There was little enough suitable fare to forage for in the kitchen. Mrs Taylor did not offer to help but went on peeling the pumpkin for luncheon. Flora cut thin slices of damper — she did know how to cut bread thin enough even for an invalid. Miraculously there was butter that morning, and cheese that belonged in a rat-trap, sweaty and hard. Flora grated it, remembering the watercress that grew among the ferns at the edge of the pool. She could scatter a little among the cheese.

Early apples, a knife to slice them with. It was poor fare, but Clementine seemed overjoyed. You will know cold chicken soon, my precious, she thought, and jellies and ice cream and lemon tapioca. You will wear lace cuffs, and your dresses will be starched and your stockings white. Most of all, you will learn you are Miss Clementine, granddaughter of Buccleuch, and that your place is in the cream of society, not with its sour dregs in the dust.

‘Come on, Mama! Come!’

Flora placed the picnic in a basket, the one used to collect the eggs, and fastened her bonnet and Clementine’s too.

‘Don’t like bonnets,’ said Clementine. ‘They make my head sweat.’

‘Darling, you must never talk of sweat! And it would be terrible if you arrived with a sunburnt nose at Drinkwater!’ Oh, how she hoped Clementine did not mention sweating — or castration — at Drinkwater.

‘Why?’

‘Ladies don’t.’

‘Oh,’ said Clementine, who had already learned that there would be no further answer once she had been told ‘ladies don’t’. But she was soon laughing again, dancing a jig that Ezekiel had taught her down to the back door to wait for her mother, suitably dressed for once not just in a dress, but with proper petticoats, camisole, stockings, and the new buttoned boots and her sunbonnet.

‘We’re going on a picnic!’ Clementine yelled to Mrs Taylor, who was pegging out dishcloths.

They walked hand in hand past the horse pen, empty since Rose had stolen the black stallion. Flora’s heart still lurched a little at the thought of Rose, but with pity now, not anger. What had happened to the girl? What possible future could she have, away from even the shreds of civilisation of Overflow?

Clementine scrambled over the rocks, tearing a hole in one of her stockings and leaving a scrape on one of the new boots. Flora sighed as she hefted the basket over the rocks herself, reaching the tiny gully just as Clementine ran up the smooth bedrock to the pool. It was a strange shape, Flora noticed for the first time, perfectly round, as if it had been carved, the water held in the rock itself, not connected by sand or soil like other pools.

‘The flowers have gone, Mama!’ protested Clementine, gazing at the flat green lily leaves that spread like a carpet across the pool.