They watched the moving pencil in awe, and she could hear them murmuring.

‘Look at that writin’ stick noo, will ye, bobbin’ along. That’s hag business.’

‘Ach, she has the kennin’ o’ the writin’, sure enough.’

‘But you’ll no’ write doon oour names, eh, mistress?’

‘Aye, a body can be put in the pris’n if they have written evidence.’

Tiffany stopped writing and read the note:

Dear Mum and Dad,

I have gone to look for Wentworth. I am perfectly probably quite safe, because I am with some friends acquaintances people who knew Granny, ps the cheeses on rack three will need turning tomorrow if I’m not back.

Love, Tiffany

Tiffany looked up at Rob Anybody, who had shinned up the table leg and was watching the pencil intently, in case it wrote something dangerous.

‘You could have just come and asked me right at the start,’ she said.

‘We dinnae ken it was thee we were lookin’ for, mistress. Lots of bigjob women walkin’ aroond this farm. We didnae ken it was thee until you caught Daft Wullie.’

It might not be, thought Tiffany.

‘Yes, but stealing the sheep and the eggs, there was no need for that,’ she said sternly.

‘But they wasnae nailed doon, mistress,’ said Rob Anybody, as if that was an excuse.

‘You can’t nail down an egg!’ snapped Tiffany.

‘Ach, well, you’d have the kennin’ of wise stuff like that, mistress,’ said Rob Anybody. ‘I see you’s done wi’ the writin’, so we’d best be goin’. Ye hae a besom?’

‘Broomstick,’ murmured the toad.

‘Er, no,’ said Tiffany. ‘The important thing about magic,’ she added, haughtily, ‘is to know when not to use it.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Rob Anybody, sliding back down the table leg. ‘Come here, Daft Wullie.’ One of the Feegles that looked very much like that morning’s egg-thief came and stood by Rob Anybody, and they both bent over slightly. ‘If you’d care to step on us, mistress,’ said Rob Anybody.

Before Tiffany could open her mouth, the toad said out of the corner of its mouth, and being a toad that means quite a lot of corner, ‘One Feegle can lift a grown man. You couldn’t squash one if you tried.’

‘I don’t want to try!’

Tiffany very cautiously raised a big boot. Daft Wullie ran underneath it, and she felt the boot being pushed upwards. She might as well have trodden on a brick.

‘Now t’other wee bootie,’ said Rob Anybody.

‘I’ll fall over!’

‘Nae, we’re good at this

And then Tiffany was standing up on two pictsies. She felt them moving backwards and forwards underneath her, keeping her balanced. She felt quite secure, though. It was just like wearing really thick soles.

‘Let’s gae,’ said Rob Anybody, down below. ‘An’ don’t worry about yon pussycat scraffin’ the wee burdies. Some of the lads is stayin’ behind to mind things!’

Ratbag crept along a branch. He wasn’t a cat who was good at changing the ways he thought. But he was good at finding nests. He’d heard the cheeping from the other end of the garden and even from the bottom of the tree he’d been able to see three little yellow beaks in the nest. Now he advanced, dribbling. Nearly there…

Three Nac Mac Feegles pulled off their straw beaks and grinned happily at him.

‘Hello, Mister Pussycat,’ said one of them. ‘Ye dinnae learn, do ye? CHEEP!’

Chapter 5

The Green Sea

Tiffany flew a few inches above the ground, standing still. Wind rushed around her as the Feegles sped out of the farmyard’s top gate and onto the turf of the downs…

This is the girl, flying. At the moment there’s a toad on her head, holding onto her hair.

Pull back, and here is the long green whaleback of the downs. Now she’s a pale blue dot against the endless grass, mowed by the sheep to the length of a carpet. But the green sea isn’t unbroken. Here and there, humans have been.

Last year Tiffany had spent three carrots and an apple on half an hour of geology, although she’d been refunded a carrot after explaining to the teacher that ‘Geology’ shouldn’t be spelled on his sign as ‘G oily G’. He said that the chalk had been formed under water millions of years before from tiny seashells.

That made sense to Tiffany. Sometimes you found little fossils in the chalk. But the teacher didn’t know much about the flint. You found flints, harder than steel, in chalk, the softest of rocks. Sometimes the shepherds chipped the flints, one flint against another, into knives. Not even the best steel knives could take an edge as sharp as flint.

And men in what was called on the Chalk ‘the olden days’ had dug pits for it. They were still there, deep holes in the rolling green, filled with thickets of thorn and brambles.

Huge, knobbly flints still turned up in the village gardens, too. Sometimes they were larger than a man’s head. They often looked like heads, too. They were so melted and twisted and curved that you could look at a flint and see almost anything—a face, a strange animal, a sea monster. Sometimes the more interesting ones would be put on garden walls, for show.

The old people called those ‘calkins’, which meant ‘chalk children’. They’d always seemed… odd to Tiffany, as if the stone was striving to become alive. Some flints looked like bits of meat, or bones, or something off a butcher’s slab, in the dark, under the sea, it looked as though the chalk had been trying to make the shapes of living creatures.

There weren’t just the chalk pits. Men had been everywhere on the Chalk. There were stone circles, half fallen down, and burial mounds like green pimples where, it was said, chieftains of the olden days had been buried with their treasure. No one fancied digging into them to find out.

There were odd carvings in the chalk, too, which the shepherds sometimes weeded when they were out on the downs with the flocks and there was not a lot to do. The chalk was only a few inches under the turf. Hoofprints could last a season, but the carvings had lasted for thousands of years. They were pictures of horses and giants, but the strange thing was that you couldn’t see them properly from anywhere on the ground. They looked as if they’d been made for viewers in the sky.

And then there were the weird places, like Old Man’s Forge, which was just four big flat rocks placed so they made a kind of half-buried hut in the side of a mound. It was only a few feet deep. It didn’t look anything special, but if you shouted your name into it, it was several seconds before the echo came back.

There were signs of people everywhere. The Chalk had been important.

Tiffany left the shearing sheds way behind. No one was watching. Sheared sheep took no notice at all of a girl moving without her feet touching the ground.

The lowlands dropped away behind her and now she was properly on the downs. Only the occasional baa of a sheep or scream of a buzzard disturbed a busy silence, made up of bee buzzes and breezes and the sound of a ton of grass growing every minute.

On either side of Tiffany the Nac Mac Feegles ran in a spread-out ragged line, staring grimly ahead.

They passed some of the mounds without stopping, and ran up and down the sides of shallow valleys without a pause. And it was then that Tiffany saw a landmark ahead.

It was a small flock of sheep. There were only a few, freshly sheared, but there were always a handful of sheep at this place now. Strays would turn up there, and lambs would find their way to it when they’d lost their mothers.

This was a magic place.

There wasn’t much to see now, just the iron wheels sinking into the turf and the pot-bellied stove with its short chimney…