A Stairs - Eva Ibbotson

The first person to call and congratulate Rupert was his friend and best man, Tom Byrne, driving over from HeslopHall.

Heslop was less than ten miles from Mersham, a great Elizabethan pile, sumptuous and tatty, which had harboured broods of roistering Byrnes for centuries. The Byrne children had played with George and Rupert, had ridden in the same gymkhanas, been to the same parties. It was natural that Tom, who had miraculously survived four years in the infantry without a scratch, should be Rupert’s best man, and he came now also to offer his family’s help in welcoming Muriel. But both Rupert, coming forward to greet him, and the servants, peeping out of the ground floor windows, forgot the wedding and everything else for they saw that Tom had brought no less a person than the Honourable Olive.

Ollie Byrne was just on eight years old and anyone speaking ill of her within fifty miles of Heslop or of Mersham would have found themselves lying flat in a gutter with a bloodied nose. The Byrnes had already had three lusty, red-headed sons: Tom, the eldest, Geoffrey and Hugh, when Lady Byrne, though in failing health, found herself pregnant once again. She only lived long enough to give birth to a premature and hopelessly delicate daughter before she died. The baby, hastily christened Olive Jane, spent the first year of her life in the prison-like wards of a famous teaching hospital, more as an aid to medical research than because the pathetic, screwed-up bundle seemed to have any chance of life. As for Ollie’s father. Viscount Byrne, presented with three sons to bring up and an infant daughter in distant London, he sought for a new wife with a frenzy he made no effort to conceal.

His choice fell, somewhat arbitrarily it was felt, on an American, Minna Cresswell, the daughter of a New York shipowner whom he happened to be standing next to at Goodwood. Confronted by a new stepmother, within a year of their mother’s death, Tom, Geoffrey and Hugh glared, scowled and swore eternal enmity. Minna was small, quiet and mousy-looking and seemed to have nothing but her fortune to commend her to anyone’s attention.

The new Lady Byrne made no attempt to ingratiate herself with the boys. She didn’t ask them to call her ‘Mother’, they were in no way bidden to love her, nor did she hand out expensive gifts. Her practical actions were confined to quietly modernizing those parts of Heslop which were in danger of collapse; and even this she did so discreetly that new bathrooms and radiators appeared as if by magic, without upsetting either her lord’s hunting or his meals. And every week she motored to London to breathe her will into the tiny, jaundiced bundle that was the Honourable Olive.

Within a year, the boys were rushing into the house calling ‘Mother!’ before they had even taken off their coats. When she was away, Byrne prowled his mansion like a labrador deprived of game - and Ollie, spewed up from her teaching hospital at last, decided to live. Not only to live but to conquer. At three, a pair of huge round spectacles perched on her freckled nose, she departed gallantly for weekend visits in the English manner (clutching, however, a rolled-up rubber sheet in case of accidents). At four, though still tiny, she learned to ride.

So when, at the age of five, she contracted tuberculosis of the hip, the blow was shattering. Once again, Ollie went away from home to be immured for two interminable years in a Scottish sanatorium where she lay, her little pinched face peering above the blankets, on freezing verandas, immobilized in a series of diabolical contrivances. It was in that sanatorium that the nurses, seeing how the child bravely coped with the recurring, debilitating fever and the agony of secondary osteomyelitis.

turned the meaningless prefix, The Honourable*, into a badge of office - and the Honourable Olive she was destined to remain.

Once again, laying the ghosts of all the wicked stepmothers since time began, Minna travelled to and fro, read to the child, sang to her, went back to Heslop to entertain the American troops stationed nearby, saw Tom and the second son, Geoffrey, off to war.

When Geoffrey was killed at Paschendale, Minna lost her look of youth for ever. But the gods were appeased. Ollie was cured and returned to Heslop. The fact that one leg was shortened and in callipers was a small price to pay. She was alive.

Lifting her out of the Crossley and setting her down on the gravel, Rupert gathered that Muriel, in response to his call last night, had been in touch with her already. For Ollie, her big blue eyes glinting behind their round spectacles, was clearly in a state of ecstasy.

‘Rupert, she rang my mother. Muriel did. She rang Mummy and she said you wanted me for a bridesmaid and she wanted me too. It’s true, isn’t it? I’m going to be a bridesmaid, aren’t I? It’s really true?’

‘Yes, Moppet, it is,’ said Rupert, taking her hand but making no other attempt to help her up the steps to the front door. Helping the Honourable Olive with the simpler tasks of life was not a thing one did twice.

‘I’ve never been a bridesmaid before. Never,’ said Ollie. ‘There are going to be two others. Mother says, grown-up ones and me. And you know what I’m going to wear?’

‘I don’t, Ollie. But I should dearly like to know. Or is it a secret?’

Ollie sighed in ecstasy. ‘Muriel told me. Rose-coloured satin. It’s true. That’s pink, you know,’ she added obligingly. ‘And a matching rose-coloured velvet muff stitched with pearls.’ She stopped for a moment.

quite overcome. ‘And in my hair - honestly, Rupert - a wreath of roses and steph… something with “steph” in it that’s white and smells lovely. And to go to the church, a white cloak lined with the same pink and trimmed with swansdown.’

Rupert looked down at the little upturned face with its mass of freckles and marigold curls and a wave of tenderness for Muriel engulfed him. She could so easily have wanted to choose someone of her own.

‘I think you’re going to be absolutely beautiful,’ he said.

Ollie, who perfectly agreed with him, nodded her head. ‘Can I go and tell Proom and Cookie and James while you talk to Tom? And Peggy and Louise?’

‘Of course. You can tell Anna too’ said Rupert pensively. ‘She’s a new maid and she’s Russian.’

Ollie was impressed. ‘Like the ballet?’ she said. ‘Mummy likes the ballet very much. She’s going to invite them down.’

‘Very like the ballet,‘said Rupert gravely.

- - - -*

It was fortunate that Peggy, polishing the brasswork in the hall, had overheard this interchange so that by the time the Honourable Olive reached the kitchen and had been installed on her favourite stool beside Mrs Park, everybody was suitably primed.

‘Guess what I’m going to do!’ said Ollie, when she had had her traditional spoonful of plum jam, felt James’s brachial muscles and been introduced to Anna.

The servants looked at each other in simulated amazement.

‘Go to a birthday party?’ suggested Mrs Park.

‘No,’ said the Honourable Olive, her eyes gleaming with importance.

‘Go away on holiday?’ suggested Louise.

‘No!’ said Ollie, wriggling with excitement. ‘Better than that!’

‘Go to the pantomime?’ hazarded Proom.

‘No!’ So intense was her delight that she seemed likely to slide off the stool altogether. ‘I’m going to be a bridesmaid?

‘Never!’ exclaimed Mrs Park.

‘Not for his lordship’s wedding?’ said James in awed tones.

‘Yes.’ Ollie’s smile shone through the kitchen like Inca gold. ‘And guess what my dress is going to be made of.’

Once again, the staff shook bewildered heads.

‘White muslin?’ suggested Mrs Park.