Chapter 1

EASTWARD IN CLERKENWELL lies the Mulberry Pleasure Garden: six acres of leafy walks, colonnades, pavilions and arbours of box, briar and vine, walled in between Rag Street and New Prison Walk. When night falls, the garden opens its eyes; lamps hang glimmering in the trees and scores of moths flap and totter in the shadowy green, imagining themselves star-drunk . . .

That’s Orpheus Jones, a sweet Welsh tenor who sells gloves by day in Compton Street and sings each night for his supper and a guinea a week besides. He stands on the balcony of the gilded rotunda near the mulberry tree itself and, accompanied by three fiddles and a flute, sends his voice as far as Corporation Lane:

‘Deli-i-i-ishus death!’ (His flexible roulades drive his imitators to despair.)

‘Delicious! That’s the word for you!’

That’s Major Smith, who comes every Friday night, and occupies arbour number twelve.

‘I shouldn’t be here with you! Really I shouldn’t. I’m doing very wrong, Major Smith. What would your wife say, if she knew?’

And that’s Leila Robinson, as lovely as the summer’s dark can make her, sitting beside the major, who is a sturdy little man with astonishingly gentle eyes. He sighs:

‘My dear, my wife is dead. She was an Indian girl; she passed away while we were still in Bombay.’

‘Oh I’m sorry . . . truly sorry.’

‘She was beautiful, in that passionate way of the East,’ murmurs the major reminiscently, stroking Miss Robinson’s wrist. ‘We had only been married a month . . .’

‘Forgive me!’ whispers Leila. ‘I didn’t know –’

Orpheus Jones is in fine voice. He sings with closed eyes and exposed teeth, leaning forward like a lover about to bite.

‘Stray-ay-ay-ing . . .’

‘Waiter! Waiter, sir! Bring us a dish of syllabub, there’s a dear! Don’t you worry, Mr Brown! I’m rich today!’

That’s Fanny Bush with her threadbare, skin-and-bone old friend whom she loves to treat, every Friday, to a night out in the garden. As the waiter departs, she presses a coin into old Mr Brown’s trembling palm and makes him promise to spend the money wisely, on nourishing food. Her eyes sparkle with pleasure and compassion.

A youngish man, of perhaps twenty-seven or -eight, watches and wonders if the old beggar is the pretty young woman’s grandfather. Then he returns to eating his cheese-cake, for which he has an undeniable weakness. He is the Reverend Martin Young, Vicar of St James’s and Justice of the Peace, to boot.

Orpheus Jones flings out his arms and blindly embraces the garden. A wood pigeon coos and from somewhere the last nightingale in Clerkenwell begins to sing. Everywhere in the arbours and the shady places that abound, hands are clasped, lips meet, eyes wink and glimmer and then go out. Discreetly, like benevolent spirits, waiters clink away empty glasses . . . and discreetly forget to bring change.

A man, ugly as sin (God knows why he comes, for to the ugly the garden is torment!), looks wistfully towards the nooks and bowers, glimpses the frill of a disturbed petticoat, and suffers the tortures of the damned.

Tom Hastey and his Lucy suit their actions to the song’s words. Of all the Friday-nighters, they are the best beloved. Their hearts are on fire, all right, and Tom swears, as usual, that he’s about to make his fortune and they’ll live happily ever after; and Lucy believes him, while keeping a sharp eye out for her guardian aunt who’s at the raffling-booth, determined to win, this time, a silver and enamel watch . . .

At eleven o’clock by the bell of St James’s, Orpheus Jones bows and retires to his supper, while the band plays on till the garden closes, half an hour after midnight. The booths in the colonnades give up trading and pack away their wares. Lucy’s guardian aunt leaves the raffling-shop, having won a paper fan, and peevishly calls to her charge; and the twelve arbours disgorge their contents in the shape of lovers old and young, who wend their linked ways along the winding walks that lead to the gate.

Here the garden’s secular arm, in the shape of a party of muscular servants armed with torches and cudgels and in green livery, awaits such solitary females as need escorting through the terrors of the night. Slowly and laughingly, with promises and assignations for the Friday to come, the revellers go out of the pleasure garden, out into the black garden of pain.

*

The Mulberry Garden was given up to darkness and quiet. The three fiddles, the flute and the singer had gone home; the waiters, stalking on tiptoes like shabby crows with napkins and corns, had poked and pried in the arbours and under the tables for valuables left behind, and then, with long snuffers, put out the lanterns in the trees.

A great stillness lay over the garden; such a stillness that the imagination might have heard the motion of a spider or the scream of a fly.

Suddenly there came the sound of a bell – a small, frail ringing: once, twice, three times . . .

The trees began to rustle, at first softly and then with increasing violence. Again the bell rang. The arbours began to shake, vines snapped and leaves fell to the ground. For a moment it seemed that the garden was in the grip of the ghosts of dead lovers, called up by the bell to partake of the warmth left by the living. Indeed, the garden was reputed to be haunted . . .

Then this invisible violence died as mysteriously as it had sprung up; and out of the low branches and down the sides and backs of the arbours slid and dropped various black creatures, like misshapen fruits.

Perhaps a dozen, in all, made up this eerie windfall. Silently they gestured to each other before scuttling along the paths to the dark and silent house that adjoined the gate.

One by one they slipped through a back door and began to descend a flight of stone steps. The rattle of feet and the noise of panting suggested that a small-sized hailstorm had got inside the house and panicked.

A door opened and light streamed out. The storm abated and shuffled into an underground parlour that was furnished with a table, two chairs and several stout benches, like a magistrate’s court. The light came from a solitary lantern on the table that jumped and flinched as the storm dispersed itself and sat upon the benches. Then the flame grew steady . . .

The dark creatures, the windfall from the arbours, turned out to be children, human children of supernaturally ragged and filthy appearance. Several of them exhibited cuts and scratches from thorns and broken branches, and it seemed that they’d bled not blood but dirt, that they were dirt all through, that their very bones were grubby and the marrow in them was as black as sin. Only their eyes, the windows of their souls, were bright and gleeful, being composed of a substance that even dirt shrank from . . .

‘Where’s Briskitt?’

The voice, sharp as a pin, came from behind the lamp where a long, thin man in black appeared to be folded rather than seated in one of the chairs. Had he not spoken, there might have been nothing but dark upholstery on the chair . . .

‘Briskitt! Briskitt!’

‘’Ere I am, Dr Dormann, sir! Jus’ come!’ The latecomer appeared. He was a scrawny infant with a diminutive face, like screwed-up paper. As was his invariable habit, he was full of breathless excuses and apologies.

‘Couldn’t ’elp bein’ late! Got caught up in that there bleedin’ vine again!’

He offered in evidence a tear in the remnant of his sleeve, and enlarged it. Dr Dormann leaned forward till he seemed all face, pale and luminous.

‘Vines don’t bleed, Briskitt,’ he said with gentle reproach. ‘They hang. You must bear that in mind. We don’t want the same to happen to you, do we?’

There was the merest trace of an accent in the doctor’s speech; but it was so slight that no one could have told where he came from. An Englishman might have said Scotland; a Scotsman might have said Ireland; and an Irishman might have made a guess at Germany.

Briskitt, suitably admonished, hung his head and went to join his colleagues with a perfectly outrageous grin the doctor was unable to see.

At last, when Briskitt had settled himself beside a particular friend, Dr Dormann flashed his teeth – which were new – and again rang the small brass bell that had summoned the children from the trees. As he did so, he rose, by a process of unfolding, and gestured, with appallingly white hands, for the company to follow his example.

A moment later there was a sound of heavy footsteps, a rustling, and a clinking of glass. The children grew still and Mrs Bray, followed by a servant bearing a tray of mulberry cordial, entered the cellar. Dr Dormann bowed . . .

Mrs Bray was the proprietress of the Mulberry Garden. According to the best judges, she was the fattest woman in London and was said to have topped four and twenty stone on a butcher’s scale in Smithfield; though how and when she had ever been persuaded into such a situation defied all conjecture.

Although a widow for seven years, she still wore black, which lent her bulk a certain mystery; sometimes it was hard to see where she ended and the night began. Dr Dormann, standing beside her, looked thinner than ever; really no more than a mere slice of a man who might have come off Mrs Bray in a carelessly slammed door.

‘All present, Dr D.?’ asked the lady, beaming kindly.

Eagerly Dr Dormann flashed his teeth again; and Mrs Bray, seating herself with infinite care, nodded to her servant to distribute the mulberry cordial which had been measured out into old beer bottles.

‘For what we are about to receive?’ inquired Mrs Bray.

‘May the Lord make us truly grateful!’ answered the children; and without more ado set about swigging down the dark drink, upending the bottles and regulating the flow by inserting their narrow, pointed tongues. They resembled, in the twitching, jumping lantern-light, mischievous imps who had just come out of the bottles and were partly stuck.

None of them was much above ten years old, nor higher than Mrs Bray’s double-barrelled breast. She might have picked up any two of them without embarrassment, and walked off with them, struggle as they might.

Indulgently the huge lady watched the curious scene, while forming, perhaps, the most curious part of it herself. Presently Dr Dormann rang the bell, to which the children seemed to have been rigorously trained. At once they desisted from the bottles and, emptying the dregs over the nearest head or down a convenient neck, returned to their benches. As they sat before Mrs Bray and Dr Dormann in an orderly fashion, they might have been a Sunday School, only it was Friday night; and the great ledger that Dr Dormann now opened and laid before his mistress was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Bible.

Mrs Bray drew the lamp towards her and put on a pair of spectacles which dwindled to dewdrops in her huge face.

‘And how does my garden grow?’ she asked with a burst of playfulness.

‘With silver bells and cockleshells and pretty maids all in a row!’ answered the children, dutifully.

‘One, two, buckle my shoe!’ cried Mrs Bray, clapping her hands.

Two scraps of animated mud and earth came forward and fidgeted just outside the circle of lamplight.

‘Well? Well? Buckle my shoe!’

She took up a pen and began to write, in large, laborious letters, as One and Two began upon the nightly catechism.

‘I heard . . .’

‘I saw . . .’

‘I heard . . .’

‘I saw . . .’

In high, monotonous voices the children disgorged the secrets they’d heard, the dreams, the lies, the unwitting truths and the tender intimacies their bright little eyes had spied out as they’d lain hidden on the tops of the arbours and stared down through peep-holes in the trellises and vines.

Mrs Bray listened and wrote, listened and wrote, pausing only to push up her spectacles which slipped down her short, broad nose. At last the children ceased and Mrs Bray nodded to Dr Dormann who gave them each a sixpence for their pains. She turned the page of the ledger.

‘Three and four, knock on my door!’

One and Two bobbed and retired, giving way to Three and Four.

‘Well, little ones? Knock on my door!’

Three and Four knocked to great advantage . . . and when they were done, why, there was a sixpence each for Three and Four! Then came Five and Six, who picked up sticks; and Seven and Eight, who laid them straight . . .

‘Nine and Ten, a big fat hen!’ cried Mrs Bray, happily. ‘Well, little ones? And what have you got for your big fat hen?’

They had a great deal, and Mrs Bray, no fluent pen-woman, had to write long and hard in her ledger, which must have contained all the dreams and little sins in the world.

Last to speak was Briskitt, the unseen genius of arbour number twelve, where Major Smith and Leila Robinson had –

‘Dig and delve,’ urged Mrs Bray. ‘Dig and delve!’

‘They was wrapped up closer’n a bundle of washin’, marm! I never seed sich goin’s-on; nor comin’s-off, neither!’ said Briskitt, concluding a tale of such lecherous delights that the very cellar walls seemed to blush at it.

Briskitt took his sixpence, bowed neatly and, with his companion, went back to his place. Mrs Bray closed the ledger with a soft bang. She stood up and shook out her dress, and a strong smell of sandalwood perfume, which she always wore, was wafted across the room.

‘Good night, little ones,’ she said, taking off her spectacles and wiping her eyes. ‘And God bless you, every one!’

She moved to stand by the cellar door and, as each child went past her, she bent to kiss it on its earthy brow. Three of these night children, among whom was Briskitt, lodged in the stables; the others lived with their natural mothers who were engaged in the forced occupation of beating hemp in nearby Bridewell Gaol.

‘Dr D.!’

Dr Dormann looked up. He had reopened the ledger, and had been studying it while the children had been departing. Mrs Bray moved to his side and peered down at the opened page. Nothing was written on it but a name at the top. Martin Young.

Gently Mrs Bray shook her head.

‘Not that one, Dr D. Never that one.’

‘Why not?’

‘I told you before. I had a dream about this page. There was blood on it.’

‘Whose blood?’

‘I don’t know. It might have been yours, Dr D.’

She pushed Dr Dormann aside and turned the ledger’s pages until she came to the sworn affidavit for arbour number twelve.

‘Now this one, Dr D. This is more in our line.’

Obediently Dr Dormann leaned forward and examined the evidence that related to no less than three Fridays in succession. Major Smith’s page was full.

‘Tomorrow, Dr D. See to it tomorrow.’

She closed the book with finality, locking the clasp with a small key that she kept on a chain that descended into her bosom. Dr Dormann’s eyes lingered on the great volume that was bound in calf and tooled with the gilded replica of a mulberry tree.

‘I know what you’re thinking, Dr D. But remember, I dreamed of blood.’

Chapter 2

DR DORMANN ALSO had dreams; but they were not of blood. Perhaps they were not so much dreams as peculiarly intense reveries that overcame him even when he was walking the streets. He did not, to his knowledge, dream when he was asleep. Indeed, sleep and its oblivion frightened him so much that he would actually lie awake for hours, trembling at the thought of its inevitability.

When he fell into one of these reveries, to which he was increasingly subject and which were usually heralded by a sense of coldness, his expression would become almost rapt in its inwardness. On several occasions he had been taken for a blind man or even some sort of religious fanatic. This latter impression was reinforced by his habit of wearing Geneva bands – those limp white ribbons that hang, like folded wings, below a clergyman’s chin.

But Dr Dormann was not a doctor of divinity. In fact, no one really knew from what branch of learning his doctorate had been plucked. It might have been law, it might have been physic, it might have been philosophy; it might even have been from a branch of the mulberry tree itself.

Where had he come from? A debtor’s prison. Mrs Bray had found him, bought his liberty and given him employment. ‘I need a man,’ she’d said, ‘to go about for me.’

And before that? A small business that had failed. And before that? A youth and childhood lost somewhere, far, far away in some ancient, crazy town where casements leaned across streets like gossiping monsters; a town of ghosts and bloodied doorposts . . .

Sometimes he felt his life stretched back for centuries . . . lonely, empty, rootless. He grimaced wryly; even his teeth lacked roots.

He was walking up Ludgate Hill and, despite the warmth of the August morning, he began to shiver. Desperately he tried to ward off the attack that he felt to be imminent. He was out upon Mrs Bray’s business; nothing must be allowed to interfere with it. The huge woman commanded his whole loyalty, and, some would have said, his soul itself. Also his attacks had become, lately, almost nightmarish . . .

He paused to recover himself and then walked on with a firmness of step that denoted the danger was past. At length he reached his destination, a respectable-looking woollen draper’s with the name A. Woodcock displayed on a sign above the door. He gazed thoughtfully in the window as if meditating a purchase, when a neatly dressed youth emerged from the shop and actually seized him by the sleeve as if to prevent him changing his mind.

‘You’re in luck, sir!’ confided this youth energetically. ‘It’s just come in! Black worsted such as you’ve never laid eyes on! Fifteen shillin’s the yard; and I can tell you, the weavers would ’ave our guts for garters if they knew we was sellin’ it that cheap! Come right on inside, sir, an’ be measured. I tell you, we’re expectin’ such a rush once it gets about that Sodom an’ Tomarrah’ll be nothin’ on it . . . beggin’ Your Reverence’s pardon! But I’m ’appy to tell you, sir,’ pattered on the youth, drawing his captive irresistibly inside the shop, ‘that we make special terms for gentlemen of the cloth like yourself. It’s on account of us bein’ so near the cathedral, y’know. The Harchbishop of Canterbury hoften drops in . . .’

Without either stopping or releasing his customer, the youth dexterously shut the door behind him with his foot, and two girls, who’d been perched on rolls of cloth, giggled and fled, calling:

‘Pa! Pa! Shop!’

A moment later, the woollen draper himself came forward, bowing from the neck and rubbing his hands. He was a sturdy little man with astonishingly gentle eyes.

Now here was a remarkable thing. Mr A. Woodcock, woollen draper of Ludgate Hill, with large wife and oppressive daughters, was identical in every respect to Major Smith, the romantic, childless widower from Bombay, who had consoled himself so passionately on Leila Robinson’s breast in the Mulberry Garden, and filled up a whole page in the ledger.

‘Ah! Mr Woodcock, sir!’ said the youth, absolutely determined to make a go of things. ‘This Rev. gent’s come in about our new line. The one we calls the Harchbishop’s choice.’

‘Good morning, sir. Good morning!’ said the draper, sincerely.

He signed to the youth to deliver up the gentleman into his own more experienced hands, from which he appeared to be removing the last traces of some invisible glue.

Instantly, as if Dr Dormann’s sleeve had been red hot, the youth relinquished his hold and, bowing his way out backwards, vanished into the rear of the shop where he was heard to stumble and provoke a muffled outburst of female mirth.

The draper looked deprecating.

‘Your daughters?’ asked Dr Dormann with a mild surprise that suggested admiration.

The draper did not contest the relationship.

‘Delightful young ladies. I congratulate you.’

‘Very kind of you to say so. I’ve another girl,’ went on Mr Woodcock, with moderate enthusiasm, ‘upstairs with her mother.’

‘A fine family,’ said Dr Dormann, smiling.

‘Devoted,’ said the draper, courteously echoing his customer’s smile.

‘You are to be envied,’ said Dr Dormann, looking round the humdrum shop.

‘I count my blessings, sir.’

‘The best arithmetic!’

The draper laughed appreciatively and removed another skin of glue from his hands. ‘Wonderful weather we’re having,’ he said intelligently.

‘Quite a Bombay summer,’ said Dr Dormann.

‘Bombay? Oh! Yes! I see what you mean! Indian. An Indian summer indeed!’ A bead of perspiration began to trickle down the side of the draper’s nose, as if in visible confirmation of the heat.

‘I brung the Harchbishop’s choice and one or two other things what might be of hinterest!’ panted several rolls of black cloth, supported on spindly legs that had just staggered in from the back of the shop.

‘And now, sir,’ said the draper, steadying the apparition, which threatened to collapse, ‘did you have in mind a suit, or a gown? Of course, if you should decide on both, then we can come down quite nicely in your favour.’

‘Neither, Mr – er – Woodstock.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘I said, neither. Neither a suit nor a gown.’

‘Ah! You want breeches, then! Or maybe a coat?’

‘You mistake me, Mr – er – Woodcock. I did not come in to buy. Your apprentice gave me no chance to explain myself . . .’

A sound of indignation came from behind the rolls of cloth.

‘If you did not come to buy, sir, what, might I ask, is the purpose of your visit?’

‘Charity, Mr Woodcock. I called on a matter of charity.’

Slowly, the rolls of cloth began to depart. The draper watched them, his face reddening with anger. He turned back to Dr Dormann.

‘Really, sir! This is a place of business! In my opinion – for what it’s worth – you are going about things very . . . very . . .’ He sought for a word, and then, staring pointedly at Dr Dormann’s black suit, came out with: ‘Shabbily. Very shabbily indeed. How would you like it, sir,’ he went on with mounting irritation, ‘if I was to come into your church and set about peddling my cloth? I’ll tell you what. You wouldn’t like it at all. You would tell me to keep to my own place of business. And you’d be right. So now I say to you, sir, keep your begging for charity inside your church where it belongs. Good day to you, sir.’

Mr Woodcock opened his shop door and stood staring rigidly in front of him.

‘It is a worthy cause,’ said Dr Dormann mildly.

‘I’m sorry to hear it. That is, I mean, I’m glad the cause is worthy, but I am sorry I cannot assist. I have enough mouths to feed as it is. Good day,’ he concluded, changing the emphasis from good to day, as if to indicate that the relationship between them had deteriorated.

‘A military man in reduced circumstances,’ pursued Dr Dormann who had approached the door but showed no sign of going through it.

‘Let him do an honest day’s work, then!’

‘A widower, Mr – er – Woodcock,’ said Dr Dormann, quietly. ‘Wife died in Bombay. Only married a month. Sad case. Childless. Name of Smith. Major Smith.’

The door swung shut. There was silence in the shop, broken only by the sound of harsh, irregular breathing.

The draper had gone very white. His eyes were bulging and rolling from side to side. It was impossible to say whether anger or fear was getting the upper hand. Dr Dormann remained as close to the door as he could. One never knew how these little visits he undertook for Mrs Bray would end up. Once he’d actually been struck; and several times he’d only owed his safety to a surprising turn of speed.

‘Major Smith –’

‘I – I’ve never heard of him!’ muttered the wretched draper, glaring at the doctor and then up to the ceiling beyond which was his unsuspecting wife and third daughter. He could not, for the life of him, imagine how the blow had fallen or how he’d been betrayed. His brain was overwhelmed with horrible possibilities. He suspected his apprentice, his daughters and every single person he knew! And worst of all, he suspected Leila Robinson . . .

‘Fifty pounds would save him,’ breathed Dr Dormann, getting ready to make a bolt for it if things should go badly.

‘I – I deny everything!’ moaned the draper, with a burst of hysterical defiance.

‘Fifty pounds and you don’t need to,’ said Dr Dormann. If the man had been going to attack him, he would have done so by now.

Mr Woodcock was sweating like a pig. His whole life hung in the balance. He could think of nothing beyond extricating himself from the terrible situation that had overwhelmed him. And out of a cruelly clear sky!

‘Ch-charity, you said?’

‘Charity, I said.’

‘And fifty pounds would save . . . would help – Major Smith?’

‘Fifty pounds and he wouldn’t have another care in the world. And after all,’ went on Dr Dormann, with a sudden smile of compassion, ‘fifty pounds is not very much to save a man from . . . ruin.’

‘Fifty pounds . . . fifty pounds. Yes; if you put it that way . . . But, oh my God! How did you know? Who was it? Will you tell me that? Was it her? Don’t say it was Miss Robinson? Did she tell you? But how could she! She doesn’t know! She must never know! Promise me that!’

‘Set your mind at rest, Mr Woodcock. The lady you mentioned will know no more than you wish her to. The money, after all, is to save Major Smith, and whatever is his.’

The draper passed a hand across his brow. He was actually crying with relief. Curiously enough, his tears were not for the saving of his family, but for Leila Robinson. Though their relationship had been of brief duration, it had become immensely precious to him. Somehow his existence as the military Bombay widower was even more important than his life as a woollen draper in Ludgate Hill. There were times, very private times, when he dreamed of going away with Miss Robinson for ever. She renewed him; when he was with her he felt all the panting excitement he’d not known since he was a boy. Fifty pounds was very little to preserve it.

And in addition to that, he went on, arguing inside his head as if there was someone there who still needed convincing, he would be sparing his wife a singularly wounding discovery. Fifty pounds was really a trifle to that! It wouldn’t be the unfaithfulness she’d be injured by, but the fact that he’d represented himself as childless and bereaved; that, in effect, he’d wished her and her children dead . . . or never to have lived at all; that in the deepest part of his heart he’d always yearned for a woman more beautiful, more mysterious and more abandoned than the one he’d got.

All these frantic and contradictory thoughts were reflected in the draper’s face, which Dr Dormann watched with a touch of weariness.

‘I’ll get the – the money now!’

Dr Dormann nodded.

‘Will you – will you take a bank-note?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you – thank you! That’s very good of you.’

The draper hastened from the shop and returned holding out the money. Dr Dormann took it and, in exchange, gave the draper a pewter medallion of about the size of a large coin. A mulberry tree was engraved on it.

‘What is it?’

‘It is . . . your season ticket, Mr Woodcock. For the garden, you understand.’ The draper stared down at the medallion . . . and then felt an inexplicable rush of warmth and gratitude to the lean, intense man in black who had the indefinable air of some religion about him. Carefully he put the medallion, which was the visible confirmation of the bargain, into his pocket. He smiled timidly at Dr Dormann, and held out his hand. Warmly Dr Dormann shook it, and, for a moment, there was a most extraordinary friendship between the two men . . . a profound intimacy as of confessor and sinner . . . It was almost a moment of exaltation.

‘I think you have been very wise, Mr Woodcock.’

‘I had no choice, sir.’

‘True. No real choice.’

‘Miss Robinson will never find out?’

‘The Mulberry Garden keeps faith. You’ll find that it is quite a place of faith.’

‘And are there many . . . of the faithful in it, sir?’

‘Put such thoughts out of your mind, my friend. Content yourself with the garden and don’t look to the Tree of Knowledge. Be satisfied with the Tree of Life.’

The draper nodded and smiled quite happily. Now that the matter was settled, it was noticeable that he had become quite boyish and relaxed, while Dr Dormann, on the other hand, had grown almost stern and was showing a marked inclination to lift the conversation onto a metaphysical or allegorical plane.

‘Don’t mind me,’ said the draper lightly. ‘I was only being curious.’

‘Curiosity cost us all the Garden of Eden, my friend. Take care that it doesn’t cost you the Mulberry Garden.’

‘I don’t know what we should do without you, Dr D.’, said Mrs Bray, when Dr Dormann returned and handed her the bank-note. She was in her upstairs parlour with curtains drawn against the afternoon light as she had weak eyes that became inflamed in the sun.

Dr Dormann smiled gratefully for the praise, even though the ‘we’ was painful to him.

Although the management of the garden was left largely to him, the genius behind it all was that of Mr Bray. The idea of recruiting the children to spy among the branches had been Mr Bray’s, his widow always declared, even though he never lived to see his dream come true. ‘And surely,’ she added, ‘they’re better off in the natural green than running about in the streets and getting run down and killed?’ Even the idea of taking on such a helper as Dr Dormann, she liked to say without realizing the pain she was inflicting, had been in Mr Bray’s mind as he’d lain dying.

No one at present employed in the garden could remember Mr Bray. He had been dead for seven years; and there was a rumour, not contradicted by his widow, that he was buried in the shade of the mulberry tree itself.

‘So you see,’ said Mrs Bray, ‘while his poor body feeds our roots, his spirit feeds everything else. I can always feel him about.’

Whether or not she really believed his ghost walked the garden was impossible to say; her simplicity and credulity were on the massive scale. But the children believed it; and whenever Mrs Bray had occasion to say, ‘Mr Bray’s watching you. He knows . . .’, they became as little angels of industry and obedience in the garden’s leafy sky.