She was just in time to see Esk come running through the gates, in tears.
‘The magic just wouldn’t work! I could feel it there but it just wouldn’t come out!’
‘Perhaps you were trying too hard,’ said Granny. ‘Magic’s like fishing. Jumping around and splashing never caught any fish, you have to bide quiet and let it happen natural.’
‘And then everyone laughed at me! Someone even gave me a sweet!’
‘You got some profit out of the day, then,’ said Granny.
‘Granny!’ said Esk accusingly.
‘Well, what did you expect?’ she asked. ‘At least they only laughed at you. Laughter don’t hurt. You walked up to chief wizard and showed off in front of everyone and only got laughed at? You’re doing well, you are. Have you eaten the sweet?’
Esk scowled. ‘Yes.’
‘What kind was it?’
‘Toffee.’
‘Can’t abide toffee.’
‘Huh,’ said Esk, ‘I suppose you want me to get peppermint next time?’
‘Don’t you sarky me, young-fellow-me-lass. Nothing wrong with peppermint. Pass me that bowl.’
Another advantage of city life, Granny had discovered, was glassware. Some of her more complicated potions required apparatus which either had to be bought from the dwarves at extortionate rates or, if ordered from the nearest human glassblower, arrived in straw and, usually, pieces. She had tried blowing her own and the effort always made her cough, which produced some very funny results. But the city’s thriving alchemy profession meant that there were whole shops full of glass for the buying, and a witch could always arrange bargain prices.
She watched carefully as yellow steam surged along a twisty maze of tubing and eventually condensed as one large, sticky droplet. She caught it neatly on the end of a glass spoon and very carefully tipped it into a tiny glass phial.
Esk watched her through her tears.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘It’s a neveryoumind,’ said Granny, sealing the phial’s cork with wax.
‘A medicine?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’ Granny pulled her writing set towards her and selected a pen. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she very carefully wrote out a label, with much scratching and pausing to work out the spellings.
‘Who’s it for?’
‘Mrs Herapath, the glassblower’s wife.’
Esk blew her nose. ‘He’s the one who doesn’t blow much glass, isn’t he?’
Granny looked at her over the top of the desk.
‘How do you mean?’
‘When she was talking to you yesterday she called him Old Mister Once A Fortnight.’
‘Mmph,’ said Granny. She carefully finished the sentence: ‘Dylewt in won pint warter and won droppe in hys tee and be shure to wear loose clowthing allso that no vysitors exspected.’
One day, she told herself, I’m going to have to have that talk with her.
The child seemed curiously dense. She had already assisted at enough births and taken the goats to old Nanny Annaple’s billy without drawing any obvious conclusions. Granny wasn’t quite certain what she should do about it, but the time never seemed appropriate to bring up the subject. She wondered whether, in her heart of hearts, she was too embarrassed; she felt like a farrier who could shoe horses, cure them, rear them and judge them, but had only the sketchiest idea about how one rode them.
She pasted the label on to the phial and wrapped it carefully in plain paper.
Now.
‘There is another way into the University,’ she said, looking sidelong at Esk, who was making a disgruntled job of mashing herbs in a mortar. ‘A witches’ way.’
Esk looked up. Granny treated herself to a thin smile and started work on another label; writing labels was always the hard part of magic, as far as she was concerned.
‘But I don’t expect you’d be interested,’ she went on. ‘It’s not very glamorous.’
‘They laughed at me,’ Esk mumbled.
‘Yes. You said. So you won’t be wanting to try again, then. I quite understand.’
There was silence broken only by the scratching of Granny’s pen. Eventually Esk said: ‘This way—’
‘Mmph?’
‘It’ll get me into the University?’
‘Of course,’ said Granny haughtily. ‘I said I’d find a way, didn’t I? A very good way, too. You won’t have to bother with lessons, you can go all over the place, no one will notice you — you’ll be invisible really — and, well, you can really clean up. But of course, after all that laughing, you won’t be interested. Will you?’
‘Pray have another cup of tea, Mrs Weatherwax?’ said Mrs Whitlow.
‘Mistress,’ said Granny.
‘Pardon?’
‘It’s Mistress Weatherwax,’ said Granny. ‘Three sugars, please.’
Mrs Whitlow pushed the bowl towards her. Much as she looked forward to Granny’s visits it came expensive in sugar. Sugar lumps never seemed to last long around Granny.
‘Very bad for the figure,’ she said. ‘And the teeth, so Aye hear.’
‘I never had a figure to speak of and my teeth take care of themselves,’ said Granny. It was true, more’s the pity. Granny suffered from robustly healthy teeth, which she considered a big drawback in a witch. She really envied Nanny Annaple, the witch over the mountain, who managed to lose all her teeth by the time she was twenty and had real crone-credibility. It meant you ate a lot of soup, but you also got a lot of respect. And then there was warts. Without any effort Nanny managed to get a face like a sockful of marbles, while Granny had tried every reputable wart-causer and failed to raise even the obligatory nose wart. Some witches had all the luck.
‘Mmph?’ she said, aware of Mrs Whitlow’s fluting.
‘Aye said,’ said Mrs Whitlow, ‘that young Eskarina is a real treasure. Quate the little find. She keeps the floors spotless, spotless. No task too big. Aye said to her yesterday, Aye said, that broom of yours might as well have a life of its own, and do you know what she said?’
‘I couldn’t even venture a guess,’ said Granny, weakly.
‘She said the dust was afraid of it! Can you imagine?’
‘Yes,’ said Granny.
Mrs Whitlow pushed her teacup towards her and gave her an embarrassed smile.
Granny sighed inwardly and squinted into the none-too-clean depths of the future. She was definitely beginning to run out of imagination.
The broom whisked down the corridor raising a great cloud of dust which, if you looked hard at it, seemed somehow to be sucked back into the broomstick. If you looked even harder you’d see that the broom handle had strange markings on it, which were not so much carved as clinging and somehow changed shape as you watched.
But no one looked.
Esk sat at one of the high deep windows and stared out over the city. She was feeling angrier than usual, so the broom attacked the dust with unusual vigour. Spiders ran desperate eight-legged dashes for safety as ancestral cobwebs disappeared into the void. In the walls mice clung to each other, legs braced against the inside of their holes. Woodworm scrabbled in the ceiling beams as they were drawn, inexorably, backwards down their tunnels.
‘You can really clean up,’ said Esk. ‘Huh!’
There were some good points, she had to admit. The food was simple but there was plenty of it, and she had a room to herself somewhere in the roof and it was quite luxurious because here she could lie in until five a.m., which to Granny’s way of thinking was practically noon. The work certainly wasn’t hard. She just started sweeping until the staff realized what was expected of it, and then she could amuse herself until it was finished. If anyone came the staff would immediately lean itself nonchalantly against a wall.