Nothing to it, really 20
Afterwords
Last dangling loose ends tied up - and I actually finish a story! For now.
Johanna sat at a table in her back garden considering the domestic accounts. Her parents still showed no signs of leaving for home, and were currently in attendance at the Palace, observing the opening legal snarling at the Trial of the Howondaland Four. She had not wanted to do this while her parents were in the house or there was a danger of them returning unexpectedly. Or her mother would have been looking over her shoulder making noises about "waste", and "well, that's an un-necessary expense, straight away!", or "you can cut back on the amount you budget for feeding your staff!" or something else. Her protestations that running a city house in Ankh-Morpork was not the same as managing a farm community on the Veldt would have been dismissed.
Periodically she looked up to where Annaliese the nanny was dealing with Bekki. Annaliese was a big broad cheerful girl from somewhere in the Stos, possibly the border region between Sto Kerrig and Sto Helit. She spoke an interesting language, the one that wasn't quite Kerrigian, known to its people as Phlegmish.(1) Johanna found she could understand it well enough if she really focused. She tried not to speak it back. She worried that people might think she was taking the piss. Or the phlegm. Her mother had over-ruled her here too, preferring to have a homely, uncomplicated, big-hearted familiar sort of a young woman as nanny to her grandchild. Annaliese's family were stolid farming yeomans, who ran a sprout and cabbage growing business in the Sto Plains. This had earned her the approval of Agnetha Smith-Rhodes, as well as the fact she spoke a broadly intelligible language related to Vondalaans. Annaliese was in fact making heroic attempts to adjust her spoken language to a more Vondalaans style; Johanna wondered if her daughter would grow up speaking a dialect all of her own that averaged out the quirks of Kerrigian, Phlegmish/ Phlaams and Vondalaans. A language professor at the University, himself from Sto Kerrig, referred to this phenomenon as Tussentaal. Apparently her daughter needed normality. Not a Gothic governess, along the lines of that strange woman who claims to be from Sto Helit but can't speak a word of a proper language. Ah well. Maybe I can get somebody like Susan later, if she's needed.
She smiled at her daughter's evident gurgling happiness with her world. All the discomfort and struggle had been worth it, then. Then she looked down at the page. The left-hand column was depressingly short and had headings like
My cash in bank.
Ponder's cash in bank.
My investment income.
Ponder's annual pay.
My annual salaries.
Sundry income.
The right-hand column covered outgoings. It was far longer. It also had to account for the additional costs of housing, clothing and paying a nanny.
Johanna looked down at one item on the page.
Mariella.
A second item had been pencilled in below. It read
Johanna SR-M.
Mariella's school fees were paid for by a government grant. Johanna suspected she knew which rich and influential people at home were underwriting that government grant, to send selected students to the Assassins' School. She wasn't one hundred per cent sure it was Uncle Charles who was covertly paying her sister's school fees, but she would not be surprised. And he was definitely paying for those of her niece, her sister's eldest, who had got an unprecedented unconditional place at the School from next year.
Better she doesn't find out….
The issue here was pocket money allowances. Johanna was not unsympathetic to the needs of a young girl for money of her own. And had watched and asked the girls she then managed in Raven House, curious as to how they viewed personal allowances and pocket money, what they chose to spend it on, whether they thought it was adequate,(2) and what they thought they should be allocated in an ideal world. (3).
Through cautious reflection and calculation, she arrived at a usefully representative figure. Then she halved it. Then, reflecting that the School fed and housed the girls, and all the clothing they needed was provided, she cut the new figure by a third. Then as the next of kin who was responsible for these things, she made sure Mariella got that sum every week. She promised a review on every birthday. It seemed to work out OK. Hearing about her sister and Rivka's private enterprise with regard to clothing repairs for other girls, Johanna had smiled and awarded full marks for enterprise.
It was a small but necessary entry on the other side of the ledger book.
And it looked as if she needed to budget as much again for her niece, due to arrive as a student.
Julian had deftly ensured his father had paid for all the repair bills to the house. Charles Smith-Rhodes' unwitting largesse had also paid for the new upper story to be built above the mews, on the flat roof where she'd had her final fight with du Plessis. She was happy about that. It meant she didn't need to confront a bad memory every time she entered or left her home. The house extension had been completed inside six weeks and now offered a suite of new rooms, both immediately above the mews and one in the attic. More rooms would be useful. Annaliese lived in now. Bekki would want a room of her own when she got older. Johanna Smith-Rhodes-Maaijande should be offered the same sort of privilege as Mariella with regard to overnight stays. Family demands dictated it. One daughter. One sister. One niece. Ag!
But it was still costing.
The items on the right hand column represented a slow but inexorable bite into the income represented on the left side. Upkeep of house, staff pay and perks for an expanded staff, money to be set aside for school fees for Bekki and potential siblings (She winced. Not just yet).
She looked down at the page again. Then made a few more calculations.
With the fifteen thousand dollars for duPlessis, Ponder and I can afford to maintain this standard of living for possibly twelve years. And in that time it is entirely possible there will be more Guild contracts to pay into my investment accounts. I believe we are financially stable as a family. I've started an investment fund for Bekki with part of the fee for du Plessis. Over eleven years, it will build as an investment and pay for her school fees. Wherever she goes. As for first school, perhaps Seven-Handed Sek's. It has a good reputation and the fees are manageable. Perhaps I can pay Mariella's weekly allowance from the nearly nineteen thousand dollars I hold in trust for her. It is her money, after all. I'll speak to the Bank as to whether this is admissible as an expense. And in coming years she will require bespoke weapons, expensive equipment, armour, specialised clothing. It looks as if this will be left to me, too…
She frowned, thinking about something she'd heard at school. Mariella's Housemistress, Mlle de Badin-Boucher, had approached Johanna privately in the staffroom and diffidently expressed a suspicion, just a soupçon, really, that Mariella might be up to something. It was a housemistress's instinct, perhaps, something her predecessor La Comptesse had said she ought to trust and not ignore, in her dealings with the girls in her care. Johanna, who had managed a House herself for over a decade, had asked her to go on. Instincts and suspicions, feeling something wasn't quite right in the atmosphere or in the moods of the girls, were part of the job.
Antoinette had asked if Johanna was allowing her sister access to the not insubstantial sum of money she had earned on the recent contract, which had been paid into her sister's care to be held in trust for her.
Johanna had said Mariella was getting nothing more than her normal weekly allowance of pocket money. Antoinette had then apologised for possibly wasting her time, for she had nothing more than the tiniest suggestion that Mariella might have a little more money about her person than her allowance, and her side income in clothing repair for other girls, could account for. She was making no adverse allegations, Johanna should understand, and some perfectly normal thing could account for it, and she was watching, but had no reason to search the girl's locker and personal space for irregularities. This was only done if clear cause existed.
Johanna had reassured her colleague, explained that eighty per cent of a Housemistress's time was spent keeping an eye on the girls, and expressed her appreciation that she was getting the hang of the finer points of the job so quickly. And that she would also watch Mariella and her friends, and casually ask if she'd found other permissible avenues for earning extra cash.
She frowned. How to approach her sister? And on what grounds? She ruled out the stupider, meaner, things like theft: Mariella was not that sort of girl, and anyway nobody in Black Widow House or indeed anywhere had complained of missing things. And no valuable Guild property had gone missing. Some students in the past had tried pinching and reselling School property. The Guild watched for this and such students tended to self-select for overconfidence and stupidity, anyway. Mariella was neither. Perhaps her father had given her a few dollars in a spirit of generosity – Barbarossa was prone to that – and neglected to tell Johanna. It could be as simple as that.
She decided to say nothing at present, just watch and be attentive. She tidied away the household accounts and returned to the house, appreciating the early summer sunshine. It's Father, she thought. He's probably given her twenty dollars or somesuch other vastly over-generous amount. Mother would shout at him for being too generous, so he's being prudently quiet about it. She knew her father had brought a small pouch of uncut diamonds and a roll of golden Burgerrands with him, knowing Pieter van der Graaf had good contacts who could turn them into local money, without trying to cheat on the deal. It was financing their stay. She preferred not to know where her father had acquired the diamonds, which he had off-hand said were part of the retirement plan for himself and her mother.
"The ladies are here, Madam." Claude the butler said.
"Show them in, Claude". she invited.
And on top of everything, she now had witches to deal with. Nice witches, friendly witches, her sort of witches. But witches, nonetheless. It was another necessary consequence of the deadly fight that had taken place here and nearly wrecked the house. There were no obvious signs of the damage and the wreckage now, and any bloodstains soaked into the floorboards had been scrubbed, disinfected, and covered in new carpet. But as Olga and Irena had said to Ponder in one of those magic-users' conversations she felt excluded from, there were subtler things to consider, especially with the baby arriving in the house.
Johanna hadn't argued: she had felt a change in the atmosphere after the fight. The maids, Eve and Blessing, had complained of not being able to sleep well at night. That could just be the usual sort of shock following on from a home invasion. Post-combat trauma. Johanna had felt a touch of that every time she'd looked up at the flat roof where du Plessis might have killed her. But Ponder had tactfully tried to explain that he thought the witches could be right. And if nothing else, the maids might be reassured by witnessing a bit of magick, with the terminal "k" that was pronounced "boffo" by the witches.
Johanna welcomed the four witches. Claude had seen to it that there was a side table with tea and a selection of cakes and sandwiches. Given what they were going to do for her, it all looked reassuringly homely. Somewhere in the background, Dorothea the cook had started preparing cabbage for the evening dinner. Now and again a waft blew through from the kitchen. (4)
"Four sugars, please, love." Mrs Proust said, genially.
Johanna knew something about witch etiquette. She motioned Claude to stand back as Nottie went to pour tea for the others. It didn't matter that she was a Princess. The youngest witch in any gathering of witches alwayspoured the tea.
Claude raised a dignified eyebrow. It clearly went against his training to allow a Royal Highness to pour her own tea.
"It's a witch thing, Claude." Johanna half-explained. As the non-witch present, she was served last. She understood this too.
Mrs Proust poured some into her saucer to cool. Then drained it.
"Sorry we couldn't have been here any earlier." she said, reaching for one of the stickier cream cakes. "But an afternoon when these three are all on the ground in the same place and not gaullivanting around on the flying horses is hard to get."
Irena and Olga nodded assent. Tea was consumed and cakes were eaten. Johanna reflected that watching an old witch eat a cream cake was, in its way, an education.
"Young Ponder identified a problem." Mrs Proust said. "Starting in his study, I understand?"
Johanna nodded. She considered she had the psychic awareness of a breezeblock. But even she had felt it, in one particular spot in Ponder's study, near the window. Apparently there was a similar cold unwholesome feeling in the hall near the front door, and again upstairs in the corridor. Annaliese had reported that baby Bekki had started crying, completely unaccountably, when walked into that part of the corridor, and had looked wide-eyed and fearful. Johanna had noted that sometimes her daughter cried in the night for no apparent reason at all. It concerned her. The dogs flattened back their ears and growled menacingly when shown any of these spots in the house. Both maids flatly refused to go into Ponder's study, which hadn't been dusted in weeks, and which was now looking very much like a wizard's bachelor quarters. Claude had listened to their stories and had not pressed the point or forced them to go in and clean. Both had used the phrase "bad muti".
Ponder had explained what he thought was happening and his first instinct had been to ask Doctor Hix to come over. Johanna, knowing Hix's speciality, had firmly vetoed this, on the grounds the cure could be worse than the disease. Ridcully had backed her up and suggested she try the witches, as they had the necessary soft skills to deal with it.
"You've got native maids from Howondaland." Irena said, considering. "At the moment they're spooked and unsettled. Talking about muti."
Irena had been to Howondaland. A witch, she instinctively understood the Howondalandian fear of muti. She'd used it to frighten Prince Samuel's army. Olga had terrified a couple of prisoners into obedience by a display of muti. In one sense it was what witches here called boffo. But it was the surface flim-flam and show that served as misdirection to very potent realities underneath.
"So we do what's necessary. But we do it with a lot of obvious boffo. So they know it's safe to dust Ponder's study again." Irena said.
"Our muti is even stronger." Olga agreed.
"Do what you need to." Johanna said. "Ponder wented Hix here. You know. The Insorcist."
Mrs Proust breathed inwards through her teeth.
"Oooh. Not good." She said. "not good at all. He'd only shift the problem down the road. Insorcism means to make it somebody else's problem. Like cats and crap. You'd be really popular with the neighbours!"
"When we have to. We do exorcism." Nottie said, cheerfully. "Mrs Ogg took me on a case once. She told me about the time she and mum and Mistress Weatherwax did all the ghosts at Lancre Castle. Some of them haunt her washroom now!"
"And I'm sure you'll do well." Mrs Proust said. "But under supervision, mind you. I promised your mother. Now speaking of your mother. Magrat Garlick had a reputation for all the frills and flounces, in her day. Totally useless, but showy, and looked good to people who were impressed by that sort of thing."
Mrs Proust looked reflective for a moment.
"Almost as bad as Lettice Earwig." she said. "Except that at bottom, Magrat was good. Still is. Nottie, I want you to channel your mother here. Good and hard. You two girls got any frills and flounces? I brought loads from the shop. This has to be seen to be good. Don't you agree, Mr Butler?"
"Completely, madam." Claude agreed. "Please tell me when I can allow the female members of staff into the vicinity, so they can be reassured that your muti is strong."
Curtains were closed. Candles and incense were lit. Ram's skulls (5) were strategically positioned. Dribbly candles were attached to the top of the skulls, centred in the pentagrams inscribed between the horns. As a nod to Howondaland, Johanna provided a real impala skull with horns attached. She also suggested some fragrant native herbs be infused into boiling water, so the maids would smell something familiar from Home.
Claude called together Blessing, Dorothea and Eve and said the witches were about to perform a potent native magic to rid the house of bad muti. It went without saying that they were expressly forbidden to try and watch or eavesdrop. He was going to go and confer with Cyprian and Simeon in the garden shed, and he trusted that nobody would try to peek in through the living room door.
Then he went to spend time in the garden, (taking the dogs with him so the real magic wouldn't spook them), having prudently left both doors to the darkened living room just enough ajar, so that a clever person, or persons, could watch through the crack.
After a round of plausible-sounding invocations and imprecations, with ceremonial libations given to the four compass directions and Guardians of the Way being invoked, the witches got down to the real business. Johanna, watching with interest, saw one after the other allow her head to droop and fall apparently into deep sleep. Ponder had described this as astral travel, Walking the Planes, or Going Out of Body. She thought she heard a little gasp behind her, abruptly cut off. It sounded like Blessing had been nudged into silence by Eve. She smiled, happily.
This was the real business, something the witches could have done in five minutes flat with no ceremony. She sat back to await results. She noted Ponder's staff, over the fireplace, glowing faintly blue-green with induced magic. Mrs Proust had said she thought it would be accepting.
Nottie drifted to her insubstantial feet, noting the staff over the fireplace was glowing with iridescent light. Mrs Proust had asked Ponder to tell it what was going on and to recognise this was for the good of the household to whom its Wizard was nominal head. Serving the witches if they needed its help would serve him, and thus fulfil the Staff's reason for being.
It's behaving itself, she thought. Good. She looked down at her own body without shock or surprise and winced at the nose and messy hair she'd inherited from her mother. She was young enough to take her genetics as an insult.
Better get moving, child. she heard Mrs Proust's voice almost in her head. Out in the hallway corridor. Remember these things are powerless. Don't let it get into your head. I'll be watching you.
Nottie contemplated the wall and closed door with a disbelief she knew was a hangover from her physical body. She stepped forward and tried to go carefully blank as she stepped through. And then she was in the hall and it was coming at her.
Where's my fifty dollars? it demanded. That bloody Howondalandian promised me fifty dollars for this job! I ain't leaving till I get paid!
Nottie forced herself to stand her insubstantial ground. She folded her arms and glared at the spectre.
-I'm sorry, but there's no gentle way of saying this. You're dead. she vocalised. Those crossbow bolts sticking out of you aren't a clue? Two in the chest, one in the neck? And the sword slashes?
Dead? That bloody Howondalandian chisseller recruited me, led me here, I did what he asked, did'n'I? I was ready to storm the house, kill everybody, first pick of valuables, and fifty dollars in hand. Then I gets dumped here! And I'm mad as Hell!
-Hell. Yes. Hold that thought…
An insubstantial ghost of a meat cleaver or some other ugly blade swung. Nottie forced herself to remain impassive and let it swing right through her. The spectre swung and swung again, anger slowly being replaced by puzzlement. Then Nottie raised a hand, refocused, caught the blade and stopped it dead. The spectre tried to wrench it loose. She smiled at him, without humour.
-The game's over. She vocalised. You came here to murder people. You were not welcome then and you aren't welcome now. In life you were a thug who used strength to frighten, intimidate and hurt people. You were strong there. Well, I'm strong here. And you are weak.
Nottie put out her strength. The ghost of an attacker recoiled and shrank as she pushed back.
-Mrs Ogg taught me a really simple banishing spell. Do you want to hear it? It goes- BUGGER OFF!
Suddenly, the spirit screamed, imploded and dwindled to nothing.
Well done, girl! She heard from behind her. Now shall we see how the others are doing?
Olga had drifted into Ponder's study. The grimoires, locked into the glass-fronted bookcase, were a wall of angry fire, occasionally flickering hostile lashes of radiance towards the spectre, locked in place by the window, who was feebly trying to dodge. This ghost, a single spectral crossbow bolt in the middle of its chest, was bewildered and frightened, if anything, and all the fight had long since been knocked out of him. Olga felt the desolate agonising cold around him and shivered.
Please, miss. It said. I've been tryin' to leave ever since that night. Something ain't letting me. Even the man with the scythe said I had to stay. He said I should await the Watch. The wizard saw me, and said he couldn't do anything about it if I had a destiny to fulfil. He did promise he'd talk to people, though.
Olga nodded and decided a little compassion was in order. She focused, and rearranged herself so she was in her Watch uniform.
-Luckily, my official title is Lance-constable Olga Romanoff, Witch Police Constable. she said. Consider yourself in my custody.
She wondered if… yes. She produced spectral handcuffs. The astral was a place where ideas and concepts were malleable.
-Walk with me. she said, locking them on. She wondered how on earth a Watchwoman would phrase this arrest report. It was the strangest beat of all to walk.
They passed out into the daylight garden together. Then Olga released him. The spirit faded to nothing. Looking round, she saw two other gloomy spectres tied to points in the front garden. She realised from the scattered pieces attached by multiple glowing blue cords that these must have been ones the goblins had got on the night. Sighing, she went to free and expel them.
Irena had drawn the upstairs corridor. She soon saw the focal point of the disturbance, near to the room Ruth and Julian had occupied on the night. This thug was still fighting mad, enraged that he'd fallen to the mad black woman with the sword. He was apparently waiting here to settle things with her. He was passing his time by trying to get anyone who passed him by. The fat blonde girl with the baby was good fun, apparently. The kid squealed with fear knowing he was trying to poke it.
-Is that really the best you can do? Irena asked. Just making a baby cry? She metaphorically rolled her sleeves up. -You're so lucky I'm not Gytha Ogg. She'd blast you into oblivion for a remark like that.
Irena focused and the ghost was enveloped in a ring of spectral fire.
-And by the way, that baby's named after me. You could say I'm her fairy godmother. In this case, "fairy" in the sense of "elf".
She watched as the ghost screamed in the fiery prison. She sensed Nottie and Mrs Proust nearby.
Hurt the baby, did he? The old witch said. She glowered at the burning spectre.
-Tried to. said Irena. Frightened her, anyway. Luckily he can't move very far from where he died. Ruth killed him on this spot.
There was a change in the psychic atmosphere. A horse whinnied. The three witches were not surprised to see the tall figure in a black cloak.
LADIES.
-You're late, aren't you?
I APOLOGISE. THIS IS WHAT YOU MIGHT CALL AN AFTERCARE VISIT. A FOLLOW-UP.
Death stalked down the corridor.
JAMES "EVIL PSYCHO BASTARD" MOLLOY. THE NODES ARE NOW RIGHT FOR ME TO COLLECT YOU AND OFFER YOU AN OPPORTUNITY TO MOVE ON. I APOLOGISE FOR THE WAIT. BUT SOME THINGS ARE MANDATED BY DESTINY. AND FATE.
The scythe swung. Death concluded his business and said
MUST GO. THREE LATE ARRIVALS TO COLLECT IN THE GARDEN. YOUR COLLEAGUE HAS BEEN HELPFUL THERE.
And then it was over.
"Hed fun?" Johanna asked, as the four witches apparently awoke, one after the other.
"I'll say!" Mrs Proust grinned. "you were right to call us. You had a big infestation of ghosts. Bound to, after that big fight! Lots of people passing on suddenly and violently. But they're all gone now. We shifted 'em."
"Bekki's safe." Irena said, with satisfaction. "Interesting she was aware of one especially nasty bastard upstairs. Evil bugger was going for her because she's vulnerable. Wonder if that's a pointer to her getting magic later?"
Claude appeared with a fresh teapot.
"I am given to understand hot sweet tea is mandated for witches after the successful completion of an act of magic." he said, smoothly. "Madam, I have instructed Eve and Blessing they now have no excuse to refuse to clean the Professor's study. They will be attending to the matter directly."
"Thenk you, Claude." Johanna said, with feeling. She wanted to rush to her daughter's side, and wondered if it was always going to feel this way when her child was distressed. And was she going to be mother of a witch?
Mariella Smith-Rhodes paid the money in over the Post Office counter. After the serpent of rebellion had flashed a fang in her, there had been no going back. The difficulty had been in arranging things so that Mlle Antoinette and others would not become aware and would find no proof.
And Moist von Lipwig's latest innovation - a Post Office Savings Bank for the small saver – had been a success. He had reasoned that with a growing network of Post Offices in place around the city and the Sto Plains, this made for a convenient network of branches for the ordinary customer to pay in and withdraw cash. There were now more Post offices than there were bank branches. Underwritten by the Royal Bank, it brought together both his big business concerns in a most satisfying way. The investor was issued a passbook and all transactions in and out were logged. Interest was paid four times a year.
It was ideal for Mariella's purposes, except that she needed a parent or a guardian's written permission to open an account. Not wanting to involve Johanna, her parents being in town offered an alternative.
And the night her father came back worse for wear, after ostensibly having been offered a guided tour of the University by Ponder Stibbons, had been a gods-send. Barbarossa had been offered hospitality by Mustrum Ridcully. The inevitable had happened, and Father had come back in a state her mother described as "happily drunk."
In that state he had spoken gravely to his younger daughter, stressed how proud he was of her, emphasised that he didn't say enough that he loved her, and had pushed a bundle of banknotes at her with the instruction not to tell her mother or her big sister, hey, go out and buy something nice for yourself. He had then reeled off to face the old cold shoulder in bed.
Mariella had counted nearly a hundred dollars.
The next day she had quietly spoken to her mother and said Father had given her some money. But she thought, rather than spend it, she ought to do the responsible and correct thing with it and open a bank account for herself. Would Mother be kind enough to give written permission?
Agnetha had smiled graciously and commended her grown-up maturity. Of course she'd help. Everybody should start saving, as early as possible.
A trip to the post office had opened the account. Her mother had winced at the amount, but said that as it was being saved and not spent, she would not complain about it. Even Miss Maccalariat had smiled, and expressed approval that here was a young girl who had good habits of thrift and prudence. So unlike so many young girls of her age.
Miss Maccalariat continued to praise her every time she paid money in. It was not unusual for pupils at the Assassins School to have more money available to them than their less privileged peers. Nobody thought it unusual or out of place.
And back in her dorm at Black Widow House, Mariella patiently inserted a knife with a wide thin flexible blade into the board cover of her issued Maths text. She wiggled it until she had separated the inner and outer boards, creating a space large enough to conceal her savings account passbook. After inserting her bank book, she closed the protective outer cover over the book. (6) It would be safely hidden in there until she needed it again.
It had all started the week Matron Igorina had examined her leg, put her though some basic physical exercise, and announced she was fit to run again. The news spread. Rupert Mericet remarked to her that the quoted odds were two to one on Sissi, who was favourite, and eight to one on Mariella, thought unlikely to win this week as she was recovering from injury.
Mariella thanked him, and did some mental arithmetic. Eight to one on me. If therefore an anonymous person bets thirty dollars, and I then win, the return is two hundred and forty dollars plus my - the anonymous person's - stake money. On the other hand, thirty dollars on Sissi at two to one. The return is only sixty dollars plus stake money. But the same anonymous person still wins sixty. That covers the thirty dollars lost on the other bet and makes thirty dollars profit. Still a profit. And one of us is bound to win.
She gave thought to the anonymous person who should place their bets. Cousin Julian had laughed at the simplicity of the idea but regretfully said it might be best if he didn't do it. He pointed out that if Johanna were to find out, and she would not do so from him, it could cause family argument, and he didn't want that. And each of you only bets on herself, even by proxy. That way, nobody can accuse the loser of deliberately throwing the race, so that her bet on the other pays. If you each have a bet on yourself in a race where winning is a matter of personal pride, it makes it more legitimate. Gives you an extra incentive to win. Not even the Gamblers' Guild could argue with that.
Mariella took the point, and she and Sissi left their stake money with Rupert Mericet to place at his bookmakers. They knew he could be trusted to get the best odds.
On the first Wednesday, Sissi won by a fiercely contended nine or ten yards. But that was expected.
"The odds on you will be longer next week, Boor-girl." Sissi said. When Rupert discreetly passed her an envelope later in the day, she counted it, nodded, peeled off thirty dollars, and gave it to Mariella, as per Agreement.
"Your stake money, Boor-girl. And I still have thirty dollars more than I did this morning."
Mariella thanked her. She'd won nothing, it was true. But then she'd lost nothing either. It showed the system worked.
The following week the odds on Mariella were nine to one. She considered, and staked forty dollars this week. It was another very close-run race where both girls ran their hearts out. Mariella won, by the barest of margins. Later in the day four hundred dollars arrived in a sealed envelope. Mariella returned Sissi's stake money on herself and banked the remainder. Rupert turned down an offer of a percentage.
"No need. I had two hundred riding on you." he said. "Same odds, different bookie. Eighteen hundred. Satisfying."
In the three Wednesday afternoons leading up to the end of term, Mariella banked nearly twelve hundred dollars. Sissi found she was better off by several hundred.
By mutual assent, the two girls decided to stop betting for a while. Rupert had gone away for the summer, and finding a new proxy might have been risky. They had sufficient to supplement their pocket money allowances for at least the summer. And they agreed it was a satisfying victory over their teachers, shaking hands and agreeing to resume in the new term.
Johanna watched carefully, but saw no sign that her sister was doing anything actionable. She did notice a growing closeness with the Zulu girl, and approved of this. She'd arrived at similar detentes with people like Ruth N'Kweze, after all. It took time, but it happened. And after the witches had performed a cleansing, the house had never felt better, warmer, cleaner, lighter. The dogs had stopped growling at certain spots in the house, and Bekki was no longer frightened in the night. The maids were sleeping soundly and a sense of harmony had settled, even if her parents - and Cousin Suki, blast her - still had to stay there until the trial was over.
Johanna had a summer outing planned for a few days. She'd be taking Mariella to Scrote. To do some historical digging around. What could be found out, at this distance, concerning her illustrious ancestor Sir Cecil Smith-Rhodes? She wanted to find out. And his birthplace would be a good start. She smiled. Uncle Charles was cagey about this. Maybe, she'd discover, with good reason.
It looked like being a nice summer.
(1) Unkind people listening to languages in the general Dutch continuum might be heard to make snide comments about the Frisian language family being not so much speech as the product of a throat infection. Flemish, as well as offering a gift name to the snarky, is spoken in Belgium, and attracts much comment of this kind. Tussentaal is the name given to an attempt to create a Standard Belgian dialect out of all the different idiolects in Belgian Flemish. (But as with BBC English, only really used by RTL and VRT). Sort of like Standard Received, or BBC English, in Britain. What you learn when researching... the idea is that as the world becomes smaller, the variant forms of an Ur-Nederlans language which have spent several hundred years getting away from each other will come back together again. Even Afrikaans.
(2) She wasn't surprised when the universal answer was "no".
(3) She was equally unsurprised that the general opinion was that it should be much, much, higher. Even from privileged Names like Eorle and Venturi, already on indulgent family allowances. She had thought it prudent to point out that some people were being woefully unrealistic, and invited them to compare wishful thinking about having twenty dollars a week to most peoples' reality, in this city, being fifteen to twenty dollars a month.
(4) Some things are inevitable and mandated by narrative causality. Mrs Cake inevitably has cabbage on the go when conducting séances. It has been speculated that the smell of cooking cabbage is inseparable from English occultism. People like their Drawing Back of the Veil to be grounded in the reassuringly homely.
(5) Almost Real Ram's Skull, with big curly horns! Also available in Goat! Essential for the Magickal Practitioner. AM$1.99 from Boffo, on Tenth Egg Street!
(6) You know. The ones every school in creation insists their pupils make to "protect" the issued books, regardless of the fact they're often hopelessly ragged, creased, dog-eared and breoken-spined to begin with.