“I did find it,” she replied. “Though not without ending in a cow pasture first.”

“Yes,” he said.

She tilted her head. Her hair caught the light again, just as it had done at Boldre Gardens. He wondered, stupidly, if she put sparkles in it. He’d never seen hair with such a sheen. “Yes?” she repeated.

He stammered, “I know. I mean yes I know. I could tell. From how you were going.”

“Oh. You were watching me from the rooftop, were you? I hope you didn’t laugh. That would be too cruel.”

“No,” he said.

“Well, I’m wretched at map reading and not much better with verbal directions, so it’s no surprise I got lost again. At least I didn’t run into any horses.”

He looked round them. “Not a good place to be, this, is it? If you’re bad with maps and directions?”

“In the wood, you mean? But I’ve had help.” She gestured to the south and he saw she was pointing to a distant knoll where an enormous oak stood beyond the wood itself. “I very carefully kept that tree in sight and on my right as I came into the wood and now that it’s on my left, I feel fairly sure I’m heading in the direction of the car park. So you see, despite stumbling onto a thatching site and into a cow pasture, I’m not entirely hopeless.”

“That’s Nelson’s,” he said.

“What? D’you mean someone owns the tree? It’s on private property?”

“No. It’s on Crown land, all right. It’s called Nelson’s Oak. Supposedly he planted it. Lord Nelson, that is.”

“Ah. I see.”

He looked at her more closely. She’d sucked in on her lip, and it came to him that she might not actually know who Lord Nelson was. Some people didn’t in this day and age. To help her out while not embarrassing her, he said, “Admiral Nelson had his ships built over Buckler’s Hard. Beyond Beaulieu. You know the place? On the estuary? They were using up a hell of a lot of timber, so they had to start replanting. Nelson probably didn’t put any acorns in the ground himself but the tree’s associated with him anyway.”