The Morning Gift

‘Look at him,’ said Frances Somerville bitterly, handing her binoculars to her maid. ‘Gloating. Rubbing his hands.’

Martha took the glasses and trained them on the middle-aged gentleman with the intellectual forehead, making his way along the cliff path towards the headland.

‘He’s writing in his book,’ she said, as though the taking of notes was further proof of Mr Ferguson’s iniquity.

‘Well he needn’t expect me to give him lunch,’ said Miss Somerville. ‘He can go to The Black Bull for that.’

Mr Ferguson had arrived soon after breakfast, sent by the National Trust at Quin’s request to see if the Trust might interest itself in Bowmont. A man of impeccable tact, scholarly and mild-mannered, he had been received by Miss Somerville as though he had just crawled out of some particularly repellent sewer.

‘Maybe it won’t come to anything,’ said Martha, handing back the glasses. After forty years in Miss Somerville’s service, she was allowed to speak to her as a friend. ‘Maybe he won’t fancy the place.’

‘Ha!’ said Miss Somerville.

Her scepticism was justified. Though Mr Ferguson would report officially to Quin in London, he had already indicated that three miles of superb coastline, not to mention the famous walled garden, would probably interest the Trust very much indeed.

So there it was, thought Frances wretchedly: there the men in peaked caps, the lavatory huts, the screeching trippers. Quin had made it clear that even if negotiations went forward, he would insist on a flat in the house set aside for her use, but if he thought she would cower there and watch over the defilement of the place she had guarded for twenty years, he was mistaken. The day the Trust moved in, she would move out.

Perhaps if the letter from Lady Plackett hadn’t arrived just after Mr Ferguson took his leave, Miss Somerville would have reacted to it differently. But it came when she felt as old and discouraged as she had ever felt in her life and ready to clutch at any straw.

The Vice Chancellor’s wife began by reminding Miss Somerville of their brief acquaintance in the finishing school in Paris.

You may find it difficult to remember the little shy girl so much your junior, wrote Lady Plackett, who was not famous for her tact, but I shall always recall your kindness to me when I was homesick and perplexed. Miss Somerville did not remember either the homesick junior or her own kindness, but when Lady Plackett went on to remind her that she had been Daphne Croft-Ellis and that she had been presented in the same year as Miss Somerville’s second cousin, Lydia Barchester, the heel of whose shoe had come off as she left Their Majesties walking backwards, she read on with the attention one affords letters from those in one’s own world.