The Morning Gift

Aunt Frances frowned. She had hoped that Quin would come prepared and joyful. ‘That I’ve invited the Placketts. Verena and her mother.’ And as Quin remained silent: ‘I knew Lady Plackett as a girl – surely she told you? We were together at finishing school.’

She looked at Quin and felt a deep unease. The signs of displeasure were only too familiar to her after twenty years of guardianship: Quin’s nose was looking particularly broken, his forehead had crumpled into craters of the kind seen on pictures of the moon.

‘Verena’s one of my students, Aunt Frances. It would be very wrong for me to treat her in a way that is different from the rest.’

Relief coursed through Aunt Frances. It was fear of seeming to single Verena out that was holding him back, nothing more.

‘Well, of course I see that, and so does she. In fact she’s said already that she expects no special treatment while you are working out of doors, but Lady Plackett is a friend – it would be very strange for me to refuse to entertain her daughter.’

Quin nodded, smiled – and the devastated features recomposed themselves into that of a personable man. Already he felt compunction: Aunt Frances must have been lonelier than he realized if she could contemplate entertaining the Placketts. Perhaps it had all been a mask, her unsociability, her stated desire to be alone – and he wondered, as he had not done for a long time, just how hurt she had been over her rejection on the Border all those years ago.

‘That’s all right, I’m sure it’ll all work out splendidly. I’d better go and change.’

But before he could make his way to the tower, he heard, somewhere above him, a cough. It was not a shy tentative cough, it was a clarion cough signalling an intention – and Quin, searching for its source, now saw a figure standing on the upstairs landing.

Verena, who had read so much, had also read that no man can resist the sight of a beautiful woman descending a noble staircase. She had watched Quin’s arrival out of her bedroom window and now, gowned simply but becomingly in bottle-green Celanese, she placed one hand on the carved banister, gathered up her skirt, and while her mother waited unselfishly in the shadows, began to make her way downstairs.

The descent began splendidly. Not only the long back, the long legs of the Croft-Ellises came to her aid, but the training she had received before her presentation at court. Verena, who had kicked her diamanté-encrusted train backwards with unerring aim as she retreated from Their Majesties, could hardly fail to walk with poise and dignity towards her host.

The first flight was accomplished and Quin stood as she had expected, his head thrown back, watching. She was not quite ready yet to utter the words she had prepared, but almost. ‘You cannot imagine what a pleasure it is to be in Bowmont after all we have heard of it,’ was what she planned to say.

But she didn’t say it. She didn’t, in fact, say anything coherent. For someone – and Aunt Frances was beginning to suspect the second housemaid whose father was a Socialist – had once more opened a door.

The puppy was not primarily interested in Verena, it was Aunt Frances that he desired, but as he passed the staircase, the mountaineering thirst which had sent him dashing at the running board of the Buick reasserted itself. With a growl of aspiration, he gathered himself together and leapt, managing to reach the bottom step at the same time as Verena completed her descent.

Verena did not tread the puppy underfoot, nor did she fall flat on her face. Anyone else would have done so, but not Verena. She did, however, stumble badly, throw out an arm, stagger – and land in disarray on her knees.

Quin, of course, was beside her in an instant to help her up – and to lead her to a chair where, being a Croft-Ellis, she at once made light of her mishap.

‘It is nothing,’ she said, as brave British girls in school stories have said for generations, spraining their ankles, biting their lips as they are carried away on gates.

But about the puppy it was more difficult to be charitable, especially as she had torn the lining of her dress, and Lady Plackett, hurrying down to aid her daughter, did not even make the attempt.

‘What an extraordinary creature!’ she said. ‘Does it belong to one of the servants?’

Miss Somerville, mortified, said the puppy was going to the village carpenter on the following day and tried to catch it, but it was Quin who seized the little dog, upended it, and examined it with the intensity which zoologists devote to a hitherto undescribed species.

‘Amazing!’ he said, grinning at his aunt. ‘Those abdominal whiskers must be unique surely? Does Barker know that he is to be the most fortunate of men?

Miss Somerville, not amused by his levity, said Barker was behind with repairs to the pews in the church and would presumably know his duty, and carried the dog from the room.