A Swans - Eva Ibbotson

All the same, those who watched her were in their different ways displeased.

“Poor child! It is a mistake to be like that,” said Simonova, flopping down on the bed when she was back in her room at the Metropole. “Of course, it is good for one’s dancing afterward.” She took off her shoes and dropped them on the floor. “What was the name of that hussar, do you remember? In the Rodenzky regiment? The year I met you.”

“Count Zugarovitch,” said Dubrov, coming to sit beside her on the bed. The young blue-eyed hussar had been killed in a duel soon afterward and he could afford to be magnanimous.

“Yes. It is because of him that I am unsurpassed in Giselle ,” said Simonova with her usual modesty. “Still, it is awful, this love.” She laid her head with unaccustomed tenderness against his shoulder—a gesture which, though it was intended for the dead hussar, Dubrov proceeded to turn to good account.

Marie-Claude, accosting Harriet as she changed in the chorus dressing room, was simply angry.

“There is no need for you to act like that; it is only a rehearsal and the whole scene will be played behind gauzes and there is no extra pay.”

“Like what?” asked Harriet, bewildered.

“As though you were really suffering. As though you were really outside and lost and frightened and looking in on happiness from which you were excluded et tout ça . It is not necessary ,” raged Marie-Claude.

“You are certainly a good actress, Harriet,” said Kirstin. “You seemed absolutely anguished.”

“Did I?” Harriet was surprised. “It’s just that I know… what it is like. I know how it is to be at a window… outside… and look in on a lighted room and not be able to make anybody hear.”

“How can you know? You have not experienced it.”

Harriet hung Odette’s glittering crown on a peg above the mirror and reached for her comb. “Perhaps I am going to one day,” she said. “There is a man in England who says that time is curved and that we can sometimes see…”

But Marie-Claude was entirely uninterested in metaphysical theories about time. “It is only necessary to do the steps,” she snapped.

And after all Marie-Claude was right, for when Harriet came on that night she was just a distant, half-lit figure vanishing in an instant—and the only man who might have known that it was Harriet and not Olga who trembled and beckoned at the window was a hundred miles away.

Chapter Nine

“Eat, Coronel ,” begged Furo, pushing the tin plate toward his master.

The brightly patterned fish, salted and grilled on a driftwood fire, smelled delicious but Rom shook his head. He sat leaning against the twisted trunk of a mango, letting the fine sand of the praia on which they had made camp run through his fingers. Nearby the Daisy May floated quietly at anchor. A cormorant turned a yellow-ringed and disbelieving eye on the intruders and flapped off across the river. In the still water, the colors of the sunset changed from flame to primrose and a last glimmer of unearthly green.

Rom, usually aware of every stirring leaf, noticed nothing; he was lost in the horror of what he had just seen.

He had meant simply to spend a few days on the river, wanting to shake off the memory of that ill-fated lunch with Harriet. Taking only the silent and devoted Furo—loading the boat with the usual gifts of fishhooks and beads and medical supplies—he had traveled up the Negro, bound for an island where tree orchids grew in incredible profusion and the snowy egrets made their nests.

Then something—he had no idea what it was—made him turn up the Ombidos river. There had long been rumors of gross ill-treatment of the Indians by the men who ran the Ombidos Rubber Company, and the report de Silva had sent down had made disquieting reading, but Rom had seen too many do-gooders and journalists make capital out of the rubber barons’ wicked treatment of the natives to be seriously disturbed. Moreover the company was entirely Brazilian-owned. Rom might fight exploitation ruthlessly where it was inflicted by Europeans, but he did not meddle in the affairs of his hosts.

Yet at the end of the second day, the Daisy May was chugging at a steady seven knots up the Ombidos. Perhaps it was hindsight, but it seemed to Rom a frightful place; the “green hell” so beloved of the fiction writers come hideously to life. Oppressive, dark, ominously silent: only the mosquitos, incessant and insatiable even in the hissing rain, seemed to be alive on that Stygian stretch of water.

That night they had tied up in a creek, concealed by overhanging trees. The next morning Rom put on a battered sombrero, slung a rifle over his shoulder and, with his pockets full of trinkets, disappeared along a jungle track in the direction of the village. With his two-day stubble, his shirt stained by grease from the Daisy May’s engine, he passed easily enough for a poor-white trader come to cheat the natives out of basket-work or cured skins for a handful of beads.

He was away for twenty-four hours. Since then he had spoken only to give Furo orders which would take them away fast, and faster, from that accursed place. Even now, fifty miles down-river in as halcyon a spot as anyone could hope for, he sat like a man in a trance and in that steaming jungle, looked cold.

“It was very bad, then?” inquired Furo at last.

Rom stirred and turned.

“Yes.”

He took the bottle of brandy that Furo had pushed toward him and tilted it to his mouth, but nothing could blot out what he had seen at Ombidos. He had believed that he knew of all the cruelties which men had inflicted on the Indians in their insane greed for rubber… Workers flayed into insensibility with tapir-hide whips for bringing in less cahuchu than their master craved; hirelings with Winchesters dragging into slavery every able-bodied man in a village… He himself had been offered—by a drunken overseer on the Madeira—one of the man’s native concubines, a girl just nine years old…

But he had seen nothing. Until he had been to Ombidos, he had not known what cruelty was. And with the men who had done… those things… he had smiled and joked. He had not killed one of them; had not throttled with his bare hands a single one of the torturers, because he had to return and bear witness.

“Is it true that messages have gone to the Minister in Rio to tell of the bad things at Ombidos?” asked Furo, staring trustingly at his master.

“Yes, it is true. To Antonio Alvarez, the Minister for Amazonia.”

“And he is coming to Manaus. So he will go to Ombidos and see for himself? He will make it right?”

Rom shook his head. “He will come, Furo. He will dine at the Sports Club and go to Madame Anita’s brothel with the Mayor and attend some meetings at the Town Hall in his tight suit and pointed shoes. But he will not go to Ombidos.”

Antonio Alvarez, a man approaching sixty… A gourmet who traveled with a French chef; a dandy who kept a retinue of hairdressers, valets and masseurs in his mansion in Rio… Nothing on God’s earth, thought Rom, would get Alvarez to that hell-hole. It was said that once he had been different—an idealist and a patriot—but that had been decades ago. Some personal tragedy was supposed to have turned him into the man he now was, the man Rom knew: wily, powerful, idle…