Phylidda gaped at the glistening black thread curled on the side of the egg. Had it truly been beneath the shell--the shell she had just delicately peeled away herself? How on earth did an egg come to have a hair beneath its shell?“Mama,” she whimpered.
“Don’t study it, Phylidda. Eat!” Lady Blystone grumpily shoveled a heap of rashers onto Ronald’s plate and, from the sides of her compressed mouth, blew wayward strands of graying chestnut hair from around her face.
Ronald reached around his mother and across the table, elaborately forking up the item at issue. “Never mind, Mother, she doesn’t like eggs.”
Lady Blystone paused in front of her only daughter, giving the heavy iron pan a slight but threatening shake. “Don’t be selfish, Phylidda. I’m not raiding the family account to provide you with scones every morning. Either you eat, or you go hungry.”
“But…but… there’s a hair on my… egg…” Phyl’s words faded into a weary whine as Ronald popped the thing into his mouth, hair and all. Goodness, he’ll choke, she thought. She assuaged her fear by convincing herself that she had warned him, after all, and, at 22, he was a man, capable of knowing right from wrong, safe from sorry. His death would be his own responsibility. She would be heartily sorry for that. She would miss him. The passage of the item through his teeth and into his interior went without incident, though he did appear to paw at his cravat ever so slightly. Did the hair offer resistance? Or had he simply knotted the article too tight in his haste for breakfast?
At the head of the table, Phylidda’s younger brother Russell adjusted a broadsheet against the teapot. “Listen to this,” he lisped through a spray of crumbs. “Lady Athol-Hight says a soiree given by Marchioness O was crashed by a gentleman dairyman who carried an invitation but wore a black domino, so nobody could tell who he was.”
Ronald refused to let his struggle with the egg in its dry entirety prevent him from contributing to the morning’s wisdom. “Ridiculouth! If nobody could tell who he wath, how did they know he wath a gentleman dairyman? Path the tea, will you, Phyl? There’th a good girl…”
Phyl did not stop to consider that the teapot was within Ronald’s reach, or that Russell was using it as a prop. She instantly burrowed her hand beneath the paper—ignoring Russell’s indignant “What the...?"—lifted the item by the handle and landed it in front of Ronald, who tapped his cup, silently demanding she pour. “I’m not your maid,” she said primly, studiously applying a slab of butter to her toast.
Instantly, she was surrounded by cries of “Mother!” The person in question placed the pan by the fire with no small show of annoyance.
“If you’re so greatly confident in the meager inheritance that allows you to sit on your arses whilst your dear mama struggles with the household chores, then you most certainly should have no argument about indulging in the hiring of somebody who will pour your tea for you.”
“But that’th what we have you for, Deareth!”
Lady Blystone peeled off the arm Ronald roguishly wrapped around her waist. “It’s unseemly for children to sit idle whilst their aged parent works for them.”
Russell tsked from behind the broadsheet that he now held straight up in front of him, as if it were a protective shrub. “It’s unseemly for a peer to work like somebody below his class. Ethpecially if he thpeakth the way Ronald ith thpeaking.”
Lady Blystone tapped the top of Russell’s head. “I didn’t do anything!” he protested.
“Precisely,” his mother retorted.
Ronald had barely swallowed before blurting, “What would you have uth—I mean us--do?”
“Something honorable. Cultivate land. Breed prize-winning sheep. Grow roses. Experiment with electricity. Ohgoodlord--” Realisation made Her Ladyship raise eyes to heaven and slap her arms against her sides. "What am I saying? You’re Oxford men! You should be able to figure out something!”
The most theatrical among the Blystone family, Ronald also had features that folded into expressions of mirth or sorrow at his slightest whim. Never doubting that his mother’s outburst was as true as snow in July, he took her hand and squashed those features into the semblance of agony that was all his own yet conveyed compassion for his parent. “Dearest, did it ever occur to you that that is precisely what we would be doing, had the estate—“
“Complete with its parks--” Russell piped up.
“--and its stables—“ Ronald continued.
“--and its sheep—“
“--and its cattle—“
“--and its orchards—“
“--and its rents—“
“--and its gardens—“
“--not been sold upon Father’s death to satisfy his debts—“
“--lest we all endure the notoriety of living as slaves to his creditors for the rest of our lives?”
Lady Blystone had followed the volley of phrases like a spectator following a tennis ball, turning her head from one speaker to the other at their respective places on either side of the table. She spoke only when the volley had ended and she was assured of her sons’ attention. And there was no trace of the despair that had inspired her eldest’s display of fervor. “I expect you to do all you can to preserve our place in society.”
Ronald’s compassion-crushed face burst into wide-eyed disbelief. He sat back, dropping his mother’s hand. “You want us to work?”
Russell giggled nervously. “We can’t work, woman! Think what people would say!”
“Think what people already say when their servants report us buying our own food and making our own clothes.”
“The Americans would say we were industri-OUS!” Russell ducked a second assault at the hand of a woman who allowed herself the semblance of having arrived at wit’s end.
“You have no sense of yourselves,” she scolded, exceptionally red in the face. “Remember who you are. Remember who we are! Until you do, and until I see any movement in the direction of doing something to improve our situation—if not to buy back everything we lost-- I’ll thank you to make your own meals and clean your own house!”
In concluding, Lady Blystone dramatically pulled off her apron, threw it on Ronald’s head and stomped from the room, shaking the floorboards.
Though Phylidda crossly whispered “Now see what you’ve done!,” Ronald emerged from under the apron with a look of bemusement. “Almost makes me want to escape to the country and become a drover or something.”
Russell blithely poured curdling cream into his coffee. ”Well, I’ll tell you one thing: I’ll wager that the dairyman who crashed that soiree doesn’t have a mother telling him what to do!”
