User blog comment:Doctor Ibrahim/Ask the Doc and his Family!/@comment-30014014-20180218051709/@comment-28358106-20180219194235

The pair find themselves in a most pleasant place.

It is, of course, the Estate, but a part of the Estate which is held in highest regard. They are in the middle of the rear garden lawn. They can see the house, but it is some thirty yards away. Being a mild winter day, nothing is green except the short, hummocky grass, so fine as to be almost like velvet and not nearly long enough to please the toes. The rocks are still green with moss, although moss couldn't care less what season it is, and so keeps right on being green.

But the moss is everywhere, because rocks, in some form or another, are everywhere. A series of stone garden walls ramble, intersecting when they please, each one of a different design and each one no doubt the legacy of previous tenants, who never tore down, but added. Here and there stone statues, all sporting the same green wig, crouch expectantly like children frozen in a game of hide-and-seek. Stone benches and balustrades beg to be climbed by the young. And everywhere, everywhere, the smell of earth and wood, sweet with freshly fallen rain.

They an see all this because it is no longer hidden behind the greenery a garden would normally have. But just the same, a sleepy magic hangs over the place, awaiting the spring once again.

It occurs to them that they can hear music.

It's a pleasant, lilting song, played somewhat hesitatntly on a lute. Two lutes, actually; two people seem to be playing, until they look through a bare shrub at the source of the sounds.

It is in fact one player. Lucida, playing no less than two lutes with both sets of hands. She sits coiled beneath an ash tree, sticking her tongue out in concentration as she plays. Antoinette, in her quadruped form, kneels beside her, listening. They sit on a blanket, the remnants of a picnic lunch in front of them.