A Hat Full Of Sky Read Free

to.
    That, rather cunningly, got her mother on her side. Her mother’s rich aunt had gone off to be a scullery maid, and then a parlor maid, and had worked her way up until she was a housekeeper and married to a butler and lived in a fine house. It wasn’t her fine house, and she only lived in a bit of it, but she was practically a lady .
    Tiffany didn’t intend to be a lady. This was all a ruse, anyway. And Miss Tick was in on it.
    You weren’t allowed to charge money for the witching, so all witches did some other job as well. Miss Tick was basically a witch disguised as a teacher. She traveled around with the other wandering teachers who went in bands from place to place teaching anything to anybody in exchange for food or old clothes.
    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 allthe 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 atfour 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 servantto 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