Текст книги "Believing Is Seeing"

Автор книги: Diana Jones

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F. C. Stone gave a slight exasperated sigh. For a moment there she had been uneasy. It had all seemed far more like a conversation than any program Danny could produce. But his actor friend seemed to have got back to his lines now. She shot forth another question. “So where is your mistress now?”

“Beside me, unconscious,” was the reply.

“Senile?” said F. C. Stone.

“Believe me, they are liable to it,” he said. “The forces they handle do seem to damage them, and it does seem to overtake them oftenest when they’re out in space. But”—she could hear the smile in his voice—“I must confess that I was responsible for this one. It took me years of study before I could outwit her, but I did it.”

“Congratulations, Adny,” said F. C. Stone. “What do you want me to do about it? You’re asking me to help you in your male backlash, is that it?”

“Yes, but you need do almost nothing,” he replied. “Since you are the counterpart of Candida One, the computer is accepting you already. If you wish to help me, all I need is your voice authorizing Candida Two to allow me functions Nine and Ten. I can then tap my mistress’s full power and navigate the ship to my rendezvous, whereupon I will cut this connection and cease interrupting you in your work.”

“What!” said F. C. Stone. “You mean I don’t get to navigate a word processor?”

“I don’t understand,” said Adny.

“Then you’d better!” said F. C. Stone. She was surprised at how strongly she felt. “Listen, Danny or Adny, or whoever you are! My whole career, my entire success as a writer, has been founded on the fact that I enjoy, more than anything else, sitting in front of this screen and pretending it’s the controls of a starship. I enjoy the dazed feeling, I like the exhaustion, I don’t mind getting cramp, and I even like drinking myself sick on ogvai! The only reason I haven’t turned the machine off again is the chance that you’re going to let me do it for real—or what feels like for real, I don’t care which—and I’m not going to let that chance slip. You let me pilot my WP and I’ll even authorize you to function Eleven afterward, if there is such a thing. Is that clear?”

“It is very clear, Great Lady,” he said. There was that in his tone that suggested he was very used to yielding to demanding women, but could there have been triumph in it, too?

F. C. Stone was not sure of that tone, but she did not let it worry her. “Right,” she said. “Brief me.”

“Very well,” he said, “though it may not be what you expect. We are about to make a microjump which in the normal way would bring us out above the spaceport but in this case is designed to bring us directly above the city of Nad and, hopefully, inside the Coven’s defenses there. Other ships of my conspiracy should be materializing, too, hopefully at the same moment, so the jump must be made with utmost accuracy. I can broadcast you a simulacrum of Partlett’s controls, scaled down to correspond to your own keyboard. But you must depress the keys in exactly the order in which I highlight them. Can you do this?”

“Yes,” said F. C. Stone. “But stop saying hopefully, or I shan’t grant you any functions at all. The word shouldn’t be used like that, and I detest sloppy English!”

“Yours to command,” Adny said. She could hear the smile in his voice again. “Here are your controls.”

The curlicue faded from the screen, to be replaced by a diagrammatic image of F. C. Stone’s own keyboard. It was quite recognizable, except to her dismay, an attempt had been made to repeat it three times over. The two outer representations of it were warped and blurred. “Gods!” said F. C. Stone. “How do I use this? There isn’t room for it all.”

“Hit HELP before you use the extra keys on the right and CAP before you use the ones on the left.” Adny’s voice reassured her. “Ready?”

She was. She took a hasty sip of cooling qavv to steady herself and hovered over her keyboard, prepared to enjoy herself as never before.

It was actually a bit of a letdown. Keys on her screen shone brighter green. Obedient to them, F. C. Stone found herself typing CAP A, d, HELP N and then HELP N, a, D. Some part of her mind suggested that this still looked like Danny’s joke, while another part, more serious, suggested it might be overwork and perhaps she should see a doctor. But she refused to let either of these thoughts distract her and typed CAP D, n, HELP A in high excitement.

As she did so, she heard the computer’s childish voice again. “Ready for jump. Candida One, are you sure of this? Your coordinates put us right on top of Nad, in considerable danger from our own defenses.”

“Reassure her,” Adny’s voice said urgently.

Without having to think, F. C. Stone said soothingly, “It’s all right, Candida Two. We have to test those defenses. Nad is under orders not to hurt us.” And she thought, As to the manner born! I’d have made a good Matriarch!

“Understood,” said the childish voice. “Jump as given, on the count of zero. Five, four, three”—F. C. Stone braced herself—“two, one, zero.”

Did she feel a slight lurch? Was there a mild ripple of giddiness? She was almost sure not. A quick look around the workroom assured her that all was as usual.

“Jumping,” said Candida Two. “There will be an interval of five subjective minutes.”

“Why?” said F. C. Stone, like a disappointed child.

Adny’s voice cut in hastily. “Standard for a microjump. Don’t make her suspicious!”

“But I don’t feel anything!” F. C. Stone complained in a whisper.

The keyboards vanished from the screen. “Nobody does,” said Adny. “Computer’s out of the circuit now. You can speak freely. There is no particular sensation connected with jump, though disorientation does occur if you try to move about.”

“Damn!” said F. C. Stone. “I shall have to revise all my books!” An acute need to visit the toilet down the passage came upon her. She picked up her mug of chphy reflexively, thought better of that, and put it down again. Her mind dwelt on that toilet, its bowl stained from Danny’s attempt, some years ago, to concoct an elixir of life, and its chain replaced by a string of cow bells. To take her mind off it, she said, “Tell me what you mean to do when you and the other ships come out over Nad. Does this start a revolution?”

“It’s rather more complicated than that,” said Adny. “Out of the twelve Male Lodges, there are only six prepared to rebel. Two of the remaining six are neutral traditionally and supported in this by the Minor Covens, but the Minor Covens are disaffected enough to ally with the Danai, who are a helium life-form and present a danger to all of us. The four loyal Lodges are supposed to align with the Old Coven, and on the whole they do, except for the Fifth Lodge, which has thrown in with the Midmost Coven, who are against everyone else. Their situation is complicated by their concessions to the Traders, who are largely independent, save for overtures they seem to have made to the Anders. The Anders—another life-form—have said they are our allies, but this flirting with the Traders makes us suspicious. So we decided on a bold ploy to test—”

“Stop!” said F. C. Stone. Much as she loved writing this kind of stuff, hearing someone talk like it made her head reel. “You mean, you’ve gone to all this trouble just for a test run?”

“It’s more complicated than—” began Adny.

“No, I don’t want to know!” said F. C. Stone. “Just tell me what happens if you fail.”

“We can’t fail,” he replied. “If we do, the High Coven will crush the lot of us.”

“Me, too?” F. C. Stone inquired anxiously.

“Possibly,” said Adny. “They may not realize how I did this, but if they do, you can probably stop them by destroying your machine.”

“Never!” said F. C. Stone. “I’d rather suffer—or, better still, win!”

A bell rang. The keyboard reappeared, elongated and bent, in her screen. “Emerged over Nad,” the computer said. “Candy! What is this? I count sixteen other ships emerged, two Trader, four Ander, and the rest appear to be Matriarch. We jump back.”

“Give me functions Nine and Ten!” Adny snapped.

“I authorize Adny—” said F. C. Stone.

“Oh, Candy!” the computer said reproachfully. “Why are you so good to that little creep? He’s only a man.”

“I authorize Adny in functions Nine and Ten,” F. C. Stone almost shrieked. It was the only way she could think of to stop the unpleasant sensations which were suddenly manifesting, mostly in her head and stomach. It was as if surf were breaking through her in bubbles of pain. A tearing feeling across her shoulders made her think she was germinating claws there. And psychic attack or not, she knew she just had to get to that toilet.

“Acknowledged,” the computer said glumly.

She leaped from her chair and ran. Behind her she heard claps of sound and booms that seemed to compress the air around her. Through them she heard Adny’s voice issuing orders, but that was shortly overlaid by a high-pitched whistling, drilling through her ears even through the firmly shut toilet door.

But in the loo, as she was adjusting her dress, a certain sanity was restored to F. C. Stone. She looked at her own face in the mirror. It was encouragingly square and solid and as usual—give or take a sort of wildness about the eyes—and it topped the usual rather overweight body in its usual comfortably shapeless sweater. She raked her fingers through the graying frizz of her hair, thinking as she did so that she would make a very poor showing beside Adny of the golden voice. The action brought away two handfuls of loose hair. As always, she was shedding hair after a heavy session at the word processor—a fact she was accustomed to transfer to her aliens, who frequently shed feathers or fur during jump. Things were quite normal. She had simply been overworking and let Danny’s joke get to her.

Or perhaps it was charred chili powder, she thought as she marched out into the passage again. Possibly due to its hallucinogenic nature, that damnable whistling was still going on, pure torture to her ears. From the midst of it she could hear Adny’s voice. “Ned Coven, do we have your surrender, or do we attack again?”

I’ve had enough! thought F. C. Stone. She marched to her desk, where the screen was showing Adny’s curlicue, pulsing to the beat of the beastly shrilling. “Stop this noise!” she commanded. “And give me a picture of Partlett’s flight deck.” If you can, she thought, feeling for the moment every inch the captain of the starship Candida.

The whistling died to an almost bearable level. “I need function Eleven to give you vision,” Adny said—irritably? casually? or was it too casually? He was certainly overcasual when he added, “It does exist, you know.”

Give him what he wants and get rid of him, thought F. C. Stone. “I authorize function Eleven then,” she said.

“Oh!” said the computer, like a hurt child.

And there was a picture on the screen, greenish and jumping and sleeting green lines, but fairly clear for all that. Partlett’s controls, F. C. Stone noted absently, had fewer screens than she expected—far fewer than she put in her books—but far more ranks of square buttons and far, far too many dials for comfort, all of them with a shabby, used look. But she was looking mostly at the woman who seemed to be asleep in the padded swivel seat in front of the controls. Mother naked, F. C. Stone was slightly shocked to see, and not a mark or a wrinkle on her slender body or on her thin and piquant face. Abruptly F. C. Stone remembered being quite proud of her looks when she was seventeen, and this woman was herself at seventeen, only beyond even her most idealized memories. Immense regret suffused F. C. Stone.

The whistling, blessedly, stopped. “Candy is really the same age as you,” Adny observed.

Her attention turned to him. His seat was humbler, a padded swivel stool. Sitting on it was a small man with a long, nervy face, the type of man who usually has tufts of hair growing in his ears and below his eyes, as if to make up for the fact that such men’s hair always tends to be thin and fluffy on top. Adny’s hair was noticeably thin on top, but he had smoothed and curled it to disguise the fact, and it was obvious that he had plucked and shaved all other hair from his wrinkled little body; F. C. Stone had no doubt of this, since he was naked, too. The contrast between his appearance and his voice was, to say the least of it, startling.

Adny saw her look and grinned rather ruefully as he leaned forward to hold a paper cup under some kind of tap below the control panel. She realized he could see her, too. The contrast between herself and the sleeping beauty beside him made her feel almost as rueful as he looked. “Can you give me a picture of Nad and any damage there?” she asked, still clinging to her role as Captain. It seemed the only way to keep any dignity.

“Certainly,” he said, running his finger down a row of the square buttons.

She found herself apparently staring down at a small town of old houses built up against the side of a hot stony hill—red roofs, boxlike white houses, courtyards shaded with trees. It was quite like a town in Spain or Italy, except that the shapes of the walls and the slant of the roofs were subtly different and wrong. It was the very smallness of the difference between this and towns she knew which, oddly enough, convinced F. C. Stone for once and for all that this place was no fake. She really was looking at a real town in a real world somewhere else entirely. There was a smoking, slaggy crater near the market square and another downhill below the town. That had destroyed a road. She had glimpses of the other spaceships, drifting about looking rather like hot-air balloons.

“Why is it such a small place?” she said.

“Because Nad is only a small outpost of the Matriarchy,” Adny replied in his golden voice. The picture flipped back to show he had turned to face her on his stool, sipping steaming liquid from his paper cup. No doubt it was kfa or even quphy. He smiled through its steam in a way that must have beguiled the poor sleeping beauty repeatedly, and she found she was wishing he had turned out to be an alien instead. “I owe you great thanks on behalf of the Second Male Lodge,” he said. “We now have the Nadlings where we want them. And since you have given me full control of this ship and access to all my ex-mistress’s power, I can move on to the central worlds in strength and use her as a hostage there.”

Hitler and Napoleon were both small men, F. C. Stone thought, with golden voices. It gave her a slight, cold frisson to think what she might have loosed on the unfortunate Matriarchy. “You gave me the impression that this was the central world,” said F. C. Stone.

“Not in so many words,” said Adny. “You don’t think I’d be fool enough to move against the strength of the Matriarchy without getting hold of a conscious-class computer first, do you?”

F. C. Stone wished to say that yes, she did. People took that sort of desperate risk in her books all the time. It depressed her to find him such a cautious rebel. And he had cheated her, as well as his sleeping beauty, and no doubt he was all set to turn the whole works into a Patriarchy. It was a total waste of a morning.

Or was it? she wondered. A matriarchy where men were sold as slaves was right up her street. There was certainly a book in there. Perhaps she should simply be grateful and hope that Adny did not get too far.

“Tell me,” she said, at which he looked up warily from his cup, “what is that stuff you’re drinking? Goffa? Xvay?”

She was glad to see she had surprised him. “Only coffee,” he said.

Bonus

Read on for an excerpt from Howl’s Moving Castle

CHAPTER ONE

IN WHICH SOPHIE TALKS TO HATS

In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.

Sophie Hatter was the eldest of three sisters. She was not even the child of a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance of success! Her parents were well to do and kept a ladies’ hat shop in the prosperous town of Market Chipping. True, her own mother died when Sophie was two years old and her sister Lettie was one year old, and their father married his youngest shop assistant, a pretty blonde girl called Fanny. Fanny shortly gave birth to the third sister, Martha. This ought to have made Sophie and Lettie into Ugly Sisters, but in fact all three girls grew up very pretty indeed, though Lettie was the one everyone said was most beautiful. Fanny treated all three girls with the same kindness and did not favor Martha in the least.

Mr. Hatter was proud of his three daughters and sent them all to the best school in town. Sophie was the most studious. She read a great deal, and very soon realized how little chance she had of an interesting future. It was a disappointment to her, but she was still happy enough, looking after her sisters and grooming Martha to seek her fortune when the time came. Since Fanny was always busy in the shop, Sophie was the one who looked after the younger two. There was a certain amount of screaming and hair-pulling between those younger two. Lettie was by no means resigned to being the one who, next to Sophie, was bound to be the least successful.

“It’s not fair!” Lettie would shout. “Why should Martha have the best of it just because she was born the youngest? I shall marry a prince, so there!”

To which Martha always retorted that she would end up disgustingly rich without having to marry anybody.

Then Sophie would have to drag them apart and mend their clothes. She was very deft with her needle. As time went on, she made clothes for her sisters too. There was one deep rose outfit she made for Lettie, the May Day before this story really starts, which Fanny said looked as if it had come from the most expensive shop in Kingsbury.

About this time everyone began talking of the Witch of the Waste again. It was said the Witch had threatened the life of the King’s daughter and that the King had commanded his personal magician, Wizard Suliman, to go into the Waste and deal with the Witch. And it seemed that Wizard Suliman had not only failed to deal with the Witch: he had got himself killed by her.

So when, a few months after that, a tall black castle suddenly appeared on the hills above Market Chipping, blowing clouds of black smoke from its four tall, thin turrets, everybody was fairly sure that the Witch had moved out of the Waste again and was about to terrorize the country the way she used to fifty years ago. People got very scared indeed. Nobody went out alone, particularly at night. What made it all the scarier was that the castle did not stay in the same place. Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest, sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north. You could see it actually moving sometimes, with smoke pouring out from the turrets in dirty gray gusts. For a while everyone was certain that the castle would come right down into the valley before long, and the Mayor talked of sending to the King for help.

But the castle stayed roving about the hills, and it was learned that it did not belong to the Witch but to Wizard Howl. Wizard Howl was bad enough.

Though he did not seem to want to leave the hills, he was known to amuse himself by collecting young girls and sucking the souls from them. Or some people said he ate their hearts. He was an utterly cold-blooded and heartless wizard and no young girl was safe from him if he caught her on her own. Sophie, Lettie, and Martha, along with all the other girls in Market Chipping, were warned never to go out alone, which was a great annoyance to them. They wondered what use Wizard Howl found for all the souls he collected.

They had other things on their minds before long, however, for Mr. Hatter died suddenly just as Sophie was old enough to leave school for good. It then appeared that Mr. Hatter had been altogether too proud of his daughters. The school fees he had been paying had left the shop with quite heavy debts. When the funeral was over, Fanny sat down in the parlor in the house next door to the shop and explained the situation.

“You’ll all have to leave that school, I’m afraid,” she said. “I’ve been doing sums back and front and sideways, and the only way I can see to keep the business going and take care of the three of you is to see you all settled in a promising apprenticeship somewhere. It isn’t practical to have you all in the shop. I can’t afford it. So this is what I’ve decided. Lettie first—”

Lettie looked up, glowing with health and beauty which even sorrow and black clothes could not hide. “I want to go on learning,” she said.

“So you shall, love,” said Fanny. “I’ve arranged for you to be apprenticed to Cesari’s, the pastry cook in Market Square. They’ve a name for treating their learners like kings and queens, and you should be very happy there, as well as learning a useful trade. Mrs. Cesari’s a good customer and a good friend, and she’s agreed to squeeze you in as a favor.”

Lettie laughed in the way that showed she was not at all pleased. “Well, thank you,” she said. “Isn’t it lucky that I like cooking?”

Fanny looked relieved. Lettie could be awkwardly strong-minded at times. “Now Martha,” she said. “I know you’re full young to go out to work, so I’ve thought round for something that would give you a long, quiet apprenticeship and go on being useful to you whatever you decide to do after that. You know my old school friend Annabel Fairfax?”

Martha, who was slender and fair, fixed her big gray eyes on Fanny almost as strong-mindedly as Lettie. “You mean the one who talks such a lot,” she said. “Isn’t she a witch?”

“Yes, with a lovely house and clients all over the Folding Valley,” Fanny said eagerly. “She’s a good woman, Martha. She’ll teach you all she knows and very likely introduce you to grand people she knows in Kingsbury. You’ll be all set up in life when she’s done with you.”

“She’s a nice lady,” Martha conceded. “All right.”

Sophie, listening, felt that Fanny had worked everything out just as it should be. Lettie, as the second daughter, was never likely to come to much, so Fanny had put her where she might meet a handsome young apprentice and live happily ever after. Martha, who was bound to strike out and make her fortune, would have witchcraft and rich friends to help her. As for Sophie herself, Sophie had no doubt what was coming. It did not surprise her when Fanny said, “Now, Sophie dear, it seems only right and just that you should inherit the hat shop when I retire, being the eldest as you are. So I’ve decided to take you on as apprentice myself, to give you a chance to learn the trade. How do you feel about that?”

Sophie could hardly say that she simply felt resigned to the hat trade. She thanked Fanny gratefully.

“So that’s settled then!” Fanny said.

The next day Sophie helped Martha pack her clothes in a box, and the morning after that they all saw her off on the carrier’s cart, looking small and upright and nervous. For the way to Upper Folding, where Mrs. Fairfax lived, lay over the hills past Wizard Howl’s moving castle. Martha was understandably scared.

“She’ll be all right,” said Lettie. Lettie refused all help with the packing. When the carrier’s cart was out of sight, Lettie crammed all her possessions into a pillow case and paid the neighbor’s bootboy sixpence to wheel it in a wheel-barrow to Cesari’s in Market Square. Lettie marched behind the wheel-barrow looking much more cheerful than Sophie expected. Indeed, she had the air of shaking the dust of the hat shop off her feet.

The bootboy brought back a scribbled note from Lettie, saying she had put her things in the girls’ dormitory and Cesari’s seemed great fun. A week later the carrier brought a letter from Martha to say that Martha had arrived safely and that Mrs. Fairfax was “a great dear and uses honey with everything. She keeps bees.” That was all Sophie heard of her sisters for quite a while, because she started her own apprenticeship the day Martha and Lettie left.

Sophie of course knew the hat trade quite well already. Since she was a tiny child she had run in and out of the big workshed across the yard where the hats were damped and molded on blocks, and flowers and fruit and other trimmings were made from wax and silk. She knew the people who worked there. Most of them had been there when her father was a boy. She knew Bessie, the only remaining shop assistant. She knew the customers who bought the hats and the man who drove the cart which fetched raw straw hats in from the country to be shaped on the blocks in the shed. She knew the other suppliers and how you made felt for winter hats. There was not really much that Fanny could teach her, except perhaps the best way to get a customer to buy a hat.

“You lead up to the right hat, love,” Fanny said. “Show them the ones that won’t quite do first, so they know the difference as soon as they put the right one on.”

In fact, Sophie did not sell hats very much. After a day or so observing in the workshed, and another day going round the clothier and the silk merchant’s with Fanny, Fanny set her to trimming hats. Sophie sat in a small alcove at the back of the shop, sewing roses to bonnets and veiling to velours, lining all of them with silk and arranging wax fruit and ribbons stylishly on the outsides. She was good at it. She quite liked doing it. But she felt isolated and a little dull. The workshop people were too old to be much fun and, besides, they treated her as someone apart who was going to inherit the business someday. Bessie treated her the same way. Bessie’s only talk anyway was about the farmer she was going to marry the week after May Day. Sophie rather envied Fanny, who could bustle off to bargain with the silk merchant whenever she wanted.

The most interesting thing was the talk from the customers. Nobody can buy a hat without gossiping. Sophie sat in her alcove and stitched and heard that the Mayor never would eat green vegetables, and that Wizard Howl’s castle had moved round to the cliffs again, really that man, whisper, whisper, whisper.... The voices always dropped low when they talked of Wizard Howl, but Sophie gathered that he had caught a girl down the valley last month. “Bluebeard!” said the whispers, and then became voices again to say that Jane Farrier was a perfect disgrace the way she did her hair. That was one who would never attract even Wizard Howl, let alone a respectable man. Then there would be a fleeting, fearful whisper about the Witch of the Waste. Sophie began to feel that Wizard Howl and the Witch of the Waste should get together.

“They seem to be made for one another. Someone ought to arrange a match,” she remarked to the hat she was trimming at that moment.

But by the end of the month the gossip in the shop was suddenly all about Lettie. Cesari’s, it seemed, was packed with gentlemen from morning to night, each one buying quantities of cakes and demanding to be served by Lettie. She had had ten proposals of marriage, ranging in quality from the Mayor’s son to the lad who swept the streets, and she had refused them all, saying she was too young to make up her mind yet.

“I call that sensible of her,” Sophie said to a bonnet she was pleating silk into.

Fanny was pleased with this news. “I knew she’d be all right!” she said happily. It occurred to Sophie that Fanny was glad Lettie was no longer around.

“Lettie’s bad for custom,” she told the bonnet, pleating away at mushroom-colored silk. “She would make even you look glamorous, you dowdy old thing. Other ladies look at Lettie and despair.”

Sophie talked to hats more and more as weeks went by. There was no one else much to talk to. Fanny was out bargaining, or trying to whip up custom, much of the day, and Bessie was busy serving and telling everyone her wedding plans. Sophie got into the habit of putting each hat on its stand as she finished it, where it sat looking almost like a head without a body, and pausing while she told the hat what the body under it ought to be like. She flattered the hats a bit, because you should flatter customers.

“You have mysterious allure,” she told one that was all veiling with hidden twinkles. To a wide, creamy hat with roses under the brim she said, “You are going to have to marry money!” and to a caterpillar-green straw with a curly green feather she said, “You are young as a spring leaf.” She told pink bonnets they had dimpled charm and smart hats trimmed with velvet that they were witty. She told the mushroom-pleated bonnet, “You have a heart of gold and someone in a high position will see it and fall in love with you.” This was because she was sorry for that particular bonnet. It looked so fussy and plain.

Jane Farrier came into the shop next day and bought it. Her hair did look a little strange, Sophie thought, peeping out of her alcove, as if Jane had wound it round a row of pokers. It seemed a pity she had chosen that bonnet. But everyone seemed to be buying hats and bonnets around then. Maybe it was Fanny’s sales talk or maybe it was spring coming on, but the hat trade was definitely picking up. Fanny began to say, a little guiltily, “I think I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry to get Martha and Lettie placed out. At this rate we might have managed.”

There was so much custom as April drew on toward May Day that Sophie had to put on a demure gray dress and help in the shop too. But such was the demand that she was hard at trimming hats in between customers, and every evening she took them next door to the house, where she worked by lamplight far into the night in order to have hats to sell the next day. Caterpillar-green hats like the one the Mayor’s wife had were much called for, and so were pink bonnets. Then, the week before May Day, someone came in and asked for one with mushroom pleats like the one Jane Farrier had been wearing when she ran off with the Count of Catterack.