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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 pathsintersected, 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