Eva Ibbotson - Journey to the River Sea

She missed the professor.

‘Would you like to marry me?’ he had asked her politely before they sailed, and she had thanked him and said she did not think she would be very good at being married.

When the boat docked at Liverpool they went their different ways. Finn was determined to go to West-wood quite alone. He had never bought a train ticket nor looked at a timetable, but he seemed to know what to do and he would let no one help him.

‘I wish he didn’t look as though he was going to have his head cut off,’ said Maia.

The moment when the children said goodbye passed quickly. Finn was taking the train to York; Maia and Minty were bound for London. The bustle of getting their luggage on and finding their seats muffled everything. Only when the train steamed out did Maia realize that she might not see Finn again — and heard the snap of Miss Minton’s handbag as she had heard it on the day they left England, and was again handed Minty’s large white handkerchief to wipe her eyes.

The school, as they drove up to it, was just the same. The brass plate saying THE MAYFAIR ACADEMY YOUNG FOR LADIES; the row of desks she could see through the window. In Classroom B, Miss Carlisle was probably still teaching the source of the river Thames.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ said Miss Minton, and drove quickly away. Mr Murray was coming to interview her at the school on the following afternoon.

Everyone was so welcoming and friendly, and somehow that made it worse. The girls clustered round Maia; Melanie had painted a picture of her with a boa constrictor round her neck, and they’d made a banner saying: welcome back. Some of them had read about the police boat sent to find her and thought she was a heroine.

‘What was it like being rescued?’ they wanted to know.

‘It was like being rescued from Paradise,’ said Maia, but no one believed her.

They listened while she tried to describe the journey in the Arabella , and life with the Xanti, but they couldn’t take it in.

‘Aren’t you glad to be back?’ they kept asking her. ‘It must have been so scary!’ and they told her that she had been given her old bed back and that there was a new history teacher who dyed her hair.

So Maia gave up. She realized that adventures, once they were over, were things that had to stay inside one — that no one else could quite understand.

The headmistress, Miss Banks, and her sister Emily, understood a little better. They were happy to take Maia back, but they thought it might not be easy for her to settle down again.

‘You must give yourself time,’ they said kindly, and Maia patted the spaniel and remembered the howls of Finn’s dog as he was left behind with Furo.

But in the evening, when at last she had a moment alone, she slipped in to the library and leant her head against the mahogany steps she had climbed the day she knew she was going to the Amazon. The dream she had dreamt there had been a true one. She had found a land whose riches she had never before imagined, and she had found Finn.

Well, now it was over. In ten minutes the bell would ring for them to go to their dormitories, then another bell for them to kneel and pray. And why not? How else was one supposed to run a school?

‘Oh Finn,’ said Maia. ‘How am I going to bear it, day after day after day?’

When he reached York, Finn changed onto a very small train which stopped, after a while, at Westwood Halt.

Clovis had said he would meet him there but there was no sign of him. Finn left his bag in the ticket office and began to walk.

It was a cold, dank afternoon and however fast he walked, he could not get warm. The light was already going — or perhaps on this bleak day it had never really come.

He saw the high pile of his ancestral home from a long way off. It looked unspeakably dismal, with its useless turrets and jagged battlements. He tried to imagine living there year in and year out, and had to clench his teeth so as not to panic.

The gate, when he reached it, was closed and surmounted by jagged spikes.

As he stood there the lodge keeper came out. ‘This is private property,’ he said. ‘No loitering. You’d best be getting along.’

Finn glared at him. The rudeness and snobbishness was just what he had expected from this awful place. But before he could tell the man what he thought of him, he saw Clovis hurrying down the drive. He wore a tweed suit and a cap — but round his neck was a large white bandage.

‘Oh God,’ thought Finn. ‘Have they tried to cut his throat?’

Clovis came up to the gates and the lodge keeper touched his cap in a humble manner and said, ‘Are you going out, sir?’

‘Yes, Jarvis,’ said Clovis. ‘I’m going into the village.’

As he came through the gate, Finn saw that the white thing round his neck was not a bandage but a scarf — rather a bumpy one knitted in white wool.

‘I thought they’d cut your throat.’

Clovis shook his head. The scarf was a present from the middle banshee who had taken up knitting. ‘There’s a tea place just down the road. No one goes there much on a weekday — we can be alone.’

The tea shop was a tiny room in the front parlour of a brick cottage. The lady who ran it greeted Clovis as respectfully as the lodge keeper had done, and asked after Sir Aubrey.

‘You’d better tell me exactly what’s happened,’ said Finn, after they had given their order. ‘You said you were in a mess. Well, I’ll help you out — but I must know. Obviously you haven’t told him who you really are. You haven’t confessed.’

‘But I have,’ said Clovis. ‘I have — and it was absolutely awful.’

So then he told Finn what had happened when at last he found Sir Aubrey alone and willing to listen to him.

‘I told him I wasn’t Finn Taverner and it was all a mistake. I was going to explain everything properly, but as soon as I said I wasn’t really his grandson he went a ghastly sort of blue colour and started clutching his chest, and then he crumpled up and fell on the floor. I knew his heart wasn’t good, but I didn’t imagine…’ Clovis shook his head, remembering the horror of that moment. ‘I was sure he was going to die and that I’d killed him. The servants came and carried him off to bed and the doctor said he’d had some sort of a shock and I wasn’t allowed to see him.’

Clovis picked up a cut-glass ashtray and started fiddling with it.

‘When they did let me in,’ he went on, ‘he tried to sit up in bed, and then he said, ‘‘You were only joking, boy, weren’t you? Tell me it was a joke and you’re really my grandson. Boys like to play jokes, I know.’’ ’

‘And?’ Finn’s voice was sharp. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said, yes of course it was a joke. Of course I was Bernard’s son and his grandson. I know I shouldn’t have done, but if you’d seen his face… And then he began to get better quite quickly. But he wants to make everything legal because I don’t have a birth certificate or anything. He wants to name me officially as heir to Westwood and give me an allowance — quite a big one. And I don’t know what to do. He’s absolutely certain I’m his grandson — there’s a painting of some admiral who’s supposed to have my nose…’

Finn was leaning across the table, staring at him intently. ‘And you don’t want it? You don’t want Westwood or the money or anything? That’s why you asked me to come?’

The lady brought their muffins and the teapot in a knitted cosy. When they were alone again, Clovis said, ‘It isn’t that I don’t want it — the old man’s been very good to me and well… there are things I could do. I’d like to bring my foster mother here to cook — she’s always wanted to work in a house like this, and the cook we’ve got is leaving. And my — your — cousins are nice. The Basher’s girls. You wouldn’t think she’d have nice children but she has. But I couldn’t take it from you for the rest of your life. For always. How could I live in a great house and take the money that’s really yours when you live in a wooden hut… I mean, now that you’ve seen it, surely—?’