The Ladies of Missalonghi

Lately she had begun to contemplate death, who appeared to her more and more a consummation devoutly to be wished. Death was everywhere, and visited young and in-between as often as old. Consumption, fits, croup, diphtheria, growths, pneumonia, blood-poisoning, apoplexy, heart trouble, strokes. Why then should she be exclusively preserved from his hand? Death was not an unwelcome prospect at all; he never is, to those who exist rather than live.

But this night she remained wakeful through the gamut of looks, kitten, bush walks and death, in spite of an extreme weariness resulting from that scamper home and the painful stitch in her left side she seemed to be suffering more and more. For Missy had made herself save some time to devote to the big wild stranger named John Smith who had bought her valley, or so Una said. A wind of change, a new force in Byron. She believed Una was right about him, that he did intend to take up residence down in the valley. Not her valley any more; his valley now. Eyelids nearly closed, she conjured up an image of him, tall and heavy-set and strong, that lovely luxuriant dark red hair all over scalp and jaws, and two startling white ribbons in his beard. Impossible to tell his age accurately because of his weather-beaten face, though she guessed him to be somewhere on the wrong side of forty. His eyes were the colour of water that had passed over decaying leaves, crystal-clear yet amber-brown. Oh, such a nice man!

And when to round out this nocturnal pilgrimage she went once more upon her bush walk, he walked with her all the way into sleep.

The poverty which ruled Missalonghi with such cruel inflexibility was the fault of the first Sir William, who had sired seven sons and nine daughters, most of whom had survived to produce further progeny. It had been Sir William’s policy to distribute his worldly goods among his sons only, leaving his daughters possessed of a dowry consisting of a house on five good acres of land. On the surface it seemed a good policy, discouraging fortune-hunters whilst ensuring the girls the status of land-owners as well as a measure of independence. Nothing loath (since it meant more money for them), his sons had continued the policy, and so in their turn had their sons. Only as the decades passed, the houses became steadily less commodious, less well built, and the five good acres of land tended to become five not-so-good acres of land.

The result two generations later was that the Hurlingford co

She had married one Eustace Wright, the consumptive heir to a large Sydney accounting firm with good interests in some manufacturing concerns as well; naturally enough, at the time of her marriage she had not suspected the consumption any more indeed than had Eustace himself. But after his death only two years later, Eustace’s father, surviving him, had elected to leave his property entirely to his second son rather than divert part of it to a widow with no better heir than a sickly girlchild. So what had started as an excellent essay into matrimony ended dismally in every way. Old man Wright had taken into consideration the fact that Drusilla had her house and five acres, and came from a very wealthy clan who would be obliged to look after her, if only for appearance’s sake. What old man Wright failed to take into account was the indifference of the Hurlingford clan to those of its members who were female, alone, and without power.

So Drusilla eked out an existence. She had taken in her spinster sister Octavia, who sold her own house and five acres to their brother Herbert in order to contribute cash to Drusilla’s household. Therein lay the rub; it was inconceivable to sell to an outsider, yet the male Hurlingfords took gross advantage of this. The ungenerous sum Herbert gave Octavia for her property was immediately invested by him on her behalf, and, as investments masterminded by Herbert had a habit of doing, this particular one yielded absolutely nothing. The few timid enquiries Octavia had made of her brother were brushed aside at first, then treated with outraged anger and indignation.

Of course, just as it was inconceivable that any female Hurlingford should dispose of her property to an outsider, so also was it inconceivable that she should disgrace the clan by going out to work, unless work could be found for her safely within the bosom of the immediate family. Thus Drusilla, Octavia and Missy stayed at home, their utter lack of capital preventing their sanctifying work through the medium of owning a business, their utter lack of useful talents meaning the immediate family regarded them as unemployable.

Any pipe-dreams Drusilla might have harboured about Missy’s growing up to snatch the ladies of Missalonghi out of penury via a spectacular marriage died before Missy turned ten; she was always homely and unprepossessing. By the time she turned twenty, her mother and her aunt had reconciled themselves to the same remorselessly straightened circumstances all the way to their respective graves. Missy in time would inherit her mother’s house and five acres, but there would be none of her own to swell that, as she was a Hurlingford only on the distaff side, and therefore ineligible.

Of course they did manage to live. They had a Jersey cow which produced wonderfully rich and creamy milk as well as splendid calves, a Jersey heifer they had kept because she was superlative, half a dozen sheep, three dozen Rhode Island Red fowls, a dozen assorted ducks and geese, and two pampered white sows which farrowed the best eating-piglets in the district, as they were allowed to graze instead of being pe

Food they did not lack; money was what beggared them. Prevented from earning a wage and cheated by those who by rights should have been their greatest support, they depended for the cash which meant clothing and utensils and medicines and new roofs upon sale of a sheep or a calf or a litter of piglets, and could permit of no relaxation in their eternal financial vigilance. That Missy was dearly loved by the two older women showed visibly in only one way; they let her squander her egg and butter money upon the borrowing of books.

To fill in their empty days the ladies of Missalonghi knitted and tatted and crocheted and sewed endlessly, grateful for the gifts of wools and threads and linens that came their way each Christmas and birthday, giving back some of the end results as their gifts in their turn, and stockpiling a great deal more in the spare room.

That they acquiesced so tamely to a regimen and a code inflicted upon them by people who had no idea of the loneliness, the bitter suffering of genteel poverty, was no evidence of lack of spirit or lack of courage. Simply, they were born and lived in a time before the great wars completed the industrial revolution, when paid work and its train of comforts were a treason to their concepts of life, of family, of femininity.

Her genteel poverty was never more galling to Drusilla Wright than each Saturday morning, when she came on foot into Byron and through it and out to where the most prosperous of the Hurlingford residences hunched across the flanks of the magnificent hills between the town and an arm of the Jamieson Valley. She went to have morning tea with her sister Aurelia, never forgetting as she trudged that when they were girls and engaged to be married, she, Drusilla, was considered to have made by far the better bargain in the matrimonial marketplace. And she made the pilgrimage alone, Octavia being too crippled to walk the seven miles, and the contrast between Missy and Aurelia’s daughter Alicia too painful to be endured. Keeping a horse was out of the question, as horses were destructive grazers and Missalonghi’s five acres had to be safeguarded against drought at all times. If they couldn’t walk, the ladies of Missalonghi stayed home.