruelty to animals that is a general feature of the rural idyll, on the basis that the rat you throw a brick at today might turn out to be the witch you need some toothache medicine from tomorrow.
It also meant that people calling on her unexpectedly would find her stretched out apparently cold and lifeless, heart and pulse barely beating. The sign had saved a lot of embarrassment.