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“Brown!” chorused every voice, and then there was a gale of laughter.
“I have an idea!” cried Lavinia when the merriment ceased. “Why don’t you give Missy one of your own cast-offs in a shade that will suit her?”
“I’d rather be dead,” said Alicia scornfully. “See one of my lovely dresses on that dago-looking scragbag? If you feel so strongly about it, my dear Lavinia, why don’t you donate her one of your cast-offs?”
“I am not,” said Lavinia tartly, “in your cosy financial position, Alicia, that’s why! Think about it, since you’re so peeved at her appearance. You wear a lot of amber and old gold and apricot. I imagine anything in that sort of range would look all right on Missy.”
At which point Missy managed to get herself on hands and knees out of the rhododendrons and onto the path. She crept on all fours until she was well clear of the window, then got to her feet and ran. The tears were pouring down her face, but she wasn’t about to stop and dry them, too angry and shamed to care who might see.
She hadn’t thought anything anybody might say about her could hurt, for a thousand thousand times in her imagination she had catalogued the various pitying or contemptuous things that might conceivably be said about her. Nor did it hurt, really. What stabbed to the quick were the dreadful things Alicia and her friends had said about her mother and all those poor spinster aunts, so decent and honourable and hard-working, so grateful for any attention, yet so proud they would accept nothing they suspected might be charity. How dared Alicia speak of those infinitely more admirable women so scathingly, so unfeelingly! Let Alicia see how she would fare if she were placed in the same pinched shoes!
As she hurried through Byron with the stitch again burning in her side, Missy found herself praying that the library would be open, for Una would be in occupation. Oh, how she needed Una tonight! But the premises were dark, and a sign on the door simply said CLOSED.
Octavia was sitting in the kitchen of Missalonghi, changed back into her workaday clothes, with the small provender of their meal simmering away in a pot on the stove. Stew. Her misshapen hands were busy with knitting needles, magically producing the most fragile and cobwebby of evening shawls as a wedding present for the ungrateful Alicia.
“Ah!” she said, laying her task aside when Missy walked in. “Did you have a nice time, dear? Is your mother with you?”
“I had a wretched time, so I left ahead of Mother,” said Missy briefly, then seized the milk bucket, and escaped.
The cow was waiting patiently to be let into the shed; Missy reached out to stroke the velvety dark muzzle, and looked deeply into the big sweet brown eyes.
“Buttercup, you’re much nicer than Alicia, so I just don’t understand why it’s such an unforgivable insult to call a woman a cow. From now on, the women others call cows, I shall call Alicias,” she told it as she led it into the shed, where it moved of its own accord into the milking stall. Buttercup was the easiest cow to milk, letting down without a struggle, never complaining if Missy’s hands were cold, as they often were. Which of course was why its milk was so good; nice cows always gave nice milk.
Drusilla was home when Missy returned. It was customary to pour most of the milk into the big flat pans which lived on the shady side of the back verandah; as she poured, she could hear her mother enthusiastically regaling her aunt with a full description of Alicia’s bridal party.
“Oh, I’m so glad one of you had a good time,” said Octavia. “All I could get out of Missy was that she’d had a wretched time. I suppose her trouble is lack of friends.”
“True, and no one is sorrier for it than I. But dear Eustace’s death removed any chance of brothers and sisters for Missy, and this house is so far out of Byron on the wrong side that no one ever wants to come and see us regularly.”
Missy waited for her sins to be divulged, but her mother made no reference to them. Courage seeping back, she went inside. Ever since the heart trouble came on it had become easier for her to assert herself, and apparently also easier for her mother to accept these signs of independence. Only it wasn’t really the heart trouble that caused the change. It was Una. Yes, everything went back to Una’s advent; Una’s forthrightness, Una’s frankness, Una’s unwillingness to be sat on by anyone. Una would have told a supercilious twerp like James Hurlingford to go bite his bum, Una would have given Alicia something verbal to remember if she condescended, Una would always make sure people treated her with respect. And somehow this had rubbed off on such an unlikely pupil as Missy Wright.
When Missy walked in, Drusilla leaped up, beaming.
“Missy, you’ll never guess!” she cried, reaching round to the back of the chair where she had been sitting and plucking a very large box off the floor. “As I was leaving the party, Alicia came and gave me this for you to wear at her wedding. She assured me that the colour would suit you beautifully, though I confess I would never have thought of it for myself. Only look!”
Missy stood turned to stone while her mother scrabbled in the box and unearthed a bundle of stiff and crushed organdie which she proceeded to shake out and hold up for Missy’s dazed inspection. A gorgeous dress of a pale toffee shade, not tan and not yellow and not quite amber; those in the know would have understood that its frilled skirt and neckline put it at least five or six years out of date, but even so it was a gorgeous dress, and with extensive alterations it would suit Missy down to the ground.
“And the hat, only look at the hat!” squeaked Drusilla, clawing a huge cartwheel of pale toffee straw out of the box and twitching its artless piles of matching organdie into place. “Did you ever see a more beautiful hat? Oh, dearest Missy, you shall have a pair of shoes, no matter how impractical they are!”
The stone dropped away from Missy’s limbs at last; she stepped forward, arms extended to receive Alicia’s bounty, and her mother placed dress and hat in them at once.
“I’ll wear my new brown satin and my home-made hat and good sturdy boots!” said Missy through her teeth, and took to her heels out the back door, the masses of organdie billowing up about her like the skirts on a swimming bêche-de-mer.
It was not yet fully dark; as she raced for the shed she could hear the frantic cries of her mother and aunt somewhere behind, but by the time they caught up with her, it was too late. The dress and hat were trampled beyond repair into the muck of the milking stall, and Missy, a shovel in her hands, was busy heaping every pile of dung she could find on top of Alicia’s grand gesture.
Drusilla was unspeakably hurt. “How could you? Oh, how could you, Missy? Just this once in your life, you had a chance to look and feel like a belle!”
Missy laid the shovel against the shed wall and dusted her hands together in complete satisfaction. “You above all people ought to understand how I could, Mother,” she said. “No one’s pride is stiffer than yours, no one I know is quicker than you to interpret the most well-meaning gift as charity in disguise. Why then are you denying me my share of that pride? Would you have taken the gift for yourself? Why then take it for me? Do you honestly think Alicia did it to please me? Of course she didn’t! Alicia is determined to have her wedding perfect down to the last guest, and I – I spoiled it! So she decided to make a silk purse out of Missy Wright the sow’s ear. Well, thank you very much, but I’d rather be my own sow’s ear in all its natural homeliness than any silk purse of Alicia’s making! And so I shall tell her!”
And so indeed she did tell her, the very next day. Though Drusilla had crept out in the dead of night armed with a lamp, the dress and hat had disappeared from their vile resting place, and she never saw them again; nor did she ever discover what had happened to them, for no one who knew remembered to tell her, so shocking were the other events of that memorable Friday morning in the Marshall residence.