Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

‘Yes,’ said Rom quietly. ‘The eyes, particularly.’ And then: ‘Your wife?’

Alvarez nodded. ‘Her name was Lucia. It was an arranged marriage; she came to me direct from her convent… there was some family connection. But straight away… on the first night… I realised that I had found what half the world is looking for.’ He took back the picture, letting it rest in the palm of his hand. ‘She was no more beautiful than that girl last night was beautiful, but she was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence… they don’t talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good …’

Rom had taken a silver propelling pencil from the desk and was turning it over and over in his hands. ‘Go on, sir, if you will.’

‘I was very young in those days, and very idealistic. I thought Brazil would become the moral leader of the New World. There were a few of us who formed the Green Horizons Party — you may have heard of it. We planned to educate the Indians, build the finest schools and hospitals in the world… oh, all the usual dreams. They thought of me as a leader, but my fervour — even my ideas, many of them — came from my wife.’

‘I knew they had great hopes of you.’

‘Great hopes,’ repeated Alvarez. ‘We were going to get rid of yellow fever, set up irrigation schemes in Ceará… I was put in charge of a population survey in Pernambuco and Lucia went with me on most of my journeys. She insisted and I let her — selfish swine that I was — because I so hated us to be apart.’

‘What happened?’

Alvarez took out a monogrammed silk handkerchief and wiped his brow.

‘Cholera. It was in one of those villages in the survey. She knew, but she wouldn’t stay behind. God, what an illness… well, I have no need to tell you, you must have seen enough of it. She literally wasted away… just her eyes…’ He broke off, shook his head. ‘After that I didn’t care and when they deposed Dom Pedro I just drifted with the scum. I must have had a hundred women since and they have meant nothing.’ He shrugged. ‘I thought I had forgotten; after all, it was more than thirty years ago. And then last night there was this girl with just that look Lucia had.’

‘She would have wanted you to go to Ombidos?’ asked Rom. ‘Your wife?’

‘Yes.’ Alvarez carefully put back the photograph in his wallet. ‘And you know, I thought the other one would have wanted it too — the girl last night who danced on the table. Absurd, isn’t it!’ He looked sharply at Rom from under his oiled eyebrows and leaned forward to retrieve the propelling pencil from which Rom had just broken the lead. ‘Now, how soon can you have the Amethyst ready? I’d like to leave today.’

The first cable which Edward sent, announcing that Harriet had been found and was well, strangely produced less apparent pleasure than the second, which brought to Louisa’s eye — and to the eye of Hermione Belper, as she virtually snatched it from Louisa’s hand — a glimmer of something which could not really have been satisfaction but looked remarkably like it.

Mrs Belper had come from Trumpington Villa to inform her friend that Stavely Hall, which had been put on the market a month ago, was sold and to an unknown buyer. She had brought the piece in the East Anglian Times which related this event and featured a view of Stavely’s south front. But the interesting speculations this item of news aroused were quite set aside when the maid arrived with the cable which poor Edward had despatched the night after the dinner in the Club.

HARRIET SUNK TO UNSPEAKABLE DEPRAVITY STOP MUST REQUEST AUTHORISATION FOR HER DETENTION AND IMMEDIATE REPATRIATION STOP PLEASE CABLE PREFECT OF POLICE MANAUS STOP EDWARD.

‘Oh, heavens!’ said Louisa, putting her hand to her chest. ‘Yet it is only what we expected.’

‘What all of us must have expected from the start, dear Louisa, even if we didn’t like to say so.’

‘What will Bernard say? Oh, how the poor man has been plagued by that girl. The bad blood there must have been in her mother!’

‘She was a dreadfully flighty little thing; I remember her well. Always mooning over the piano.’

‘What do you suppose he means by “unspeakable depravity”, Hermione?’ said Louisa, grasping her friend’s arm. ‘Could there be some scandal that… that one simply cannot hush up? Something… medical?’

The Professor’s key in the lock put an end to this line of speculation. He entered the drawing-room and, without preamble, Louisa put the cable into his hand.

He read it once, read it again. ‘This tells me nothing that I did not already know,’ said the Professor heavily. ‘It was perfectly obvious that the first cable was just moonshine. No girl would defy her father and throw in her lot with those scoundrels unless she was thoroughly sick in her soul. And her body.’ His voice shook with anger. ‘Harriet had everything here: a good home, upright companions, financial security. It was you’ — he rounded on Louisa — ‘who told me to give her a guinea. Without that, she could not have done it.’

Louisa bowed her head. ‘Yes, Bernard. I admit it. I let my generosity overcome me — but see how I have been punished!’

The Professor took out his watch. ‘Too late to go up to London now; I shall take the first train in the morning. This is a matter for the Foreign Office. Cedric Fitzackerly will know what to do; he’s a Junior Secretary now.’

‘That was the student you actually approved of, wasn’t it?’ said Louisa. ‘The one that didn’t argue or fall asleep in tutorials?’

She had not expressed it exactly as the Professor would have wished, but substantially she was correct. Unlike the idle, womanising undergraduates it was his misfortune to teach, Fitzackerly had been attentive and polite, thanking the Professor at the end of every lecture and devoting his final-year dissertation to the Professor’s own views on the odes of Bacchylides, so that when the young man came to him for references it had been a pleasure to write something that would make those fellows in Whitehall sit up.

‘I shall go and telegraph Fitzackerly now and tell him to expect me. It’s too late to hush things up — matters have gone too far. Edward must be given every assistance by the authorities out there. Better even that Harriet should be locked up until the boat sails rather than—’ But here for a moment he was unable to continue. ‘We must not forget our debt to Edward. To travel back with a girl such as she has become involves a considerable sacrifice. If, that is, he means to bring her back himself.’

‘He has wasted a great many words on that cable,’ said Louisa. ‘There was no need to put MUST — it would have made quite good sense without it. Or PLEASE. To put PLEASE on a cable is quite unnecessary. No one expects it.’

But for once the Professor, usually sympathetic to Louisa’s passion for frugality, was impatient. ‘This is hardly the moment to think of such trivialities, Louisa. We had best give our minds to thinking of how Harriet can be punished when she returns.’

‘Do you mean to have her back here, then, Bernard? Would it not be better if she was sent to some kind of institution where they deal with… girls of that sort?’

‘When she has been returned, we shall decide what to do,’ said the Professor.

He then left for the post office and Hermione Belper also prepared to take her departure. A discussion of who had bought Stavely and what would happen to the Brandons would clearly have to wait for another day and, determined to be the first to spread the news of Harriet’s degradation through the city, she too hurried away.