“You’d better hurry. Everybody will be grabbing. I hear Mr. Markos is a man short up at Mardling. Not that I think my Gardener would take an under-gardener’s job.”

“What’s he called?”

“Who?”

“Your gardener.”

“You’ve just said it. Gardener.”

“You’re joking.”

Sybil made an exasperated noise into the receiver.

“So he’s gardener-Gardener,” said Verity. “Does he hyphenate it?”

“Very funny.”

“Oh, come on, Syb!”

“All right, my dear, you may scoff. Wait till you see him.”

Verity saw him three evenings later. Mrs. Black’s cottage was a short distance along the lane from Keys House and she walked to it at six-thirty, by which time Mrs. Black had given her brother his tea. She was a mimbling little woman meekly supporting the prestige of recent widowhood. Perhaps with the object of entrenching herself in this state she spoke in a whimper.

Verity could hear television blaring in the back parlour and said she was sorry to interrupt. Mrs. Black, alluding to her brother as Mr. Gardener, said without conviction that she supposed it didn’t matter and she’d tell him he was wanted.

She left the room. Verity stood at the window and saw that the flower-beds had been recently dug over and wondered if it was Mr. Gardener’s doing.

He came in: a huge sandy man with a trim golden beard, wide mouth and blue eyes, set far apart, and slightly, not unattractively, strabismic. Altogether a personable figure. He contemplated Verity quizzically from aloft, his head thrown back and slightly to one side and his eyes half-closed.

“I didna just catch the name,” he said, “Ma-am.”

Verity told him her name and he said: Ou aye, and would she no’ tak’ a seat.

She said she wouldn’t keep him a moment and asked if he could give her one day’s gardening a week.

“That’ll be the residence a wee piece up the lane, I’m thinking. It’s a bonny garden you have there, ma-am. I’ve taken a keek at it through the entrance. It has what I call perrrsonality. Would it be all of an acre that you have there, now, and an orchard, foreby?”