“She hasn’t given me anything I want. She says she wants to put me in the attic.”

“That’s as may be. You were her way here, and it’s a dangerous thing to be a door.” She tapped my chest, above my heart, with her forefinger. “And she was better off where she was. We would have sent her home safely—done it before for her kind a dozen times. But she’s headstrong, that one. No teaching them. Right. Your breakfast is on the table. I’ll be up in the nine-acre field if anyone needs me.”

There was a bowl of porridge on the kitchen table and beside it, a saucer with a lump of golden honeycomb on it, and a jug of rich yellow cream.

I spooned up a lump of the honeycomb and mixed it into the thick porridge, then I poured in the cream.

There was toast, too, cooked beneath the grill as my father cooked it, with homemade blackberry jam. There was the best cup of tea I have ever drunk. By the fireplace, the kitten lapped at a saucer of creamy milk, and purred so loudly I could hear it across the room.

I wished I could purr too. I would have purred then.

Lettie came in, carrying a shopping bag, the old-fashioned kind you never seem to see anymore: elderly women used to carry them to the shops, big woven bags that were almost baskets, raffia-work outside and lined with cloth, with rope handles. This basket was almost full. Her cheek had been scratched, and had bled, although the blood had dried. She looked miserable.

“Hello,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “Let me tell you, if you think that was fun, that wasn’t any fun, not one bit. Mandrakes are so loud when you pull them up, and I didn’t have earplugs, and once I’d got it I had to swap it for a shadow-bottle, an old-fashioned one with lots of shadows dissolved in vinegar . . .” She buttered some toast, then crushed a lump of golden honeycomb onto it and started munching. “And that was just to get me to the bazaar, and they aren’t even meant to be open yet. But I got most of what I needed there.”

“Can I look?”

“If you want to.”

I looked into the basket. It was filled with broken toys: dolls’ eyes and heads and hands, cars with no wheels, chipped cat’s-eye glass marbles. Lettie reached up and took down the jam jar from the window ledge. Inside it, the silvery-translucent wormhole shifted and twisted and spiraled and turned. Lettie dropped the jam jar into the shopping bag, with the broken toys. The kitten slept, and ignored us entirely.

Lettie said, “You don’t have to come with, for this bit. You can stay here while I go and talk to her.”

I thought about it. “I’d feel safer with you,” I told her.

She did not look happy at this. She said, “Let’s go down to the ocean.” The kitten opened its too-green and blue eyes and stared at us disinterestedly as we left.

There was a pair of black leather boots, like riding boots, waiting for me, by the back door. They looked old, but well cared for, and were just my size. I put them on, although I felt more comfortable in sandals. Together, Lettie and I walked down to her ocean, by which I mean, the pond.

We sat on the old bench, and looked at the placid brown surface of the pond, and the lily pads, and the scum of duckweed by the water’s edge.

“You Hempstocks aren’t people,” I said.

“Are too.”

I shook my head. “I bet you don’t actually even look like that,” I said. “Not really.”

Lettie shrugged. “Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”

I said, “Are you a monster? Like Ursula Monkton?”

Lettie threw a pebble into the pond. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.”

I said, “People should be scared of Ursula Monkton.”

“P’raps. What do you think Ursula Monkton is scared of?”

“Dunno. Why do you think she’s scared of anything? She’s a grown-up, isn’t she? Grown-ups and monsters aren’t scared of things.”

“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters. And as for grown-ups . . .” She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, “I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” She thought for a moment. Then she smiled. “Except for Granny, of course.”

We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

“I love my ocean,” Lettie said, and I knew our time by the pond was done.

“It’s just pretending, though,” I told her, feeling like I was letting childhood down by admitting it. “Your pond. It’s not an ocean. It can’t be. Oceans are bigger than seas. Your pond is just a pond.”

“It’s as big as it needs to be,” said Lettie Hempstock, nettled. She sighed. “We’d better get on with sending Ursula whatsername back where she came from.” Then she said, “I do know what she’s scared of. And you know what? I’m scared of them too.”

The kitten was nowhere to be seen when we returned to the kitchen, although the fog-colored cat was sitting on a windowsill, staring out at the world. The breakfast things had all been tidied up and put away, and my red pajamas and my dressing gown, neatly folded, were waiting for me on the table, in a large brown-paper bag, along with my green toothbrush.

“You won’t let her get me, will you?” I asked Lettie.

She shook her head, and together we walked up the winding flinty lane that led to my house and to the thing who called herself Ursula Monkton. I carried the brown-paper bag with my nightwear in it, and Lettie carried her too-big-for-her raffia shopping bag, filled with broken toys, which she had obtained in exchange for a mandrake that screamed and shadows dissolved in vinegar.

Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths. We went off the road, took a shortcut that Lettie knew that took us through some fields, then into the extensive abandoned gardens of a rich man’s crumbling house, and then back onto the lane again. We came out just before the place where I had gone over the metal fence.

Lettie sniffed the air. “No varmints yet,” she said. “That’s good.”

“What are varmints?”

She said only, “You’ll know ’em when you see ’em. And I hope you’ll never see ’em.”

“Are we going to sneak in?”

“Why would we do that? We’ll go up the drive and through the front door, like gentry.”

We started up the drive. I said, “Are you going to make a spell and send her away?”

“We don’t do spells,” she said. She sounded a little disappointed to admit it. “We’ll do recipes sometimes. But no spells or cantrips. Gran doesn’t hold with none of that. She says it’s common.”

“So what’s the stuff in the shopping bag for, then?”

“It’s to stop things traveling when you don’t want them to. Mark boundaries.”

In the morning sunlight, my house looked so welcoming and so friendly, with its warm red bricks, and red tile roof. Lettie reached into the shopping bag. She took a marble from it, pushed it into the still-damp soil. Then, instead of going into the house, she turned left, walking the edge of the property. By Mr. Wollery’s vegetable patch we stopped and she took something else from her shopping bag: a headless, legless, pink doll-body, with badly chewed hands. She buried it beside the pea plants.