Every year Marigold Cotton makes gooseberry and elderflower jam. Her mother taught her when she was very young, and it's difficult for Marigold to get through the cooking of it without having a bit of a cry. She misses her mother, who died when her children were still small, and though the Gaffer was kind and sweet he had none of his late wife's tenderness. And Marigold misses the babes she hasn't got, too, wishes there was some curly-headed lassie beside her to watch the process of wrapping the elderflowers in muslin to simmer with the gooseberries. She wants to teach a daughter how to sew and dance and laugh, oh how she wants to.

Marigold loves Tom, despite their fighting. They argue 'til they're blue in the face, and then they pounce at each other with hungry urgency and tup until blue turns flushed. It seems terrible cruel that a husband and wife with such an appetite for each other should be cursed with an oven cold.

Tom, for all he can be gruff and stupid, has never raised his hand to her and never said words of blame, and Marigold's deeply thankful for that. It's obvious that the fault lies in her, after all, as she can catch the seed well enough but never carries it to blooming.

But then, Marigold's sister-in-law Rosie has her share of miscarriages, and it doesn't seem to be any lacking in her womb. The real reason for it isn't the sort of thing polite folk bring up in conversation, but, as Tom affectionately reminds his wife from time to time, Marigold's not known for her politeness. There's something wrong with Mr Frodo, something that taints any children so bad they can't be born. But there's nothing of that sort in her Tom, so why can't they be as lucky as his sister?

Sam can pass on the recipe and way of making the jams their mother put so much love and care into on to his children, and Marigold can't, and that makes a curl of nasty rot twist in her heart. It's not fair, as if life was ever that.

"Anything I can help with?" a voice asks by the kitchen door. Marigold wipes her sniffles away, ashamed to be caught blubbing like a tween. It's Aislin, come in from making up the butter pats for market tomorrow. Marigold smiles as well as she can at the girl, glad of the company. Aislin and Owen are good workers, quiet and respectful and eager to learn. One night after they'd headed home, Tom commented that they were a pair starved of love and Marigold thinks that may be true. It was hard enough to lose a mother young, to lose both parents with only one sibling to lean on must have been horrible.

Marigold doesn't know if she can feed that hunger in the children, worries that her own bitterness has tainted any warmth she might offer. She aches to hug Aislin close and call her duck, as Rosie does to her own daughters, but fears that neither of them would quite know how to behave in such a situation.

But there are other hungers more easily filled.

"Come in closer, girl, I'll teach you how to make my mother's special jam," Marigold says with a smile.

~

Pretty Good Year | email Mary