The Morning Gift

‘Why should it?’ said Miss Somerville tartly. And in spite of herself: ‘How old?’

‘Sixty-four,’ said Ruth, and Miss Somerville frowned, for sixty-four is not old to a woman of sixty.

Ruth, working in the compost, looked up at the formidable lady and made a decision. You had to be worthy to hear the story of Mishak’s romance, but oddly this sharp-tempered spinster who had left Quin alone was worthy.

‘Would you like to hear how they met – Uncle Mishak and Marianne?’

‘I don’t mind, I suppose,’ said Aunt Frances, ‘as long as you go on with what you’re doing.’

‘Well, it was like this,’ said Ruth. ‘One day, oh, many, many years ago when the Kaiser was still on his throne, my Uncle Mishak went fishing in the Danube. Only on that particular day, he didn’t catch a fish, he caught a bottle.’

She paused to judge whether she had been right, whether Miss Somerville was worthy, and she had been.

‘Go on then,’ said the old lady.

‘It was a lemonade bottle,’ said Ruth, pushing back her hair and getting into her stride. ‘And inside it was a message . . .’

Late that night, Aunt Frances stood by her bedroom window and looked out at the sea. It had rained earlier, raindrops as big as daisies had hung on the trees, but now the sky was clear again, and the moon was full over the quiet water.

But the beauty of the view did little for Miss Somerville. She felt unsettled and confused. It was all to be so simple: Verena Plackett, so obviously suitable, would marry Quin, Bowmont would be saved and she, as she had intended all along, would move to the Old Vicarage in Bowmont village and live in peace with Martha and her dogs.

Instead, she found herself thinking of a woman she had never known, a plain girl standing terrified before a class of taunting children in an Austrian village years and years ago. ‘She was as thin as a rake,’ the girl in the garden had said, ‘with a big nose, and she had a stammer. But for him she was the whole world.’

Frances had been just twenty years old when she went to the house on the Scottish Border, believing that she had been chosen freely as a bride. She knew she was plain, but she thought her figure was good, and she was a Somerville – she believed that that counted. The house was beautiful, in a fold of the Tweedsmuir Hills. She had liked the young man; as she dressed for dinner that first night, she imagined her future: being a bride, a wife, a mother . . .

It was late when she returned to her room where Martha waited to help her to bed. She must have left the door open, for she could hear voices outside in the corridor.

‘Good God, Harry, you aren’t really going to marry that anteater?’ A young voice, drawling, mocking. A silly youth, a friend of her fiancé’s who’d been at dinner.

‘You’ll have to feed her on oats – did you see those teeth!’ A second voice, another friend.

‘She’s like a hacksaw; she’ll tear you to pieces!’

And then the voice of her young man – her fiancé – joining in the fun. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got it all worked out. I’ll go to her room once a month in my fencing kit, that’s padding enough. Then as soon as she’s pregnant I’m off to town to get myself a whizzer!’

It was Martha who shut the door, Martha who helped her to undress. Martha who kept silence when, the next morning, Frances left the house and said nothing, enduring the anger of her parents, the puzzlement of the family on the Border. That had been forty years ago and nothing had happened since. No door had opened for Frances Somerville as it had opened for that other girl in an Austrian village. No black-suited figure with a briefcase had stood on the threshold and asked her name.

Irritated, troubled, Frances turned from the window, and at that moment Martha came in with her evening cocoa – and the puppy at her heels.

‘Now what?’ she said, relieved to have found something to be angry about. ‘I thought you were taking him down to The Black Bull after tea.’

‘Mrs Harper sent word she couldn’t have him,’ said Martha. ‘Her mother-in-law’s coming to live and she hates dogs.’ She looked down at the puppy who was winding himself round Miss Somerville’s legs like a pilgrim reaching Lourdes. ‘He’s a bit unsettled, not having been down with the students today.’

Frances said she could see that and picked him up. Nothing had improved: not his piebald stomach, not his conviction that he was deeply loved.