She put on her hat and coat and ran down the back stairs fastening her coat buttons as she went. John was walking along the back passage, on his way to smoke a cigarette in the boiler room.

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’

She hurried past him.

‘Nowhere in particular.’

‘Wait, I’ll come.’

‘I can’t wait. I’ve got to go alone.’

The back door banged. John walked on slowly. Perhaps his letter had been a mistake. She hadn’t been very nice to him since she’d got it.

Ellen was running through the kitchen garden.

‘Want some apples, Ellen? Take to your Mum?’

Bernard the garden boy, who had a big hollow behind his ear where he had had an operation for meningitis, was pushing a wheelbarrow along the mossy path between the apple trees.

‘Apples! She’s got more than she knows what to do with as it is.’

But she was kind to Bernard because of his being a bit funny, so she added, ‘Thanks all the same, Bernard. Sorry, I’m in a bit of a rush.’

She went through the door in the wall, closing it carefully behind her, and hurried on down the back drive towards the Park. She was making for the river. Osbert was not back and that presumably meant that he had not found the duck. She had promised to help him.

Osbert was generally liked in the servants’ hall, except by Mr Rodgers who detested all children. Osbert was preferred to Lucy, who was considered spoilt; he had such a funny way of putting things, and sometimes seemed so lonely. Ida was considered rather a hard sort of mother, which she probably was. In spite of it Osbert found her wonderfully reassuring, because she was always the same, and because in some ways it was comforting not to be understood. It made his preoccupations seem unimportant and therefore no longer, as they sometimes were, overwhelming. He liked being alone, but Ellen thought that he should have friends, other boys with whom to wander round the woods, or fish, or make spears, or throw stones at squirrels, as her brothers had done when they were that age, walking to and from school. She thought he spent too much time learning Latin and ought to be outside more, getting roses in his cheeks. She remembered Mr Marcus at that age back from prep school and full of life. ‘Master Osbert dreams too much,’ she’d said more than once to Cicely. ‘Waking or sleeping he’s in a dream’. Cicely would say that he was all right, he was sharper than anyone thought, but Ellen had noticed that Cicely was just as protective towards Osbert as she was.

When Ellen reached the bridge and leaned over the wall she saw a pair of mallard below her in the river, just where she had seen a whole group of them the other day. But how could she tell whether this was the right duck? She looked round for Osbert but there was no sign of him.