Eva Ibbotson: A Company of Swans

For nearly half an hour Edward, bent almost double, moved absorbedly across the grass, flicking the heavy sweep-net to and fro over the ground.

‘Pooter, please, Harriet,’ he would say from time to time, straightening up, and she would hand him the little glass tube with its rubber pipe into which he would suck the hopping, wriggling, jumping little creatures; then, ‘Killing bottle!’, and that too Harriet would put into his hand so that the miniature flies and bright bugs and stripy beetles could find, among the fumes of potassium cyanide, their final resting place.

As they moved slowly towards the terrace Edward suddenly perceived, on a blossoming viburnum bush, a large and golden Brimstone butterfly. At once he became transformed and the heavy cumbersome sweep-net, the crouching position were abandoned. Plucking the gossamer butterfly-net from Harriet, he almost danced up the steps. This was a new Edward: a lithe and entomological Ariel. For a few moments he hovered, measuring his prey — then, with a magnificent sideways sweep of the net, he struck!

‘Got it!’ he announced with satisfaction and as Harriet approached, he pinched the fluttering creature’s thorax between his forefinger and thumb.

A neat and expert movement: an instant and humane death. But it made a noise which Harriet had not expected — a small but distinct ‘crack’ — and it was now that she told Edward he must excuse her for a while and left him.

Walking unthinkingly, she found herself in a small copse through which there ran a stream, its banks carpeted with more primroses than she had ever seen.

If the first butterfly you see is a yellow butterfly, then it will be a good summer, Harriet knew that. But if the first butterfly you see is a dead butterfly, what then?

She had come to an orchard. The lichened pear trees were in blossom, the apples still in pink-tipped bud. What a heavenly place, thought Harriet, for here Stavely’s neglect only added to its loveliness, and as if in echo to her thoughts she found herself on a wide track which must have branched off from the main avenue, in front of a sign saying: ‘To Paradise Farm’.

She hesitated, not uninterested in the idea of Paradise, but the glimpse of tall chimneys and tiled roofs half-hidden in the trees suggested a house far more important than an ordinary agricultural dwelling and, not wishing to trespass, she retraced her steps. Finding a door in an ivy-covered wall, she entered a walled garden and here for the first time encountered a gardener — a bent old man pottering among the broken frames who acknowledged her greeting so ill-temperedly that she went out again, walked through the stable yard, passed an overgrown tennis court — and saw behind it a curiously shaped clump of yew hedges, irregular and dark.

Of course. A maze… She had heard the maze at Stavely mentioned: a famous one, as intriguing and clever as that at Hampton Court. Jokes had been made about it on the bus and Mrs Brandon, in her letter, had forbidden the ladies to enter it.

‘Harriet! Harriet, where are you?’

Aunt Louisa’s high petulant voice in the distance sent Harriet quickly foward and unhesitatingly she entered the maze.

It was very silent between the yew hedges, which almost closed over her head; on the mossy paths her light feet made not the slightest sound. The idea of a labyrinth had always alarmed Harriet and the story of Theseus and the Minotaur had been one of her favourite ways of terrifying herself as a child, but now she wandered unhurried and in peace, for it seemed to her that there were worse things than to be abandoned in this green and secret place.

Which didn’t mean that she was not lost. All the theories that people had about turning always to the right or always to the left did not seem to be very good theories. She wandered on, twisting this way and that, disturbed by nothing except a nesting blackbird which flew up from the hedge. And then, quite without warning, she took a last sharp turn and found herself in the circular sweep of grass which constituted the core, the very heart of the labyrinth.

‘Oh!’ exclaimed Harriet, startled.

For sitting on a stone bench beside the mildewed statue of a faun was a hunched figure so small, so self-contained that it might have been the spirit of the maze itself. Then it looked up, as startled as she was, and Harriet saw a small boy with dark red hair and a pale, rather pinched little face almost covered by a large pair of spectacles. A child of about seven years of age trying to shield, with hands woefully too small for the task, a large black book.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Harriet in her low, soft voice. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you, I expect you wanted to be alone.’

‘Well, yes, I did,’ said the boy, now pressing the book against his diminutive sailor-suited chest. He looked at the girl standing in front of him. She was a grown-up — he could tell that because her blue skirt touched the ground — and grown-ups could make trouble; but as he stared at her anxiously, she smiled — a terribly friendly, crunched-up sort of smile — and he knew that it would be all right, that she would not betray him. ‘But I don’t mind as long as you don’t tell anyone. I’m not supposed to read this book, you see. It’s forbidden.’

‘I promise not to tell anyone,’ said Harriet. She came over and sat down on the bench beside him, noting with a pang the fragile, elderly-looking legs, the feet in their black strap-shoes hanging so high above the ground. ‘I was always reading books I wasn’t supposed to when I was little. I used to tie a piece of cotton to my toe and to the door-handle, so that when someone came in my toe twitched and I had time to put the book under my pillow before they saw it.’

‘Did you?’ The boy was impressed, lifting his spectacles a moment to look at Harriet. His eyes were unexpectedly beautiful: large grey eyes with a golden rim round the iris. ‘My name is Henry,’ he now offered. ‘Henry St John Verney Brandon.’

‘Mine is Harriet Jane Morton,’ said Harriet, realising without undue surprise that she was in the presence of Stavely’s heir. And solemnly, for they were both people of great politeness, they shook hands.

It was then, their credentials exchanged, that the child lowered the book and laid it carefully in Harriet’s lap, open at the title page.

‘Would you like to see it?’ he asked.

For a moment she could not speak. The coincidence was too uncanny, here in this dreamlike place.

‘Is anything the matter, Harriet?’ Henry’s russet head was tilted anxiously up at her, for she had given a little gasp and put one hand to her mouth.

‘No… it’s all right.’ She forced herself to speak calmly and sensibly. She did not know what she had expected Henry to have carried off into the secrecy of the maze — perhaps some pathetic explanation of the so-called ‘facts of life’. Instead, now she read:

AMAZON ADVENTURE

Being the account of a journey with rod and gun

along the Rivers Orinoco, Negro and Amazon

by

Colonel Frederick Bush, D.S.O., M.C.

‘It’s just so extraordinary, Henry. You see, I have been thinking and thinking about this place. For a whole week I’ve thought of nowhere else. And then I find you…’ she shook her head. ‘It’s a beautiful book,’ she said. ‘Absolutely beautiful.’

‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?`

Fellow bibliophiles, they looked with satisfaction at the thick pages with their wavy edges, the sepia illustrations protected by wafer-thin paper; drank in the smell of old leather and dust, while Henry — an impeccable host — led her into his promised land.

‘That’s an anaconda — it was twenty feet long before Colonel Bush killed it — and here’s a canoe full of Indians: friendly ones, not the kind that shoot you full of arrows. Those are terribly dangerous rapids in the background; the Colonel had to drag his boat out of the water and carry it over the hill when he got to them. And somewhere there’s a lovely one of a whole lot of capy… capy-somethings, like huge guinea-pigs. Look!’