They called her Nanny Bee, although as far as anyone knew she had never been a wife or a mother, let alone a grandmother. But she was popularly believed to be a witch – so Nanny it was. She lived in a pink-walled thatched cottage that crouched between the village green and the vicarage. The Reverend Alphonso Scoggins (a person of peculiarly mixed heritage and a fondness for large dinners) joked that between him and Nanny they could see the villagers from birth to burial.
Nanny’s garden was the most verdant and productive little patch you could ever imagine, and she could be found pottering in its walled prettiness from dawn to dusk almost every day. People came to visit and were given advice, or medicine, or other potions in tiny bottles or scraps of paper – but they always had the sneaking suspicion they were getting in the way of the gardening.
But there again, digging is second nature to gnomes.
When eating brownies was first mentioned in the village, there was a certain amount of disquiet: cannibalism and all that. But when it was discovered that the brownies in question were delicious cakes that put an entirely different complexion on the whole thing.
The cake was delicious, dense and chewy and sweet, and the village embraced it with enthusiasm.
Nanny, however, was less enthusiastic and she found a surprising ally in the corpulent person of the vicar who came to air his disquiet.
“There’s no doubt the stuff’s beyond edible,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s safe. It’s from the future and shouldn’t be here.”
“Agreed. But I don’t know how it gets here.”
“Neither did I until this morning. I went out for a fly because the dawn was calling and I saw him.”
“Saw who?”
“The baker. He’s found a wormhole and he’s swapping rocks from the spoil heap of the dwarf mine for trays of cake.”
“Where?”
He showed her and she had a word with the mine foreman. Who was unamused.
When the baker arrived at his wormhole the next morning he was driven back by knobbly dwarfish fists and his source of cake had been dynamited into oblivion.
It took a while, though, for the village to forget the forbidden savour of chocolate.
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