The Ladies of Missalonghi

She walked out of the house wearing neither overcoat nor scarf to protect her from the wind.

Drusilla and Octavia looked at each other.

“I hope her brain’s not affected,” said Octavia dolefully.

So secretly did Drusilla, but aloud she said stoutly, “At least you can’t call this bit of defiance underhanded!”

In the meantime Missy had let herself out of the front gate and turned left instead of right, down to where Gordon Road dwindled to two faint wheel-marks meandering into the heart of the bush. A glance behind her revealed that no one was following; Missalonghi’s squat ugliness sat with front door firmly closed.

It was a still clear day and the sun was very warm, even filtering through the trees. Up here on top of the ridge the bush was not thick, for the soil was scanty and whatever did grow mostly had to scrabble for an unloving hold on the sandstone substrate. So the eucalypts and angophoras were short, stunted, and the undergrowth sparse. Spring had arrived; even high up in the Blue Mountains it came early, and two or three warmish days were sufficient to bring the first wattle popping out into a drift of tiny fluffy yellow balls.

The valley went on to her right, glimpsed through the trees; where was John Smith’s house, if house he had? Her mother’s Saturday morning visit to Aunt Aurelia’s yesterday had elicited no further information about John Smith, save a wild rumour that he had engaged a firm of Sydney builders to erect him a huge mansion at the bottom of the cliffs, made out of sandstone quarried on the spot. But Missalonghi could offer no evidence to support this, and Missalonghi sat plump on the only route such builders would have to use. Besides which, Aunt Aurelia apparently had more important worries than John Smith; it seemed the upper echelons of the Byron Bottle Company were becoming extremely alarmed about some mysterious movements in shares.

Missy had no expectation of meeting John Smith on top of the ridge, as it was Sunday, so she decided to find out where his road went over the edge of the valley. When at last she stumbled upon the spot she could see the logic behind the site, for a gargantuan landslide had strewn boulders and rocks in a kind of ramp from top to bottom of the cliff, thus decreasing the sheerness of the drop. Standing at the commencement of the track, she could just glimpse it twisting back and forth across the landslide in a series of zigzags; a perilous descent, yes, but not an impossible one for a cart like John Smith’s.

However, she was far too timid to venture down, not from fear of falling but from fear of walking into John Smith’s lair. Instead, she struck off into the bush on top of the ridge along a narrow path that might have been made by animals going to water. And sure enough, as time went by a sound of ru

She turned to the right and followed the river, inside her dream of enchantment at last. The sun glanced off the surface of the water in a thousand thousand sparks of light, and the ferns dripped tiny droplets, and dragonflies hovered with rainbow-mica wings, and brilliant parrots wheeled from the trees of one bank to the trees of the other.

Suddenly the river vanished. It just fell away into nothing, a smoothly curving edge. Gasping, Missy drew back quickly, understanding the roar. She had come to the very head of the valley, and the stream which had cut it was entering it in the only way possible, by going down, down, down. Working cautiously along the brink for a good quarter of a mile, she came to a place where a great rock jutted far out over the cliff. And there, right on its end, legs dangling into nothingness, she sat to watch the waterfall in awe. Its bottom she could not discover, only the beautiful untidy tangle of its flight through the windy air, and a rainbow against a mossy place on the cliff behind it, and a chilly moistness that it exhaled as it fell, like a cry for help.

Several hours slipped away as easily as the water. The sun left that part of the ridge. She began to shiver; time to go home to Missalonghi.

And then where her path joined the road leading down into John Smith’s valley, Missy met John Smith himself. He was driving his cart from the direction of Byron, and she saw with surprise that the cart was laden with tools and crates and sacks and iron machinery. Somewhere was a shop open on Sunday!

He pulled up at once and jumped down, smiling broadly. “Hello!” he said. “Feeling better?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“I’m glad to catch you like this, because I was begi

“You came to see how I was?”

“Yes, last Tuesday.”

“Oh, thank you for that!” she said with fervour.

His brows rose, but he didn’t attempt to quiz her. Instead, he left his conveyance where it was, and turned to walk back with her towards Missalonghi.

“I take it there was nothing serious wrong?” he asked after some minutes during which they just paced along together without speaking.

“I don’t know,” said Missy, recognising the emanations of pity and sympathy his obviously healthy being was giving off. “I have to see a doctor in Sydney quite urgently. A heart specialist, I believe.” Now why did she say it like that?

“Oh,” he said, at a loss.

“Whereabouts exactly do you live, Mr. Smith?” she asked, to change the subject.

“Well, further around in the direction you’ve just come from is a waterfall,” he said, not at all reticently, and in a tone of voice which told Missy that, whether because of her sickly condition or because maybe she was so manifestly harmless, he had decided she could be counted a friend. “There’s an old logger’s hut near the bottom of the waterfall, and I’m camping in that for the time being. But I’m starting to build a house a bit closer to the waterfall itself – out of sandstone blocks I’m quarrying on the site. I’ve just been down to Sydney to pick up an engine to drive a big saw. That way I can cut my blocks a lot faster and better, and mill my own timber too.”

She closed her eyes and heaved a big unconscious sigh. “Oh, how I envy you!”

He stared down at her curiously. “That’s an odd thing for a woman to say.”

Missy opened her eyes. “Is it?”

“Women usually don’t like being cut off from shops and houses and other women.” His tone was hard.

“You’re probably right for the most part,” she said thoughtfully, “but in that sense I don’t really count as a woman, so I envy you. The peace, the freedom, the isolation – I dream of them!”

The end of the track came into sight, and so did the faded red corrugated iron roof of Missalonghi.

“Do you do all your shopping in Sydney?” she asked, for something to say, then chastised herself for asking a silly question; hadn’t she met him first in Uncle Maxwell’s?

“I do when I can,” he said, obviously not co

Missy gri

He burst out laughing, evidently tickled that she should bring the matter up. “My valley, you mean? They could have bought it, the sale wasn’t secret – it was advertised in the Sydney papers and in the Katoomba paper. But they’re just not as smart as they think they are, that’s all.”