As punishment for unacceptable behavior, Nicholas must stay home while his cousins and brother are treated to a trip to the beach at Jagborough. At breakfast that morning, Nicholas had complained about a frog in his bowl of bread and milk. His aunt thought it was ridiculous, but the frog was actually there: Nicholas had put it in the bowl himself.
Nicholas's aunt—who is actually his cousins' aunt but acts as if she is related to Nicholas—hopes Nicholas will be upset as the carriage leaves for the beach. However, he is upbeat. In fact, his cousin cries loudly in the carriage as it pulls away because she scraped her knee. Nicholas predicts the others will have a bad day.
The aunt adds an extra condition to his punishment: he is to stay out of the gooseberry garden. She expects that he will purposely disobey this instruction. Nicholas acts as though the rule upsets him. He then walks toward the doors that open to the gooseberry garden a few times. He hopes to throw his aunt off the scent and make her believe she has to stay outside. In fact, he has no interest in the garden. With his aunt occupied, he puts into action a plan he has been scheming about for ages.
In the library, he climbs up to where his aunt keeps the key to the lumber room—a room that's off-limits to children. He proceeds to open the door to the lumber room, entering and exploring it. He is not disappointed by what he finds. While the rest of his aunt’s house lacks anything that could stimulate excitement, the lumber room is a treasure trove beyond imagining. Nicholas studies a large tapestry depicting a deer hunt and predatory wolves, candlesticks shaped like snakes, a teapot that looks like a duck, and a book of illustrated bird pictures. Nicholas spends a while looking at the tapestry. He wonders if the hunter and his dogs would escape from what seems an inevitably grisly encounter with approaching wolves. The man has only two arrows remaining and the nearness of his prey strongly suggests his aim is only reliable at short distances. He also seems not to have noticed the wolves heading his way from the woods.
Nicholas loses himself in the excitement of his discovery and is only taken away from it by the sound of his aunt calling his name. Nicholas replaces the key and goes to the garden, where his aunt, while searching for him, accidentally has fallen into the rain-water tank. She asks him to fetch a ladder from the gooseberry garden. Nicholas quickly reminds her that she forbade him entry to the garden. She says she has changed her mind and he is now free to enter. Nicholas replies that her voice does not sound like his aunt’s voice and that he is now suspicious that the Evil One is actually in the water tank, tempting him into the garden.
When Nicholas asks if strawberry jam will be served with tea and the aunt replies affirmatively, Nicholas seizes upon the slip: she must be the Devil since just yesterday he asked for strawberry jam and his aunt told him they were out. However, when he later looked in the cupboard, he saw that there were actually four jars of jam, but since his aunt had said there was none, she must not have known this. Only the Evil One, Nicholas says, could also have known of the plentiful supply of strawberry jam. Nicholas decides not to over-indulge in the luxury of having power over his aunt, so he walks away. Half an hour passes before the maid discovers and rescues the aunt.
After the children return from their trip to Jagborough, tea-time is awkwardly silent. The aunt stews in embarrassed muteness resulting from her time stuck in the water tank. The cousins are unhappy and unexcited because the tide was too high to play in the sand. Nicholas also takes tea in silence because he is pondering the story left untold in the moment frozen in time on the tapestry in the lumber room. If the hunter sacrifices the stag to the wolves, Nicholas thinks, the hunter and his dogs just might escape the ravenous pack after all.
