The Ladies of Missalonghi Read Free Page B

for the phenomenon of the person with an aura; now within the space of a single little month she had met two of them, Una with her luminescence, and today the stranger in Uncle Maxwell’s with his fizzy blue cloud of energy crackling around him.
    “Goody!” cried Una at sight of Missy. “Darling, I have a novel you’re going to adore! All about a young noblewoman of indigent means who is obliged to go governessing in the house of a duke. She falls in love with the duke and he gets her into trouble, then refuses to have anything to do with her because it’s his wife has all the money. So he ships her to India, where her baby dies of cholera just after it’s born. Then this terrifically handsome maharajah sees her and falls in love with her on the spot because her hair is red-gold and her eyes are lime-green where of course all his dozens of wives and concubines are dark. He kidnaps her, intending to make her his plaything, but when he gets her into his clutches he finds out he respects her too much. So instead, he marries her and casts off all his other women because he says she is a jewel of such rarity she must have no rival. She becomes a maharanee, and very powerful. Then the duke arrives in India with his regiment of hussars to quell a native uprising in the hills, which he does, only he’s fatally wounded in the battle. She takes the duke into her alabaster palace, where he finally dies in her arms, but only after she forgives him for so cruelly wronging her. And the maharajah understands at last that she really does love him more than she ever loved the duke. Isn’t that a wonderful story? You’ll just adore it, I promise!”
    Being told the entire plot never put Missy off a book, so she accepted Dark Love at once and tucked it down on the bottom of her shopping bag, feeling as she did so for her own little money-purse. But it wasn’t there.
    “I’m afraid I’ve left my purse at home,” she said to Una, as mortified as only someone very poor and very proud can be. “Oh, dear! I was sure I put it in! Well, you’d better have the book back until Monday.”
    “Lord, darling, it’s not the end of the world to forget your money! Take the book now, otherwise someone else will grab it, and it’s so good it’ll be out for months. You can pay me next time you’re in.”
    “Thank you,” said Missy, knowing she ought not embark upon a course of action utterly against the precepts of Missalonghi, but helpless in the face of her lust for books. Smiling awkwardly, she began to back out of the shop as fast as she could.
    “Don’t go yet, darling,” pleaded Una. “Stay and talk to me, do!”
    “I’m sorry, I really can’t.”
    “Go on, just a wee minute! Between now and seven it’s as quiet as the grave, everyone’s home eating tea.”
    “Honestly, Una, I can’t,” said Missy wretchedly.
    Una looked mulish. “Yes, you can.”
    So, discovering that to refuse favours to those who held one in debt was quite impossible, Missy capitulated. “Well, all right then, but only for a minute.”
    “What I want to know is if you’ve set eyes on John Smith yet,” said Una, her sparkling nails fluttering about her sparkling topknot, her blue-white eyes glowing.
    “John Smith? Who’s John Smith?”
    “The chap who bought your valley last week.”
    Missy’s valley was not actually her valley, of course, it simply lay along the far side of Gordon Road, but she always thought of it as hers, and had told Una more than once about her longing to walk through it. Her face fell.
    “Oh, what a shame!”
    “Pooh! It’s a jolly good thing, if you ask me. Time someone got his foot in the Hurlingford door.”
    “Well, I’ve never heard of this John Smith, and I’m sure I’ve never seen him,” Missy said, turning to go.
    “How do you know you’ve never seen him when you won’t even stay to hear what he looks like?”
    A vision of the stranger in Uncle Maxwell’s shop rose in front of Missy’s eyes; she