On the evening of his wedding, when the schoolhouse had been swept and the water pumped for the next morning and the firewood stacked beside the newly blacked stove, Bird could at last close his front door, edge past the piled books in the hallway, and offer his new wife a shy smile. On the kitchen table was one bottle of wine left from the wedding feast. “I think we shall have that!” Bird rubbed his hands in anticipatory glee. In truth he was feeling extraordinarily timid, so much so that he had deliberately dallied over his evening chores.

“I thought perhaps we might eat what was left from the wedding?” Priscilla, equally timid, suggested.

“Capital idea! Capital!” Thaddeus Bird was hunting for a corkscrew. He did not often get to drink a bottle of wine in his own house, indeed he could hardly remember the last time he had enjoyed such a luxury, but he was sure there was a corkscrew somewhere.

“And I thought perhaps I might rearrange the shelves.” Priscilla watched her husband’s frantic attempts to find the corkscrew amidst the jumble of handle-less skillets, holed pans and chipped plates that Bird had inherited from the previous schoolmaster. “If you have no objection,” she added.

“You must do whatever you wish! This is your home, my dear one.”

Priscilla had already tried to cheer up the dingy kitchen. She had put her wedding spray of redbud blossoms in a vase and pinned strips of cloth to either side of the window to suggest curtains, but somehow the touches did little to alleviate the gloom of the dark, low-beamed, smoke-stained room, which contained a stove, a table, an open hearth with an iron bread oven, two chairs and two old dressers, which were stacked with chipped plates, mugs, bowls, pitchers and the inevitable books and broken musical instruments that Thaddeus Bird accumulated. The illumination in the kitchen, as in the rest of the small house, came from candles, and Priscilla, who was ever mindful of the cost of good wax candles, lit only two as night fell. It was still raining hard.

The corkscrew was at last discovered and the wine opened, but Bird immediately declared himself dissatisfied with the glasses. “Somewhere there are a pair of proper glasses. Ones with stems. The kind they use in Richmond.”

Priscilla had never been to Richmond and was about to say that she doubted Richmond glasses could make the wine taste any better, but before she could open her mouth to speak there was a sudden hammering on the front door.