“Of course; Mum must have them,” said Erebus with decision. “But how are we going to get into the peach-garden? The door in the wall only opens on the inside.”
“We’re not. I’ve worked it out. Now you just hurry up and get some big leaves to put the peaches in. Mum will like them ever so much better with the bloom on, though it doesn’t really make any difference to the taste.”
Erebus ran into the kitchen-garden and gathered big soft leaves of different kinds. When she came back she found the Terror tying the landing-net they had borrowed from the vicar for their trout-fishing, to the backbone of his bicycle. She put the leaves into her bicycle basket, and they rode briskly to Muttle Deeping.
The Twins knew all the approaches to Muttle Deeping Grange well since they had spent several days in careful scouting before they had made their raid earlier in the summer on its strawberry beds. A screen of trees runs down from the home wood along the walls of the gardens; and the Twins, after coming from the road in the shelter of the home wood, came down the wall behind that screen of trees.
About the middle of the peach-garden the Terror climbed on to a low bough, raised his head with slow caution above the wall, and surveyed the garden. It was empty and silent, save for a curious snoring sound that disquieted him little, since he ascribed it to some distant pig.
He stepped on to a higher branch, leaned over the wall, and surveyed the golden burden of the tree beneath him. The ready Erebus handed the landing-net up to him. He chose his peach, the ripest he could see; slipped the net under it, flicked it, lifted the peach in it over the wall, and lowered it down to Erebus, who made haste to roll it in a leaf and lay it gently in her bicycle basket. The Terror netted another and another and another.
The garden was not as empty as he believed. On a garden chair in the little lawn in the middle of it sat the Princess Elizabeth hidden from him by the thick wall of a pear tree, and in a chair beside her, sat, or rather sprawled, her guardian, the Baroness Frederica Von Aschersleben, who was following faithfully the doctor’s instructions that her little charge should spend her time in the open air, but was doing her best to bring it about that the practise should do her as little good as possible by choosing the sultriest and most airless spot on the estate because it was so admirably adapted to her own comfortable sleeping.
The baroness added nothing to the old-world charm of the garden. Her eyes were shut, her mouth was open, her face was most painfully crimson, and from her short, but extremely tip-tilted nose, came the sound of snoring which the Terror had ascribed to some distant pig.
The princess was warmly—very warmly—dressed for the sweltering afternoon and sweltering spot; little beads of sweat stood on her brow; the story-book she had been trying to read lay face downward in her lap; and she was looking round the simmering garden with a look of intolerable discomfort and boredom on her pretty pale face.
Then a moving object came into the range of her vision, just beyond the end-of the wall of pear tree—a moving object against the garden wall. She could not see clearly what it was; but it seemed to her that a peach rose and vanished over the top of the wall. She stared at the part of the wall whence it had risen; and in a few seconds another peach seemed to rise and disappear.