The Ladies of Missalonghi Read Free Page A

closed the shops of Byron at five on weekday afternoons, for the bulk of her patrons preferred to exchange their books in the evenings.
    Books were Missy’s only solace and sole luxury. She was permitted to keep the money she made from selling Missalonghi’s excess eggs and butter, and she spent all of this pittance borrowing books from her Aunt Livilla’s library. Both her mother and aunt disapproved strongly, but having announced some years earlier that Missy should have an opportunity to put something by above and beyond the fifty pounds her father had bestowed upon her at her birth, Drusilla and Octavia were too fair to rescind their decree simply because Missy turned out a spendthrift.
    Provided she did her allotted share of the work – and did it properly, without skimping by a whisker – no one objected if Missy read books, where they objected strenuously if she voiced a desire to go walking through the bush. To walk through the bush was to place her debatably desirable person smack in the path of murder or rapine, and was not going to be permitted under any circumstances. Drusilla therefore ordered her cousin Livilla to supply Missy only with good books; no novels whatsoever, no scurrilous or scandalous biographies, no sort of reading matter aimed at the masculine gender. This dictum Aunt Livilla policed rigorously, having the same ideas as Drusilla about what unmarried ladies should read.
    But for the last month Missy had harboured a guilty secret; she was being supplied with novels galore. Aunt Livilla had found herself an assistant to run the library on Monday and Tuesday and Saturday, thus enabling Aunt Livilla to enjoy a four-day respite from the grizzling importunities of locals who had read everything on her shelves and visitors whose tastes her shelves did not cater for. Of course the new assistant was a Hurlingford, though not a Hurlingford from Byron; she hailed from the fleshpots of Sydney.
    People rarely took any notice of the tongue-tied and sadly inhibited Missy Wright, but Una, as the new assistant was named, had seemed instantly to detect in Missy the stuff of a good friend. So from the beginning of her tenure, Una had drawn Missy out to an amazing degree; she knew Missy’s habits, circumstances, prospects, troubles and dreams. She had also worked out a foolproof system whereby Missy might borrow forbidden fruit without Aunt Livilla’s finding out, and she plied Missy with novels of all kinds, from the most adventurous to the most wildly romantic.
    Of course tonight it would be Aunt Livilla on duty, so her book would have to be of the old kind. Yet when Missy opened the glass door and came into the cheery warmth of the book room, there sat Una behind the desk, and of the dreaded Aunt Livilla there was no sign.
    More than Una’s undeniable liveliness, understanding and kindness had endeared her to Missy; she was a truly remarkable looking woman as well. Her figure was excellent, her height sufficient to mark her out as a true Hurlingford, and her clothes reminded Missy of her cousin Alicia’s clothes, always in good taste, always in the latest fashion, always verging on the glamorous. Arctically fair of skin and hair and eye, still Una contrived not to appear half bald and wholly washed out, which was the fate of every Hurlingford female except Alicia (who was so ravishingly beautiful that God had given her dark brows and lashes when she grew up) and Missy (who was entirely dark). Even more intriguing than Una’s positive brand of fairness was a curious, luminous quality she owned, a delicious bloom that lay not so much upon her skin as inside it; her nails, oval and long, radiated this light-filled essence, as did her hair, piled in the latest puffs all around her head and culminating in a glittering topknot so blonde it was almost white. The air around her took on a sheen that was there and yet was not there. Fascinating! Lifelong exposure to none save Hurlingfords had left Missy unprepared