A Swans - Eva Ibbotson

“We’ll start again somewhere quite different—somewhere in the New World. I shall build you a house fifteen times as grand as Stavely, you’ll see!”

“Oh, Rom—in that wretched Amazon of yours!”

“No.” But he smiled, for one cannot entirely choose one’s obsessions and since his ninth birthday his had been that vast, wild place of mazed rivers and impenetrable jungle. “There’s a fortune to be made there, but you would hate the climate. In North America-California, perhaps. Or Canada—wherever you please!”

He stretched out his hands to her, for he no more doubted her than he doubted his own right arm, but she shook her head. Isobel had seen her mother humbled when the great Lexbury estate was broken up. She was afraid—and she wanted Stavely.

Thus it was Isobel who succeeded where Henry had failed; it was she who broke Rom. A month after the General’s death, she withdrew from her engagement. That night Rom found her in the Orangery with Henry and knew what she would do.

The next day he was gone and nobody at Stavely ever heard from him again.

Crossing the courtyard behind the house with the coati at his heels, Rom’s way was barred by Lorenzo, his butler and general factotum, beaming with pleasure and surrounded by a duster of indoor servants who had left their preparations for tomorrow’s party for the ballet company in order to share their master’s impending joy.

“It has come, Coronel !” said Lorenzo, throwing out an annunciatory arm. “Roderigo has sent word from Sao Gabriel and Furo has gone to fetch it in the truck.”

There was no need for Rom to ask what had come. Follina was connected by a rough road, passable by motor in the dry season, to Manaus where he had his main office and warehouse. Another, much shorter track led to the tiny village of Sao Gabriel on the Negro where he had built a floating jetty, storehouses and a rubber smoking shed; it was there, rather than at his private landing stage, that goods for Follina were unloaded.

But though Rom could pioneer a dozen new enterprises, could import grand pianos from Germany, American motor cars, carpets from Isfahan, nothing excited his men so much as the arrival of the washing basket from Truscott and Musgrove in Piccadilly containing his freshly-laundered shirts.

To add to the stories of ludicrous and extravagant behavior among the rubber barons had not been his intention. Mrs. Lehmann who washed her carriage horses in champagne, or young Wetherby who walked a jaguar with a diamond collar through the streets, had Rom’s utmost contempt. Yet unwittingly he had created a legend which outclassed them all. The travels of his laundry to and from London’s most exclusive valeting service were spoken of in Rio and Liverpool, in Paris and Madrid.

Rom ran Follina entirely with a native staff. He found that his Indians could be taught to do anything except perhaps to count; certainly they washed and ironed entirely to his satisfaction. His shirts traveled to England to be laundered because of a promise he had made to a generous and lovely woman and it was her memory, now, that softened his face.

Had it not been for Madeleine de la Tour, Rom’s midnight flight from Stavely might have ended very differently. Arriving penniless in London, half-crazed with rage and pain, he had gone to the house of the only relative he knew his mother to possess: a distant cousin; Jacques de la Tour, who had a number of business interests and who Rom hoped might give him work.

Jacques was away on an extended tour of the East, but his wife Madeleine took Rom in. She took him in in all senses: into her house, her mind, her heart and—with marvelous flair and intelligence—into her bed. She soothed the appalling hurt that Isobel had dealt him; she civilized him and left him with a sense of gratitude that had never faded. In the end, sensing his need to start on his adventure, she insisted on lending him money for his fare to Brazil.

“Only don’t turn into a savage, Romain,” she had said, standing at Euston brave as a grenadier—and much more beautiful—to see him go. “Be particularly careful of your shirts—the starch must be just so. No thumping them on flat stones, promise?”

“I promise.”

Then the train went and she cried a little in the ladies’ room and went on to the Summer Exhibition at Burlington House in a splendid herbaceous border of a hat because she was as gallant as she was good and knew that English ladies must not make a fuss.

Rom never repaid the money that she lent him. He waited two years and then went down to the Minas Gerais, that strange mineral-rich region of Brazil famous for its ornate and treasure-stocked churches, to seek out a hunchbacked craftsman who wrought precious stones into jewelry for the processional Madonnas. And a few months later a messenger arrived in Grosvenor Place and delivered a package which Madeleine opened to find—wrapped around a laundry receipt from Truscott and Musgrave—a necklace. A diamond necklace, each stone set in an intricately wrought halo of platinum, which her sensible husband—after a gasp of incredulity—fastened without too many questions around her lovely throat.

It was in an immaculate dress shirt from his laundry basket that Rom, delayed by a blocked feed-pipe on the Amethyst , entered his box in the Teatro Amazonas and saw—without undue excitement—the curtain rise on Act One of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake .

“I’m going to be sick,” said Harriet.

“You cannot be going to be sick again, ‘arriette,” said Marie-Claude, exasperated, turning from the long mirror where the girls sat in their tutus whitening their arms, putting on false eyelashes, applying Cupid’s bows to their mouths.

“I can—” said Harriet, and fled.

Act One had been called, but Act One is no business of the swans and the girls still had half an hour to complete their toilettes. It was a half-hour which Harriet did not expect to live through.

“For heaven’s sake, there are eighteen swans in this production. Also two big swans. Also those idiot cygnets with their pas de quatre ,” said Kirstin when Harriet returned, green and shivering. “You don’t matter ! Why don’t you tell yourself that?”

“I know I don’t matter,” said Harriet—and indeed no one could have lived for eighteen years in Scroope Terrace and not known that. “If I get it right, I don’t matter. But if I get it wrong … all those people who trusted me… Monsieur Dubrov and everyone… making the company look silly.”

“You won’t get it wrong. I’m in front of you most of the time and when it isn’t me, it’s Olga,” said Maria-Claude, piling up her golden hair and jabbing pins through the circlet of feathers in a way which would have driven the wardrobe mistress into fits. “ Merde ,” she said softly—and indeed the headdresses had not traveled well. She turned and dabbed a spot of red into each corner of Harriet’s eyes. “There is no need to whiten yourself. You look like a ghost.”

“I must say, Harriet, such fear is excessive ,” said Kirstin. “What would your Roman emperor say?”

But for once the thought of the great Marcus Aurelius did little for Harriet. The famous Stoic had experienced most of the troubles of mankind, but it was unlikely that he had ever made his debut before a thousand people as an enchanted swan.

If Dubrov’s newest swan was nervous to the point of prostration, his ballerina assoluta was hardly in a state of calm.

“Why didn’t you put it on the posters, that this was my farewell appearance?” She yelled at Dubrov. “I asked you to do it—and you promised. A simple thing like that and you can’t do it!”