Eva Ibbotson - Journey to the River Sea

‘Look at that one,’ he said to her. ‘It’s the left eye of a tramp found dead in a ditch on Wimbledon Common. Look at the way those blood vessels are painted! You wouldn’t imagine a tramp could afford an eye like that.’

‘Perhaps he was a very important person before he became a tramp,’ suggested Maia — but the eyes were beginning to get into her dreams.

Mrs Carter had set up what she called her ‘larder’ in a cupboard in the hall, but it was not a larder to store food. Instead of bottles of plums or pats of butter, the shelves held flasks labelled POISON, and masks for protecting the face, and rubber gloves. There were glass jars of chloral hydrate, and spray cans with nozzles, and a new very large bottle labelled COCKROACH KILLER — KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE.

‘We’ll be safe now,’ she told the girls. ‘No creepy-crawlies will get past us now.’

She had also started to talk to the picture of Lady Parsons on the wall of the drawing room.

‘You were right,’ Maia heard her say to the lady’s fierce, red face. ‘I should have let Clifford go to prison instead of bringing him out here. Look what we have come to!’

And one morning Maia came into the drawing room and found the portrait wreathed in red ribbon.

‘I hope you haven’t forgotten that today is Lady Parsons’ birthday,’ Mrs Carter said to the twins. ‘Do you remember when she allowed you to share her cake?’

‘Yes, Mama, we wouldn’t forget.’

‘What kind of cake was it?’ asked Maia. She had spoken without thinking, wanting to be polite. There was certainly nothing she was less interested in than the cake which Lady Parsons had shared with Beatrice and Gwendolyn when they were still in England.

The twins glared at her. Lady Parsons was theirs ; Maia had no business even to ask.

‘It was a sponge cake with pink icing,’ said Mrs Carter.

‘No, it wasn’t, Mother. It had white icing,’ corrected Beatrice.

‘No, it didn’t; it was covered with marzipan and grated chocolate,’ said Gwendolyn.

They went on arguing, but Maia had forgotten them again, following Finn in her mind.

Where was he? Did he have enough wood for the firebox, were his maps accurate? Did he miss her at all?

Finn did miss her — she would have been surprised to know how much. He had never sailed the Arabella alone for any distance and it wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped. While she was under way he managed well, but when it came to anchoring in the evening or setting off at dawn, he would have given anything for another pair of hands. Not any pair of hands — Maia’s. She had obeyed his orders quickly but not blindly; he had learnt to trust her completely.

And she was nice. Fun. Quick to catch a joke and so interested in everything — asking about the birds, the plants. This morning he had found himself starting to say, ‘Look, Maia!’ when he saw an umbrella bird strutting along a branch, and when he realized that she wasn’t there, the exotic creature, with its sunshade of feathers, had seemed somehow less exciting. After all, sharing was something everyone wanted to do. He could hear his father’s voice calling, ‘Look, Finn, over there!’ a dozen times a day.

But his father was dead and he had left Maia, and suddenly being alone, which he had always enjoyed, turned into loneliness, which was a very different thing.

He had anchored close to a sandbank, a beautiful place sheltered by large-fronded palms, and found a nest of turtle eggs. A shoal of black-banded fishes glided past the boat; he had caught some earlier, using pieces of banana to bait his line, and they made a delicious supper. He had hardly touched his stores — and the Arabella was going steadily.

‘What’s the matter with me?’ said Finn.

He was doing what his father had suggested. He was going to see the Xanti — but now he wondered what it was all about. They were just as likely to put an arrow through him as to welcome him with open arms.

The dog, who had been curled up on the foredeck, thumped once with his tail, then got to his feet and offered him a wet nose for comfort.

‘It’s all right,’ said Finn to his dog. ‘It’s all right, Rob.’

But there was more to his unease than loneliness. He knew he could not have taken Maia — he had no idea how the journey was going to end, and in any case Miss Minton would never have allowed her to come.

All the same, he felt he should not have left her. He remembered Clovis saying, ‘But Maia shouldn’t live in a house that’s been cursed.’

Only that was silly. He had told Furo and the others to look after her and they had promised.

It was that other side of him, the Indian side, which went in for rubbish like premonitions and inklings, and things you felt without knowing why. Suddenly furious with himself, Finn crawled to his haversack, turned up the lamp, and took out Caesar’s Gallic Wars .

‘After marching from the country of the Menapii…’ he translated. And became an ordinary English schoolboy doing his homework.

When Finn had been gone for nearly a week, the Great Event which the twins had been expecting actually happened. Colonel da Silva arrived in the police launch, bringing the reward for the capture of Bernard Taverner’s son.

He brought it as he had promised, in Brazilian notes so that it could be divided into two equal parts, but he warned the twins to get it into a bank as soon as possible.

‘If you don’t have an account your parents could bank it for you.’

But the twins did not mean to do that. As da Silva left, they were already counting out their separate heaps on the dining room table.

Twenty thousand milreis … each .

For a short time, Beatrice and Gwendolyn were perfectly happy.

Miss Minton and the professor had become friends. He had taken the butterfly she had found to the collector in Manaus who had paid her. He had also lent her a collecting tin and some preservative, and though so far she had not found anything else worth selling, she was secretly proud of having become a naturalist.

Because Maia now had lunch with the Haltmanns after her music lesson, Miss Minton lunched with the professor in the little café he had shown her. But being friends did not mean blabbing out one’s troubles and Miss Minton was slow to share with the professor her anxieties about Maia. It was only when he particularly asked about her that she said, ‘I’m not happy about the way things are going at the Carters. The twins are bullying Maia more openly now and their mother seems to live in a fantasy world. She talks to the portrait of Lady Parsons and sometimes I’m afraid she—’

But Miss Minton stopped there, not liking to admit that her employer was possibly losing her mind.

‘They will have anxieties about Mr Carter’s business,’ said the professor. ‘I understand that Gonzales is baying for Carter’s blood. He certainly seems to owe enormous sums of money. Isn’t there anywhere else that you can take Maia?’

Miss Minton hesitated. Even to the professor she preferred not to reveal her plan before she was sure it could be carried out. ‘I’ve written to Mr Murray,’ was all she said.

She then asked about his work and he sighed deeply. ‘Carruthers is dead,’ he said, and his large, pink forehead creased into lines like a mournful pug’s.

Miss Minton waited. She didn’t think she had heard about Carruthers.

‘He was a brilliant man; knew more about extinct animals than anyone I know, but they hounded him.’

‘Who hounded him?’

‘The “proper” scientists. You should have seen what they wrote about him in the papers. “An unrealistic dreamer, a man who let himself be led away by myths and stories — always searching for the impossible…” ’