The seasons turn and winter is coming. Heat is followed by rain and wind and damp airs.
Ingrid's instruction was clear: come to the Tavern; she would have her man waiting for Abraham Norton and the interview would go from there.
The Tavern was easy enough to find. Locate the little wishing-well ornament and clamber down through the Hedge Gate at its bottom. Take a deep breath as one's sense of gravity and place lurch and twist. And step out into the pleasant Tavern with its slightly curved walls and beautifully austere wooden panelling. Perfume and alcohol permeate the air. A fire crackles on a hearth. A gust of wind lightly scratches at the rounded windows.
A bearded hipster fellow is waiting, using his time to check through the bottles and glasses behind the bar. This man is professionally courteous and completely at ease with Abraham Norton 's Fairest seeming. If required, he'll offer a little small talk before he leads the Emerald Courtier out through the Tavern's other Door into the Hedge (this is Angus we are talking about...)
...And out into a rough glade, hemmed in by a thick wall of trees and topiary. The illusion of the Tavern Hollow persisted here: the Spring Hollow continued to appear as a dear little fairy tavern, its sloping roof thick with vegetation, chimney puffing gently into what passed as the Hedge's sky.
Three paths exited the glade, unless the Lost wished to carve their own through the ranks of scraggy fern and close packed trees. Three paths, of which two might easily have been the two halves a much larger byway, all rutted and pooled with mud and standing water.
The narrowest path wriggled and writhed away to their left as it bounded over boulders and the stumps of trees. Left it went, and down, sinking behind a stand of palm-like growths and cloaked by a slow moving miasma of damp air.
The other path (or two) only glanced the glade but such was its muddy size that it appeared, on first glance, that the glade was a stopping point on a larger trod. A careful reconnoitre of the ground would quickly disabuse Abraham of that notion. The path (for path it was, not big enough yet or indeed stable enough to be a Trod) disappeared before and behind the Lost. In either direction, the rutted path curved gently away until it was lost in the shivering foliage of the Hedge.
Ingrid is having a picnic.
She is seated on a large blanket (red and white squares seem to gleam among the rampant vegetation). To one side is a big wicker hamper that she has already opened, and the little Darkling is laying out plates and dishes. There is wine, lemonade, ginger beer, a quality ham, sausages, sandwiches, spreads and dips. Ingrid has certainly gone over the top for a meal for two.
Ingrid looks up and smiles coyly, her mantle shivering in recognition and sending out an intoxicating plum aroma.
Over to you Woland Abraham Norton