The Ladies of Missalonghi (7 page)

Oh, but he had been nice to her! Nice to a nonentity like Missy Wright. Even through that hideous and frightening pain she had been conscious of his presence, felt too some strange passage of strength from him to her that had, she fancied, tossed death aside like so much chaff.

John Smith, she thought, if I were only young and pretty, you would stand no more chance of escaping me than poor Little Willie did Alicia! I would chase you remorselessly until I caught you. Wherever you went, there I would be, with my best foot forward to trip you up. And once I had you in my toils, I would love you so much and so well that you would never, never want to get away from me.

John Smith came in person the next day to enquire after Missy, but Drusilla dealt with him at the front door and did not permit him sight or sound of Missy. It was merely a courtesy call, as Drusilla perfectly understood, so she thanked him nicely but not profusely and then stood watching as he strode off down the path to the gate with his hands swinging loosely and his lips whistling a saucy tune.

“Fancy that!” said Octavia, coming out of the parlour, where she had been hiding to watch John Smith through a lifted curtain edge. “Are you going to tell Missy he called?”

“Why?” asked Drusilla, surprised.

“Oh, well...”

“My dear Octavia, you sound as if you’ve been reading those penny dreadful romances Missy’s been bringing home from the library recently!”

“
Has
she?”

Drusilla laughed. “You know, until I realised what a dither she was in trying to hide the covers of her books, I’d forgotten all about our original rule as to the kind of books she might read. After all, it was fifteen years ago! And I thought, why should the poor little wretch not read romances if she wants? What has she to enjoy the way I enjoy my music?”

Nobly Drusilla refrained from adding that Octavia had her rheumatics to enjoy, and Octavia, who might under different circumstances have implied aloud how bereft she herself was of things to enjoy, wisely decided to leave the subject of enjoyment alone.

“Aren’t you going to tell her she may read romances?” Octavia asked instead.

“Certainly not! If I did that, it would remove most of her pleasure, you know. Pure freedom to read them would only give her sufficient detachment to see how dreadful they are.” Drusilla frowned. “What intrigues me is how Missy managed to persuade Livilla of all people to let her borrow them. But I can’t ask Livilla without letting the cat out of the bag, and I wouldn’t spoil Missy’s fun for the world. I see it as a wee bit of defiance, and that gives me hope that there’s some starch in Missy’s backbone after all.”

Octavia sniffed. “I can’t see anything laudable about a sort of defiance that necessitates her becoming
underhanded
!”

A small sound halfway between a growl and a mew escaped Drusilla’s lips, but then she smiled, shrugged, and led the way into the kitchen.

Drusilla accompanied Missy to the doctor the following Friday morning. They went off on foot in good time, warmly clad – naturally – in brown.

The surgery waiting room, dim and fusty, was empty. Mrs. Neville Hurlingford, who did service as her husband’s nurse, ushered them into it with a cheery word for Drusilla and a rather blank stare for Missy. A moment later, the doctor poked his head round his consulting room door.

“Come in, Missy. No, Drusilla, you can stay there and talk to your aunt.”

Missy went in, sat down, and waited warily, her guard up.

He commenced with a frontal attack. “I do not believe you were merely short of breath,” he said. “There had to be pain, and I want to hear all about it, and no nonsense.”

Missy gave in, told him about the stitch in her left side, the way it only bothered her on long walks if she hurried, and the way it had ushered in that sudden, terrifying onslaught of severe pain and breathlessness.

So he examined her again, and afterwards sighed. “I can find absolutely nothing the matter with you,” he said. “When I examined you last Monday there were no residual signs to indicate heart trouble, and today is the same. However, from what Mr. Smith told me, you certainly did have some sort of genuine turn. So, just to make sure, I’m going to send you to a specialist in Sydney. If I can arrange an appointment, would you like to go down with Alicia on her weekly Tuesday trip to the city? It would save your mother having to go.”

Was there an understanding twinkle in his eyes? Missy wasn’t sure, but she looked at him gratefully all the same. “Thank you, I’d like to go with Alicia.”

In fact, Friday was a very good day, for in the afternoon Una drove up to Missalonghi in Livilla’s horse and sulky, and she had half a dozen novels with her, discreetly wrapped in plain brown paper.

“I didn’t even know you were ill until Mrs. Neville Hurlingford told me this morning in the library,” she said, sitting down in the best parlour, to which Octavia had ushered her, dazzled by her elegance and composure.

Neither Drusilla nor Octavia offered to let the two young women talk alone, not because they were consciously spoilsporting, but because they were always starved for company, especially when the company took the form of a brand new face. Such a lovely face too! Not beautiful like Alicia, yet – disloyal though the thought was, they fancied Una was perhaps the more alluring of the two. Her arrival pleased Drusilla particularly, since it answered the vexed question as to how Missy was suddenly managing to borrow novels.

“Thank you for the books,” said Missy, smiling at her friend. “The one I brought home last Monday is nearly worn out.”

“Did you enjoy it?” asked Una.

“Oh, very much!” As indeed she had; its dying heroine with her dicky heart could not have come at a more appropriate moment. Admittedly the heroine actually had managed to die in her beloved’s arms, but she, Missy, had had the good fortune merely
almost
to die in her beloved’s arms.

Una’s manners were perfect. By the time she had partaken of a cup of tea and some plain home-made biscuits, she had won Drusilla and Octavia over completely. To have no better fare to offer was humiliating, but Una’s appreciation turned the despised biscuits into an inspired guess as to what the visitor really liked and wanted.

“Oh, I get so tired of cream cakes and asparagus rolls!” she exclaimed, smiling with dazzling effect at her hostesses. “How clever of you, and how considerate! These little biscuits are delicious, and
so
much better for my digestion! Most Byron ladies swamp one in oceans of jam and cream, and as a guest it is of course impossible to refuse refreshments without offending.”

“What a lovely person,” said Drusilla after Una had gone.

“Delightful,” agreed Octavia.

“She may come again,” said Drusilla to Missy.

“Any time,” said Octavia, who had made the biscuits.

On Sunday afternoon Missy announced that she didn’t care to read, she was going for a walk in the bush instead. So calm and decided was her tone that for a moment her mother just stared at her, at a loss.

“A walk?” she asked at last. “In the
bush
? Most definitely not! You don’t know who you might meet.”

“I won’t meet anyone,” said Missy patiently. “There has never been any kind of prowler or molester of women in Byron.”

Octavia pounced. “How do you know there’s never been a prowler, madam? It’s that ounce of prevention, and never do you forget it! If a prowler is prowling hereabouts, he never finds anyone to molest, because we Hurlingfords keep our girls safe at home, which is where you ought to be.”

“If you are set on the idea, then I suppose I must come with you,” said Drusilla in the tones of a martyr.

Missy laughed. “Oh, Mother! Come with me when you’re so engrossed in your beading? No, I’m going on my own, and that’s final.”

She walked out of the house wearing neither overcoat nor scarf to protect her from the wind.

Drusilla and Octavia looked at each other.

“I hope her brain’s not affected,” said Octavia dolefully.

So secretly did Drusilla, but aloud she said stoutly, “At least you can’t call this bit of defiance
underhanded
!”

In the meantime Missy had let herself out of the front gate and turned left instead of right, down to where Gordon Road dwindled to two faint wheel-marks meandering into the heart of the bush. A glance behind her revealed that no one was following; Missalonghi’s squat ugliness sat with front door firmly closed.

It was a still clear day and the sun was very warm, even filtering through the trees. Up here on top of the ridge the bush was not thick, for the soil was scanty and whatever did grow mostly had to scrabble for an unloving hold on the sandstone substrate. So the eucalypts and angophoras were short, stunted, and the undergrowth sparse. Spring had arrived; even high up in the Blue Mountains it came early, and two or three warmish days were sufficient to bring the first wattle popping out into a drift of tiny fluffy yellow balls.

The valley went on to her right, glimpsed through the trees; where was John Smith’s house, if house he had? Her mother’s Saturday morning visit to Aunt Aurelia’s yesterday had elicited no further information about John Smith, save a wild rumour that he had engaged a firm of Sydney builders to erect him a huge mansion at the bottom of the cliffs, made out of sandstone quarried on the spot. But Missalonghi could offer no evidence to support this, and Missalonghi sat plump on the only route such builders would have to use. Besides which, Aunt Aurelia apparently had more important worries than John Smith; it seemed the upper echelons of the Byron Bottle Company were becoming extremely alarmed about some mysterious movements in shares.

Missy had no expectation of meeting John Smith on top of the ridge, as it was Sunday, so she decided to find out where his road went over the edge of the valley. When at last she stumbled upon the spot she could see the logic behind the site, for a gargantuan landslide had strewn boulders and rocks in a kind of ramp from top to bottom of the cliff, thus decreasing the sheerness of the drop. Standing at the commencement of the track, she could just glimpse it twisting back and forth across the landslide in a series of zigzags; a perilous descent, yes, but not an impossible one for a cart like John Smith’s.

However, she was far too timid to venture down, not from fear of falling but from fear of walking into John Smith’s lair. Instead, she struck off into the bush on top of the ridge along a narrow path that might have been made by animals going to water. And sure enough, as time went by a sound of running water gradually overpowered the omnipresent sound of the trees talking in that faint, plaintive, fatigued speech gum trees produce on calm days. Louder and louder was the water, until it became a bewildering roar; then when she came upon the stream, it offered her no answer, for though it was quite deep and wide, it was sliding along between its ferny banks without a flurry. Yet the roar of rushing water persisted.

She turned to the right and followed the river, inside her dream of enchantment at last. The sun glanced off the surface of the water in a thousand thousand sparks of light, and the ferns dripped tiny droplets, and dragonflies hovered with rainbow-mica wings, and brilliant parrots wheeled from the trees of one bank to the trees of the other.

Suddenly the river vanished. It just fell away into nothing, a smoothly curving edge. Gasping, Missy drew back quickly, understanding the roar. She had come to the very head of the valley, and the stream which had cut it was entering it in the only way possible, by going down, down, down. Working cautiously along the brink for a good quarter of a mile, she came to a place where a great rock jutted far out over the cliff. And there, right on its end, legs dangling into nothingness, she sat to watch the waterfall in awe. Its bottom she could not discover, only the beautiful untidy tangle of its flight through the windy air, and a rainbow against a mossy place on the cliff behind it, and a chilly moistness that it exhaled as it fell, like a cry for help.

Several hours slipped away as easily as the water. The sun left that part of the ridge. She began to shiver; time to go home to Missalonghi.

And then where her path joined the road leading down into John Smith’s valley, Missy met John Smith himself. He was driving his cart from the direction of Byron, and she saw with surprise that the cart was laden with tools and crates and sacks and iron machinery. Somewhere was a shop open on Sunday!

He pulled up at once and jumped down, smiling broadly. “Hello!” he said. “Feeling better?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“I’m glad to catch you like this, because I was beginning to wonder if you were still in the land of the living. Your mother assured me you were when I called, but she wouldn’t let me see for myself.”

“You came to see how I was?”

“Yes, last Tuesday.”

“Oh, thank you for that!” she said with fervour.

His brows rose, but he didn’t attempt to quiz her. Instead, he left his conveyance where it was, and turned to walk back with her towards Missalonghi.

“I take it there was nothing serious wrong?” he asked after some minutes during which they just paced along together without speaking.

“I don’t know,” said Missy, recognising the emanations of pity and sympathy his obviously healthy being was giving off. “I have to see a doctor in Sydney quite urgently. A
heart
specialist, I believe.” Now why did she say it like that?

“Oh,” he said, at a loss.

“Whereabouts exactly do you live, Mr. Smith?” she asked, to change the subject.

“Well, further around in the direction you’ve just come from is a waterfall,” he said, not at all reticently, and in a tone of voice which told Missy that, whether because of her sickly condition or because maybe she was so manifestly harmless, he had decided she could be counted a friend. “There’s an old logger’s hut near the bottom of the waterfall, and I’m camping in that for the time being. But I’m starting to build a house a bit closer to the waterfall itself – out of sandstone blocks I’m quarrying on the site. I’ve just been down to Sydney to pick up an engine to drive a big saw. That way I can cut my blocks a lot faster and better, and mill my own timber too.”