Eva Ibbotson - Journey to the River Sea

But she needed all her courage as she stood in the hall a month later, saying goodbye. Her trunk was corded, her travelling cape lay in the small suitcase which was all she was allowed to take into the cabin, and she stood in a circle of her friends. Hermione was crying, the youngest pupil, Dora, was clutching her skirt.

‘Don’t go, Maia,’ she wailed. ‘I don’t want you to go. Who’s going to tell me stories?’

‘We’ll miss you,’ shrieked Melanie.

‘Don’t step on a boa constrictor!’

‘Write — oh, please write lots and lots of letters.’

Last-minute presents had been stuffed into her case; a slightly strange pin cushion made by Anna, a set of ribbons for her hair. The teachers too had come to see her off, and the maids were coming upstairs.

‘You’ll be all right, Miss,’ they said. ‘You’ll have a lovely time.’ But they looked at her with pity. Piranhas and alligators were in the air — and the housemaid who had sat up most of the night with Maia after she heard of her parents’ death, was wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron.

The headmistress now came down the stairs, followed by Miss Emily, and everyone made way for her as she came up to Maia. But the farewell speech Miss Banks had prepared was never made. Instead she came forward and put her arms round Maia, who vanished for the last time into the folds of her tremendous bosom.

‘Farewell, my child,’ she said, ‘and God bless you!’, and then the porter came and said the carriage was at the door.

The girls followed Maia out into the street, but at the sight of the black-clad woman sitting stiffly in the back of the cab, her hands on her umbrella, Maia faltered. This was Miss Minton, the governess, who was going to take care of her on the journey.

‘Doesn’t she look fierce?’ whispered Melanie.

‘Poor you,’ mumbled Hermione.

And indeed the tall, gaunt woman looked more like a rake or a nutcracker than a human being.

The door of the cab opened. A hand in a black glove, bony and cold as a skeleton, was stretched out to help her in. Maia took it and, followed by the shrieks of her schoolmates, they set off.

For the first part of the journey Maia kept her eyes on the side of the road. Now that she was really leaving her friends it was hard to hold back her tears.

She had reached the gulping stage when she heard a loud snapping noise and turned her head. Miss Minton had opened the metal clasp of her large black handbag and was handing her a clean handkerchief, embroidered with the initial ‘A’.

‘Myself,’ said the governess in her deep gruff voice, ‘I would think how lucky I was. How fortunate.’

‘To go to the Amazon, you mean?’

‘To have so many friends who were sad to see me go.’

‘Didn’t you have friends who minded you leaving?’

Miss Minton’s thin lips twitched for a moment.

‘My sister’s budgerigar, perhaps. If he had understood what was happening. Which is extremely doubtful.’

Maia turned her head. Miss Minton was certainly a most extraordinary-looking person. Her eyes, behind thick, dark-rimmed spectacles, were the colour of mud, her mouth was narrow, her nose thin and sharp and her black felt hat was tethered to her sparse bun of hair with a fearsome hat pin in the shape of a Viking spear.

‘It’s copied from the armour of Eric the Hammerer,’ said Miss Minton, following Maia’s gaze. ‘One can kill with a hatpin like that.’

Both of them fell silent again, till the cab lurched suddenly and Miss Minton’s umbrella clattered to the floor. It was quite the largest and ugliest umbrella Maia had ever seen, with a steel spike and a long shaft ending in a handle shaped like the beak of a bird of prey.

Miss Minton, however, was looking carefully at a crack in the handle which had been mended with glue.

‘Did you break it before?’ Maia asked politely.

‘Yes.’ She peered at the hideous umbrella through her thick glasses. ‘I broke it on the back of a boy called Henry Hartington,’ she said.

Maia shrank back.

‘How—’ she began, but her mouth had gone dry.

‘I threw him on the ground and knelt on him and belaboured him with my umbrella,’ said Miss Minton. ‘Hard. For a long time.’

She leant back in her seat, looking almost happy.

Maia swallowed. ‘What had he done?’

‘He had tried to stuff a small spaniel puppy through the wire mesh of his father’s tennis court.’

‘Oh! Was it hurt badly? The puppy?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘One leg was dislocated and his eye was scratched. The gardener managed to set the leg, but we couldn’t do anything about his eye.’

‘How did Henry’s mother punish him?’

‘She didn’t. Oh dear me no! I was dismissed instead. Without a reference.’

Miss Minton turned away. The year that followed when she could not get another job and had to stay with her married sister, was one that she was not willing to remember or discuss.

The cab stopped. They had reached Euston station. Miss Minton waved her umbrella at a porter, and Maia’s trunk and her suitcase were lifted on to a trolley. Then came a battered tin trunk with the letters A. MINTON painted on the side.

‘You’ll need two men for that,’ said the governess.

The porter looked offended. ‘Not me. I’m strong.’

But when he came to lift the trunk, he staggered.

‘Crikey, Ma’am, what have you got in there?’ he asked.

Miss Minton looked at him haughtily and did not answer. Then she led Maia onto the platform where the train waited to take them to Liverpool and the RMS Cardinal bound for Brazil.

They were steaming out of the station before Maia asked, ‘Was it books in the trunk?’

‘It was books,’ admitted Miss Minton.

And Maia said, ‘Good.’

The Cardinal was a beautiful ship; a snow-white liner with a slender, light blue funnel. She had two state rooms, a dining room and lots of deck space where people could lie about and drink beef tea or play games.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ said Maia, and she imagined herself standing by the rail with the wind in her face as she watched the porpoises play and the white birds wheel and circle overhead.

But the beginning of the voyage wasn’t at all like that because after the ship left Lisbon, the Cardinal ran into a storm. Great green waves loomed up like mountains, the ship rolled and shuddered and pitched. Hardly anyone got as far as the dining room, and the doors to the decks were closed so that any passengers still on their legs did not get washed overboard.

Maia and Miss Minton shared a cabin with two Portuguese ladies who spent their time in their bunks groaning, being sick, praying to the Virgin and begging to die. Maia thought this was going too far, but it is true that being seasick is so awful that people do sometimes wish that the ship would simply sink and put them out of their misery.

Maia was not seasick and nor was Miss Minton. They did not feel exactly hungry but they managed to get to the dining room, holding onto everything they could find, and to eat some of the soup which the waiters poured into the bowls fastened onto the table with a special gadget that came out in storms. It is difficult not to feel superior when everyone is being ill and you aren’t, and Maia couldn’t help being a bit pleased with herself. This lasted till Miss Minton, hanging onto the saloon rail with her long, black arms, said that this would be a good time to start learning Portuguese.

‘We shall be undisturbed.’

Maia thought this was a bad idea. ‘Maybe the twins would teach me. They must speak it if they’ve been there for so long.’