A Spear of Summer Grass Read Online Free PDF Page A

stay until everyone stops being so difficult about things. When the headlines have faded away, I’ll be back,” I told him. I would have said more, but just then there was a bit of a commotion on the platform. There was the sound of running footsteps, some jostling, and above it all, the baying of hounds hot on the scent.
    “There she is!” It was the photographers, and before they could snap a decent picture, Weatherby had shoved me onto the train and slammed the door, very nearly stranding Dora on the platform. She fought her way onto the train, leaving the pack of reporters scrambling in her wake.
    “Honestly,” Dora muttered. Her hat had somehow gotten crushed in the scrum and she was staring at it mournfully.
    “Don’t bother trying to fix it, Dodo. It’s an improvement,” I told her. I moved to the window and let it down. Instantly, the photographers rushed the train, shouting and setting off flashbulbs. I gave them a mildly vulgar gesture and a wide smile. “Take all the pictures you want, boys. I’m headed to Africa!”
    * * *
    My high spirits had evaporated by the time we boarded the ship at Marseilles. I was no stranger to travel. I liked to keep on the move, one step ahead of everybody, heading wherever my whims carried me. What I resented was being told that I had to go. It was quite hurtful, really. Mossy had weathered any number of scandalous stories in the press and she’d never been exiled. Of course, none of her husbands had ever died in mysterious circumstances. She’d divorced all except my father, poor Peregrine Drummond, known to all and sundry as Pink. He’d gone off to fight in the Boer War just after their honeymoon without even knowing I was on the way. He had died of dysentery before lifting his rifle—a sad footnote to what Mossy said had been a hell of a life. He had been adventuresome and charming and handsome as the devil, and no one could quite believe that he had died puking into a bucket. It was a distinctly mundane way to go.
    Since Mossy might well have been carrying the heir to the Drummond title, she’d spent her pregnancy sitting around at the family estate, waiting to pup. As soon as she went into labour, my father’s five brothers descended upon Cherryvale from London, pacing outside Mossy’s room until the doctor emerged with the news that the eldest of them was now the undisputed heir to their father’s title. Mossy told me she could hear the champagne corks and hushed whoops through the door. They needn’t have bothered to keep it down. If she’d been mother to the heir she’d have been forced to stay at Cherryvale with her in-laws. Since I was a girl—and of no particular interest to anyone—she was free to go. The prospect of leaving thrilled her so much she would have happily bought them a round of champagne herself.
    As it was, she packed me up as soon as she could walk and we decamped to a suite at the Savoy with Ingeborg and room service to look after us. Mossy never returned to Cherryvale, but I went back for school holidays while my grandparents were alive. They spent most of their time correcting my posture and my accent. I eventually stopped slouching thanks to enforced hours walking the long picture gallery at Cherryvale with a copy of Fordyce’s Sermons on my head, but the long Louisiana drawl that had made itself at home on my tongue never left. It got thicker every summer when I went back to Reveille, but mellowed each school term when the girls made fun of me and I tried to hide it. I never did get the hang of those flat English vowels, and I eventually realised it was just easier to pummel the first girl who mocked me. I was chucked out of four schools for fighting, and Mossy despaired of ever making a lady of me.
    But I did master the social graces—most of them anyway—and I made my debut in London in 1911. Mossy had been barred from Court on account of her divorces and it was left to my Drummond aunt to bring me out properly. She did it