“There’s no place for you here, my Lord, and you can take yourself and those horseflesh of yourn out of my yard as quick as you came in.”

There was a faint smile on the Marquis’s lips as he advanced further into the kitchen and put his grey driving gloves down on the edge of the table.

“You are expecting me?” he asked her quietly.

“Indeed I was not,” Mrs. Merryweather snorted. “And nor was that poor lamb – ”

She stopped suddenly for she had seen the look of triumph in the Marquis’s eyes.

“So Gretna is here then?” he said. “I thought she would be.”

“I’ll not have you troublin’ her or makin’ her more miserable than she is already,” Mrs. Merryweather stormed. “Comin’ back here, looking like a wee bird that’s been left out in a storm. Not a patch of colour in her cheeks and her eyes that miserable I could cry at the very sight of her – ”

She stopped for an instant and then added accusingly,

“What have you done to her, you and your smart friends? She was happy enough before she left here.”

“She has been growing up, Mrs. Merryweather,” the Marquis said. “You could not keep her a baby for ever.”

“Growing up indeed! With her cryin’ on my shoulder and askin’ me if she could stay here until she found work. Work! I ask you! What can she do to earn a decent livin’?”

“That is just what I have come to talk to her about,” the Marquis pointed out.

“And what might you be suggestin’?” Mrs. Merryweather asked truculently.

The Marquis told her.

*

Gretna knelt on the grass in the churchyard and laid the bunch of roses she carried on the newly marked grave. There was only a plain cheap cross.

But both her father’s and her mother’s names were inscribed on it and beneath them were the words, In death they were not divided.

She arranged the flowers and then from her bent head a tear dropped onto one pink petal and lay there glistening like a dewdrop.

‘You are – together,’ she whispered softly. ‘But I am – alone, so terribly – alone. I don’t not know where to – go or what to do. Can you not help – me? Can you not somehow tell me – what I must do?”

It seemed that there was no answer and another dewdrop glistened on another rose.

And then another and another.

She was suddenly conscious that there were footsteps approaching down the path that led from the village. She bent her head still lower, hoping that whoever it was would pass by and not speak to her.

But the footsteps drew nearer and then stopped.

She willed that whoever it was would go away, seeing that she was preoccupied. But, after a moment or two when nothing happened, curiosity made her turn her head and she saw who stood there.