The Ladies of Missalonghi (6 page)

“I’ll take it,” said Missy instantly, paid up all her debts, which made her feel a lot better, and tucked
The Troubled Heart
into the bottom of one of her shopping bags.

“I’ll see you next Monday,” said Una, and went to the door to wave at her until she disappeared from sight.

As long as she walked it on her own, the five miles from Byron’s shops to Missalonghi never seemed half so much. For as she walked, she dreamed, fantasising herself into roles and events and characters far beyond her real ken. Until Una had come to the library these characters had all looked exactly like Alicia, and the antics they got up to revolved around hat shops or dress shops or tea rooms of awesome gentility, and the men in their lives were a composite Hurlingford beau ideal, Siegfrieds in boots, bowlers, and three-piece suits. Nowadays her imagination had better grist to work on, and whatever character she played through whatever adventure it might be bore far more resemblance to the latest novel Una had smuggled her than to any aspect of Byron life.

So for the first half of her walk home that Monday, Missy metamorphosised herself into a divinely beautiful strawberry blonde with amazing lime-green eyes; she had two men in love with her, a duke (fair and handsome), and an Indian prince (dark and handsome). In this guise she shot tigers down from the howdahs of richly caparisoned elephants without assistance, she led an army of her husband’s subjects against Muslim marauders without assistance, she built schools and hospitals and mothers’ institutes without assistance, while her two lovers drifted vaguely in the background rather like the little male spider consorts not permitted into the wife’s parlour.

But halfway home, where Gordon Road branched off from the long straggle of Noel Street, began her valley. At this point Missy always stopped daydreaming and looked about her instead. It was a beautiful day, as late winter days on the Blue Mountains can be when the wind takes time off to rest. Answering the lure of the valley, she crossed to the far side of Gordon Road and lifted her face to the kindly sky and swelled her nostrils to take in the heady tang of the bush.

No one had ever produced a name for the valley, though from now on it would in the way of Byron folk come to be known as John Smith’s Valley, no doubt. Compared to the Jamieson Valley or the Grose Valley or even the Megalong Valley it was not very big, but it was perfect, a bowl some fifteen hundred feet lower than the three thousand foot ridge upon which Byron and all the other towns of the Blue Mountains were built. In shape it was a symmetrical oval, one narrow curving end lying just beyond the place where Gordon Road petered out and the far end some five miles away to the east, where its otherwise uninterrupted wall was dramatically broken by a chasm through which flowed its nameless river on its way to join the Nepean-Hawkesbury system of the coastal plain. All the way round the margin was a stunning drop of dull orange sandstone cliff a thousand feet high, and below this sheer precipice a tree-covered skirt of fallen rock curved down to the course of the river which had made the valley aeons before. And the valley was, looking across it, stuffed with lush native forest, a blue ocean of gums that sighed and whispered ceaselessly.

On winter mornings the valley was filled with brilliant white cloud that sat like turning milk below the level of the cliff tops, and suddenly as the sun increased in warmth it would lift up in a moment and vanish. Sometimes the cloud would come down from above, fingers seeking out the tree tops far below until it succeeded in covering them from sight under a spectral blanket. And as sunset approached, winter and summer, the cliffs began to take on deeper, richer colour, glowering rose-red, then crimson, and finally the purple that faded into night’s mysterious indigo. Most wonderful of all was the rare snow, when all the crags and outcrops of the cliffs were picked out in white, and the moving leafy trees shook off their powdering of icy moisture as fast as it fell upon them, unwilling to accept a touch so alien.

The only way down to the valley’s floor was a terrifyingly steep track just wide enough for a large wagon, a track that emerged onto the top of the rim just beyond the end of Gordon Road. Fifty years earlier, someone had made the track in order to plunder the rainforest below of its massive cedars and turpentines, but after a whole team of eighty oxen, their driver, two loggers and a dray bearing a mighty tree trunk had gone over the edge, the plundering had ceased abruptly. There were easier forests to log. And gradually the track had been forgotten, as indeed had the valley; visitors preferred to go south to the Jamieson than north to this less awesome cousin, bereft as it was of kiosks and properly landscaped lookouts.

That wretched stitch came back just as Missy rounded the corner not far from Missalonghi, and ten seconds later the pain struck at her chest like a blow from an axe. She faltered and dropped her loaded shopping bags, her arms flying up to pluck at this terrifying agony; then she saw the neat hedge of Missalonghi through her terror, and ran for home. At precisely the same moment John Smith rounded the corner from its other side, striding along with his head down in thought.

Only ten yards short of the gate in the hedge, she pitched headlong. No one inside Missalonghi saw, for it was about five o’clock, and the rolling chords of Drusilla’s organ were erupting into the outside air like a suffocating fall of hot volcanic ash.

But John Smith saw, and came running. His first thought was that the odd little soul had tripped after bolting to escape meeting him, but when he knelt and turned her face upwards, one look at her grey skin and sweat-soaked hair told him differently. He half-sat her against his thigh, rubbing her back helplessly, wishing he knew of some way to force air into her lungs. That much knowledge he had, not to lie her flat on the ground, yet farther than that his knowledge did not extend. She put up her hands to clutch at his arm where it lay lightly across the front of her shoulders, supporting her; the whole of her body was heaving with the fight to breathe, and her eyes were turned up to his, silently beseeching him for an aid he was incapable of giving. Caught mesmerised, watching the extraordinary cavalcade of an inner horror and bewilderment and pain pass through those eyes, he began to think she was going to die.

Then with startling swiftness the grey colour faded, a warmer and healthier tinge crept into her skin, and her hands relaxed on his arm.

“Please!” she gasped, struggling to rise.

He got to his feet at once, slipped one arm under her legs and scooped her up. Though he had no idea where she lived, there must surely be some assistance in the dingy house behind the hedge, so he carried her through the gate and down the path, calling for help at the top of his voice and praying he would be heard above the bellowing of the organ.

Apparently he was heard, for two ladies came out of the house immediately, both unknown to him. There was no nonsense about them, which he appreciated deeply; one pointed wordlessly to the front door, while the other slipped around ahead of him and ushered him into the parlour with his burden.

“Brandy,” said Drusilla curtly, bending to loosen her daughter’s clothes. She wore no stays, having no need of them, but her dress was tightly belted and high to the neck.

“Do you have a telephone?” asked John Smith.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then if you give me directions, I’ll go for the doctor right now.”

“The corner of Byron and Noel, Dr. Neville Hurlingford,” said Drusilla. “Tell him it’s Missy – she’s my daughter.”

He went immediately, leaving Drusilla and Octavia to administer the brandy every prudent household kept in the sauce cupboard in case of heart trouble.

By the time Dr. Neville Hurlingford arrived some sixty minutes later, Missy had almost fully recovered. John Smith did not return with him.

“Very puzzling,” said Dr. Hurlingford to Drusilla in the kitchen; Octavia was helping Missy into bed.

The experience had shaken Drusilla badly, used to assuming that everyone she knew enjoyed the same rude health she did herself; Octavia’s bones were such old friends they didn’t really count. So soberly and quietly she made a pot of tea, and drank from her own cup more gratefully than Dr. Hurlingford did from his.

“Did Mr. Smith tell you what happened?” she asked.

“I must say, Drusilla, that in spite of the tall stories going around at the moment, Mr. Smith seems to me to be a good fellow – a sensible and practical man. According to him, she grabbed at her chest, ran across the road in a panic, and collapsed. She was grey and sweating and having great trouble breathing. The attack lasted about two minutes, and her recovery was quite sudden. Her colour came back, so did her breath. That was when Mr. Smith brought her inside, I gather. I could find nothing wrong with her a minute ago, but I may find more when I do a proper examination once she’s in bed.”

“There’s no heart trouble in our branch of the family, as you know,” said Drusilla, feeling betrayed.

“She takes after her father’s family in the rest of her bodily makeup, Drusilla, so she may have inherited a bad heart from that side too. She has had no other attack like it?”

“Not that we know of,” said Drusilla, properly rebuked. “
Is
it her heart?”

“I honestly don’t know. It’s possible.” But he sounded doubtful. “I’ll go in and see her again now, I think.”

Missy was lying in her narrow little bed with her eyes closed, but the moment she heard Dr. Hurlingford’s unfamiliar step she opened them and looked at him, then unaccountably seemed disappointed.

“Well now, Missy,” he said, sitting gingerly alongside her. “What happened, eh?”

Drusilla and Octavia hovered in the background; he would dearly have liked to dismiss them, sensing that their presence inhibited Missy, but decency and convention forbade it. In all of Missy’s life he had only seen her two or three times, so he knew only the little about her that everyone knew; she was the sole dark Hurlingford in history, and she had been doomed to spinsterhood before she was into her teens.

“I don’t know what happened,” lied Missy.

“Come now, you must remember something.”

“I got short of breath and fainted, I suppose.”

“That’s not what Mr. Smith says.”

“Then Mr. Smith is wrong – where is he? Is he here?”

“Did you experience any pain?” pressed Dr. Hurlingford, not satisfied, and not bothering to answer Missy’s question.

A ghastly vision of herself reduced to the status of a chronic invalid at Missalonghi rose up in front of Missy’s mind; the awful additional monetary burden she would become, the guilt she would in consequence feel every day of her bedbound life, the impossibility of ever getting away on her own to walk past her valley into Byron and the library – no, it could not be borne!

“I had no pain at all,” she insisted.

Dr. Hurlingford looked as if he didn’t believe her, but for a Hurlingford he was fairly perceptive, and he too knew what sort of life Missy would lead from the moment she was diagnosed a case of heart trouble. So he forebore to press the poor girl further, merely got out his old-fashioned funnel-shaped stethoscope and listened to her heart, which was beating quite normally, and to her lungs, which were clear.

“Today is Monday. You had better come and see me on Friday,” he said as he rose. He patted Missy reassuringly on top of her head and then walked into the hall, where Drusilla lurked in wait. “I can’t find anything wrong,” he said to her. “Lord knows what happened, I don’t! But mind she sees me on Friday, now, and if anything else happens in the meantime, send for me at once.”

“No medicine?”

“My dear Drusilla, how can I prescribe medicine for a mystery illness? She’s as skinny as a wormy cow, but she seems healthy enough. Just leave her alone, let her sleep, and give her plenty of good nourishing food.”

“Should she stay in bed until Friday?”

“I don’t think so. Let her stay in bed tonight, but let her get up tomorrow. Provided she only does light duties, I can see no harm in her leading a normal and active life.”

With that Drusilla had to be satisfied. She ushered her uncle the doctor out, tiptoed across the hall to the door of Missy’s room and peeped in, saw that Missy was asleep, and so retreated to the kitchen, where Octavia was sitting at the table polishing off the last of the doctor’s pot of tea.

Actually Octavia looked very shaken; the hands that both were needed to lift her cup to her lips trembled badly.

“Uncle Neville doesn’t seem to think it’s serious,” said Drusilla, sitting down heavily. “Missy is to stay in bed for what’s left of this evening, but she can get up tomorrow and move around, though only light duties until Uncle sees her again on Friday.”

“Oh, dear!” A large pale tear rolled down Octavia’s large pale cheek as she looked down at her gnarled fingers. “I will try in the garden, Drusilla, but I really cannot milk the cow!”

“I’ll milk,” said Drusilla. She put her hand to her head and sighed. “Don’t worry, sister, we’ll manage somehow.”

The disaster! Drusilla saw her precious two hundred pounds frittering itself away on a series of doctors and hospitals and treatments, none of which would she grudge for a moment; what depressed her was the disappearance of her tail just when she thought she had caught up with it at last. If she had not already cut out the lilac crêpe and the powder-blue silk and the snuff-brown satin, back they would have gone to Herbert’s emporium on the morrow.
Wouldn’t
it?

At dinner time Drusilla brought Missy a huge bowl of beef-and-barley broth and sat by the bed until Missy managed to struggle through it; but after that she was left mercifully alone. The long sleep of the earlier part of the evening had left her wakeful, though, so she settled to think. About the pain and what it might mean. About John Smith. About the future. Between the pain and the future, two deserts of appalling dreariness, John Smith stood lit up and glorious. So she abandoned all thought of pain or future, and concentrated upon John Smith.

Such a nice man! Interesting too. How easily he had lifted her off the ground and carried her inside. The recent avalanche of second-hand knowledge Una’s smuggled novels had tipped on top of her was suddenly of genuine benefit; Missy understood that she was in love at last. But hope was not present at all in the sweet and smiling train of thought this realisation of love triggered. The Alicias of this world might scheme and plot to attain their ends, but the Missys could not. The Missys didn’t know enough about men, and the smidgin they did know lay in the realm of generality. All men were untouchables, even jailbirds. All men had choices. All men had power. All men were free. All men were privileged. And presumably jailbirds had more of everything than men like poor Little Willie Hurlingford, sheltered as he had been from every adverse wind that might have blown a little stiffening into him. Not that she believed John Smith was really a jailbird; Una had known him during her years in Sydney, and presumably that meant he had moved at least on the fringes of the highest society – unless of course despite his friendship with Una’s husband he had delivered the ice, or the bread, or the coal.