The girls said, ‘Are you all right, miss?’
‘Forget-me-lots!’7 said Tiffany, more sharply than she had intended. But the girls hadn’t noticed, so she continued to say, brightly, ‘Quite unusual to see it here. It must be a garden escapee. And, as I’m sure you both know, you have bound them all together with strips of candle rush, which once upon a time people used to make into rush lights. What a lovely surprise. Thank you both very much. I hope you have a lovely time at the fair …’
Becky raised her hand. ‘Excuse me, miss?’
‘Was there something else, Becky?’
Becky went pink, and had a hurried conversation with her friend. She turned back to Tiffany, looking slightly more pink but nevertheless determined to see things through.
‘You can’t get into trouble for asking a question, can you, miss? I mean, just asking a question?’
It’s going to be ‘How can I be a witch when I’m grown up?’ Tiffany thought, because it generally was. The young girls saw her on her broomstick and thought that was what being a witch was. Out loud she said, ‘Not from me, at least. Do ask your question.’
Becky Pardon looked down at her boots. ‘Do you have any passionate parts, miss?’
Another talent needful in a witch is the ability not to let your face show what you’re thinking, and especially not allowing it, no matter what, to go as stiff as a board. Tiffany managed to say, without a single wobble in her voice and no trace of an embarrassed smirk, ‘That is a very interesting question, Becky. Can I ask you why you want to know?’
The girl looked a lot happier now that the question was, as it were, out in the public domain.
‘Well, miss, I asked my granny if I could be a witch when I was older, and she said I shouldn’t want to, because witches have no passionate parts, miss.’
Tiffany thought quickly in the face of the two solemn owlish stares. These are farm girls, she thought, so they had certainly seen a cat have kittens and a dog have puppies. They’d have seen the birth of lambs, and probably a cow have a calf, which is always a noisy affair that you can hardly miss. They know what they are asking me about.