The Ladies of Missalonghi (4 page)

So Drusilla eked out an existence. She had taken in her spinster sister Octavia, who sold her own house and five acres to their brother Herbert in order to contribute cash to Drusilla’s household. Therein lay the rub; it was inconceivable to sell to an outsider, yet the male Hurlingfords took gross advantage of this. The ungenerous sum Herbert gave Octavia for her property was immediately invested by him on her behalf, and, as investments masterminded by Herbert had a habit of doing, this particular one yielded absolutely nothing. The few timid enquiries Octavia had made of her brother were brushed aside at first, then treated with outraged anger and indignation.

Of course, just as it was inconceivable that any female Hurlingford should dispose of her property to an outsider, so also was it inconceivable that she should disgrace the clan by going out to work, unless work could be found for her safely within the bosom of the immediate family. Thus Drusilla, Octavia and Missy stayed at home, their utter lack of capital preventing their sanctifying work through the medium of owning a business, their utter lack of useful talents meaning the immediate family regarded them as unemployable.

Any pipe-dreams Drusilla might have harboured about Missy’s growing up to snatch the ladies of Missalonghi out of penury via a spectacular marriage died before Missy turned ten; she was always homely and unprepossessing. By the time she turned twenty, her mother and her aunt had reconciled themselves to the same remorselessly straightened circumstances all the way to their respective graves. Missy in time would inherit her mother’s house and five acres, but there would be none of her own to swell that, as she was a Hurlingford only on the distaff side, and therefore ineligible.

Of course they did manage to live. They had a Jersey cow which produced wonderfully rich and creamy milk as well as splendid calves, a Jersey heifer they had kept because she was superlative, half a dozen sheep, three dozen Rhode Island Red fowls, a dozen assorted ducks and geese, and two pampered white sows which farrowed the best eating-piglets in the district, as they were allowed to graze instead of being penned up, and ate the scraps from Julia’s tea room besides the scraps from Missalonghi’s table and vegetable garden. The vegetable garden, which was Missy’s province, produced something all year round; Missy had a green thumb. There was a modest orchard too – ten apples of various kinds, a peach, a cherry, a plum, an apricot, and four pear trees. Of citrus they had none, Byron being too cold in winter. They sold their fruit and butter and eggs to Maxwell Hurlingford for a lot less than they could have got elsewhere, but it was inconceivable that they should sell their produce to any but a Hurlingford.

Food they did not lack; money was what beggared them. Prevented from earning a wage and cheated by those who by rights should have been their greatest support, they depended for the cash which meant clothing and utensils and medicines and new roofs upon sale of a sheep or a calf or a litter of piglets, and could permit of no relaxation in their eternal financial vigilance. That Missy was dearly loved by the two older women showed visibly in only one way; they let her squander her egg and butter money upon the borrowing of books.

To fill in their empty days the ladies of Missalonghi knitted and tatted and crocheted and sewed endlessly, grateful for the gifts of wools and threads and linens that came their way each Christmas and birthday, giving back some of the end results as their gifts in their turn, and stockpiling a great deal more in the spare room.

That they acquiesced so tamely to a regimen and a code inflicted upon them by people who had no idea of the loneliness, the bitter suffering of genteel poverty, was no evidence of lack of spirit or lack of courage. Simply, they were born and lived in a time before the great wars completed the industrial revolution, when paid work and its train of comforts were a treason to their concepts of life, of family, of femininity.

Her genteel poverty was never more galling to Drusilla Wright than each Saturday morning, when she came on foot into Byron and through it and out to where the most prosperous of the Hurlingford residences hunched across the flanks of the magnificent hills between the town and an arm of the Jamieson Valley. She went to have morning tea with her sister Aurelia, never forgetting as she trudged that when they were girls and engaged to be married, she, Drusilla, was considered to have made by far the better bargain in the matrimonial marketplace. And she made the pilgrimage alone, Octavia being too crippled to walk the seven miles, and the contrast between Missy and Aurelia’s daughter Alicia too painful to be endured. Keeping a horse was out of the question, as horses were destructive grazers and Missalonghi’s five acres had to be safeguarded against drought at all times. If they couldn’t walk, the ladies of Missalonghi stayed home.

Aurelia had also married out of the family, but far more judiciously, as things turned out. Edmund Marshall was the general manager of the bottling plant, having a talent for practical administration every Hurlingford lacked. So Aurelia lived in a twenty-roomed imitation Tudor mansion set within four acres of parkland planted with prunus and rhododendron and azalea and ornamental cherry that transformed the place into a fairyland each late September and lasted for a month. Aurelia had servants, horses, carriages, even a motorcar. Her sons Ted and Randolph were apprenticed to their father in the bottling plant and showed great promise, Ted on the accounting side and Randolph as a supervisor.

Aurelia also had a daughter, a daughter who was everything Drusilla’s daughter was not. The two possessed only one fact in common; they were both thirty-three-year-old spinsters. But where Missy was as she was because no one had ever dreamed of asking her to change her single status, Alicia was still single for the most glamorous and heartrending of reasons. The fiancé she had accepted in her nineteenth year was gored to death by a maddened work elephant only weeks before their wedding, and Alicia had taken her time about recovering from the blow. Montgomery Massey had been the only child of a famous family of Ceylon tea planters, and very, very rich. Alicia had mourned him in full accordance with his social significance.

For a whole year she had worn black, then for two more years she wore only dove-grey or pale lilac, these being the colours referred to as “half-mourning”; then at twenty-two she announced the period of retirement was over by opening a millinery boutique. Her father purchased the old haberdashery shop that time and Herbert Hurlingford’s clothing emporium had made redundant, and Alicia put her one genuine talent to good stead. Convention demanded that the business be placed in her mother’s name, but no one, least of all her mother, was under any illusion as to whose business it was. The hat shop, called Chez Chapeau Alicia, was a resounding success from the moment it opened its doors, and drew customers from as far afield as Sydney, so delightfully attractive and flattering and fashionable were Alicia’s confections in straw and tulle and silk. She employed two landless, dowerless female relations in her work room and her spinster Aunt Cornelia as her aristocratic sales dame, confining her own share of the enterprise to design and banking the profits.

Then, just when everyone had assumed that Alicia was going to wear the willow for Montgomery Massey until she too died, she announced her engagement to William Hurlingford, son and heir of the third Sir William. She was thirty-two, and her prospective bridegroom was only just nineteen. Their wedding was set for the first day of this coming October, when the spring flowers would make a garden reception
de rigueur
; the long wait would finally be over. That there had been a long wait was the fault of the third Sir William’s wife, Lady Billy, who on hearing the news had attempted to flog Alicia with a horse whip. The third Sir William had been forced to forbid the couple to marry until the groom turned twenty-one.

So it was with no joy in her at all that Drusilla Wright marched up the well raked gravel drive of Mon Repos and applied the knocker to her sister’s front door with a vigour born of mingled frustration and envy. The butler answered, informed Drusilla loftily that Mrs. Marshall was in the small drawing room, and conducted her there imperturbably.

The interior of Mon Repos was as charmingly right as its façade and gardens; pale imported wood panellings, silk and velvet wallpapers, brocade hangings, Axminster carpets, Regency furniture, all perfectly arranged to show off the lovely proportions of the rooms to best advantage. No need to use brown paint here, where economy and prudence so patently did not reign.

The sisters kissed cheeks, more alike in every way than either of them to Octavia or Julia or Cornelia or Augusta or Antonia, for both of them possessed a certain brand of haughty frostiness, and their smiles were identical. In spite of their contrasting social circumstances they were also more fond of each other than of any of the rest; and only Drusilla’s implacable pride prevented Aurelia from assisting her financially.

After the greetings were over they settled on either side of a small marquetry table in velvet-covered chairs, and waited until the maid had served them from a tray of China tea and two dozen fairy cakes before getting down to business.

“Now it’s not a scrap of use being proud, Drusilla, I do know how desperately you need the money, and can you give me one good reason why all those lovely things should pile up in your spare room instead of in Alicia’s glory box? You can’t plead that you’re saving them for Missy’s glory box when we both know Missy said her last prayers years ago. Alicia wants to buy her household linens from you, and I am in full accord,” said Aurelia firmly.

“I am of course flattered,” said Drusilla stiffly, “but I cannot
sell
them to you, Aurelia. Alicia may have whatever she wants as our gift.”

“Nonsense!” countered the lady of the manor. “One hundred pounds, and let her take her pick.”

“She may have her pick gladly, but only as our gift.”

“One hundred pounds, or she will have to spend several times that buying her linens from Mark Foy’s, for I will not permit her to take anything like as much as she needs from you as a gift.”

The argument went on for some time, but in the end poor Drusilla was obliged to give in, her outraged pride warring with a secret relief so great it finally vanquished pride. And after she had drunk three cups of fragrant Lapsang Souchong and eaten her confection-starved way through almost the entire plate of perfectly iced pink and white fairy cakes, she and her sister had passed from the awkwardness of their social disparity to the cosiness of their social consanguinity.

“Billy says he’s a jailbird,” said Aurelia.

“In
Byron
? Good God, how did Billy let this happen?”

“He couldn’t do a thing to prevent it, sister. You know as well as I do that it is a myth, the Hurlingfords owning every acre of land between Leura and Lawson. If the man could buy the valley, which apparently he has done, and if he has paid his debt to society, which apparently he has also done, then there is nothing Billy or anyone else can do to drive him out.”

“When did all this take place?”

“Last week, according to Billy. The valley has never been Hurlingford land, of course. Billy assumed it was Crown land – a mistaken impression dating back to the first Sir William, it seems, so no one within the family has ever thought to verify the fact, more’s the pity. Had we only known, a Hurlingford would have bought it long since. Actually it has been a Master of Lunacy estate for donkey’s years, and then this chap bought it at auction in Sydney last week without our even learning it was for sale. The whole valley, if you please, and
dirt
cheap! Wouldn’t it? Billy is livid.”

“How did you find out about it?” asked Drusilla.

“The fellow arrived in Maxwell’s shop yesterday just on closing time – Missy was there too, apparently.”

Drusilla’s face cleared. “So that’s who he was!”

“Yes.”

“Maxwell found out, I take it? He could prise information out of a deaf mute.”

“Yes. Oh, the fellow wasn’t at all backward, he talked about it very frankly – too frankly, in Maxwell’s judgement. But you know Maxwell, he thinks any man a fool who advertises his business.”

“What I fail to understand is why anyone other than a Hurlingford would
want
to buy the valley! I mean, to own it would have significance for a Hurlingford, because it’s in Byron. But he can’t farm it. It would take him ten years to clear enough to put to the plough, and it’s so wet down there that he couldn’t keep it cleared. He can’t log it because the road out is too dangerous. So why?”

“According to Maxwell, he said he just wants to live alone in the bush and listen to the silence. Well, if he isn’t actually a jailbird, you must admit he’s certainly a bit of an eccentric!”

“What exactly makes Billy think he’s a jailbird?”

“Maxwell phoned Billy as soon as the fellow had loaded up his cart and gone. And Billy set enquiries going at once. The fellow calls himself John Smith, if you please!” Aurelia snorted derisively. “Now I ask you, Drusilla, would anyone call himself John Smith unless there was real dirty work at the crossroads?”

“It might be his proper name,” said Drusilla fairly.

“Pooh! One is forever reading about John Smiths, but have you ever actually
met
one? Billy thinks the John Smith is an – an – what do the Americans call it?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Well, not that it matters, this isn’t America. A false name, anyway. Billy’s investigations have revealed that the man has no records with any official body. He paid in gold for the valley, and that’s as much as can be found out.”

“Perhaps he’s a lucky strike miner from Sofala or Bendigo?”

“No. Every gold field in Australia has been in company hands for years, and there have been no big finds by a private individual, Billy says.”

“How extraordinary!” said Drusilla as she absently reached for the second-last fairy cake. “Did Maxwell or Billy have anything else to add?”

“Well, John Smith bought a very large quantity of food, and he paid in gold. Out of a big money-belt under his shirt, and he not wearing an undergarment, either! Luckily by then Missy had gone, for Maxwell swears the fellow would have pulled up his shirt just the same. He
cursed
in front of Missy,
and
he said something or other that implied Missy was no lady! With
no
provocation, I assure you!”