Read Online Hogfather by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online Page B

That’s what we’re here for. Big sharp teeth? What big shar—Oh, these big sharp teeth?…They’re just for, er, cracking nuts. And some of these berries can be really vicious.
    The city’s clocks were striking six when she got back to the house. She was allowed her own key. It wasn’t as if she was a servant, exactly.
    You couldn’t be a duchess and a servant. But it was all right to be a governess. It was understood that it wasn’t exactly what you were, it was merely a way of passing the time until you did what every girl, or gel, was supposed to do in life, i.e., marry some man. It was understood that you were playing.
    The parents were in awe of her. She was the daughter of a duke, whereas Mr. Gaiter was a man to be reckoned with in the wholesale boots and shoes business. Mrs. Gaiter was bucking for a transfer into the Upper Classes, which she currently hoped to achieve by reading books on etiquette. She treated Susan with the kind of worried deference she thought was due to anyone who’d known the difference between a serviette and a napkin from birth.
    Susan had never before come across the idea that you could rise in Society by, as it were, gaining marks, especially since such noblemen as she’d met in her father’s house had used neither serviette nor napkin but a state of mind, which was “Drop it on the floor, the dogs’ll eat it.”
    When Mrs. Gaiter had tremulously asked her how one addressed the second cousin of a queen, Susan had replied without thinking, “We called him Jamie, usually,” and Mrs. Gaiter had had to go and have a headache in her room.
    Mr. Gaiter just nodded when he met her in a passage and never said very much to her. He was pretty sure he knew where he stood in boots and shoes and that was that.
    Gawain and Twyla, who’d been named by people who apparently loved them, had been put to bed by the time Susan got in, at their own insistence. It’s a widely held belief at a certain age that going to bed early makes tomorrow come faster.
    She went to tidy up the schoolroom and get things ready for the morning, and began to pick up the things the children had left lying around. Then something tapped at a window pane.
    She peered out at the darkness, and then opened the window. A drift of snow fell down outside.
    In the summer the window opened into the branches of a cherry tree. In the winter dark, they were little gray lines where the snow had settled on them.
    “Who’s that?” said Susan.
    Something hopped through the frozen branches.
    “Tweet tweet tweet, would you believe?” said the raven.
    “Not you again?”
    “You wanted maybe some dear little robin? Listen, your grand—”
    “Go away!”
    Susan slammed the window and pulled the curtains across. She put her back to them, to make sure, and tried to concentrate on the room. It helped to think about…normal things.
    There was the Hogswatch tree, a rather smaller version of the grand one in the hall. She’d helped the children to make paper decorations for it. Yes. Think about that.
    There were the paper chains. There were the bits of holly, thrown out from the main rooms for not having enough berries on them, and now given fake modeling clay berries and stuck in anyhow on shelves and behind pictures.
    There were two stockings hanging from the mantelpiece of the small schoolroom grate. There were Twyla’s paintings, all blobby blue skies and violently green grass and red houses with four square windows. There were…
    Normal things…
    She straightened up and stared at them, her fingernails beating a thoughtful tattoo on a wooden pencil case.
    The door was pushed open. It revealed the tousled shape of Twyla, hanging onto the doorknob with one hand.
    “Susan, there’s a monster under my bed again…”
    The click of Susan’s fingernails stopped.
    “…I can hear it moving about…”
    Susan sighed and turned toward the child.
    “All right, Twyla. I’ll be along directly.”
    The girl nodded and went back to her