Gothic cross with rose and thorned vine

They said it would bring thorns into the house. She said the thorns were already in the house, and it was the least they could do to give them something to hold. The cross on the gable had been cut by her grandfather from a single block of grey slate, its arms flared at the ends like the points of a bishop's staff, and nobody on Hallan Holm had ever seen it without weather on it.

Through the summer the vine climbed. It wound round the shaft and out along the cross-arm, and by August it had put out leaves with toothed edges that caught the wind off the sound. A rose came in September, late and pale, opening on the north side where no one looked. Maud cut it and set it in a jug on the schoolroom sill, and the children stood in a row to smell it. Young Tam Rendall asked whether roses grew in the sea. She told him they grew wherever somebody was willing to keep them.

When the boat came round the point in October, only four of the men were in it. Maud walked down to the slip with a loaf under her arm and a length of the vine coiled in her apron. She tied it to the bow rope with the thorns facing outward, said nothing about it, and nobody on Hallan Holm ever asked her to take it off.