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hair was of no particular color. His skin was smooth and red-flushed, though she did not know whether this enviable condition was due to his outdoor life or the private bottle he kept by him in his little stone house near the orchard. During the winter when the wind cut coldly through the chinks of the best-built house, he complained of his aching back.
    On days like this, though, it was as if the years dropped away. Last spring a housekeeper left after complaining that Mr. Quigg pinched her in the dairy house. Why she had been there, since Mrs. Luckem kept no cows, she had not volunteered.
    “I’ve smelt the wind all the day and I still be here,” Mr. Quigg said in response to Jocelyn’s question about his health. He bundled the wood into the stove and set it blazing with a chip lighted from his pipe.
    “Time was, in my young life, such a wind would have blown me clear away. Did, too, more than once.” He chuckled. “Except that’s what happened to Mrs. Who-sit. She opened the door and blew right ‘way.”
    Jocelyn smiled at a vision of the heavy-figured woman flying away like a peeved angel. They came and went, these women. Mrs. Luckem insisted on their using only Saxon cooking utensils, and one woman did make the effort, until caught using a fork. During another’s stay, Granville turned away in disgust from anything other than boiled eggs and toasted wheat bread, because some London dandy suggested this diet to cultivate a pale and interesting complexion. Mr. Luckem shouted at one for dusting the library, and she left, muttering imprecations. Arnold, too, contributed to the parade of departing housekeepers by keeping a live snake in the kitchen, the warmest part of the house.
    The stove heated well. Jocelyn took down a large cast-iron pot and filled it with settled water from the bucket that stood beside the dry sink.
    Mr. Quigg warmed his hands a moment longer at the stove and then said, “Don’t you mind putting out a place fer me, miss. I been eating boiled beef too long to relish it much.”
    “I’m going to give you a piece of this pie I made just two days ago, Mr. Quigg.”
    “Give it me now, then, miss. I’ll eat it under the trees.” He held out his large blue-spotted handkerchief, none too clean, and Jocelyn cut him a wide slice. He thanked her and left, knowing she did not have the key to the cellar. The drink that went with his pie would have to come from his private source.
    Sliding the slab of beef into the hot water, Jocelyn tried to remember how long to heat preserved asparagus. Was it to steaming or to roiling? She supposed that if she made enough white sauce, no one would notice if the timing was off.
    She could scarcely wait until her own fresh vegetables were ready for picking. Jocelyn had grown tired of last year’s produce in March, when it seemed as if spring would never come. She felt she should not complain. Some of the older and poorer people perished in the midst of the interminable snow. The Luckems had been very fortunate. Only the one week had been very bad, when the firewood gave out and they’d burned the old game table. Putting her cool fingers against her hot face, she recalled the recipe for white sauce with an effort.
    Cooking made Jocelyn irritable. She thought of Arnold reading or messing about with one of the animals in his room. She entered the servants’ stair, where steep steps lead straight to a tiny closet on the next floor. The acoustical properties of this hall were well known. Anything said in the kitchen could be clearly heard at the top of the stair.
    Jocelyn called, “Arnold!” loudly and impatiently. She knew summoning Granville was pointless. If he was not lying down with a cloth over his eyes after his difficult day, he was undoubtedly trying new ways of tying a cravat to amaze his family at dinner. Arnold, however, would not be able to resist finding out what was happening in the house.
    Arnold appeared, clattering down heedless of his limbs. He