This chapter is dedicated to my friend Helen, on her Birthday- Happy Birthday!
They walked cautiously over to the clothes stall. Tommy pushed across a hung-up cardigan, and the three of them looked down.
There sat a girl of about sixteen, with black streaks in her white-blonde hair, pulling a violet jumper over her knees. A look suggesting that they'd caught her out flashed in her amber-green eyes, but before they could really be sure that that was what it was, she had changed her expression to a friendly smile.
She appeared to be furiously un-clipping a gold disc from a chain around her neck, and, as they continued to stare in bewilderment, she stood up and pushed it into Madge's hand. The strange girl brushed herself off quickly, looking around.
The stallholder was one of those large men that always have either an astonished or disagreeable look on their face. He turned to see what the commotion was about, and upon discovering the answer began to run after the girl, but she leaped up the steps outside of the nearest building and was gone.
The man stopped in his tracks, mostly because he ran into Tommy's stiff arm, and he complained angrily.
"That was one of my best jumpers! She hasn't paid!"
Madge looked frustrated as the man struggled to get past Tommy. But they had grown up in one of the rougher parts of Ankh-Morpork and not much could budge Tommy when his mind was set on something.*
When the man had calmed down, the two men let him go, and Madge dropped the strange disc into his hand. He gazed at it, and his eyes shone.
"R- real gold?" he wondered, maybe to himself, disbelievingly.
"You can probably check it out down the Alchemists' Guild," volunteered Ricky.
"Wouldn't trust them blighters with such as this."
"I reckon, I reckon, right," began Tommy, who appeared to be counting on his fingers. "I reckon that at least ten percent o' that is Madge's."
The man glanced down. The little girl stared up at him with her puppy dog eyes. He fished around in his pocket and produced a coin, which he placed into her small palm.
Then he said, "Alright then, off you go now, little girl."
"C'mon Madge," said Tommy, taking the coin from her unresisting hand. "Not bad f'ra day's work, hey, Rick?"
But Ricky was still thinking about the strange young woman behind the stall, and the look of clear yet mild surprise on her face. And what about the cat? Madge wouldn't lie. Well, not to her big brother at any rate. So… But no. It wasn't even possible.
He shook his head, and took his sister's hand in his own.
The silence was broken by a quiet swishing sound, as Arch-Chancellor Ridcully turned the page of his book. It was heavy and leather-bound, with a large gold tassel marking the page. On the cover, in delicate golden lettering, it was entitled "advanced fishing".
Ridcully usually spent his Friday evenings like this, his feet crossed on his desk, and a good book in his hands. In fact he had a pile of such books by his chair, mostly with titles like "hunting tactics" and "the super sport of angling".
Down the hallway from Ridcully's study, in one of the smaller rooms, the Dean and the Chair of Indefinite Studies sat around a crooked wooden table, playing whist. This 'smaller room' happened to be the current staff room, and would remain to be until the Arch-Chancellor no longer felt it necessary to stash his fishing bait in the cupboards in the previous one.
Now the senior wizards gathered in this less fishy-smelling room, with its moth-eaten curtains and battered sofas. They'd brought down a couple of tables and chairs from one of the classrooms, and Stibbons had busied himself producing a notice board, so it now vaguely resembled what he thought a staff room should look like.
The wizards used their own cushions from their rooms to make the seating bearable, and they managed well enough, despite the grumbles.
"Hah! Beat you again, old chap!"
"You seem to think I can't see you cheating, Chair," smiled the Dean.
"Cheating? How dar-"
There was a polite knock at the door.
The room went silent. Eventually, the Dean said, "Er, come in?"
A pink figure entered, pushing a trolley laden with confectionery and cakes.
"Ai thought hyou gentlemen hwould be hungry," said Mrs Whitlow.
From his position behind him, Ponder Stibbons automatically bent to catch the swooning Senior Wrangler.
"Thank you, Mrs Whitlow. Er."
"Ai think Ai'd better hleave," she said carefully .
She put the trays of food onto a small table by the door, and then left with a gleam of pink silk, the door closing gently behind her. The wizards heard the trolley rattling along the corridor.
The Dean looked around at them.
"Well?" he said. "Get on with it, gents."
"Um, I wonder if I co-"
"Yes, Stibbons. You may put the Senior Wrangler down now. Gently, mind."
Ponder, relieved, laid the man out on one of the emptier sofas. The elderly wizard at the other end looked around, and then looked bewildered as a piece of paper was pushed into his hands, and he was told to fan it at the man sprawled next to him.
"Right," said the Dean. "That's better."
After a while someone said, "Where's the Bursar?"
They all looked around.
"Oh no…" began the Chair. "What now?"
*Physically, anyway. Only Ricky knew it, but Tommy was very partial to the occasional bowl of jelly and ice cream.