‘Be you hungry, maid?’
She opened her eyes and it was true and Ezra was beside her. She looked up at him and smiled and he smiled back, and again she felt that the midnight dancing had been a dream, for this Ezra did not seem quite the same as the other. That had been a many-coloured, gay, fantastic creature; this was a kindly, earthy, sober man who moved slowly on his wooden leg, and this morning his corduroy trouser-leg was pulled down to hide the bee that was carved and painted upon it. But perhaps the bee was no longer there. Perhaps there were two Ezras, a midnight one and a daytime one, for anything was possible in a place like this. The daytime Ezra was looking tired and old and she was filled with remorse.
‘Because we took Rob-Roy, I mean Jason, and the trap, you had to walk all the way home from the Wheatsheaf on your wooden leg,’ she said.
He laughed and lowered his voice to a husky whisper. ‘As I be now, maid, I couldn’t ’ave done it,’ he said. ‘But as I were then I done it easy.’
And with this cryptic remark he led her back to the kitchen where the other three had already started their breakfast. Ezra had put everything that was on the kitchen table on the floor and pushed the settle up to it, with four piles of sacks of varying heights upon it, so that each child should be at exactly the right height for comfortable eating.
He himself sat opposite them behind a large black teapot and presided with a wonderful benignity. When breakfast was over they helped him to wash up, a process which involved the removal of the cuckoo clock and Andromache and her kittens to the floor, the placing of the frying pan and crockery and knives and forks in the sink, the turning of the cold tap on full blast, the emptying of the kettle of boiling water on top of the resultant whirlpool, the stirring of the mixture as though it were a Christmas pudding and then its removal to the draining board where it was left to dry by itself, because Andromache had all the drying-up cloths to make the basket soft for her kittens.
When they had finished Ezra asked, ‘Will you be stoppin’ for dinner?’
‘What’s for dinner?’ asked Timothy.
‘Fried steak an’ onions an’ rhubarb pie,’ said Ezra.
‘Yes,’ they said in chorus.
‘Then be off with you an’ let me get to me pastry,’ said Ezra. ‘An’ don’t speak to them bees. Not yet.’ They obeyed him instantly because obedience, which had seemed so difficult at Grandmama’s, came easily here, and they were out in the yard before they realised they had got there. But Nan came back to ask, ‘Will the elderly gentleman be back to dinner?’
‘Couldn’t say,’ said Ezra. ‘Over and above that little matter o’ the groceries, the master ’ad a call to make in town.’
Nan ran back to the others, feeling uneasy, and found them grouped about the well looking uneasy too. Though they brazened it out about dinner, the mere suggestion that they might not be stopping for it had upset them terribly. ‘I shall stay here until Father comes home,’ said Betsy suddenly. ‘And then I shall go on staying here, with Father.’
‘Sh!’ the others hissed at her. It seemed to them dreadfully dangerous to put it into words like that, for lately the things they didn’t want to happen were the things that happened, and the logic of this was that if you pretended not to want what you really wanted dreadfully, you would be more likely to get it.
‘But I think it would be all right to explore the garden,’ said Nan. ‘Only not to want too much to play in it every day.’
‘Come on,’ said Robert.
It was a wonderful garden, quite different from Grandmama’s. Hers had been a sort of continuation of the house, dreadfully tidy and a place where you had to step carefully and not touch things. This garden was also a continuation of the house, but untidy, unexpected, comfortable and homely. They explored the kitchen garden first and it seemed made for them. The grass paths between the miniature box hedges were just the right width for children running in single file, and the tangle of apple trees, currant and gooseberry bushes, flowers, weeds, vegetables, and herbs, that the paths intersected, was so wild that leaping through it couldn’t make it much wilder than it was. Betsy, who loved picking flowers, picked a bunch of periwinkles and primulas, but there were so many that no holes were left. When the children reached the top of the garden they stood at a little distance from the beehives and surveyed them with awe, but they did not speak. Even if Ezra had not forbidden them to do so, they would not have presumed, for there was a strangeness there. It was like standing on the frontier of a foreign country. You would have to know something of the customs and a few words of the language before you dared to go over.
An exciting tunnel of yew trees beside the house led to the front garden. At the lower end of the sloping lawn was a mulberry tree, its lower limbs held up by stakes of crotched wood. Its branches grew out from the main trunk in such a way that to climb the tree would be as easy as running upstairs. Timothy, who loved climbing trees, dared not look too long and they all ran determinedly past it to the part of the garden down below that they had not seen properly last night. They found it now to be a rough grassy slope planted with rhododendrons and azaleas and flaming with glorious colours. The path, with steps here and there, descended steeply among them and as they came down they could look right over the wall of the stableyard and see the river and the bridge and the stretch of the moor beyond. The road down which they had driven last night was looped like a ribbon round the shoulder of a hill that was blue and green with bluebells and bracken. Stone walls divided the wilderness into fields in which sheep were feeding, and cows and a few ponies.
They sat down under a flame-coloured rhododendron and gazed, with the sun on their faces, and then they shut their eyes and listened. They could hear the voice of the little river as it tumbled over the stones in its shallow bed, the sheep bleating, the humming of the bees, but at first nothing else, and then suddenly there was the sound of a pony’s trotting feet and their eyes flew open. The little trap was coming down the hill at a brisk pace, Rob-Roy in fine fettle and the elderly gentleman apparently in fine fettle too, for he was sitting very upright with a tall hat set upon his head, his whip held upright like a king’s sceptre. As he rattled over the bridge they saw he was swaying a little as though in time to music. Could he be singing? It didn’t seem possible that so terrible and statuesque a person could be doing such an unsuitable thing, yet as the trap disappeared from sight and slowed up on the hill they heard the strains of The British Grenadiers floating up to them. They jumped up and raced down to the arched door in the wall, pulled it open and ran down the steps to the stableyard as he drove in, Absolom at their heels. The moment the elderly gentleman had pulled Rob-Roy to a standstill they had surrounded him.
‘Ah,’ he said, grimly surveying their eager anxious faces. ‘You slept well, I see. Breakfasted well also, I trust. I see no signs of fatigue or starvation upon your grubby faces. Robert, look after your pony. You three, carry up the groceries. The luggage follows in the carrier’s cart.’
He stalked up the steps to the garden door with his hands folded in the small of his back and the three followed. His back looked very grim, yet he had returned with a great many groceries, far more than he and Ezra would need, and peeping into one bag Nan saw that it was full of dog biscuits. And what did he mean by the luggage following in the carrier’s cart? As they went up through the garden the church clock struck one, a gong boomed inside the house and he said, ‘Ah! Luncheon! I breakfasted early. What’s for luncheon?’
‘Fried steak and onions and rhubarb pie,’ said Nan.
‘Ah,’ said the elderly gentleman. ‘There is in my pocket a packet of peppermint lozenges for indigestion should the need for them subsequently arise.’
Ten minutes later they were all sitting round the table in the cool panelled dining room, with steaming plates of steak and onions before them. Ezra, with a large apron tied over his shepherd’s smock, was handing spring greens and baked potatoes. Absolom was under the table with a dog biscuit. Hector was on top of the marble clock on the mantelpiece with a dead mouse. The dining-room window looked out on the village street and the scent of the flowers that were growing in the garden of