Free Not Just a Witch by Eva Ibbotson Page B

. . er, worms. What I mean is, I can’t bear to be in the same room. When I was small, I had asthma, you see; I couldn’t get my breath, and the doctors told me that if I went near anything like . . . the thing you have described, I would simply choke to death.’
    Heckie was very disappointed. She had set her heart on showing the dragworm to this attractive man. But of course the idea of Lionel Knacksap choking to death was too horrible to think about.
    Mr Knacksap, in the meantime, was doing sums in his head. A tiger skin fetched over two thousand pounds. Even after he’d paid someone to kill and skin the beast, there’d be a nice profit. And plenty more where that came from: ocelots, jaguars, lynx . . . All he had to do was butter up this frumpy witch.
    ‘Dear Miss Tenbury-Smith—’
    ‘Heckie. Please call me Heckie.’
    Mr Knacksap gulped. ‘Dear Heckie – I wonder if you would care to have dinner with me next Saturday? At the Trocadero at eight o’clock?’
    ‘How do I look?’ asked Heckie, and Sumi and Daniel said she looked very nice.
    This was true. Heckie had gone to Madame Rosalia for advice about what to wear for her night out with the furrier, but she had made it clear that she wanted to be tastefully dressed.
    ‘I may be a witch,’ Heckie had said to Madame Rosalia, ‘but I am also a woman.’
    So she had decided not to wear black whiskers on her chin, or a blue tooth, and just three blackheads – more enlarged pores, really – on the end of her nose. And her dress was tasteful too – a black sheath embroidered all over with small green toads.
    ‘My shoes pinch,’ said Heckie, but there was nothing to be done about that. Heckie’s Toe of Transformation always hurt when she bought new shoes.
    Mr Knacksap had booked a table by the window and ordered a three-course meal. He hated spending money, but he knew that if he was going to get the witch to do what he wanted, he’d have to make a splash for once. The Trocadero was very smart, with gleaming white tablecloths and a man playing sloppy music on the piano, but the dinner didn’t get off to a very good start.
    The trouble began with a beetle that was crawling about in the centre of a rose in a cut glass vase on the table. Heckie thought the beetle did not look well and she asked the waiter if he’d mind putting it out in the garden, if possible near a cowpat.
    ‘It’s a dung beetle, you see,’ she told him, ‘so it really cannot be happy on this rose.’
    Then the starter came and it was shrimps in mayonnaise.
    ‘Is there anything wrong?’ asked Mr Knacksap. ‘They look nice and pink to me.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Heckie faintly. ‘But you see, shrimps aren’t meant to be pink. They’re meant to be a sort of grey. If they’re pink they’re dead.’
    ‘Well, we could hardly eat them if they weren’t,’ said Mr Knacksap, but he had to keep on the right side of Heckie so he sent them back and ordered vegetable soup.
    After the shrimps came some meat in a brown sauce and when Heckie saw it, she turned quite pale.
    ‘ Now what’s the matter?’ asked Mr Knacksap. ‘Those are pheasant breasts done in wine.’
    ‘I know they’re pheasant breasts,’ said Heckie faintly. ‘But you see eating them would be . . . well, like eating a friend.’ And as Mr Knacksap frowned at her: ‘You must know what I mean. Think of a friend of yours. Any friend.’
    Mr Knacksap tried to think of a friend he had had. ‘There was a boy called Marvin Minor at my prep school. He used to lend me his roller skates.’
    ‘Well, now you see,’ said Heckie. ‘Imagine you were served slices of Marvin Minor’s chest in wine sauce. How would you feel?’
    But even now, Mr Knacksap kept his temper. The pheasant breasts were taken away and Heckie was given a mushroom omelette instead. And there was no fuss over the pudding. Even Heckie didn’t think that caramel custard was like swallowing a friend.
    By now they had drunk quite a lot of wine and Mr Knacksap