The Ladies of Missalonghi (14 page)

“But why have curtains?” Missy asked aloud.

“Eh?” In the act of lighting two kerosene lamps from a spill he had thrust into the stove, he looked at her.

“How splendid to live in a house that doesn’t need any curtains,” said Missy.

He put one lamp on the table and the other on an orange crate beside his bed, then busied himself making tea.

“There’s really enough light,” said Missy, “without lamps.”

“You’re sitting in front of the window, Miss Wright, and I want some light on your face.”

So Missy lapsed into silence, letting her eyes wander wherever they chose, from John Smith to his dwelling and back again. As usual he smelled clean, though dust and earth on his clothing and arms suggested that he had been doing something fairly strenuous all morning, as did a long superficial graze on the back of his left hand and wrist.

He served the tea in enamel mugs and the biscuits still in their huge gaudy tin, but he did everything without apology and with no physical awkwardness. After he had served her and she had indicated she wished for nothing else, he carried his mug and a fistful of biscuits to the leather easy-chair, which he pulled round so he could sit facing her at close quarters.

“Why on earth, Miss Wright, would you want to marry me?”

“Because I love you!” said Missy, her tone astonished.

This answer threw him into confusion; as if suddenly he didn’t wish her to see what might lie in his eyes, he removed his gaze from her person to the window behind her, frowning.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said at last, chewing his lip.

“I would have said it was obvious.”

“You can’t possibly love someone you don’t even know, woman! It’s ridiculous.”

“I know quite enough about you to love you,” she said earnestly. “I know that you’re very kind. You’re strong on the inside. You’re clean. You’re different. And you – you have enough
poetry
in you to want to live here of all places.”

He blinked. “Christ!” he exclaimed, and laughed. “I must say that’s the most interesting catalogue of virtues I’ve ever been privileged to hear. I like the clean bit best.”

“It’s important,” said Missy gravely.

For a moment he looked as if amusement might get the better of him again, but with an effort he remained sober, and said, “I’m afraid I can’t marry you, Miss Wright.”

“Why?”

“Why? I’ll tell you why,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “You are looking at a man who has found happiness for the first time in his life! If I were twenty, that would be a stupid statement, but I’m pushing fifty, Miss Wright, and that means I’m entitled to some happiness. I’m finally doing all the things I’ve always wanted to do and never had the time or the chance – and I’m
alone
! No wife, no relations, no dependents of any kind. Not even a dog. Just me. And I love it! To have to share it would spoil it. In fact, I’m going to put a bloody great gate across the top of my road and keep the whole world out.
Marriage?
Not in a fit!”

“It wouldn’t be for very long,” said Missy quietly.

“A day would be too long, Miss Wright.”

“I understand how you feel, Mr. Smith, and I do mean that most sincerely. I too have spent a confined life, I too have chafed against it. But I cannot imagine for a moment that your life has been as dull, as drab and uneventful as mine has always been. Oh, I don’t wish to imply that I’ve been mistreated, or treated one iota worse than the other ladies of Missalonghi. We all live the same dull drab uneventful life. But I am tired of it, Mr. Smith! I want to live a little before I die! Can you understand that?”

“Hell, who couldn’t? But if you’re in a proposing mood, why not put the hard word on some of the widowers or bachelors in Byron? There must be a few around somewhere.” His shell of hardness was setting with every word he said, and he was beginning to feel as if he might extricate himself from this most embarrassing situation without losing either his freedom or his self-respect.

“That would be a fate worse than Missalonghi, because it would be no different. I’ve chosen you because you’re living exactly the kind of life I want to live – away from people, away from houses and smugness and gossip. Believe me, Mr. Smith, I have no intention of cramping your style – on the contrary, I want you to free up mine! I won’t be a millstone around your neck. In fact, I’ll guarantee to leave you alone most of the time. And it wouldn’t be forever, I promise you. A year. Just one little year!”

“So after a year of living the sort of life you’re dying to live, you’re going to pick up and tamely go back to the life you hate?” His tone was sceptical.

Missy drew up her meagre form with profound dignity. “I only have a year to live, Mr. Smith,” she said.

He looked desperately sorry for her, as if he now knew everything about her there was to know.

She pushed her advantage relentlessly. “I understand very well your reluctance to share this paradise – if it were mine, I too would guard it jealously. But try to see my side, please! I am thirty-three years old, and I have never known any of the things most women my age either take for granted or wish they didn’t have at all. I am an old maid! That is the most dreadful fate a woman can suffer, for it goes hand in hand with poverty and lack of beauty. If I had suffered one without the other, some man would have been prepared to marry me, but to suffer both is to be completely undesirable. Yet I
know
that if I can only get past these handicaps, I have a great deal to offer that most women don’t, because they have no need to. You would enjoy all the advantages, Mr. Smith, for I would be tied to you by the bonds of gratitude and thankfulness, as well as by love. I wish there was some way right at this moment whereby I could show you how little you’d lose by marrying me, and how much you’d gain you don’t even know about. I have good sense, and no puffed-up notion of my own importance. And I would try with might and main to be the nicest of companions for you, as well as the most loving.”

He got up abruptly and went to stand looking out the door, his hands clasped behind his back. “Women,” he said, “are liars, cheats, connivers and fools. I wouldn’t care if I never saw another woman as long as I lived. As for love – I don’t
want
to be loved! I just want to be left alone!” This cry from the heart he seemed to think was enough, then, rethinking, he added harshly, “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

“Well, Mr. Smith, you are not exactly at the top of the list of Byron’s most eligible men! I have heard you described as everything from a jailbird to an eccentric, and it is common knowledge that you are not rich. Why therefore should I lie?” She opened her purse and fished out the neatly folded piece of paper she had appropriated from Dr. Parkinson’s desk, then got up from her chair and walked across to join him at the door. “Here. Read this. You do know I’m ill, because you were there when I had my first bad turn. And when I met you the other day on my walk, I’m sure I told you I had to go to Sydney to see a heart specialist. Well, this is his report on my condition. I stole it, first of all because I don’t want my mother and aunt to know I’m so sick. I don’t want to become an object of worry for them, I don’t want to be forced into bed and fussed over. So I told them I had a kinked spinal nerve, and if I can keep up the deception, that’s what they’re going to go on thinking is wrong with me. My second reason for stealing it concerns you. I knew I was going to ask you to marry me and I knew I’d need proof of my sincerity. There is no name on it except the doctor’s, I know, but if you look at it carefully, you will see no patient’s name has been erased from it, either.”

He took the paper, unfolded it, read it quickly and turned to face her. “Aside from being awfully skinny, you look healthy enough to me,” he said doubtfully.

Missy did some fast thinking, and prayed he was no medical expert. “Why, between my turns I am healthy enough! Mine is not the sort of heart trouble that saps the strength, it’s more like – like – like having little strokes. The valves – stick – and – and when they do, the blood stops flowing. That I gather is what’s going to kill me. I don’t know any more than that – doctors never want to tell you anything. I suppose they find it hard enough to tell you you’re going to die.” She heaved a sigh, and began to scale histrionic heights with the aplomb of an actress. “I shall just go out like a light one day!” Her eyes lifted to his wistfully. “I don’t want to die at Missalonghi!” she cried pitifully. “I want to die in the arms of the man I love!”

He was a born fighter, so he tried a different tack. “How about a second opinion? Doctors can be wrong.”

“What for?” countered Missy. “If I only have a year to live, I do not want to spend it traipsing from one doctor to another!” A big tear fell down her cheek, while others still swimming with telling effect threatened to follow its lead. “Oh, Mr. Smith, I want to spend my last year
happily
!”

He groaned the groan of a condemned man. “For God’s sake, woman, don’t cry!”

“Why not?” sobbed Missy, scrabbling up her sleeve for her handkerchief. “I think I have every right to cry!”

“Then cry, damn you!” he said, goaded beyond endurance, and marched out of the door.

Missy stood mopping her tears, eyes following him through them as he strode to the far side of the clearing and then disappeared from view. Head down, she returned to her chair and finished her cry with no more appreciative audience than a large blow-fly. After which, she didn’t know what to do. Was he coming back? Was he hiding somewhere watching to see her leave before coming back?

Suddenly she felt very tired, utterly dispirited. All that, and no result. So much for Una’s encouragement. So much for stolen reports. So much for her bright vision of emancipation. She sighed, and had never meant a sigh more, or sighed more. No use staying here. She wasn’t wanted.

She let herself out of the cabin quietly, and made sure that she closed the door. It was gone two o’clock, and she had a nine-mile walk, all uphill, all difficult terrain; it would be late before she arrived back at Missalonghi.

“Yet I don’t feel sorry I tried,” she said aloud. “It was worth a try, I
know
it was.”

“Miss Wright!”

She turned, hope kindling and blazing.

“Hold on, I’ll drive you home.”

“Thank you, I can walk,” she said, not stiffly or huffily, just in her old colourlessly polite manner.

By this he had reached her side, and put his hand beneath her elbow. “No, it’s too late and too hard a walk, especially for you. Sit here while I harness up.” And he deposited her on the same tree stump where she had sat waiting for him.

She really was too tired to argue, and perhaps too tired to face the walk, so she made no demur. When he was ready, he lifted her up into the cart as easily as if she had been a child.

“This only goes to prove what I’ve been telling myself lately,” he said as he turned the horses out of the clearing onto the track. “I need a smaller vehicle, a sulky or a gig. It’s a damned nuisance to have to use both horses and a big cart unless I’ve got a heavy load.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re right,” she said meaninglessly.

“Angry?”

Her face turned to his, its expression purely surprised. “No! Why should I be?”

“Well, you didn’t meet with much luck, did you?”

She laughed, not very heartily, yet still a genuine laugh. “Poor Mr. Smith, you don’t understand at all.”

“Obviously I don’t. What’s the joke?”

“I had nothing to lose. Nothing!”

“Did you really think you might win?”

“I was sure I would win.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re you.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Oh — just that you’re so very kind. A decent person.”

“Thanks.”

After that little was said; the horses plodded reluctantly along the jungly track, obviously not understanding why they were proceeding away from home. But even when they came to the switchback up the landslide they plodded on without visible protest, which to the country-wise Missy indicated that they knew their master better than to baulk. Yet he was pleasant to them, and didn’t ply the whip; he dominated them by the force of his will.

“I must say that it shows, your not being a Hurlingford,” he said abruptly as the journey neared its end.

“
Not
a Hurlingford? What makes you assume that?”

“Lots of things. Your name, for a start. Your appearance. The godforsaken position of your home, and the lack of money in it. Your nice nature.” He sounded as if he grudged this last admission.

“Not all Hurlingfords are rich, Mr. Smith. As a matter of fact I am a Hurlingford, at least on the distaff side. My aunt and mother are the sisters of Maxwell and Herbert Hurlingford, and first cousins of Sir William’s.”

He turned to stare at her while she explained this, then whistled. “Well, that’s a smack in the eye! A nest of genuine Hurlingfords all the way out at the end of Gordon Road, and scraping to make ends meet. What happened?”

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.