A Swans - Eva Ibbotson

Such little Breasts she had… but very much there… thought Edward, drifting into sleep—and woke sweating to rise from his bed and take a cold shower: the first of many that he was to take as he contemplated the descent from cake to gutter of the girl he had once loved.

Chapter Thirteen

The Minister for Amazonia had sent for Rom. It was the morning after the banquet. Rom had spent the night at the Casa Branca and had not slept well. The presence of Edward Finch-Dutton at the dinner had been as unexpected as it was unfortunate, and the flushed face and drunken mutterings of Harriet’s erstwhile suitor as he staggered from the room made it clear that all his own efforts to reconcile Harriet’s family to her activities must now be set at naught.

But Harriet’s affairs must wait. He had come to do battle with Alvarez and arriving, punctual to the minute, at the Palace of Justice, he was shown into the room set aside for the Minister.

“Come in, Verney.”

Alvarez, immaculately dressed as always, was sitting at a vast desk shuffling a pile of papers, but he rose and shook Rom’s hand.

“I wanted to see you about the Ombidos report,” he said. “I’ve read it again.”

“Yes.” Rom braced himself for a repetition of the excuses of the previous day.

“And I have decided to go!”

Surprise and relief chased the shadows from Rom’s face.

“You will go yourself?” he repeated incredulously. “To Ombidos? Oh, but that’s splendid! You are the only person who can put things right up there.”

“It means delaying my return to Rio and I am sending home my domestic staff. I want you to take me as far as Santa Maria in the Amethyst; I shall let it be known that we’re off on a fishing trip. Can you spare a few days?”

“Of course.”

“De Silva can meet me there in a government launch with a suitable escort. We’ll go by night and take them by surprise. Nominally it will be merely a courtesy visit, but if naif of what you say is true, then the rest will follow.”

“Would you like me to come all the way to Ombidos? I can bring a dozen of my own men and follow you.”

Alvarez smiled at the eagerness in Rom’s voice, but shook his head.

“I know how you feel, but this is a job for my own countrymen. You have already made quite enough of a reputation as a rescuer of the oppressed. Now it is my turn for some of the glory!”

Rom was not fooled. Alvarez faced a dangerous journey and the hostility of his fellow politicians in Rio, for there were powerful men making money from Ombidos.

“Could I ask you what made you change your mind about going?”

“Yes, you could ask. And I will tell you.” Alvarez sat down again behind the massive desk and motioned Rom to a chair. “It was that girl last night—the girl in the cake.”

“ What !” Rom leaned forward, unable to believe his ears.

“Yes, the girl in the cake,” repeated Alvarez. “You can thank her that I’m risking my neck up that hellish river.” He felt in his pocket, brought out a wallet and extracted a faded sepia photograph which he handed to Rom. “Do you see the resemblance?”

The picture showed a young girl in a wedding-dress holding a bouquet of lilies. The portrait was conventional enough, but transcending the stiff pose, the studio props, was the expression on the thin face—a look both brave and eager, as though she could hardly wait for the adventure of her life to begin.

“Yes,” said Rom quietly. “The eyes, particularly.” And then: “Your wife?”

Alvarez nodded. “Her name was Lucia. It was an arranged marriage; she came to me direct from her convent… there was some family connection. But straight away… on the first night… I realized that I had found what half the world is looking for.” He took back the picture, letting it rest in the palm of his hand. “She was no more beautiful than that girl last night was beautiful, but she was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence… they don’t talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good …”

Rom had taken a silver propelling pencil from the desk and was turning it over and over in his hands. “Go on, sir, if you will.”

“I was very young in those days, and very idealistic. I thought Brazil would become the moral leader of the New World. There were a few of us who formed the Green Horizons Party—you may have heard of it. We planned to educate the Indians, build the finest schools and hospitals in the world… oh, all the usual dreams. They thought of me as a leader, but my fervor—even my ideas, many of them—came from my wife.”

“I knew they had great hopes of you.”

“Great hopes,” repeated Alvarez. “We were going to get rid of yellow fever, set up irrigation schemes in Ceará… I was put in charge of a population survey in Pernambuco and Lucia went with me on most of my journeys. She insisted and I let her—selfish swine that I was—because I so hated us to be apart.”

“What happened?”

Alvarez took out a monogrammed silk handkerchief and wiped his brow.

“Cholera. It was in one of those villages in the survey. She knew, but she wouldn’t stay behind. God, what an illness… well, I have no need to tell you, you must have seen enough of it. She literally wasted away… just her eyes…” He broke off, shook his head. “After that I didn’t care and when they deposed Dom Pedro I just drifted with the scum. I must have had a hundred women since and they have meant nothing.” He shrugged. “I thought I had forgotten; after all, it was more than thirty years ago. And then last night there was this girl with just that look Lucia had.”

“She would have wanted you to go to Ombidos?” asked Rom. “Your wife?”

“Yes.” Alvarez carefully put back the photograph in his wallet. “And you know, I thought the other one would have wanted it too—the girl last night who danced on the table. Absurd, isn’t it!” He looked sharply at Rom from under his oiled eyebrows and leaned forward to retrieve the propelling pencil from which Rom had just broken the lead. “Now, how soon can you have the Amethyst ready? I’d like to leave today.”

The first cable which Edward sent, announcing that Harriet had been found and was well, strangely produced less apparent pleasure than the second which brought to Louisa’s eye—and to the eye of Hermione Belper, as she virtually snatched it from Louisa’s hand—a glimmer of something which could not really have been satisfaction but looked remarkably like it.

Mrs. Belper had come from Trumpington Villa to inform her friend that Stavely Hall, which had been put on the market a month ago, was sold and to an unknown buyer. She had brought the piece in the East Anglian Times which related this event and featured a view of Stavely’s south front. But the interesting speculations this item of news aroused were quite set aside when the maid arrived with the cable which poor Edward had dispatched the night after the dinner in the dub.

HARRIET SUNK TO UNSPEAKABLE DEPRAVITY STOP MUST REQUEST AUTHORIZATION FOR HER DETENTION AND IMMEDIATE REPATRIATION STOP PLEASE CABLE PREFECT OF POLICE MANAUS STOP EDWARD.

“Oh, heavens!” said Louisa, putting her hand to her chest. “Yet it is only what we expected.”

“What all of us must have expected from the start, dear Louisa, even if we didn’t like to say so.”