A Hat Full Of Sky

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 at four 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 servant to 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 words upset her. Tiffany had read it all the way through.
    And that was it, and suddenly here she was, a month later, wrapping her old boots, which had been worn by all her sisters before her, in a piece of clean rag and putting them in the secondhand suitcase her mother had bought her, which looked as if it was made of bad cardboard or pressed grape pips mixed with ear wax, and had to be held together with string.
    There were good-byes. She cried a bit, and her mother cried a lot, and her little brother, Wentworth, cried as well just in case he would get a sweet for doing so. Tiffany’s father didn’t cry but gave her a silver dollar and rather gruffly told her to be sure to write home every week, which is a man’s way of crying. She said goodbye to the cheeses in the dairy and the sheep in the paddock and even to Ratbag the cat.
    Then everyone apart from the cheeses and the cat stood at the gate and waved to her and Miss Tick—well, except for the sheep, too—until they’d gone nearly all the way down the chalky-white lane to the village.
    And then there was silence except for the sound of their boots on the flinty surface and the endless song of the skylarks overhead. It was late August and very hot, and the new boots pinched.
    “I should take them off, if I was you,” said Miss Tick after a while.
    Tiffany sat down by the side of the lane and got her old boots out of the case. She didn’t bother to ask how Miss Tick knew about the tight new boots. Witches paid attention. The old boots, even though she had to wear several pairs of socks with them, were much more comfortable and really easy to walk in. They’d been walking since long before Tiffany was born, and knew how to do it.
    “And are we going to see any…little men today?” Miss Tick went on, once they were walking again.
    “I don’t know, Miss Tick,” said Tiffany. “I told them a month ago I was leaving. They’re very busy at this time of year. But there’s always one or two of them watching me.”
    Miss Tick looked around quickly. “I can’t see anything,” she said. “Or hear anything.”
    “No, that’s how you can tell they’re there,” said Tiffany. “It’s always a bit quieter if they’re watching me. But they won’t show themselves while you’re with me. They’re a bit frightened of hags—that’s their word for witches,” she added quickly. “It’s nothing personal.”
    Miss Tick sighed. “When I was a little girl, I’d have loved to see the pictsies,” she said. “I