Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton by Rowland Hughes

it impaired her contentment or her spirits to any marked degree. When girlhood was left behind and all her sisters married, she settled down cheerfully to the role of what Lady Skelton described as ‘our home bird’. She was her father’s companion, her mother’s right hand, and so active in parish affairs that the rector used to declare that she was worth two curates to him.
    When her father’s and, years later, her mother’s deaths left Isabella to face middle-age alone, she was neither idle nor lonely. She lived on in the small dower house with a devoted maid. Her life was filled with good works, gardening, and the interests of her large band of nephews and nieces and, later, their children (her drawing-room was so thick with family photographs that there was hardly room to put down a cup of tea). She made one or two trips to Switzerland and the Italian lakes with a friend, another maiden lady, enjoyed herself, admired and sketched the scenery, but was glad to get back to Maiden Worthy where everyone spoke English.
    Every Sunday, wet or fine, her neat little black-clad figure, growing more bent as the years went on, could be seen trotting, umbrella in hand, up the avenue of Maryiot Cells, for it was an understood thing that she always took tea on Sunday afternoons with her cousin Arthur and his wife.
    When she died in her sleep in her late seventies, she was sincerely mourned, by her relations and regretted bythe village people. During her lifetime some of the more recalcitrant parishioners, habitual drunkards, faithless wives, unmarried mothers and the like, had resented her gentle but persistent interference in their affairs (she had a supply of text cards, decorated with lilies, violets and other devout-looking flowers which, in her opinion at least, were effective weapons against every form of spiritual wickedness that might flourish in the parish). But when she was gone, these irritations were forgotten in appreciation of her many acts of benevolence.
    A placid colourless life, one would say, and a placid colourless personality. True, yet Isabella Skelton’s reaction to the one extraordinary and alarming thing that happened to her, indicates that her conventional, timid nature possessed reserves of self-control that would have stood her in good stead in grimmer times.

    It happened in 1873, and at a time when Maryiot Cells had so many people packed under its roof that not a single bed, far less bedroom, was unoccupied. The occasion was the marriage of Sir Wilfrid’s and Lady Skelton’s eldest daughter Blanche. The bridegroom was a young Irishman, William Allen of Castle Allen and his widowed mother, and his numerous sisters and younger brothers had been invited to stay at Maryiot Cells for the ceremony, only Mr William Allen himself being obliged, by a curious convention that supposed that the most temperate bridegroom’s desires would prove too much for him on the wedding eve, to put up at a neighbouring country house.
    Consequently even the rabbit warren of attics at Maryiot Cells was occupied by a bevy of young and giggling Miss Skeltons and Miss Allens, and by schoolboy cousins who tormented the young ladies by making them apple-pie beds, 3 or, invading their maiden privacy in whooping gangs, tying them together by their stay-laces.
    The young men of the party were accommodated in the rooms over the stables where the under-footmen, grooms and pantry boys usually slept. Where these underlings had been banished it would be as well perhaps not to enquire.
    The match was a most propitious one. Blanche was a good and beautiful girl, while William Allen did not appear any less amiable or personable for being one of the largest landowners in the North of Ireland. Even Aunt Lizzie could find no sourer criticism to offer than to remark that she doubted if ‘poor William would make old bones’.
    The atmosphere of the house-party was redolent of goodwill, coy, innocuous little