Free The Book of Ebenezer le Page by G.B. Edwards Page B

top and wide at the bottom; and I wore a white shirt with it and a starched white collar and a shiny silk tie. I stuck my cap sideways on the back of my head, and my hair was done in a curl across my forehead. I had done it with the curling-tongs my father used to heat over the fire to do his with; and, as soon as I could, I grew a moustache. I wasn’t sure about myself in a moustache. Sometimes I thought my face looked better without, and would shave it off. Jim used to laugh at me over my moustache. He didn’t have one himself and would make out he didn’t know me when I grew it. ‘Why, if it isn’t old Ebby!’ he’d say. ‘I’d never have known it was you, if you hadn’t spoke.’ When I cut it off, he would again make out he didn’t know me; until one day he said, ‘If I was you, I would let one side grow and cut the other off for good; and then everybody would know who you are.’ After that I cut both sides off for good; and have never kept any hair on my face since. I still shave every morning with a cut-throat razor; and sometimes my hand shake and I cut myself.
    I didn’t have a moustache the day I went to my Cousin Mary Ann’s wedding; but I had a big flower in my button-hole. She was only a third cousin really, but she was a cousin both sides; and all the Le Pages and all the Martels was invited. I don’t want to say anything against my Cousin Mary Ann, because in her old age she was one of my very best friends, and you didn’t notice her looks as an old woman; but when she was young, she was downright ugly. She was short and squat with a coarse skin and a snout of a nose and a sulky mouth and a heavy jaw. La Prissy said she looked like a mule, but I don’t know, because I have never seen a mule. She got married to the chap who must have been the best-looking young fellow on the island. He had a boyish face with crisp curly ginger hair parted in the middle and bright blue eyes and a skin as smooth as a girl’s; and he was slim yet well-built, and so light on his feet he might have been an acrobat in a circus. It was said he didn’t have a very good character, but I don’t believe Eugene Le Canu was nearly as bad as he was painted. The girls was round him like flies round a jam-pot, and he had to do something to get rid of them. He came of a very mixed family: Guernsey and French and, I think, Jersey as well; and nobody quite knew which was the fathers and mothers of which. He was coachman for La Princesse Zubeska.
    There was a mystery about La Princesse Zubeska. She had red hair like Eugene, but it was grey when she came to Guernsey. I don’t know if she was a Russian princess, or a German princess, or what; but Eugene said she could speak French and was easy to wind round your little finger, if you let her think she was having her own way. La Prissy said she wasn’t a princess at all, but a cook who had been left some money by her mistress and come to live in Guernsey where nobody would know who she was. If so, she must have been left quite a lot of money, because she had a lovely carriage and pair and covered herself in scent and when she passed you could smell her for a mile. I think myself she was a real princess; but perhaps not very high up as princesses go.
    My Cousin Mary Ann had set her heart on a white wedding, but La Prissy said, ‘Mon Dou, but you wouldn’t have the cheek, you!’ so the bridesmaids was in white, but she wore a blue dress cut loose and with a long train. In the wedding photo she was taken sitting down with the handsome Eugene standing behind her. Her father had given her a cottage in the Robergerie with a vergée of land and a greenhouse. He thought Eugene would be able to work in the greenhouse in the evenings; but it was in the evenings La Princesse wanted him to drive her all dressed up to visit the gentry in the Grange and Queen’s Road. She left him very little time for his