Love The Gift

Can a woman who has been dead for over one hundred years help Mark overcome the grief of his mother’s death and find the woman he’s always loved?

Love the Gift is a love story with a difference. It’s set in the present and in 1905.

Mark Hamilton accepts his friend’s offer to visit her in the New South Wales Highlands. He and Beth have been best mates since university days. Beth had returned to her family home at Sutton Forest four years ago to help her mother turn their family home into a boutique hotel.

Mark had spent those years devoting himself to his art, when he wasn’t working in the art shop to help pay the bills. At least until his mother fell ill. She had been everything to him since his father had died years before. She was his friend, his rock, and his inspiration. He was pleased that at the end, he had been her rock. But he could not save her. Despite hours spent at her bedside willing life into her, she slipped way from him and took his happiness and inspiration with her.

Mark knows that Beth has brought him to ‘The Magnolias Boutique Hotel and Spa’ to help him recover from his grief, but he doesn’t mind. She has always known when he needed her.

Beth gives Mark a room she doesn’t normally use for guests. It belonged to her Great, Great-Aunt Charlotte who died in 1905. The room has been kept just as Charlotte left it. Mark thinks it is quaint and happily settles in. He feels immediately drawn to a portrait of Charlotte that is on the bedroom wall.

After dinner, over a nightcap in front of the fireplace in Beth’s room, she declares her love for Mark. He wonders why he has never guessed. This discovery would have been welcomed at another time but not now when his grief consumes him. Shaken, he returns to his bedroom. Drawn once more to Charlotte’s portrait, he steps outside into her walled garden that leads off the bedroom and is shocked to find he is in a sunny afternoon with Charlotte in the garden to greet him.

Is it a dream? Or has he somehow stepped into 1905? It’s beyond Mark’s comprehension. Then he discovers that it is only three days until her death, and he becomes desperate to save her. In the end it is Charlotte and Beth who save him.