The Ladies of Missalonghi

  So for the rest of the way home Missy regaled John Smith with an account of the perfidy of the first Sir William, and the compounded perfidy of his successors.

  “Thank you,” he said at the end of it. “You’ve answered a lot of questions for me, and given me quite a bit to think about.” He pulled his horses up outside the front gate of Missalonghi. “Here you are, home again, and well before your mother would be worried.”

  She jumped down without assistance. “Thank you, dear Mr. Smith. It’s as I still maintain – you’re a very kind man.”

  In answer, he tipped his hat and flashed her a smile, then began turning his horses.

  ✳

  Octavia found Missy’s note when she went to investigate Missy’s whereabouts. There it sat, very white against the brown coverlet, with the single word MOTHER printed across its surface. Her heart thudded down into her boots; notes that said MOTHER never contained good news.

  So when she heard Drusilla letting herself in through the front door, she scuttled into the hall with the note in her hand and her protuberant pale blue eyes all geared up to shed as many tears as the contents of the note dictated.

  “Missy’s gone, and she’s left this note for you!”

  Drusilla frowned, unalarmed. “Gone?”

  “Gone! She has taken all her clothes, and she has taken our carpetbag.”

  The skin over Drusilla’s cheeks began to prickle and stretch uncomfortably; she snatched the note from Octavia and read it aloud so Octavia could not misinterpret the contents.

  “Dear Mother,” it said,

  “Please forgive me for going off without a word, but I really think it is better that you do not know what I plan until I know whether or not it’s going to work. I will probably be home tomorrow or the next day for a visit at least. Please do not worry. I am safe. Your loving daughter, Missy.”

  Octavia’s tears overflowed, but Drusilla did not weep. She folded the letter again and carried it into the kitchen, where she propped it very carefully on the shelf of the chimney.

  “We must call in the police,” said Octavia tearfully.

  “We will do no such thing,” contradicted Drusilla, and moved the kettle to the front of the stove. “Oh, dear, I need a cup of tea badly!”

  “But Missy might be in danger!”

  “I very much doubt it. There’s nothing in her note to indicate any kind of foolishness.” She sat down with a sigh. “Octavia, do dry your eyes! The events of the last few days have taught me that Missy is a person to be reckoned with. I have no doubt that she is safe, and that, probably tomorrow, we will indeed see her again. In the meantime, we do not so much as mention to anybody that Missy has left home.”

  “But she’s out there somewhere without a soul to protect her from Men!”

  “It may well be that Missy has decided she would rather not be protected from Men,” said Drusilla dryly. “Now do as you’re told, Octavia, stop crying and make us some tea. I have a lot to tell you that has nothing to do with Missy’s disappearance.”

  Curiosity overcame distress; Octavia poured a little hot water into the teapot and set it to stand by the stove. “Oh, what?” she asked eagerly.

  “Well, I gave Cornelia and Julia their money, and I bought myself a Singer sewing machine.”

  “Drusilla!”

  And so the two ladies left at Missalonghi drank their tea and discussed the events of the day more thoroughly, after which they went back to their routines, and eventually retired to their respective bedrooms.

  “Dear God,” said Drusilla on her knees, “please help and protect Missy, keep her from all harm and give her strength in all adversities. Amen.”

  After which she climbed into her bed, the only double one, as befitted the only married lady. But it was some time before she managed to close her eyes.

  The organ had saved Missy from detection when John Smith dropped her back at Missalonghi; no one heard his cart arrive or depart, and no one heard Missy as she crept around the side of the house and headed across the backyard towards the shed. It held no place capable of concealing her, but she managed to tuck the carpetbag down behind a sack of fodder, and then she left the shed for the shelter of the orchard until after her mother had milked the cow. Of course the cow knew her step and began to low pitifully to be milked, but before Buttercup became really agitated, out came Drusilla with the bucket.

  Missy huddled down behind the fattest-trunked apple tree and closed her eyes and wished she did have terminal heart disease, preferably severe enough to ensure she would never see the morning.

  Not until after full darkness had fallen did she stir; it was the penetrating Blue Mountains cold spring air drove her from the orchard at last, into the relative warmth of the shed. Buttercup was lying with feet tucked under, placidly chewing cud, udder comfortably empty. So Missy put a clean sack down on the ground next to the cow, and curled up on the sack with her head and shoulders lying against Buttercup’s warm rumbly side.

  Of course she should have gathered up her courage and walked into the house the minute John Smith had gone, but when she tried to make her feet mount the front verandah steps, they just would not. How could you tell your mother that you’d proposed marriage to a near-stranger and been refused for your pains? Or failing that one, what convincing story could she have concocted? Missy was not a story spinner, she was only a story reader. Maybe in the morning she could confess, she told herself, gasping at the ache and sorrow of it; but how much worse would that be, with a night spent elsewhere than under the roof of Missalonghi to be accounted for? Who would ever believe she had spent it sleeping with a cow? Go inside at once, whispered her better self; but her worse self could not find the courage.

  The tears began to gather and to fall, for indeed Missy was exhausted, not so much from her physical exertions as from the terrific burst of will that had sent her to see John Smith.

  “Oh, Buttercup, what am I going to do?” she wept.

  Buttercup merely huffed.

  And shortly afterwards, Missy fell asleep.

  The Missalonghi rooster woke her about an hour before dawn, screeching his clarion from the beam right above her head. She leaped up, confused, then subsided against her living pillow in a fresh agony of pain and bewilderment. She wasn’t hungry, she wasn’t thirsty. What to do? Oh, what to do?

  But by dawn she had made up her mind what to do, and rose then to her feet with purpose in her movements. Pulling comb and brush from the carpetbag, she tidied herself as best she could, but at the end of her efforts was dismally aware she smelled strongly of cow.

  No sound of stirring life came from Missalonghi as she crept past it, and faintly from out her mother’s window came a series of little snores. Safe.

  Down once more into John Smith’s valley, not with the dreamy enchantment of yesterday, nor with the irrepressible happiness of yesterday, when nothing had seemed impossible and everything had seemed bound to end well. This time Missy marched with little hope but iron determination; he would not say her nay again, even if it meant she had to spend every night of the next year in her mother’s shed with Buttercup for a bedmate, and every day marching down to the bottom of John Smith’s valley to ask again. For ask again she would, and tomorrow if he said nay today, and the day after, and the day after that...

  It was going on for ten o’clock when she came at last to the clearing and the cabin; there rose the same rippling blur from the chimney, but, as yesterday, no John Smith. Down on the tree stump she sat to wait.

  Perhaps he too had passed beyond hunger; when noon came and went without a sign of him, Missy resigned herself to waiting the whole afternoon as well. Indeed, the sun had long gone behind the great walls above, and the light was fading rapidly, before he came home. More seriously than yesterday, but just as blind to Missy sitting on her stump.

  “Mr. Smith!”

  “Bloody hell!”

  He came across immediately to stand looking down at her, not angrily, but not pleasantly, either.
“What are you doing back here again?”

  “Will you marry me, Mr. Smith?”

  This time he didn’t put his hand beneath her elbow and walk her across to the cabin; he turned to face her fully as she rose to her feet, and looked down into her eyes.

  “Is someone putting you up to this?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Does it really mean that much to you?”

  “It means my life, literally. I am not going home! I’m going to come here every day and ask again.”

  “You’re playing with fire, Miss Wright,” he said, lips thin and tight. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that a man might resort to violence if a woman refuses to leave him alone?”

  She smiled up serenely, sublimely, seraphically. “Some men, maybe. But not you, Mr. Smith.”

  “What do you really stand to gain? What if I did say I’d marry you? Is that the sort of husband you want, a man you’ve worn down until he doesn’t know what else to do for peace than give in – or strangle you?” His voice dropped, became very hard. “In this big wide world, Miss Wright, lives a malignant thing called hate. I beg of you, don’t uncage it!”

  “Will you marry me?” she asked.

  He screwed up his mouth, blew air through his nose, and lifted his head to stare above hers at something she couldn’t see. And said nothing for what seemed like a very long time. Then he shrugged, looked down at her. “I admit I’ve thought a lot about you since yesterday, and even the heaviest work I could find didn’t stop my thinking about you. And I started to wonder too if maybe I was being offered a way to atone, and if my luck might disappear because I ignored the offer.”

  “A way to atone? Atone for what?”

  “Just a figure of speech. Everyone has something to atone for, no one is free of guilt. In forcing yourself on me, you’re creating a cause for atonement, don’t you see that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it makes no difference?”

  “I’ll take whatever comes to me gladly, Mr. Smith, if I can take you along with it.”

  “Very well, then. I’ll marry you.”

  All of Missy’s pain and numbness flew away. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Smith! You won’t regret it, I promise!”

  He grunted. “You’re a child, Miss Wright, not a grown woman, and perhaps that’s why I’ve given in rather than strangled you. I can’t honestly believe there’s woman’s guile in you. Only don’t ever give me reason to change that opinion.”

  And now his hand went under her arm, the signal to walk.

  “There’s one thing I must ask, Mr. Smith,” she said.

  “What?”

  “That we never refer to the fact that I’m going to die, nor let it influence our behaviour. I want to be free! And I cannot be free if I am to be perpetually reminded by word or deed that I’m going to die.”

  “Agreed,” said John Smith.

  Not wanting to push her luck, for she sensed she had gone about as far in that line as was prudent, Missy entered the cabin and went to sit quietly in one of the kitchen chairs, while John Smith swung round inside the door and stood staring out of it at the beginnings of a thin blue night’s ground mist.

  Silently she watched his back, which was long and broad and, at the moment, extremely eloquent. But after about five minutes she ventured to say, her voice very small and apologetic, “What happens now, Mr. Smith?”

  He jumped as if he had forgotten she was there, and went to sit opposite her at the table. His face in the gloom was full of shadows, heavy, deadened, a little daunting. But when he spoke, it was cheerfully enough, as if he had decided there was no point in making himself more miserable than the situation called for. “My name is John,” he said, and got up to light his two lamps, both of which he placed on the table so he could see her face. “As to the main business, we get a licence, and we get married.”

  “How long will it take?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, if banns aren’t called. A couple of days? Maybe even sooner, with a special licence. In the meantime, I’d better drive you home.”

  “Oh, no! I’m staying here,” said Missy.

  “If you stay here you’re likely to start your honeymoon prematurely,” he said, hope blossoming. What a good idea! She might decide she didn’t like it! After all, most women didn’t. And he could be hard about it, not rape her exactly, just force her a little; a virgin of her age was bound to be easy to frighten. At which point he made the mistake of looking at her to see how she reacted. And there she was, poor little dying thing, just gazing at him with blinded foolish affection, like a puppy awash with love. John Smith’s sleeping heart moved, felt a bitter and unaccustomed pain. For indeed she had haunted him all day, no matter how hard he worked to drive out her image and replace it by emptiness hacked out of physical labour. He had his secrets, some of them buried so deep he could tell himself in all truth that he had never suffered those secrets, that he was reborn in all the newness and nakedness of a life begun again. But all day things had nibbled and whispered and gnawed, and the utter pleasure he had found in his valley had vanished. Maybe he did have to atone; maybe that was why she had come. Only he honestly didn’t have one thing to atone for so large, so depressing. He didn’t. Oh no, he didn’t, he didn’t!

  Maybe she wouldn’t like it. Take her to bed, John Smith, show her what it’s like in the wasteland of the body, fill her with yourself and with disgust for it. She’s a woman.

  But Missy liked it very well, and demonstrated a surprising aptitude for it. Another nail went thudding into John Smith’s coffin, as he wryly admitted to himself about three hours after he and Missy had retired dinnerless to bed. Wonders never ceased. This ageing spinster virgin was made for it! Though dreadfully ignorant at first, she was neither shy nor shamed, and her affectionate responses warmed him, touched him, made it impossible for him to be cruel or unkind to her. The little baggage! None of your lying there passively with your legs open for her! And how much life there was in her, just waiting to be tapped. Suddenly the thought that the end of her life was imminent shocked him; it was one thing to pity someone he didn’t know, quite another to face the same dilemma with someone he knew intimately. That was the trouble with beds. They turned strangers into intimates more quickly than ten years of polite teas in parlours.

  Missy slept like a log and woke before John Smith did, probably because sleep eluded him long after it had claimed her. He had more to think about.

  A faint light filtered through the window, so she eased herself carefully out of the bed and stood shivering until she donned the dressing gown out of her bag. How lovely it had been! More of a realist than she had suspected, she dismissed the initial unpleasantness of pain and remembered instead those big strong work-roughened hands stroking and soothing and comforting. Feelings and sensations, touches and kisses, heat and light – oh yes, it was lovely!

  She moved as quietly as she could about the cabin, hotting up the stove and moving the kettle to a place where it would boil. But of course her activity woke him, and he got out of bed too, quite unconcerned at his nakedness; Missy was given an unparalleled opportunity to study the anatomical differences between men and women.

  Even more delightful than this was his reaction to her presence. He walked straight across to her, folded her in his arms and stood rocking gently, still half-asleep and thus heavy against her, his beard scraping her neck.

  “Good morning,” she whispered, her smiling lips pressing little kisses on his shoulder.

  “Morning,” he mumbled, evidently liking her response.

  Of course she was ravenous, having had virtually nothing to eat in two days. “I’ll get breakfast,” she said.

  “Want a bath?” He sounded more awake, but made no attempt to move away from her.

  He could smell Buttercup! Oh, poor man! Hunger fled yet again. “Yes, please. But a lavatory too?”

  “Get your shoes on.”

  While she slid her feet into her boots, not bothering to lace them, he rumma
ged in a big chest and produced two towels, old and rough, but clean.

  The clearing sparkled with frost and was still in heavy shade, but as Missy looked up, the great sandstone walls of the valley were already glowing red with the sunrise, and the sky was taking on the muted milky radiance of a pearl – or of Una’s skin. Birds called and sang everywhere, never more prone to give voice than at dawn.

  “The lavatory’s a bit primitive,” he warned, showing her where he had dug a deep hole and placed some stone blocks around it for a seat, with newspaper tucked into a box to keep it dry; he had not enclosed it with roof or walls.

  “It’s the best-ventilated lavatory I’ve ever seen,” she said cheerfully.

  He chuckled. “Long job, or short?”

  “Short, thank you.”

  “Then I’ll wait for you. Over there.” He pointed to the far side of the clearing.

  When Missy joined him a minute later she was already shivering in anticipation of an icy plunge into the river; he looked like the kind of man who would relish freezing ablutions. Maybe, she thought, I’ll be hoist with my own petard, and keel over stone dead from the shock.

  But instead of steering her towards the river, John Smith drew her into the middle of a thicket of tree-ferns and wild clematis in feathery white flower. And there before her was the most beautiful bathroom in the entire world, a warm spring that trickled out of a cleft between two rocks at the top of a small stony incline, and fell, too thinly to be called a cascade, into a wide and mossy basin.

  Missy had her robe off in a flash, and two seconds later was stepping down into a crystal-clear pool of blood-heat water, tendrils of steam rising languorously off it into the chilly air. It was about eighteen inches deep, and its bottom was clean smooth rock. No leeches, either!

  “Go easy on the soap,” advised John Smith, pointing to where a fat cake of his expensive brand sat in a small niche alongside the pool. “The water obviously gets away, because the level of the pool never rises any more than the spring stops flowing, but don’t tempt fate.”

  “Now I understand why you’re so clean,” she said, thinking of Missalonghi baths, two inches of water in the bottom of the rusting tub, hot from a kettle and cold from a bucket. And that one miserably inadequate ration of water was used by all three ladies, with Missy, the shortest straw, last in line.