A crooked cottage on the mist-soggy edge of Wiltshire, on the morning of 1 May 1909. The universe hiccuped.

It was a small hiccup. Nothing dramatic. The sort of hiccup that, if you were the kind of being that watched time as a line on graph paper, like one of those seismograph thingies, it would register as a faint squiggle. Just enough to make a difference if you were decorating spider’s webs with a feather.

But it was enough to gently rattle the teacups of Mrs. Goodweather.

Mrs. Goodweather, as you might have suspected, wass a witch. Not the warty, _pointy-hat, eye-of-newt_ kind of witch, obviously. Although she did own a hat, and there had been an incident involving a newt in 1883. Goodweather is the sort of witch who knew when to apply dock leaves, how to silence a colicky child using only a stern look, and who had Opinions about jam.

On that particular morning, she was in her kitchen, arguing in a series of not-quite-silent hisses, with the teapot.

“You _will_ give me the proper number of cups this time,” she said firmly. “None of that three-and-a-dribble nonsense.”

The teapot, being enchanted, gurgled sulkily, emitting a curl of steam in protest.

Mrs. Goodweather narrowed her eyes and cast what witches refer to as The Glare. It had, in its time, wilted young vicarss and once made a tax inspector apologise.

The teapot harrumphed and poured. Four full cups.

At precisely that moment, as the fourth cup, golden and steaming, met porcelain, a scream echoed from the village down the lane. Not a scream of terror. A _birth scream_.

“About time,” said Mrs. Goodweather, who hadn’t even looked out the window.

You see, Mrs. Goodweather had predicted this child for some years now, which was not unusual for her, she’d predicted lots of things. War, pestilence, summer, wet bank holiday Mondays, but this child was different. She would be _long-lived_, the witch had said, in the way you might describe a particularly determined verucca.

Not that anyone had believed her.

Mrs. Goodweather reached into a cupboard and retrieved a small tin labelled “For The Child”. Inside was a pinch of dried elderflower, a single perfectly preserved dandelion seed, and an awkward poem that had arrived fully formed in her head during a thunderstorm.

She bundled it all up in a small sachet and walked, slowly, down into the village. By the time she reached the cottage where the baby had been born, the clouds had evaporated.

The mother, still pale and blinking with the shock of it all, looked up as the witch entered.

“W-would you like to see her?”

Mrs. Goodweather didn’t answer immediately. She went straight to the cradle, looked down, and nodded.

“This one’ll outlast us all,” she said, patting the child’s forehead. “And will attribute her longevity to a lifelong diet of parsnips. Got the look of someone who’ll keep going just to be contrary.”

The baby, incapable of stating its profound dislike of parsnips, gurgled.

Mrs. Goodweather tucked the sachet into the cradle’s blanket. “Bit of luck in there. Don’t open it. Don’t throw it out. Just keep it close. Might come in handy when everything else has gone to the dogs.”

Then she left, teacup still in hand, and vanished into the fog that had returned despite itself.

No one saw her again after that.

But in 2025, as the world media gathered to interview the astonishingly sprightly 115-year-old Hettie Marsh of Wiltshire, they asked her what she attributed her remarkable longevity to.

She smiled.

“Well, there’s a sachet under my pillow,” she said. “Don’t know where it came from. Smells like dandelions and defiance.”

Meditatively, as the reporters all took their photos and scuttled away to file their stories, Hettie spread parsnip jam on her morning toast and took a swig of tea from her favourite porcelain tea-mug. The one with a picture of ‘Newts of the British Isles’ on it.