Swords and Crowns and Rings by Ruth Park

had not even guessed existed. He had become aware of the adult world and wary of those in it.
    Of course he had always known they were there, abstracted giants lurching about on the periphery of the real world. But now a massive shift in perception had taken place in his brain. He understood that those ambiguous beings, who were both servants and masters of the children, observed and judged him. There was no guarantee that they would do either aright.
    Still, he knew what he was. Their judgment, though it might hurt, as Piper Nicolson’s had hurt, could not alter that. Nevertheless, Jackie was changed. The ruthless confidence of his infancy had been eroded.
    Through some deep instinct he avoided Cushie Moy. At school he saw her watching him wistfully and anxiously, turning away quickly when she thought herself observed. For a long time he missed her, in his turn spying on her from the treehouse, a lonely little girl skipping on the path in her big garden, or playing solitarily at houses amongst the dripping trees.
    The piper got twelve months in prison for wilful destruction of private and public property. The magistrate, apparently personally injured by the profane and inexplicable attack on a public monument, observed that he might have imposed a sterner sentence but that he had taken into account the unsettling nature of the news received by the accused that day. He added that it was not the British way to react to bad news in such a manner, or where would we all be? Recommending the prisoner to bite the bullet like a man, he called for the next case.
    Thus everyone came out of the death of Baillie Nicolson a little different.
    Shortly after her eighth birthday, Cushie Moy was sent away to boarding-school. When the final arrangements were made for Cushie to attend the Mount Rosa Academy for Young Gentlewomen, Mrs Moy was smitten with the strangest pang. Emotions she had forgotten flooded her heart. Her hand quivered as she laid it upon the tumbled hair of her daughter, helpless with terror and tears.
    â€˜Cushie...Dorothy...’
    At the sound of her christened name, which she would be forced to adopt as an alias in the alien surroundings of the Academy, Cushie hiccuped with anguish. She was a messy weeper, grunting, snorting, and in no time at all grimy with the tumult of her woe. Half of her mother’s will inclined towards shaking her severely; the other half, melting under the force of her confused feelings, impelled her to take the child into her arms. Cushie, who was never embraced because ‘ladies do not behave like kitchenmaids’, was overcome by the sweet odour of her mother’s person, clung like a limpet, and wept patches of sticky wetness into Mrs Moy’s silk blouse. Suddenly, like a sideslip in time, Mrs Moy recalled doing the same thing to her mother, when Papa had volcanically forbidden his headstrong youngest daughter any more clandestine meetings with the gloriously handsome young man in his accounting department. Mrs Moy could, for a moment, actually feel the whalebone in her mother’s long corset, sense once again on her cheek the slippery texture of the taffeta bodice.
    â€˜I adore him, Mama. I’ll die if Papa won’t consent. I will marry him, Mama!’ she said imperiously.
    And so she had, eloping on her twenty-first birthday, and ruining her life. But, ah, she remembered the turbulence of that passion!
    Becoming for a little while that twenty-year-old Belle Jackaman, Mrs Moy touched Cushie’s hair tenderly, saying, ‘You must be educated and taught to be a lady. Your grandfather is a wealthy man, and some day you too may be required to take your place in society, so you must become accustomed to the company of young ladies of your own class.’
    â€˜I want to stay home,’ snuffled Cushie. ‘I like it here!’
    â€˜If by here you mean this village, this repository of clods and peasants,’ said her mother, ‘you are well out of