It had a sitting-room attached, with cheerful red walls and scenes of distant hillsides painted in the panels, and it had a glazed window and a door which led out onto our personal garden. “In case you feel like taking a stroll later,” I said to him. “Or need to come and go unobserved,” he agreed. “Thanks. This will be excellent.”The morning wore on with a series of the usual guest-house dramas. Cook was moaning that someone was stealing plums, and then he threw a real temperament because he was making sausages, and didn’t like the quality of the smoked pork that Albia and two of the maids had prepared. He maintained it had an odd smell. Albia said it was fine, and I thought so too, when I was called in to arbitrate. One of the barmaids dropped a tray of six beakers; I gave her a box on the ears, and she went crying to Albia for sympathy, which she didn’t get. Taurus reported that a garden-boy had put an axe through his foot, so now they were short-handed for harvesting vegetables.
