“I came to show you how I feel about your charity, Alicia, and to tell you that I am happy to come to your wedding in good old brown,” said Missy, marching across the room and dumping her parcel on the table in front of Alicia. “There! Thank you, but no thank you.”
Alicia stared at her much as she might have stared at a dog turd she had almost stepped in. “Please yourself!”
“I intend to, from now on.” She glanced up at the much taller Alicia (who admitted to five feet ten but was actually six feet one) with a puckish grin. “Go on, Alicia, open it! I dyed it brown just for you.”
“You what?” Alicia began to fumble with the knots in the string, so Randolph came to her rescue with his pocket knife. After the string was cut the wrapping parted easily, and there lay the beautiful organdie dress and the ravishing hat, unspeakably smirched with what looked – and smelled – like fresh, sloppy, healthy cow and pig dung.
Alicia let out a squeak of horror that kept on growing and swelling until it became a long thin screech, and jumped away from the table as her mother, father, brothers, uncle and fiancé crowded round to see.
“You – you disgusting little trollop!” she snarled at the beaming Missy.
“Oh, I am not!” said Missy smugly.
“You’re worse than a trollop! And you may count yourself lucky indeed that I am too much of a lady to tell you exactly what I do think you are!” gasped Alicia, hardly knowing which had shocked her most, the deed, or the doer of the deed.
“Then you may count yourself unlucky that I am not too much of a lady to tell you exactly what I think you are, Alicia. I am only three days older than you, which puts you a lot closer to thirty-four than it does to thirty-three. Yet, here you are, mutton dressed up as lamb, brazen as brass, about to marry a boy hardly more than half your age! His father’s years are more suitable! And that makes you a cold-blooded cradle-snatcher! When Montgomery Massey died before you could haul him to the altar – thereby escaping a fate worse than death – you couldn’t see anyone on your horizon who was a tenth as good a catch. And then you spied poor Little Willie, still with all his baby-curls, playing with his hoop in his sailor suit, and you decided to be Lady Willie one day. I have no doubt that had the circumstances changed, you’d have been just as happy to be Lady Billy instead of Lady Willie – happier maybe, since the title’s already there. I admire your gall, Alicia, but I do not admire you. And I feel very sorry for poor Little Willie, who is going to lead a wretched life, a bone between his wife and his mother.”
The object of her pity was standing, with the rest of his relatives, gaping at Missy as if she had jumped stark naked out of a gigantic cake and proceeded to do the can-can. Aurelia had mercifully gone into hysterics, but so mesmerised was the rest of Missy’s audience that it had failed to notice the fact.
Sir William recovered first. “Get out of this house!”
“I’m on my way,” said Missy, looking very pleased.
“I will never forgive you for this!” cried Alicia. “How dare you? How dare you?”
“Oh, go bite your bum!” said Missy, and laughed. “It’s big enough,” she added, and departed.
This was the proverbial last straw; Alicia stiffened until she became utterly rigid, gave a gurgling moaning shriek, and fell over with a crash to join her mother on the floor.
Oh, how satisfying that had been! But as she walked away down the gradual hill of George Street that led into the main thoroughfare of Byron, Missy’s elation faded. Compared to the topic under discussion during her first and unnoticed tenure of the drawing room, the presentation of Alicia’s violated clothing was picayune. Those poor women! Missy knew as little about the world of company business as her mother and aunts, but she was fully intelligent enough to have caught the drift of Sir William’s words. She even knew of the shares, for Drusilla kept hers and Octavia’s both in the small tin cash-box that lay inside her wardrobe and held things like the deeds to her house and five acres of land. Ten shares each, twenty shares altogether. Which meant that Aunt Cornelia and Aunt Julia probably had ten shares each as well. Dividend. That was obviously some sort of periodic payment, a share in the company’s profits.
How very despicable most of her male relations were! Sir William, eager to keep that disgraceful policy of the first Sir William’s going, so that the hapless female members of his family who pinched and scraped in grinding but genteel poverty should have none of the fruits that accrued from the bottling of what was, after all, in God’s gift rather than in any Hurlingford’s. Uncle Maxwell, who was the worst kind of thief, rich in his own right, yet stealing the eggs and butter and orchardings of his poor relations because he had bullied them into believing that to sell elsewhere would be an unforgivable act of disloyalty. Uncle Herbert, who had bought up many of those houses on five acres in his time, always for a great deal less than they were worth, being the same kind of bully as his brother Maxwell. Only he was worse, because he stole back the little he paid out as well, by telling his victims that the investment schemes designed to make that little a little more had failed.
Not only the male relations were despicable, Missy amended, in a mood to dish out criticisms fairly. If the Aurelias and Augustas and Antonias had brought pressure to bear, having married on the inside of the clan fortunes, maybe they might have succeeded in changing things, for the worst bully is vulnerable to being bullied by his wife.
Well, something must be done. But what? Missy debated carrying her tale home, then decided she would not be believed, or if believed, that her mother and aunts would still end in being bullied out of their just due. Something had to be done, and done soon, before Alicia came smarming round to secure the shares, as secure them she undoubtedly would.
The library was open today; Missy glanced through the window expecting to see Aunt Livilla’s grim form behind the desk, but there instead was Una. So she slowed down, turned round, and backtracked.
“Missy! What a treat! I didn’t expect to see you today, darling,” said Una, smiling as if she really did think it a treat to see the family trollop cum scragbag.
“I’m so angry!” cried Missy, and sat down on the hard chair provided for browsers, fanning herself with her hand.
“What’s the matter?”
Suddenly realising she couldn’t possibly expose that small clutch of close blood-relations to the contempt of a person as remotely connected to the Byron arm of the clan as Una, she had to compromise with a lame, “Oh, nothing.”
Una didn’t attempt to probe. She just nodded and smiled, that lovely radiance emanating from skin and hair and nails subtly soothing rage.
“How about a cup of tea before the long hike home?” she asked, getting up.
A cup of tea assumed the proportions of a life-giving elixir; “Yes, please!” said Missy with fervour.
Una disappeared behind the last bookshelf at the back of the room, where in a small cubicle there lay facilities for making tea; there was no toilet, the norm in Byron shops, for everyone was expected to use the toilets in the Byron Waters Baths, and be quick about it.
To investigate the novels while she waited seemed like a good idea to Missy, so she moved to the back of the room and inched along the shelf that came hard up against the edge of Aunt Livilla’s desk. And her eye in moving sideways round the desk to where the shelf continued on its far side encountered a familiar-looking sheaf of papers lying there. A packet of share certificates in the Byron Bottle Company.
Una emerged. “Kettle’s on, but it takes time to boil from scratch on a spirit stove.” Her eyes followed Missy’s, then came to rest on Missy’s face. “Isn’t it lovely?” she asked.
