A Curious Life for a Lady by Pat Barr

Author:Pat Barr [Pat Barr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571305865
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2015-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VI

The Doctor’s Wife

HENRIETTA BIRD, writing to Ella Blackie from Mull in the summer of 1873, reported that she had recently received ‘three delightful cheerful letters from Isa…. They have not contained a single word which has left other than a pleasant impression. Is not this delightful?’ The cheer and delight continued during the years spent abroad, as we know, and these and other brimful letters positively bounded into the sedate Tobermory cottage, sparkling with details of Isa’s marvellous adventures on the other side of the world. And Hennie – ‘My Dearest Pet’, ‘My Ownest’, as her sister called her – sipping a cup of tea by the fire or ensconced in the window-seat overlooking the bay, read and re-read the letters with pleasure and shared their contents with her intimate friends.

First came the stories of the dangerous climb to the top of the volcano on Hawaii, with Isa actually sleeping in a tent on the crater’s very edge, and that was followed by Isa’s reckless winter ride in the Rockies, and her friendship (if not more than friendship) with poor Mr Nugent, who sounded such an extraordinary man. Then after Isa had been at home again, which, alas, didn’t seem to suit her at all, came the letters from North Japan, describing those terrible flea-ridden inns in which she had stayed during the wet summer of 1878. So much of that Japanese journey had sounded very dismal and bad for Isa’s health – but then the ‘Great Perak Letter’ had arrived, a hundred and sixteen pages of it and each one a burst of colour and vitality. And soon after, in the early spring of 1879, the still waiting, faithful, patient Hennie heard that darling Isa was truly coming home again at last. She was stouter, she said in her last letter from Malaya, and even her face was fatter, and the tropic sun had browned her so much that she ‘could be taken for a Portuguese’! And everyone everywhere – in Hawaii, Colorado, Japan, Perak – had liked Isa; and so they should because she was extremely intelligent and most interesting to listen to, and so loving, sympathetic and really most amazingly courageous and enterprising. It would be very delightful to see Isa again.

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