Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

‘My darling… oh, my love.’ He wiped her face, took the tiller from her and gathered her to him with his free arm. ‘What is it, Harriet? What are you frightened of? Tell me, my heart, for I swear that whatever it is—’

‘Nothing… honestly, Rom, nothing. I have everything anyone could want. I am probably the happiest person in the world. Only please, please , could we not talk about… what comes next? Could we just live each day fully and properly, savouring every second like in Marcus Aurelius?’ And again, ‘I promise not to make a fuss when the time comes to leave. I promise.’

He left it then. ‘Of course,’ he said cheerfully, giving her the tiller once more. ‘There is not the slightest need to think about it now. Steer for the far side of that little island — there’s a wonderful spot there for our picnic. That was a turtle which just plopped into the water. Maybe we’ll find some eggs and have an orgy…’

But that night, long after she was sleeping in his arms, he lay awake puzzling out the reason for her fear. Did she feel herself incompetent to run Stavely? She must know that he would help her in every way, that she would have a first-class staff. Was it something to do with Isobel? She seemed to pronounce her name with difficulty. He had meant to offer Isobel Paradise Farm — there seemed no other way to keep an eye on Henry and that he should do so was clearly Harriet’s dearest wish. Did she imagine that Isobel as an older woman would interfere in her affairs? Surely she must know that he would never permit that? Or was it her love for Follina that made the thought of leaving such a dread?

No, there was nothing there to account for Harriet’s terror. It had to be something far deeper than that. And as he lay wakeful in the dark, there came to him the image of Harriet balancing on her leaf by the lake with the Victoria Regina lilies — and the answer Simonova and the others had given to the question he had found it so hard to ask.

‘When she came, we thought it was too late… But we don’t think it as much as we did… We remember Taglioni, you see.’

And three days ago in Simonova’s sick-room: ‘You have taken the only girl who might have made a serious dancer.’

Did Harriet know how good she was? Was that it? That much as she loved him, she couldn’t bear to give up dancing? Once at Stavely he had found his mother sitting at the piano, her hands on the silent keys and a blind, lost look on her face. God knows she had loved her husband if any woman had, but had she paid too great a price?

Now it was Rom’s turn to be afraid. He looked down at Harriet and she seemed to sense his regard, for without opening her eyes she burrowed deep into his shoulder with a sleep-drugged sigh of utter contentment.

No, thought Rom, banishing his spectres. I don’t believe it.

The next day he left early to inspect a consignment of redwoods unloaded at São Gabriel. Returning earlier than expected, he let himself silently into his drawing-room.

From the horn of the gramophone came the sound of a Brahms impromptu. Harriet was standing with her back to him, her fingertips resting on the arms of a chair.

He had often seen her dance… for his delighted villagers, for Maliki and Rainu, creating a ‘ballet of the bath’ in which, suffocated with mirth, they brought her towels en pointe — and once, unforgettably, at night in his room after love when she had spun like a dervish, expressing her ecstasy in movement; for she was not a girl who suffered from the tristesse that is supposed to follow passion.

But now she was working. Relentlessly, steadily, Harriet practised her pliés… bending… rising… bending… while he watched her straight, slim back, the tendrils of soft hair lapping her neck. His territory — his — and now turned away from him in the iron discipline of class.

He stood for some time in the doorway, his face taut. It seemed to him that it would have been easier to see her absorbed in another man than to watch this impersonal dedication, this being lost to everything except the need to perfect each movement. Then he went out silently and made his way to his study.

Harriet had woken that morning chiding herself for letting her happiness make her soft. She must keep her muscles supple, her body in shape, for she must not be a burden to Rom. She must be able to find work as a dancer — if possible far away, for she did not think she could bear to be in Cambridge knowing he was so close. The others had gone without complaint, those girls he had brought to Follina and honoured with his love. She would not be less brave, less competent than they.

And so she worked, murmuring instructions to herself, and saw him neither come nor go, while in his study Rom stood looking down at the letter he had written to Professor Morton… and then tore it slowly into shreds.

‘That woman is not fit to have charge of a child,’ said the plump and motherly Sister Concepcion. ‘It’s insufferable the way she paces up and down like a caged animal in front of him. Every time she is with him for an hour, his temperature goes up.’

She put down her cup and glared round the bare, white-walled refectory in which the nuns were taking a brief break. It was midday but the convent, built around a tree-shaded courtyard, had no truck with the noise and bustle of Belem harbour where the Gregory had just docked, down from Manaus, and was taking on cargo before setting off across the Atlantic.

‘Poor little scrap!’ Sister Margharita’s eyes behind their pebble glasses were angry. A schoolteacher before she took the veil, Sister Margharita — who helped Sister Concepcion in the infirmary — spoke a little English and she had formed an excellent opinion of Henry. Not even at the highest point of his fever had the child failed in courtesy to those who nursed him. ‘He needs at least a week convalescing quietly, and a fortnight would not be too much, but she was on again this morning, trying to tell me he was well enough to travel. I shall be glad when the Bernadetto goes out tonight. There isn’t another sailing for a week, so maybe she’ll settle down.’

‘Not her,’ said Sister Concepcion. ‘She’s possessed by some devil.’

‘Or some man,’ said Sister Annunciata. She had been a considerable beauty before she took the veil, but if this made her understand Mrs Brandon better than the others, she judged her no less harshly. Henry had been extremely ill. Bronchitis had set in just as his rash was fading and for a few days they had feared pneumonia, that dreaded aftermath of measles. While the child’s life had been in danger Mrs Brandon had shown a proper concern, but now her restless impatience was once more in full flood. To see Henry’s anxious eyes following his mother round the room, to see the touching way in which the weakened little boy tried to respond to her injunction to sit up properly and endeavour to put his feet on the ground, was to have feelings about the beautiful widow which, as handmaidens of the Lord, they had hoped to have put behind them.

‘Anyway, she is out for the morning,’ said Sister Concepcion. ‘So the child will get some sleep.’

Isobel was, in fact, sitting on the pavement of an elegant harbour-side café eating an ice-cream. Fashionably dressed in black muslin, her hair swept up under a wide-brimmed hat, she attracted a good deal of attention, but she was as indifferent to the admiring glances of the passers-by as she had been to the friendly greetings of the women drinking lemonade at a neighbouring table, or the laughter of the children playing beside the boats. Only the black and scarlet funnel of the Bernadetto , just beginning to take on passengers for the journey to Manaus, pierced her absorption — taunting her with her incarceration in this wretched place. It was a slow boat, taking nine days for the voyage and stopping absolutely everywhere, but at least it would have got her there.