Laying Betsy down on the bed, he took his candle from Robert and walked out of the room without a backward glance. Yet they looked at each other with dancing eyes, for if he had really intended to turn them adrift tomorrow, he would not have expressed a wish to see their combinations.
‘We’ll do everything he tells us,’ said Robert. ‘We’ll wash. Come on.’
Now Robert hated washing, and he hated doing what he was told, so it was all the more extraordinary that it was he who poured hot water into one of the big basins, rummaged out a bath towel from under the bedding, a piece of hard yellow soap from a cupboard under the washstand, and fell upon Timothy. There was no flannel, but he soaped Timothy’s face and neck good and hard with the soap in direct contact with the skin, ducked his head in the basin and then rubbed him dry. Timothy yelled once, kicked twice and then submitted. Nan woke up Betsy, washed her face, took off her smock and petticoat and tucked her back into bed again. Then she washed her own face and hands, took off her smock and helped the boys with their sailor suits. Followed by Absolom, they climbed up the little flight of steps and settled themselves joyously in the big bed. With the girls at the top, the boys at the bottom and Absolom in the middle there was plenty of room for all of them. It was cosy and soft with all the feather pillows and a feather bed, and about eight blankets. Their combinations, excellent garments, but as out of fashion now as the kind of grandmother Grandmama was, clung warmly. The moonlight lay in benediction upon the bed and they were immensely happy and presently immensely sleepy. Yet suddenly Nan raised her head from the deep hollow in her feather pillow and asked, ‘Robert, did you wash?’
There was no answer. He was asleep and so were Timothy, Betsy and Absolom. For a moment Nan felt annoyed, then she dropped her head back in the hollowed pillow again. What did it matter? She was too warm and happy to mind. It was nice sleeping in blankets, with no chilly sheets. She gave a sigh of contentment and closed her eyes.
A few hours later she suddenly woke up again, and in a moment she was sitting bolt upright with trickles of fear 1g down her spine. She had been awakened by a tremendous crash, followed by a piercing yell and then yowling and booting. She was so terrified that for a moment or two she forgot about Ezra Oake, and then she heard a tenor voice carolling out a rollicking song that was like a spring wind and the sea on a fine day and suet pudding with treacle. It was punctuated by the sound of castanets, and an extraordinary thumping sound, and was altogether so exciting that her fear vanished and she shook the others awake so that they could hear it too. ‘It’s Ezra Oake,’ she told them. ‘He’s come home and fallen into the saucepans. But now he’s singing and I think Hector and Andromache are singing too. And he’s dancing. Come on.’
All four children had the gift of awaking instantly from the deepest of sleeps if there was anything exciting going on. They rolled out of bed on to the floor without bothering to go down the steps, picked themselves up and made for the door. Nothing except being picked up and dropped woke Absolom and so he remained in bed and asleep. They raced down the passage and down the stairs to the kitchen, where a glorious sight met their eyes. A man with a wooden leg was dancing in the bright moonlight, two saucepan lids held in his hands as castanets, singing as he danced. Hector was perched on a flowerpot on the mantelpiece hooting like mad, and Andromache was yowling melodiously on top of a pile of dishes on the kitchen table. To complete the perfection it only needed the cuckoo clock to join in, which it immediately did, cuckooing twelve times down inside the sink, and after the cuckooing came the sound of a great bell tolling far up in the sky. The children only paused for a moment at the door and then they leapt in and began to dance too, stamping their feet and clapping their hands and trying to join in the song that was like a spring wind and the sea on a fine day and suet pudding with treacle. They did not get the words properly that night, but they caught the tune. They could have sung and danced for ever, only suddenly the man tripped over a saucepan, fell on his back on the settle, stretched out his legs and was instantly asleep.
Andromache returned to her box, where she could be heard purring contentedly to her kittens, Hector flitted away into the passage and back into the library and the children gazed in adoration at the man.
He was a little man, not much bigger than Robert, and he lay with his brown gardener’s hands placidly folded on his chest. His rosy wrinkled face was even in sleep extraordinarily kind. He had a short grey beard, but there was not a single hair upon his acorn-coloured head. His brown corduroy trousers were fastened below the knee with string on his real leg, but on the wooden leg they were folded back to show the fascinating bee that was carved and painted upon its round polished surface. He had a mustard-coloured waistcoat, a full-skirted beech-brown coat and a scarlet handkerchief knotted round his throat. In the moonlight all these wonderful colours were muted and the moon lent them mystery. With a sigh of satisfaction the children tiptoed out of the kitchen and up the stairs and back to their room. One by one they climbed the flight of steps that led up into the big bed, fell among the blankets and pillows and Absolom, and snuggled down. They were asleep at once and did not see the fading of the moonlight and the growing of the dawn, or hear the morning chorus of the birds and the sound of the sheep bleating on the hills.
They woke up to the smell of fried sausages and were quickly dressed and pursuing it. Just at first, after they had caught up with it in the kitchen, they wondered if that wonderful interval of song and dance in the middle of the night had been a dream, because the man who was frying the sausages, turning them over and over in the huge iron pan with a long two-pronged fork, was wearing a shepherd’s smock tied round the waist with bast. But when he turned his head it was Ezra Oake all right, and when he saw them he smiled. He had the most wonderful smile, which seemed to run up into all the wrinkles on his face. His eyes were bright blue.
‘Lucky us weren’t out of sausages,’ he said. ‘Nor bread. If it ’ad been pickle an’ cheese you was wantin’ for your breakfast you’d ’ave ’ad none.’ And he winked one eye and chuckled. He had a deep rumbling chuckle and a husky voice. The children gathered round him fascinated by the interior of the frying pan, which contained not only sausages but bread, eggs and kidneys, all sizzling gloriously.
‘Nothin’ like a good fry for breakfast,’ said Ezra. ‘An’ a nice strong cup o’ tea. Settles the stomach.’
The cuckoo clock in the sink struck ten.
‘Ten?’ gasped the children.
‘Aye,’ said Ezra. ‘Ten. The master ’e ’ad breakfast an’ ’e was off in the trap two hours ago.’
‘Where to?’ said Robert, and fear clutched at their hearts.
‘Down to town,’ said Ezra.
‘Why?’ whispered Nan.
‘Us be short o’ cheese, pickles, biscuits, ’am, sugar an’ marmalade,’ said Ezra, and again he winked. ‘But I reckon us should be thankful ’Ector ’as ’is sardines. ’E takes the ’uff if ’e don’t get breakfast.’
The children now saw that Hector was sitting at the open window above the sink with an open tin in front of him. As they watched he stretched out a claw and delicately removed a sardine. It went down at one swallow and he removed another. Andromache was looking at them over the top of her basket, a tortoise-shell cat with apprehensive green eyes.
‘Better put the dog out,’ said Ezra.
Nan grasped Absolom’s collar and pulled him past Andromache’s basket and out into the garden. The back door opened straight into the little yard behind the house, where there was a well and a washing line. Opposite the back door four steps led up to a small walled kitchen garden on the slope of the hill. At the top of the garden under the wall were four beehives and beyond the wall was an old grey church with a tower that soared so far into the sky that it took Nan’s breath away. A door in the wall beside the beehives led from the garden to the churchyard. There was a jumble of whitewashed thatched cottages grouped round the church, and on the other side of the lane, and the smoke was curling lazily up from their crooked chimneys. She shut her eyes and smelt flowers, wood-smoke and sausages,