The Ladies of Missalonghi Read Free

house-devil.
    When Missy entered the shop a bell tinkled raucously, that being a perfect description of the sound Maxwell Hurlingford had devised in order to gratify his ascetics as well as his prudence. He emerged immediately the bell summoned him from the nether regions out the back, where resided the bran and chaff and wheat and barley and pollard and oats in towering stacks of hempen bags; not only did Maxwell Hurlingford cater to the gastronomic needs of the human population of Byron, he also victualled its horses, cows, pigs, sheep and chooks. As one local wit said when his grass failed, Maxwell Hurlingford got you going and coming.
    His face bore its normal expression, sour, and his right hand a big scoop whiskered with webby strands of fodder.
    “Look at this!” he snarled, waving the scoop at Missy in an uncanny imitation of his sister Octavia bearing her mouse-pillaged bags of oats. “Weevils all over the place.”
    “Oh, dear! The bulk oats too?”
    “The lot.”
    “Then you’d better give me a box of proper breakfast oats, please, Uncle Maxwell.”
    “Just as well horses aren’t fussy,” he grumbled, putting the scoop down and squeezing behind the grocery counter.
    The bell erupted into agitated life again as a man came through the door with a huge swirl of cold misty air and a dazzling briskness of purpose.
    “Bloody hell, it’s colder than a stepmother’s tits out there!” gasped the newcomer, slapping his hands together.
    “Sir! There are ladies present!”
    “Oops!” said the newcomer, neglecting to follow this sop with an apology proper. Instead, he bellied up to the counter and grinned wickedly down at the gaping Missy. “Ladies in the plural, man? I can only see half a one!”
    Neither Missy nor Uncle Maxwell could work out whether this was merely an insulting reference to her lack of height in a town of giants, or whether he was grossly insulting her by implying she was not really a lady. So by the time Uncle Maxwell had collected the use of his famously acid wits and tongue, the stranger was already well embarked upon his list of requirements.
    “I want six bags of bran and pollard, a bag of flour, a bag of sugar, a box of twelve-gauge cartridges, a side of bacon, six tins of baking powder, ten pounds of tinned butter, ten pounds of raisins, a dozen tins of golden syrup, six tins of plum jam, and a ten-pound tin of Arnott’s mixed biscuits.”
    “It is five minutes to five, and I close at five on the dot,” said Uncle Maxwell stiffly.
    “Then you’d better hop to it, hadn’t you?” asked the stranger unsympathetically.
    The box of proprietary oats was sitting on the counter; Missy milked her sixpence out of the finger of her glove and tendered it, waiting in vain for Uncle Maxwell to give her any change and quite lacking the courage to ask him whether a small quantity of a basic commodity could cost so much, even dolled up in a fancy box. In the end she picked up the oats and left, but not before stealing another glance at the stranger.
    He had a cart drawn by two horses, for such was tethered outside the store, and had not been there when Missy entered. A good-looking equipage too; the horses were trim and sleek with a sensible dash of draft in them, and the cart seemed new, the spokes of its wheels picked out in yellow on a rich brown background.
    Four minutes to five. If she reversed the order of their arrival in Uncle Maxwell’s shop, she could plead the stranger’s rudeness and vast order as an excuse for being late, and thereby manage to fit in a dash to the library.
    The town of Byron possessed no public library; few towns in Australia did in those days. But there was a privately owned lending library to fill the gap. Livilla Hurlingford was a widow with a very expensive son; economic need allied to the need always to appear respectable had driven her to open a well-stocked book room, and its popularity and profitability had led her to ignore the general blue laws which