I Shall Wear Midnight

The rough music was getting nearer slowly, because it’s hard to walk across fields on a dark night when you’ve had a skinful of beer, no matter how righteous you are currently feeling. She had to hope that they did not go into the barn first, because they would hang him there and then. If he was lucky, they would just hang him. When she had looked into the barn and seen that murder had been done, she knew that, without her, it would be done again. She had put a charm on the girl to take her pain away, holding it just above her own shoulder. It was invisible, of course, but in her mind’s eye it burned a fiery orange.

‘It was that boy,’ mumbled the man, with vomit trickling down his chest. ‘Coming round here, turning her head so as she wouldn’t listen to her mum or me. And her being only thirteen. It’s a scandal.’

‘William is thirteen too,’ said Tiffany, trying to keep her voice level. It was difficult; the rage was bursting to get out. ‘Are you trying to tell me that she was too young for a bit of romance, but young enough to be beaten so hard that she bled from places where no one should bleed?’

She couldn’t tell if he had really come to his senses, because the man had so few of them at the best of times, it was hard to know if he had any at all.

‘It wasn’t right, what they were doing,’ he said. ‘A man’s got to have discipline in his own house, after all, ain’t that right?’

Tiffany could imagine the fiery language in the pub as the overture to the music got wound up. There were not very many weapons in the villages of the Chalk, but there were such things as reaping hooks and scythes and thatching knives and big, big hammers. They weren’t weapons – until you hit somebody with them. And everyone knew about old Petty’s temper, and the number of times his wife told the neighbours that she had got her black eye by walking into a door.

Oh, yes – she could imagine the conversation in the pub, with the beer joining in and people remembering where all those things that weren’t weapons were hanging in their sheds. Every man was king in his little castle. Everyone knew about that – well, at least every man – and so you minded your own business when it came to another man’s castle until the castle began to stink, and then you had to do something about it lest all castles should fall. Mr Petty was one of the neighbourhood’s sullen little secrets, but it was not a secret any more.

‘I am your only chance, Mr Petty,’ she said. ‘Run away. Grab what you can and run away right now. Run away to where they’ve never heard of you, and then run a bit further, just to be on the safe side, because I will not be able to stop them, do you understand? Personally, I could not care less what happens to your miserable frame but I do not wish to see good people get turned into bad people by doing a murder, so you just leg it across the fields and I won’t remember which way you went.’

‘You can’t turn me out of my own house,’ he mumbled, finding some drunken defiance.

‘You’ve lost your house, your wife, your daughter … and your grandson, Mr Petty. You will find no friends here this night. I am just offering you your life.’

‘It was the drink what done it!’ Petty burst out. ‘It was done in drink, miss!’

‘But you drank the drink, and then you drank another drink, and another drink,’ she said. ‘You drank the drink all day at the fair and you only came back because the drink wanted to go to bed.’ Tiffany could feel only coldness in her heart.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not good enough, Mr Petty, not good enough at all. Go away and become a better person and then, maybe, when you come back as a changed man, people here might find it in their hearts to say hello to you, or at least to nod.’

She had been watching his eyes, and she knew the man. Something inside him was boiling up. He was ashamed, bewildered and resentful, and in those circumstances the Pettys of the world struck out.

‘Please don’t, Mr Petty,’ she said. ‘Do you have any idea what would happen to you if you hit a witch?’

She thought to herself, With those fists, you could probably kill me with a punch and that is why I intend to keep you scared.

‘You set the rough music on me, didn’t ya?’

She sighed. ‘No one controls the music, Mr Petty, you know that. It just turns up when people have had enough. No one knows where it starts. People look around, and catch one another’s eye, and give each other a little nod, and other people see that. Other people catch their eye and so, very slowly, the music starts and somebody picks up a spoon and bangs it on a plate, and then somebody else bangs a jug on the table and boots start to stamp on the floor, louder and louder. It is the sound of anger, it is the sound of people who have had enough. Do you want to face the music?’

‘You think you’re so clever, don’t ya?’ Petty snarled. ‘With your broomstick and your black magic, ordering ordin-ery folks about.’