partner upstairs was only Uncle Samuel—all he liked to do was peer at her over his newspaper, give her a slight nod, then dive back into the pages. Dina never rose before ten, when the mail was delivered.
Below stairs, Mrs Morison usually had some pithy reflection on the state of affairs in the Rennie household. Failing that, she sat with Mary to look over the day’s meals and assign some useful task that kept Mary from boredom upstairs, where life was comfortable, but not much was required of her.
Since Christmas approached, Mrs Morison had assigned her to the agreeable chore of inventorying the spice cabinet. Since her arrival in the Rennie household twelve years ago, it had been Mary’s duty to open each aromatic little drawer in the spice cupboard, take a good whiff and decide which spices had run their course and which could hang around another year.
Mary had just opened the cloves drawer when there came an unearthly shriek from the upstairs bedchambers. The note quavered on the edge of hysteria as it rose higher and higher. Alarmed, Mary watched with big eyes as a crystal vase shivered on its base.
‘My God,’ she said, closing the drawer and running into the kitchen, where Mrs Morison stared at the ceiling.
Above stairs, a door slammed, another door opened and slammed, a few moments passed, then another scream of anguish shattered the calm of Wapping Street. Mrs Morison crossed herself and she wasn’t even Catholic.
‘We...we...could go upstairs,’ Mary suggested, but it was a feeble suggestion, much like the chirping of the last cricket on the hearth before winter.
By unspoken consent, they remained where they were. Another door slammed, then there was a great tumult on the stairs as the sound of disaster came closer and closer to the kitchen.
Mary and Mrs Morison looked at each other, mystified. ‘What did we do?’ Mary asked.
They held hands as the racket reached the stairs to the kitchen. Mary took a deep breath as the door slammed open and Aunt Martha and Dina squeezed through the door at the same time, Aunt Martha with fire in her eyes and Dina more pale than parchment.
If she hadn’t been so mystified, Mary would have chuckled to see that Aunt Martha had a tight handful of Dina’s already thinning hair. She gave her daughter a shake.
When Mary just stared, open-mouthed, Aunt Martha said something that didn’t usually pass her lips and thrust a letter into her niece’s hand.
Holding it out to Mrs Morison as well, Mary read the letter, a stilted bit of prose from Dina’s fiancé, not designed to tickle any woman’s fancy or much else. Her eyes widened and she felt her own face grow pale. As imaginary buzzards seemed to flap about and roost in the kitchen, Mary read it again.
‘“My choice and chosen one, that little bauble I sent you was given to my great-great-great-who-knows-how-many-greats grandfather by Queen Elizabeth herself. It is the dearest wish of my heart—and a Page family tradition—to see it on your finger when we announce our engagement on December the thirty-first.”’
‘Oh, my,’ Mary whispered. She stared at her aunt.
Aunt Martha gave her daughter another shake. ‘Dina just told me quite a tale. I am here for you to dispute and deny it.’
‘I fear we cannot,’ Mary said finally, when no one else seemed prepared to speak.
‘Then we are ruined,’ Aunt Martha said as she sank on to a chair that Mary quickly thrust behind her.
Dina began to wail, until she was shut up sharply by a resounding slap from her mother. ‘You are a foolish, foolish lassie,’ Aunt Martha hissed. ‘What are we to do?’
More silence, until Mrs Morison cleared her throat.
‘Simple. We send Mary to find those four cakes and retrieve the ring. She will start tomorrow.’
Aghast, Mary stared at the cook. Mrs Morison just smiled and patted her hand.
‘My dear, you are overdue for an adventure. Wouldn’t you agree?’
Chapter Three
Trust a little boy to find travel by the Royal Mail adventurous. Captain Rennie knew he would have preferred post chaise, but Mrs Pritchert informed him that Nathan longed to ride the mail coach.
‘When we’re in the Barbican, he always has his ears on the swivel to listen for the coachman’s blast and eyes in the back of his head to watch the horses,’ Mrs Pritchert explained. ‘And the uniforms! He pined for one when he was five.’
As if Ross needed an explanation. He used to do that in Dumfries a century ago, when the world was peaceful and he was a little boy. He could barely remember such a time; thank God he had a son to remind him.
‘Aye, Nathan, we’ll take the Royal Mail,’ he said, which practically made his boy wriggle with delight.
Still, it was hard travel for a man wanting nothing but comfort for the first time in more than a decade. Captain Rennie was starting to feel every single one of his thirty-eight hard-lived years when the mail coach pulled into Carlisle on December the sixth. By contrast, Nathan was as bright-eyed as on the morning they set out from Plymouth, with Mrs Pritchert’s tears and blessings.
‘That’s how women are,’ Ross had assured his son, as the child watched Plymouth recede in the distance. ‘They cry and fuss and let you go finally.’
‘But she’s not really my mother,’ Nathan said, looking around for his handkerchief. ‘I have a cold.’
Ross was wise enough to overlook his little sniffles. With a pang, he knew his son was close to the kind Mrs Pritchert; he knew no other mother. He put his hand on Nathan’s neck and gave him a little shake. ‘Laddie boy, we’ll be back in Plymouth in a month and she’ll be waiting for you, mark my words.’
As the miles passed, he had also realised with another pang that he didn’t like to see the ocean disappear from view. He said as much to Nathan, who gave him a look like the one he had given his son when Mrs Pritchert disappeared from view.
‘We’ll have a good time,’ Nathan assured him in turn and they were content with each other.
The first day with Nathan was always tentative. When his son was still a baby, there had been several days of reacquaintance, with lots of shy glances from both of them and maybe sentences started and stopped or half-finished. Now that he was ten, Nathan required only a few hours to remember his father. By the end of the first day’s travel north, he was laughing and telling Ross a year’s worth of school stories, memorising scriptures under duress and watching the harbour with his telescope. When he grew tired, Nathan leaned against Ross’s arm with a sigh of contentment. Or maybe that was his own sigh.
They had struck a bargain before leaving Plymouth. Nathan might want to travel by the Royal Mail, but, by God, they were going to stop every night in a respectable inn. As much as he loved his sister, Ross wasn’t in so much hurry to get to Dumfries that they needed to travel all night, too. He had taken this route before and knew where the good meals and soft beds were found. But more than that, he had a list this time. Not just a list: the list.
December the sixth found them in Carlisle, the last stop of any consequence before Scotland. He had given Nathan a map of England and Scotland, because ten
