Read I Shall Wear Midnight for Free Online

them as can’t twist”, don’t you? And because sometimes you get a good day that makes up for all the bad days and, just for a moment, you hear the world turning,’ said Tiffany. ‘I can’t put it any other way.’
    Her father looked at her with a kind of proud puzzlement. ‘And you think that’s worth it, do you?’
    ‘Yes, Dad!’
    ‘Then I am proud of you, jiggit, you are doing a man’s job!’
    He’d used the pet name only the family knew, and so she kissed him politely and did not tell him that he was unlikely to see a man doing the job that she did.
    ‘What are you all going to do about the Pettys?’ she asked.
    ‘Your mum and me could take Mrs Petty and her daughter in and …’ Mr Aching paused and gave her a strange look, as if she frightened him. ‘It’s never simple, my girl. Seth Petty was a decent enough lad when we were young. Not the brightest piggy in the litter, I’ll grant you that, but decent enough in his way. It was his dad who was a madman; I mean, things were a bit rough and ready in those days and you could expect a clip around the head if you disobeyed, but Seth’s dad had a thick leather belt with two buckles on it, and he would lay into Seth just for looking at him in a funny way. No word of a lie. Always used to say that he would teach him a lesson.’
    ‘It seems that he succeeded,’ Tiffany said, but her father held up a hand.
    ‘And then there was Molly,’ he went on. ‘You couldn’t say that Molly and Seth were made for one another, because in truth neither of them were rightly made for anybody, but I suppose they were sort of happy together. In those days, Seth was a drover, driving the flocks all the way to the big city sometimes. It wasn’t the kind of job you needed much learning for, and it might be that some of the sheep were a bit brighter than he was, but it was a job that needed doing, and he picked up a wage and no one thought the worse of him for that. The trouble was, that meant he left Molly alone for weeks at a time, and …’ Tiffany’s father paused here, looking embarrassed.
    ‘I know what you’re going to tell me,’ said Tiffany, to help him out, but he took care to ignore this.
    ‘It’s not that she was a bad girl,’ he said. ‘It’s just that she never really understood what it was all about, and there wasn’t anyone to tell her, and you got all kinds of strangers and travellers passing through all the time. Quite handsome chaps, some of them.’
    Tiffany took pity on him, sitting there looking miserable, embarrassed about telling his little girl things his little girl shouldn’t know.
    So she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek again. ‘I know , Dad, I really do know . Amber isn’t actually his daughter, right?’
    ‘Well, I never said that, did I? She might be,’ said her father awkwardly.
    And that would be the trick, wouldn’t it, Tiffany thought. Maybe if Seth Petty had known one way or the other, he might have come to terms with the perhaps . Maybe. You never know.
    But he didn’t know, either, and there would be some days when he thought he did know and some days when he thought the worst. And for a man like Petty, who was a stranger to thinking, the dark thoughts would roll around in his head until they tangled up his brain. And when the brain stops thinking, the fist steps in.
    Her father was watching her very closely. ‘You know about this sort of thing?’ he said.
    ‘We call it going round the houses. Every witch does it. Please try and understand me, Dad. I have seen horrible things, and some of them all the more horrible because they were, well, normal. All the little secrets behind closed doors, Dad. Good things and nasty things I am not going to tell you about. It’s just part of being a witch! You learn to sense things.’
    ‘Well, you know, life is not exactly a bed of roses for any of us …’ her father began. ‘There was the time when—’
    ‘There was this old woman up near Slice,’ Tiffany