‘You’re the Austrian girl, then? The one with the dietary problems?’

‘I don’t think I have dietary problems,’ said Ruth, puzzled. ‘Though I’m not very fond of the insides of stomachs. Tripe is it?’

‘Miss Plackett informed us that you didn’t eat pork. It is very foolish to suppose that anyone would make you eat what you don’t want. And anyway you could have had an omelette.’

She knelt down and began to clear a patch of earth for her bulbs, and Ruth knelt down beside her to help.

‘But I like pork very much. We often had it in Vienna — my mother does it with caraway seeds and redcurrant jelly; it’s one of her best dishes.’

Miss Somerville tugged at a tuft of couch grass. ‘I thought you were a Jewish refugee,’ she said, a touch of weariness in her voice, for she could see again that life was not going to be simple; that it was the blond cowman all over again.

‘Yes, I suppose I am. Well, I’m five-eighths Jewish or perhaps three-quarters — we don’t know for certain because of Esther Olivares who may have been Jewish but may have been Spanish because she came from Valencia and was always painted in a shawl which could have been a prayer shawl but it could have been one that she wore to bull fights. But my mother was a Catholic and we’ve never been kosher.’ She pulled up a mare’s-tail and threw it onto the pile of weeds. ‘It’s a bit of a muddle, I’m afraid — the poor rabbi in Belsize Park gets quite cross: all these people being persecuted who don’t even know when Yom Kippur is or how to say kaddish. He doesn’t think we deserve to be persecuted.’ She turned to Aunt Frances: ‘Would you like me to stop talking? Because I can. I have to concentrate, but it’s possible.’

Miss Somerville said she didn’t mind one way or another and passed her the bag of bonemeal.

‘I just can’t believe this garden! I used to think that when I went to heaven I’d want to find a great orchestra like you see it from the Grand Circle of a concert hall — all the russet-coloured violins and the silver flutes and a beautiful lady harpist plucking the strings. But then when I came here I thought it had to be the sea. Only now I don’t know… there can’t be anything better than this garden. Whoever made it must have been so good!’

‘Yes. She was a Quaker.’

‘Gardeners are never wicked, are they?’ said Ruth. ‘Obstinate and grumpy and wanting to be alone, but not wicked. Oh, look at that creeper! I’ve always loved October so much, haven’t you? I can see why it’s called the Month of the Angels. Shall I go and fetch a wheelbarrow?’

‘Yes, it’s over there behind the summerhouse. And bring a watering can.’

Ruth disappeared. Minutes passed; then there was a cry. Displeased, and for a moment fearful, Miss Somerville rose.

Ruth was kneeling down by a patch of mauve flowers which had gone wild in the grass behind the shed. Flowers like slender goblets growing without leaves so that their uncluttered petals opened to the sky and their golden centres mirrored the sun. She was kneeling and she was worshipping — and Miss Somerville, made nervous by what was obviously going to be more emotion, said sharply: ‘What’s the matter? They’re just autumn crocus. I put some in a few years ago and they’ve spread.’

‘Yes, I know. I know they’re autumn crocus.’ She looked up, pushing her hair off her forehead, and it was as Miss Somerville had feared; there were tears in her eyes. ‘We used to wait for them every year before we left the mountains. There were meadows of them above the Grundlsee and it meant… the marvellousness of summer but also that it was time to leave. Things that flower without their leaves… they come out so pure. I never thought I’d find them here by the sea. Oh, if only Uncle Mishak was here. If only he could see them.’

She rose, but it was hard for her to pick up the handle of the barrow, to turn her back on the flowers.

‘Who’s Uncle Mishak?’

‘He’s my great-uncle… he loves gardening. He’s managed to make a garden even in Belsize Park and that isn’t easy.’

‘No, I imagine not. A dreadful place.’

‘Yes, but it’s friendly. He’s cleared quite a patch, and now he’s trying to grow vegetables for my mother… We can’t get fertilizer but —’

‘Why on earth not? Surely they sell it there?’

‘Yes, but we can’t afford it. Only it doesn’t matter — we use washing-up water and things like that. But oh, if he saw these! They were Marianne’s favourite flowers. It was the wild flowers she loved. She died when I was six but I can remember her standing on the alp and just looking. Most of us ran about and shrieked about how lovely they were, but Marianne and Mishak — they just looked.’

‘She was his wife?’ asked Aunt Frances, realizing she would be informed whether she wished it or not.

‘Yes. He loved her — oh, my goodness those two! She was very tall and as thin as a rake, with a big nose, and she had a stammer, but for him she was the whole world. It was very hard for him to leave Vienna because her grave is there. He’s old now, but it doesn’t help.’

‘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.

That was what things were coming to, she thought. Twenty years ago, the wife of a publican would have been honoured to have a dog from the big house. Any dog. It was all of a piece, this idiot mongrel… all of a piece with waitresses who wept over the autumn crocus, with cowmen who sang and Wagner’s stepdaughter with her unequal eyes. Comely slept in her kennel; she would not have dreamt of coming upstairs. And it wasn’t any good rereading Pride and Prejudice yet again. Mr Darcy might have been disappointed in Elizabeth Bennet in chapter three, but by chapter six he was praising her fine dark eyes.

‘I’ll take him down,’ said Martha, reaching for the dog.

‘Oh, leave him for a bit,’ said Frances wearily. Still holding the puppy in her arms, she sat down in the chair beside her bed.

‘I have come to fetch you,’ the little man had said, opening his briefcase, removing his hat…

It began so well, the trip to the Farnes. The weather had been unsettled for the past two days, but now the sun shone again and as the Peggoty chugged out of Sea-houses harbour, they felt that lift of the heart that comes to everyone who sails over a blue sea towards islands.

The puppy felt it too, that was clear. Its rejection by the innkeeper had left it emotionally unscarred and its position as student mascot was now established. Quin would not allow it in the dinghy, but the Peggoty was a sturdy fishing boat which he rented each year and there was a cabin of a sort where the owner stored his lobster pots and tackle — the dog could be shut in there when they landed.

Dr Felton had stayed behind to sort out the previous day’s samples; Quin was at the wheel, steering for one of the smaller islands where the warden was waiting to show them the work in progress. They had missed the spectacular breeding colonies of the spring when the cliffs were white with nesting guillemots and razorbills and the puffin burrows honeycombed the turf, but there were other visitors now: the migrant goldcrests and fieldfares and buntings — and the seals, hundreds of them, returning to have their pups.

They passed Longstone lighthouse and the Keeper, digging his vegetable patch, straightened himself to wave.

‘That’s where Grace Darling came from, isn’t it?’ asked Sam, thinking how like the Victorian heroine in the paintings Ruth looked with her wind-whipped hair.

Quin nodded. ‘The Harcar rocks are to the south, where the Forfarshire broke up. We’ll see them on the way back.’

‘It’s amazing that Mrs Ridley’s grandmother knew her, isn’t it?’ said Ruth. ‘Well, the family… someone in a legend. She said it wasn’t the tuberculosis so much that killed her, but the fuss they made of her afterwards making her a heroine. I wouldn’t mind being a heroine — it wouldn’t kill me!’

Quin didn’t doubt this. ‘How did you meet Mrs Ridley’s grandmother?’ he asked curiously. ‘She usually keeps herself to herself.’

‘I went to fetch some eggs and we got talking.’

They were very close to the shore when it happened. Dr Elke had gone into the cabin to hand out their belongings, Quin was watching the point, steering for the jetty on the far side.