A Swans - Eva Ibbotson

She had to remember for always the shape of the carved handles on the chest of drawers and the glint of the carriage clock, its hands at ten to six. She had to remember the books lying on the low table—three books with leather bindings and beside them a small bronze dragon and Rom’s fountain pen. She had to remember the Persian rug spread on the carpet and that was going to be difficult: she must work and work at remembering that, for the squares and diamonds of cinnamon and amethyst and pearl were unbelievably complex.

She must remember how it felt to walk barefoot to the window and lift the curtain a little… The mosquito netting had trapped a moth, which must not die because nothing was allowed to die on the morning of her ruin, and which she freed and saw flutter up to the lamp. Which meant that she must study the lamp, too: five petals of rosy glass held by a silver chain…

“Who gave you permission to leave my side?”

She spun around. Rom was leaning on one arm, looking at her. He was awake, alive—he had not perished in the night!

“I was getting to know the room,” she said.

“So I saw. But you happen to be further away than I care for.”

“Then I will come back.” She came to him and hung her head, for what she saw in his eyes was too much even for a woman as officially depraved as she now was.

“I thought perhaps I should get dressed?” she suggested.

“No, I’m not very keen on that,” said Rom in conversational tones.

“Actually it’s difficult, because I only have my Wili costume. But I can’t go out into the garden without my clothes.”

“Ah… But you aren’t going into the garden.”

“Am I not?” She considered this. Then her face crunched into the urchin smile which had so surprised him when he first saw her with Manuelo’s baby under the trees. “Well, I will come back—only I would like to creep from the foot of the bed into your presence, like the odalisques did with Suleiman the Great.”

“Over my dead body will you creep!”

“But if I wanted to?”

He pulled her down so that she lay against his shoulder. “It’s bad for people to get what they want—it deprives them of their dreams. I’ll explain it to you. Later…”

Harriet lifted her head. “How many times a day can one be ruined?” she asked—not in any way displeased, just interested.

“We shall have to find out.” And his mouth suddenly twisted: “Oh, God, I have ruined you, too, you gallant girl, but I swear—”

She had begun obediently to put up a hand to the buttons of her negligee, was beginning to undo the one at the top.

“How dare you?” he said roughly, pulling her fingers away. “Leave it alone! That button is mine !”

In the days that followed, Harriet became somewhat beautiful. Her skin glowed, her hair—Rom swore it grew thicker and heavier almost by the hour and like most lovers he both rejoiced in what improved her and swore that he wanted nothing about her to change.

He had sent word to the Company that she was safe and Marie-Claude, the sensible girl, had packed Harriet’s clothes and taken them to Verney’s office for Miguel to send to Follina. However, this helped Harriet little for Rom promptly gave orders to have them burned.

“Nothing personal, you understand. Just a difference of opinion between me and your Aunt Louisa. Later we’ll buy some more. The blue skirt and the white blouse are all right—and your petticoat; you can keep that.” He grinned down at her. “Who knows, after all, when you may get the urge to dance on tables!”

But clothes were not really Harriet’s problem, for the white cloud bed with its mosquito netting—from which she occasionally still rescued the moths that became trapped in its folds—had become her world. She saw it now as a white-sailed ship on which she voyaged with Rom to Monserrat or Venusburg.

“I think God has made a mistake about love,” she said to him, lying with her head in the hollow of his arm. “If one can find it—all this ecstasy, and seeing the world in a grain of sand like this… then one isn’t going to struggle to be properly religious and good.”

“If you knew how rare it was, Harriet,” he said, smoothing back her hair. “What we have here. God wasn’t chancing His arm much, I assure you. Not many people are deflected from the pursuit of the good by a requited passion. I have chased it all my adult life—and I found it the day you came.”

“It’s because they haven’t got you that they don’t find it. But then why should I be given this chance? Why me?”

She could make no sense of this. Wickedness had led to ecstasy. Only temporary ecstasy, of course—she would lose him and she knew how. But already she had had so much more than she was entitled to.

“Only I’m not completely happy all the time,” she pointed out, “because you won’t let me creep from the foot of the bed into your presence. So perhaps God will let me—”

“Oh, Harriet, let Him be. He’s not after you, poor God! You’re His suffering creature now bathed in love. Come here and I’ll show you.”

When Rom was working in his study or at the loading bay at Sao Gabriel, Harriet had baths. Maliki and Rainu presided over these hour-long rituals from which Harriet emerged smelling now of frangipani, now of hibiscus or increasingly—as her helpers became aware of her passion for the scents and unguents of their country—of essences they themselves had compounded from plants which she had not even known existed. Even so, she could never defeat Rom who, after burying his face in her hair only for a moment, would announce firmly, “Cedar-wood” or “Cattelya” or “Moon Lily,” before unwinding the snowy towel in which she was wrapped in order to make certain that he had guessed correctly.

When she was not having baths, Harriet ate pomegranates.

It is difficult to speak well of this fruit. Once opened, it disgorges enormous quantities of slimy reddish pips which laboriously have to be consumed because there is little else. Just how many seeds there are in a pomegranate, is hard to discover—more, certainly, than can be counted with ease.

Harriet, however, ate them: seed by seed, forcing them down… at breakfast… at lunch, enduring the insipid taste, the stickiness… for the legend of Persephone was always with her—Persephone, who had been forced to remain in Hades for as many months as she had eaten pomegranate seeds. Not expecting the impossible, Harriet had altered the time-scale: one pomegranate seed, which had kept Persephone with her dark-visaged lover for a month, was to give her one day with Rom.

“That’s five hundred and twenty-three, I think,” she told him triumphantly. “Five hundred and twenty-three whole days with you sometime in my life—” and went off to wash her hands.

After a while she took the only sensible course and, watched by her cheerful attendants, she ate her pomegranates in the bath.

When Harriet had been at Follina for a week, Rom went into Manaus where he called first at the police station. He had no fears for Harriet’s safety. Not only had he doubled the guard on his gates, but he had indicated to his Indians that Harriet was not to be unattended in his absence, and as he drove away, a glimpse of Manuelo’s one-eyed uncle, old Jose, with his machete, and Maliki and Rainu with their weaving—all converging on Harriet as she sat reading on the terrace—made it clear that any kidnapper trying to snatch her would have his work cut out.

But the news young Captain Carlos gave him when he inquired about the troublesome English girl was entirely reassuring. Yes, they had taken the girl onto the Gregory and locked her into her cabin. Dr. Finch-Dutton had gone on board an hour later—since when neither the girl nor the doctor had been seen.