A Swans - Eva Ibbotson

Isobel, walking ahead, had seen nothing.

Those who believe that nuns are gentle soft-voiced souls who speak ill of no one, would have been surprised could they have heard Sister Concepcion and her two helpers in the Convent of the Sacred Heart after the evening meal. But by that time Isobel and her son had steamed out of harbor and were once more en route for the Golden City.

Chapter Seventeen

“I must say I think they have it all wrong, the people who say that to part is to die a little. It seems to me,” said Harriet, “that to part is to die really quite a lot. I mean, thirty-six hours without you…”

She stood on the terrace wearing the extraordinarily becoming blue dress that Marie-Claude had bought, waiting for Furo to bring around the black car in order to drive her to Manaus. For the Company was leaving the following day, due to embark on the Lafayette on Friday evening ready to sail at dawn, and she was going to say goodbye to Madame Simonova and spend a last night with her friends at the Metropole.

Rom stood beside her, troubled for no reason he could understand. She holds my shadow , he thought, quoting the phrase his Indians used to describe someone who had them in their power. Once it had seemed to him that this country was the “incomparable remedy.” Now it was this quiet, unspectacular girl, whose loss would utterly diminish him.

But why should he lose her?

“Do you want me to go back with the Company?” Harriet had asked a few days earlier. “Would that be… the right thing to do?”

“ Want you to go back? Want you to? God, Harriet, do you have to ask me that?” Rom had replied. “Do you want to go with them?”

“No, I don’t. I would like to stay… if it is convenient.”

“ Convenient ? Sometimes I think you’re a little mad. Perhaps you should come upstairs,” he had said furiously. “I don’t seem to be able to make you understand anything when you’re on your feet.”

Since then she had abandoned herself to a degree of creative loving which exceeded anything he had ever imagined, her passionate physical response balanced by a respect for his work that gave him both rest and stimulus. But for her solitary practice sessions each morning at her makeshift bane , he would have sworn that she was utterly content.

“I wish I could have gone with you,” he said yet again. “I hate you to go alone.”

He had intended to take Harriet to Manaus himself and make good his promise to Simonova to bring her to say goodbye, but Alvarez—his work at Ombidos completed—was calling at Sao Gabriel on his way home, and to Alvarez Rom owed a debt that must be paid. There was no question of Harriet being in danger. Edward had been seen standing on the deck of the Gregory as she steamed away from Belem, and it was most unlikely that a man who had made such an idiot of himself once would return to the attack. Moreover de Silva was back in Manaus and well able to control the antics of his men.

Why, then, this unease?

“You’ve given me too much money,” protested Harriet. “Even if I buy presents for absolutely everybody, I can’t spend it.”

“It is not for buying presents for absolutely everybody,” he said sternly. “It’s for you.”

She shook her head and reached for his hand, counting the knuckles carefully, checking them off one by one with her fingertips to make sure that everything was as it should be and that she would not forget—in the day and night she was to be away—the configuration of his little fingernail or the exact place where a vein to which she was particularly devoted changed its course.

“I got to one thousand and forty-three seeds last night,” she said. “In the bath. So it’s absolutely all right.”

“Of course it’s all right,” he said roughly. “All the passengers have to be on board by eight o’clock, so you’ll be back in time for a splendid supper. I’m putting a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on ice—no doubt you will merely get hiccups again, but we must persevere.”

But now they were back, his Indians. He had shooed them away twice before, explaining that Harriet was only going to Manaus and would be back tomorrow, but here again were old José, Andrelinho with his crippled boy, Manuelo with his wife, his baby… and that old witch, Manuelo’s mother-in-law, who now wore her boa of anaconda skins over Harriet’s brown foulard…

The missionaries had taught them to wave—prolonged goodbyes were one of their accomplishments, but there were too many of them today and Maliki and Rainu were sniveling. And now Lorenzo, who was an educated man and should have known better, came forward with a gift for Harriet which he placed in her hand—and which made Rom turn on him angrily with a few low words in his own dialect.

“Is there something wrong?” asked Harriet, troubled, looking up from the tiny, perfectly carved wooden canoe with paddles the size of splintered matchsticks and an intricate pattern of blue and scarlet painted across its bows. “Should I not take it?”

Rom shook his head. “It’s all right.” But as Harriet thanked Lorenzo, his sense of wretchedness increased. The gift was one traditionally given to ensure safety for those traveling far away across water—and Harriet wasn’t even going in the Amethyst , Lorenzo knew that perfectly well. What the devil had got into them all?

The car arrived. Furo got out and held open the door and Harriet turned to Rom. “Could you be so kind as to remember that I love you absolutely?” she said quietly, almost matter-of-factly. “Could you be so kind as to remember that?”

He bent down then to kiss not her mouth, but her fingers, holding them in a strangely formal gesture to his lips.

“Yes,” he said. “I could remember that. Were I to forget it, Harriet, it would go very ill with me.”

Long after the car was out of sight and he had returned to the house, his Indians still stood on the steps, waving and waving and waving…

The theater was dark and silent, the seats already shrouded. It would be a month before another company made its way to Manaus—a Cossack choir from Georgia.

Would they be the last? Harriet wondered, picking her way across the deserted stage. Was Rom right and would this marvelous and fantastical theater be given over to the mice? Would bats hang from the chandeliers and moths devour the silken hangings? But if it was so—if Mrs. Lehmann’s carriage horses had drunk their last champagne and the grandly dressed audience would no longer sweep across the great mosaic square—it had still been a splendid and worthwhile dream to build a theater here in this place… and one day, surely, it would open its doors again, music would stream from the pit and men, perhaps still unborn, would wait with bated breath for the gold glimmer of the footlights that meant curtain rise.

Down in the wardrobe she found a lone stage-hand who at first greeted her with respect, not recognizing in the elegantly dressed girl the little dancer in her shabby clothes—and then as she smiled, he asked her to sit on the last of the skips so that he could close it, as he had asked her to do three months ago in the Century Theater when the adventure began.

Then she went back to the stage-door where Furo was waiting and was driven to the Metropole where she went, first of all, to say goodbye to Simonova.