A Swans - Eva Ibbotson

Nor did Harriet want rest. Every muscle ached, the perspiration ran down her back, but she dreaded the moment when Grisha would dismiss her. She would have liked to collapse with exhaustion, to weep like Taglioni and faint like Taglioni. To faint particularly, and thus find the oblivion that sleep did not bring as in her dreams she tore through bramble thickets, clawed at stone walls, searching in vain for Rom.

“Sixteen grandes battements— then twelve ronds de jambe en l’air ,” said Grisha viciously as Simonova swept in to study the progress of her future pupil. It had been a brilliant idea to take Harriet along. For Cremorra no longer figured in Simonova’s itinerary. A triumph at the Maryinsky and then a return to Paris to open a school and become, as she had been the world’s greatest ballerina, its greatest teacher of the dance—this was what she now intended. And who was better suited to be a show pupil than this work-hungry English girl?

“You may go,” said Grisha. “Return at two.” Even before Harriet had risen from her curtsey it had seized her again, the pain, tearing and clawing—and embarrassed by the unseemliness of an agony so unremitting, she stole off to her favorite hiding place between the life-boat and the railing of the deck.

At least she had caught the boat, she told herself for the hundredth time. Stumbling away from Follina, still numb with shock, she had found the Raimondo brothers fishing with flares in the bay off Sao Gabriel and given them the last of Rom’s money to take her to the Lafayette before it sailed. Because of that she had this chance. Many people had nothing to do with grief like hers, whereas she could turn it into art. Dubrov had explained this when he had told her that they would take her to Russia. He had been quite confident about it all; the Russian girls had traveled on a group ticket and there had been no sign of Olga at Belem. No one would ask for names if the numbers were right—and aghast at Harriet’s state, he had found for her the only consolation she could accept.

Only now, standing with her hands folded across her chest so that what was happening inside her could not escape and make people recoil from her, she wondered if it could be done. If this beast tearing at her entrails could be transformed into those moments of high art when Odette lets her fingertips run lightly down the Prince’s arm before she vanishes forever into the lake. How many years would have to pass? How many eons?

” ‘arriette, you must eat !” scolded Marie-Claude, coming to find her as she always did and taking her down to the dining room—and at two she was back with Grisha, welcoming the ache in her limbs, the soreness, which people who did not understand were stupid enough to confuse with pain.

So the ship steamed eastward and Harriet worked and pledged herself to make it come at last: the day when, contained in the iron framework of a flawless technique, she could reveal to those who watched her the heartbreak and the glory of an immutable love.

Four weeks after they left Brazil, punctual to the hour, the Lafayette steamed into Cherbourg. Harriet had scarcely thought of Cambridge or her home and she walked unthinkingly off the ship with her friends, bound for the custom sheds and the train to Paris.

Waiting at the bottom of the gangway—black-clad, menacing, flanked by two gendarmes with truncheons—stood her father and her aunt.

Chapter Eighteen

Harriet had been locked in her attic for nearly a month. Her clothes had been removed; she was conveyed to and from the bathroom by Aunt Louisa or those of the Trumpington Tea Circle ladies who came to take over when Miss Morton had to go shopping or merely needed a break. A doctor had been to examine her—not the old family doctor who had once recommended dancing classes, but a new man suggested by Hermione Belper—and had confirmed the Mortons’ worst fears. Pending further treatment of the unfortunate girl, Dr. Smithson had given instructions for her to be kept in a darkened room and on a meatless diet to avoid over-stimulation—instructions which Louisa obeyed meticulously, feeding her niece mostly on semolina and rusks of oven-baked stale bread.

The purpose of this regime was reasonable enough: to break Harriet’s will, to make her understand the enormity of what she had done, and to confess it.

“And then?” asked Louisa as the days passed and Harriet remained silent. “What is to be done with her then?” She had enjoyed the drama of the original recapture and imprisonment, but the daily task of keeping Harriet guarded fell on her, and the whispers in the town—the suggestion that the Mortons had gone too far in inflicting punishment—were far from pleasant.

“We shall see,” Professor Morton had replied. Obsessed with the idea of a groveling, weeping daughter begging for mercy, he could think no further than Harriet’s utter subjugation.

In deciding how best to deal with Harriet, the Mortons were under the disadvantage of knowing nothing of her life in Manaus for Edward Finch-Dutton, on whom they had relied, seemed to have disappeared. It was not Harriet’s former suitor who had informed them that she was arriving in Cherbourg, but an anonymous well-wisher who had been kind enough to cable St. Philip’s from Manaus.

And Harriet would say nothing. She was willing only to apologize for having caused them anxiety by running away, and for nothing else.

“I was happy there,” she had said at the beginning. “I did nothing of which I am ashamed. It was the best part of my life and I would as soon apologize for breathing.”

And incredibly the weeks of confinement, the near-starvation, the appalling monotony—for they had taken away her books—had not weakened her resolution.

“The name of your seducer!” Professor Morton yelled at her on the rare occasions when he visited his daughter. “Assuming there was only one!”

But she had shaken her head and as day followed wretched day she neither broke down nor admitted her wrong.

Harriet endured because she had been loved by Rom. This honor had been accorded her, this ultimate benison, and she must not let them break her because to do so would be to denigrate his love.

So she kept herself sane and she did it by remembering. Not a haphazard wallowing in past happiness, but a disciplined, orderly progression through the rooms of Follina, through its gardens… along the banks of the river. Waking hungry in her cold and dismal room Harriet, in her mind, rose from the cloud-netted bed where Rom still slept, felt the softness of the carpet beneath her feet… took three steps—exactly three—to the brocaded chair to trace the pattern of the golden fleur de lys … read the titles of the books on the low table: The Collected Works of John Donne; The Stones of Venice; The Orchid Grower’s Manual … moved to the window to draw aside the curtains and name, with the same rigorous precision she had once accorded her work at the bane , the plants that grew on the terrace beneath.

While she could do this—while she could drift in the Firefly past the bank where the otters played and see the sun bittern fly into the light—they could not touch her, and knowing she had to keep well so as to garner these memories, to make them part of her forever, she ate every morsel of the food she was given and kept her muscles active with exercises as she well knew how to do.