Tiffany could actually see it coming up the road when she heard the hoofbeats across the green. She turned, and her heart seemed to leap and sink at the same time.

It was Roland, the Baron’s son, on a fine black horse. He leaped down before the horse had stopped, and then stood there looking embarrassed.

‘Ah, I see a very fine and interesting example of a… a… a big stone over there,’ said Miss Tick in a sticky-sweet voice. ‘I’ll just go and have a look at it, shall I?’

Tiffany could have pinched her for that.

‘Er, you’re going, then,’ said Roland as Miss Tick hurried away.

‘Yes,’ said Tiffany.

Roland looked as though he was going to explode with nervousness.

‘I got this for you,’ he said. ‘I had it made by a man, er, over in Yelp.’ He held out a package wrapped in soft paper.

Tiffany took it and put it carefully in her pocket.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and dropped a small curtsy. Strictly speaking that’s what you had to do when you met a nobleman, but it just made Roland blush and stutter.

‘O-open it later on,’ said Roland. ‘Er, I hope you’ll like it.’

‘Thank you,’ said Tiffany sweetly.

‘Here’s the cart. Er… you don’t want to miss it.’

‘Thank you,’ said Tiffany, and curtsied again, because of the effect it had. It was a little bit cruel, but sometimes you had to be.

Anyway, it would be very hard to miss the cart. If you ran fast, you could easily overtake it. It was so slow that ‘stop’ never came as a surprise.

There were no seats. The carrier went around the villages every other day, picking up packages and, sometimes, people. You just found a place where you could get comfortable among the boxes of fruit and rolls of cloth.

Tiffany sat on the back of the cart, her old boots dangling over the edge, swaying backwards and forwards as the cart lurched away on the rough road.

Miss Tick sat beside her, her black dress soon covered in chalk dust to the knees.