‘Why, you!’ He laughed. ‘I almost dropped dead of shock when I walked in and saw you standing there.’

‘Oh.’

‘You did look pretty shocked yourself,’ he added, seeming to want corroboration from her that it had been shocking. Awful.

‘I was pretty concerned to find m’self six feet from a cheetah, if that’s what you mean.’

He grinned as he reached for another asparagus stem but she sensed the conversation was hovering above something else – close to, but not quite touching it.

‘Did you manage to keep your father away from the library?’

‘Yes, actually, although it took some doing. He was quite insistent about getting in there. I started out telling him a bird had come down the chimney but in the end, I had to say an entire jackdaw’s nest had come down too. Whole thing. Fledglings. The lot. Hence the aggressive parents.’

Effie stared at him, her next radish poised in mid-air. ‘And he believed that?’

He shrugged. ‘Seemed to.’ He saw how she was staring at him. ‘What?’

‘Jackdaws fledge in June . . . July at the latest.’

Sholto stared back at her, his eyes beginning to dance with amusement. ‘. . . They do?’

‘How can you not know that?’ she cried.

‘Ah.’

‘You are useless! You have a hundred thousand eggs in that house and you don’t even know when jackdaws fledge?’ An exasperated laugh escaped her and without thinking what she was doing, she flung the radish at him. It was done before she even knew it.

He dodged it with a laugh. ‘What can I say? We’re just humble collectors. You’re the expert!’ He reached forward and threw a cranberry back at her. It whistled past her ear.

She gasped. He looked shocked too, and for several moments they sat poised on a precipice, eyes locked. Had he gone too far? Had she? The formality and distance that had existed between them since her arrival, throughout this ride, was suddenly gone. Here was the Sholto she knew again, the one from St Kilda who swam in the moonlight and rowed the sea, who climbed ropes and chased her up hillsides.

She saw him see the gleam light up in her eyes and he grinned devilishly. He lobbed another cranberry that whistled past her hair, making her scream. She threw back another radish as she got to her feet, laughing now. It hit him on the temple and he yelled, catching her on the shoulder with a baby beet. He threw with impressive accuracy as she began dodging around the trees for protection but she realized too late that she should never have left the rug – for now he alone had the ammunition with which to pelt her.

For several long moments, he launched a sustained attack of gooseberry fire, but she drew him out, running back into the trees and forcing him to chase after her, allowing her to nimbly double back to the basket and pick up more supplies.