A Swans - Eva Ibbotson

“Oh yes, there is dancing,” said Simonova. “Make no mistake! Every finger dances.” She looked for a moment at Harriet’s rapt face. “It is one of the glories of our tradition, that mime. When Karsavina does it, it is impossible not to weep.”

“Nobody can do it better than you!”

Harriet’s husky-voiced adulation made the ballerina smile. “Kchessinskaya taught it to me. Perhaps one day I shall teach it to you, who knows?” She patted Harriet on the cheek, swept up her accompanist and was gone—but her words sang in Harriet’s head. It meant nothing of course, it was only nonsense; she would never dance Lise. But if just once in my life I could do that mime, thought Harriet—and still in a dream, she moved out on to the empty silent stage.

Thus Rom, coming to find her, stood in the wings and watched as she had watched Simonova. He had put out of his mind this girl who had been Henry’s creature: he would do nothing now except gently break to her the news he had brought, and leave her. Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theater, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.

Harriet was humming, trying to remember… After Simonova had stretched out her hand in church for her lover’s ring—had she knelt to pray? No, surely she must have looked up, lifted her face for the bridal kiss. Yes, of course she had. She had pushed back her veil, turned, lifted her head…

So Harriet turned, lifted her head… and saw Verney standing in the shadows.

“I must speak to you, Harriet.” His words were curt, his face guarded again. The insane desire to step forward into her dream had passed. “We can go to the trustees’ room; there will be no one there.”

He led her through a baize door, along a corridor… up a flight of steps to a richly paneled room dominated by a vast, satinwood table.

“Sit down.”

She sat obediently, looking very small in one of the twelve carved and high-backed chairs, like a studious pupil facing a board of examiners.

“What I have to say will upset and sadden you,” he began and she made a movement of acquiescence. Anything he said while he still looked so angry and bitter would do just that. “But I felt you should know while you were out here and had a chance to… forget a little. Henry is dead, Harriet. Henry Brandon. He died a week after you left England.”

Her reaction was worse than anything he could have imagined. The color drained from her face and she shrank back in the tall chair. She was completely stricken.

“No… Oh, no, he can’t be! God couldn’t…”

She had really loved him then, that pale deceitful slug of a man, thought Rom, noting with detached surprise the degree of his own wretchedness.

“I’m afraid it’s true, Harriet. I cabled for confirmation.”

“He was perfectly all right when I saw him… he was in the maze… he was reading your book,” she said wildly. “He admired you so much.” Her mouth began to tremble and she bit her lip with a desperate effort at control. “How did he die?” she managed to say. “What happened?”

He had decided to tell her only if she asked. “He shot himself.”

Her head jerked up. “ Shot himself? But that’s impossible! How can a little child shoot himself? Did they let him play in the gun room? Surely even that horrible Mr. Grunthrope wouldn’t have let—”

“Wait!” Rom took a steadying breath. At the same time everything suddenly grew lighter—the room, the lowering sky outside. “Harriet, I am talking of Henry Brandon, the owner of Stavely—Isobel’s husband. A man of thirty-eight.”

“A man? Oh, I suppose that’s his father. I never met him. My Henry will be eight in June.” Her face as she took in what Rom had said became transfigured. “It’s all right, then? My Henry is all right?”

“Yes, I’m sure he is. We’ll cable anyway, but there’s not the slightest reason to assume otherwise.” He had been standing, needing to be distanced from her grief. Now he pulled out a chair in order to sit beside her. “I didn’t know there was a child,” he said slowly. “I took good care to know nothing about what went on at Stavely.” He stared for a while at the swirling clouds outside, massing for the afternoon downpour. Then: “When you talked of meeting Henry… of loving him… it was of my brother that I thought you spoke. Of the man who has just died.”

She looked up, amazed. “But I never even met him! And if I had, I wouldn’t plead for a grown man who had deserted his family. It would be none of my business… well, it isn’t anyway, I suppose. But if you had seen Henry—my Henry—he’s lost all his milk teeth and he worries about wearing spectacles and he had this image of you. I think the idea of you somehow kept him going.”

She fell silent, realising how uncannily accurate the child’s description of Rom had been. Rom could save Stavely; he could save anything or anyone he chose.

“Yes, I see. I’m afraid it’s a case of Romeo and the chicken feather,” he said ruefully. “I should have thought—it was obvious really—but I was too angry. I have no reason to be fond of my half-brother.” There was a pause. Then, “Did you see Isobel Brandon?”

“I saw her for a moment through a doorway. She seemed very distressed. And very beautiful.”

“Yes, I can imagine she would still be beautiful.” He looked about for something to help him through what was to come, found Harriet’s hand and appropriated it, feeling it to be his due. “I think it’s time I told you about my youth at Stavely. I was once engaged to Isobel, you see.”

He began to speak then, and in the hour that followed he held back nothing.

Harriet learned of his childhood, his veneration for his father, the desolation he had felt at his mother’s death. Of his brother he could not speak even now without hatred, but the passage of time made it possible for him to be fair to Isobel. He emphasized her youth, the agony she had experienced when her grandfather was ruined.

“I saw only her betrayal,” he said. “Now I see that she must have suffered. I expected too much from someone so young.”

“No.” Harriet’s denial was scarcely audible, but he caught it and smiled, unfolding her fingers to make a fan which he spread out on the satinwood table.

“I was penniless, futureless; she wanted to be safe.”

He went on then to tell Harriet of the kindness of Madeleine de la Tour, of his early adventures on the river. But there remained with Harriet the image of a woman, beautiful and high-born, whom he had passionately loved—a woman who belonged to his own world—and a place for which he still craved. And she saw that in calling up help for Isobel’s child, she had also invoked help for Isobel whose first—and surely last—love he had been.

Chapter Ten

“I’m sorry,” said Henry in a small, croaking voice. It hurt him to speak, his head throbbed and though the nuns had closed the shutters of the long windows of the sanatorium, a ray of light entering through a crack pierced his eyes as if it were a dagger. “I’m awfully sorry I’m ill,” said Henry to his mother.