Swords and Crowns and Rings by Ruth Park Page B

bronchitic Olwyn, who hardly knew her at all and was querulously disinclined to know her better. The stamping tantrum and coughing fit that followed caused Cushie to be sent upstairs to her room.
    But this time Cushie, though she was a girl of ungenteel appetite, did not mind going without dinner.
    It was winter, and Mr Moy liked to dine early on such cold dark days. Cushie listened from the top of the stairs, waiting till he was well away on the table conversation. His smooth face would be engraved with a smile, but there would be no smile underneath, for he found almost everyone and everything unsettling. He treasured up each little slight and act of ill-will until he had a boxful of spiders, ready to jump out and bite him every time he opened the box.
    Cushie did not know this. She attributed his constant complaints about the Bank, the War, the Government, the world, life itself, to an obscure burden he bore. It was called business worries and, according to the girls at Mount Rosa, was commonly suffered by fathers. She longed to help him, for she still loved him achingly.
    Her attitude towards her mother had changed. The experience of being torn from her and hurled into Mount Rosa’s abyss of homesickness and bullying had hardened the girl a little. The wound was still there somewhere, but it was covered with scar tissue. Her father had not sent her away: it was her mother who had her banished to boarding-school. A daughter of Bede Moy would never have been classified as a gentlewoman unless she were also a daughter of Belle Jackaman, of one of the oldest established and most respected families in the country.
    Now Cushie crept down the stairs and out into the garden. It was a foggy evening, with blue spectral glimmers everywhere. Kingsland was still lit by gas, and its familiar smell, the very essence of home to Cushie, hung dankly about the trees. She groped gingerly in the ivy-covered beehive, hoping that Jackie had already visited it. A tight-folded wad of paper met her hand. She undid three buttons on her bodice and slipped it into the constricted front of her chemise. Though she was fevered to be back safely in her room, a hard-earned caution made her do up the buttons and tidy her hair before she crept back into the kitchen hall.
    Olwyn was helping her mother carry the sweets course into the dining-room. Live-in servants were unheard of in Kingsland. Mrs Moy managed with a gardener, a handyman, and a daily woman who cooked the evening meal before she departed for her own home.
    Olwyn’s face, pinched and monkeyish, crinkled into a spiteful smile.
    â€˜Cushie’s supposed to be in her room and she’s been outside!’ she said.
    â€˜I was just putting Tib outside,’ said Cushie. She tossed her head at Olwyn. ‘She was in your room, not mine! I heard her mewing.’ She escaped past the pair of them, hearing with some triumph her mother scolding Olwyn. ‘How many times have I told you not to let that cat into your room? You know the fur makes you cough.’
    Cushie was not able to lock her bedroom door, so she hastened into the lavatory. There she unrolled the many careful pleats of Jackie’s note.
    â€˜I love you,’ it read. ‘I really do.’
    A wild unchildlike exultation filled her. Rapt and justified, she stayed in the arctic cubicle until Olwyn came whining to the door. Then she carefully tied the note in her handkerchief and pinned it inside her knickers, which was the only inviolable place she could think of. She felt that she had come out of a twilight that had been her world since she was born. She was loved, for the first time. She knew that her father did not love her, that inexplicably she disappointed him. Her mother loved her, she supposed, but only as a mother loved a child, not because she was uniquely herself. But now a person loved her for herself.
    Pushing past the hopping Olwyn, she glided away to her room like a swan. She was always to remember