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her window and waved him out.
    Now he joined Maggie at the window to look out over it.
    â€œFunny to see this from above,” she said. “I only ever seen it from there.” She indicated the brick wall at the far end of the garden.
    â€œWhat, you climb over?”
    â€œNot over—I an’t been in it. I just have a peek over the wall every now and then, to see what she’s up to. Not that there’s ever much to see. Not like in some gardens.”
    â€œWhat’s that house in the field past the wall?” Jem indicated a large, two-story brick house capped with three truncated towers, set alone in the middle of the field behind the gardens of the Hercules Buildings houses. A long stable ran perpendicular to the house, with a dusty yard in front.
    Maggie looked surprised. “That’s Hercules Hall. Didn’t you know? Mr. Astley lives there, him an’ his wife an’ some nieces to look after ’em. His wife’s an invalid now, though she used to ride with him. Don’t see much of her. Mr. Astley keeps some of the circus horses there too—the best ones, like his white horse and John Astley’s chestnut. That’s his son. You saw him riding in Dorsetshire, didn’t you?”
    â€œI reckon so. It were a chestnut mare the man rode.”
    â€œHe lives just two doors down from you, the other side o’ the Blakes. See? There’s his garden—the one with the lawn and nothin’ else.”
    Hurdy-gurdy music was now drifting over from Hercules Hall, and Jem spotted a man leaning against the stables, cranking and playing a popular song. Maggie began to sing along softly:
    One night as I came from the play
    I met a fair maid by the way
    She had rosy cheeks and a dimpled chin
    And a hole to put poor Robin in!
    The man played a wrong note and stopped. Maggie chuckled. “He’ll never get a job—Mr. Astley’s got higher standards’n that.”
    â€œWhat d’you mean?”
    â€œPeople’s always coming to perform for him over there, hopin’ he might take ’em on. He hardly ever does, though he’ll give ’em sixpence for tryin’.”
    The hurdy-gurdy man began the song again, and Maggie hummed along, her eyes scanning the neighboring gardens. “Much better view here than at the back,” she declared.
    Afterward Jem couldn’t remember if it was the sound or the movement that first caught his attention. The sound was a soft “Ohh” that still managed to carry up to the Kellaways’ window. The movement was the flash of a naked shoulder somewhere in the Blakes’ garden.
    Closest to the Blakes’ house was a carefully laid out, well-dug kitchen garden partially planted, a garden fork now stuck upright in the rich soil at the end of one row. Anne Kellaway had been following its progress over the last week, watching with envy the solid, bonneted woman next door double-digging the rows and sowing seeds, as Anne Kellaway would be doing herself if she were in Dorsetshire or had any space to plant a garden here. It had never occurred to her when they decided to move to London that she might not have even a small patch of earth. However, she knew better than to ask Miss Pelham, whose garden was clearly decorative rather than functional; but she felt awkward and idle without her own garden to dig in springtime.
    The back of the Blakes’ garden was untended, and filled with brambles and nettles. Midway along the garden, between the orderly and the chaotic, sat a small wooden summerhouse, set up for sitting in when the weather was mild. Its French doors were open, and it was in there that Jem saw the naked shoulder and, following that, naked backs, legs, bottoms. Horrified, he fought the temptation to step back from the window, fearing it would signal to Maggie that there was something he didn’t want her to see. Instead he pulled his eyes away and tried to direct her attention