A Company of Swans

by Eva Ibbotson

  Of course. A maze . . . She had heard the maze at Stavely mentioned: a famous one, as intriguing and clever as that at Hampton Court. Jokes had been made about it on the bus and Mrs Brandon, in her letter, had forbidden the ladies to enter it.

  ‘Harriet! Harriet, where are you?’

  Aunt Louisa’s high petulant voice in the distance sent Harriet quickly foward and unhesitatingly she entered the maze.

  It was very silent between the yew hedges, which almost closed over her head; on the mossy paths her light feet made not the slightest sound. The idea of a labyrinth had always alarmed Harriet and the story of Theseus and the Minotaur had been one of her favourite ways of terrifying herself as a child, but now she wandered unhurried and in peace, for it seemed to her that there were worse things than to be abandoned in this green and secret place.

  Which didn’t mean that she was not lost. All the theories that people had about turning always to the right or always to the left did not seem to be very good theories. She wandered on, twisting this way and that, disturbed by nothing except a nesting blackbird which flew up from the hedge. And then, quite without warning, she took a last sharp turn and found herself in the circular sweep of grass which constituted the core, the very heart of the labyrinth.

  ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Harriet, startled.

  For sitting on a stone bench beside the mildewed statue of a faun was a hunched figure so small, so self-contained that it might have been the spirit of the maze itself. Then it looked up, as startled as she was, and Harriet saw a small boy with dark red hair and a pale, rather pinched little face almost covered by a large pair of spectacles. A child of about seven years of age trying to shield, with hands woefully too small for the task, a large black book.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Harriet in her low, soft voice. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you, I expect you wanted to be alone.’

  ‘Well, yes, I did,’ said the boy, now pressing the book against his diminutive sailor-suited chest. He looked at the girl standing in front of him. She was a grown-up – he could tell that because her blue skirt touched the ground – and grown-ups could make trouble; but as he stared at her anxiously, she smiled – a terribly friendly, crunched-up sort of smile – and he knew that it would be all right, that she would not betray him. ‘But I don’t mind as long as you don’t tell anyone. I’m not supposed to read this book, you see. It’s forbidden.’

  ‘I promise not to tell anyone,’ said Harriet. She came over and sat down on the bench beside him, noting with a pang the fragile, elderly-looking legs, the feet in their black strap-shoes hanging so high above the ground. ‘I was always reading books I wasn’t supposed to when I was little. I used to tie a piece of cotton to my toe and to the door-handle, so that when someone came in my toe twitched and I had time to put the book under my pillow before they saw it.’

  ‘Did you?’ The boy was impressed, lifting his spectacles a moment to look at Harriet. His eyes were unexpectedly beautiful: large grey eyes with a golden rim round the iris. ‘My name is Henry,’ he now offered. ‘Henry St John Verney Brandon.’

  ‘Mine is Harriet Jane Morton,’ said Harriet, realising without undue surprise that she was in the presence of Stavely’s heir. And solemnly, for they were both people of great politeness, they shook hands.

  It was then, their credentials exchanged, that the child lowered the book and laid it carefully in Harriet’s lap, open at the title page.

  ‘Would you like to see it?’ he asked.

  For a moment she could not speak. The coincidence was too uncanny, here in this dreamlike place.

  ‘Is anything the matter, Harriet?’ Henry’s russet head was tilted anxiously up at her, for she had given a little gasp and put one hand to her mouth.

  ‘No . . . it’s all right.’ She forced herself to speak calmly and sensibly. She did not know what she had expected Henry to have carried off into the secrecy of the maze – perhaps some pathetic explanation of the so-called ‘facts of life’. Instead, now she read:

  AMAZON ADVENTURE

  Being the account of a journey with rod and gun

  along the Rivers Orinoco, Negro and Amazon

  by

  Colonel Frederick Bush, D.S.O., M.C.

  ‘It’s just so extraordinary, Henry. You see, I have been thinking and thinking about this place. For a whole week I’ve thought of nowhere else. And then I find you . . .’ she shook her head. ‘It’s a beautiful book,’ she said. ‘Absolutely beautiful.’

  ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?`

  Fellow bibliophiles, they looked with satisfaction at the thick pages with their wavy edges, the sepia illustrations protected by wafer-thin paper; drank in the smell of old leather and dust, while Henry – an impeccable host – led her into his promised land.

  ‘That’s an anaconda – it was twenty feet long before Colonel Bush killed it – and here’s a canoe full of Indians: friendly ones, not the kind that shoot you full of arrows. Those are terribly dangerous rapids in the background; the Colonel had to drag his boat out of the water and carry it over the hill when he got to them. And somewhere there’s a lovely one of a whole lot of capy . . . capy-somethings, like huge guinea-pigs. Look!’

  They pored together over the herd of large, somewhat absurd rodents basking on a sand-bank. Not all the pictures were very clear, for the intrepid Colonel had wielded his Kodak under conditions of quite spectacular hardship, but to Harriet and Henry each and every one was of absorbing interest. There was one of a steamer of the Amazon Navigation Company going down the river; one of a rubber gatherer, a seringueiro, crossing a creek on a felled tree . . . And several of the author: a splendid man in a topee, lying in his hammock at a bivouac, standing with his gun astride a dead jaguar . . . arm-in-arm with an Indian chief in a lip-disc who came scarcely to his waist.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt them, having their mouths like that,’ explained Henry reassuringly. ‘They like it – they sort of stretch their lips gradually. It’s an honour.’

  Harriet nodded, as entranced as the little boy. ‘Is there a picture of Manaus, Henry?’

  ‘Yes, there is.’ Enormously pleased to be able to oblige her, he turned the pages carefully, his square-tipped fingers uncannily like those of old General Brandon in the portrait the gloomy Mr Grunthorpe had shown them in the Long Gallery. ‘Look, here it is! It’s called the “Golden City”. Why is it called that, do you know?’

  ‘I think it’s because everyone there is so rich,’ answered Harriet thoughtfully. ‘But I’m not sure. People have always thought about gold in South America and searched for it. Golden cities with golden roofs; golden palaces where there’s hidden treasure. “Eldorado”, they call it.’

  She gazed at the picture – an elegant cathedral, a flight of steps, a park with palm trees. In the distance, blurred, some other buildings. Was that faint crisscrossing in front of one of them a line of scaffolding? The book was dated 1890 – just about the time that the Opera House was begun . . . Avidly she began to read the text, only to be recalled by a small sigh from Henry. Glad as he was to have found for her the city she had requested, he yearned inevitably for the tree sloth and giant electric eel which awaited them.

  ‘What I don’t understand, Henry, is why you are not supposed to read this book,’ said Harriet when they had studied all the pictures. ‘Surely it’s a good book for someone young to read? A book about adventures?’

  There was a pause while Henry pondered, evidently putting her through some final test.

  ‘It’s because it belonged to “the Boy”.’ He spoke with a curious awe, looking up at her to gauge the effect of his words. ‘He’s a secret, you see. No one’s allowed to talk about him and if I ask anyone, Mama gets cross. I took it from old Nannie in the Lodge, when she was asleep. It was his absolutely favourite book and he left it for her when he went away.’

  ‘He lived here, then?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But he did something bad, I think, and they sent him away. Before I was born, this was – about when Grandfather
died. He had the book for his ninth birthday, Nannie said. Sometimes she tells me a bit about him when she’s had her medicine.’

  ‘Her medicine?’

  Henry nodded. ‘It’s called Gordon’s Gin and it’s in a big bottle by her bed; when she’s had some, she tells me about him. She just calls him “the Boy”, as though there weren’t any other boys in the world. He was very wild and very brave. He climbed the oak tree by the gatehouse roof and swung over to the parapet – and he had a huge black dog that followed him everywhere and when he went away the dog stopped eating and died.’ The child’s eyes shone with hero-worship. ‘He had a cross-bow too and he could shoot for miles and he didn’t wear spectacles and he wasn’t afraid of the dark. At least, I don’t think he was – Nannie didn’t say.’

  ‘I expect he was older than you, Henry,’ said Harriet gently. ‘I expect when you’re his age you will be just like him.’

  ‘No.’ Henry shook a resigned head. ‘Cook says I’m as clever as a cartload of monkeys, but he was clever and brave. He could ride anything.’ He sighed. ‘I can’t ride anything. I fell off Porridge, who’s only a Shetland pony; the girths slipped. He made a tree-house in the Wellingtonia; that’s about a hundred feet high – you can still see some of the planks at the top – and he built a dug-out canoe like Colonel Bush’s and launched it on the river and got as far as Appleby Meadows before it sank.’

  Harriet turned back the pages to glance at the flyleaf. ‘July 5th 1891’, she read. If ‘the Boy’ had been nine years old then, he would be a man approaching thirty now, but she said nothing, realising that to Henry it was necessary that this magical being should exist outside the rules of time.

  ‘Grunthorpe knew him. That’s our butler. He didn’t like him; he said he was a changeling.’

  ‘A changeling? Why, Henry?’

  The child sighed. ‘Because he could talk to animals. It wasn’t natural, Grunthorpe said.’ There was a pause before Henry added in a carefully expressionless voice, ‘I told Grunthorpe I was going to be an explorer when I grew up and join an expedition, but he said I couldn’t because explorers don’t wear spectacles.’

  Needing a few moments to control her anger, Harriet fixed her gaze on the mildewed statue of the faun. ‘I find that a most extraordinary remark, Henry,’ she said presently in a detached, calm voice. ‘Consider, for example, the insects. For you must admit that the insects are a trouble. The mosquitoes, the blackfly and this one here’ – she searched for the page in which Colonel Bush had devoted a paragraph to the ravages of the tabanid fly. ‘It would seem to me perfectly obvious that insects like that could get into a person’s eyes, and that would be very awkward if he was paddling a canoe. Now if I was in charge of an expedition, the man I would put in front – in the very front of any boat – would be the man with glasses.’

  Henry said nothing, but after a moment – while not exactly coming to lean against her – he moved along the stone bench so that even the small space which had been between them was there no longer, and when Harriet turned to look at him she found herself staring at the riot of impending incisors and cavernous gaps which betokened Henry’s peculiarly ravishing smile.

  For a while they sat together in companionable silence. Then: ‘Sometimes I think he’ll come back. “The Boy”, I mean,’ said Henry shyly. ‘And then everything will be all right again.’

  ‘Isn’t it all right now?’

  ‘No. Because Papa has deserted us and Mama gets angry and the servants keep leaving and we have to have “Tea Ladies” going through the rooms.’

  ‘Yes, I see. That isn’t very nice.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s my fault?’ said Henry, his small face pinched and anxious once again.

  ‘How could it be your fault, Henry,’ she answered passionately. ‘How could it be?’

  So far they had felt themselves quite alone, but now the voices of the agitated ladies calling her name seemed to be getting closer and, conscious of limited time, Harriet said, ‘Henry, you may think this quite incredible, but only a week ago I was offered a job to go out to the Amazon, as a dancer. To Manaus. To this very place.’ She pointed to the book, open once more at the picture of the ‘Golden City’. ‘Only they won’t let me go.’

  Somehow it seemed perfectly natural to talk to this diminutive child as though he was a fully-fledged adult.

  Henry turned towards her, a puzzled look on his face.

  ‘But Harriet,’ he said, pronouncing her name with professorial clarity and a certain reproach, ‘you’re grown-up, aren’t you? You can do what you like?’

  She looked down at his russet head, tilted up at her trustfully as he proclaimed her adult status. And suddenly she was flooded with a feeling of the most extraordinary power and elation. So strong was this feeling that she rose to her feet and in a voice entirely different from the one she had used hitherto, she said, ‘Yes. You are perfectly right, Henry. I am grown-up.’

  The change in her momentarily deflected Henry from his purpose. She looked so pretty all at once that he wondered if it might be possible, by achieving a sudden spurt in growth, to marry her. But more urgent than his matrimonial plans was the request he was about to make, and slipping down from the bench he came up to her and lifted his small hand to pluck gently at her sleeve.

  ‘Harriet, I think he’s there. “The Boy” . . . in the Amazon. I’m sure he is. Nannie says he was always talking about it. Will you find him and tell him to come back? Will you, Harriet? Please?’

  And Harriet, now, did not say one of the things that came into her head. She did not say, ‘Henry, the Amazon basin is a million square miles – how can I find someone whose name I do not even know? And even if I found him, he would probably be a pompous empire-builder with a big moustache and refuse even to talk to me.’

  She said none of these things; she said only, ‘I will try, Henry. I promise you that if I get there, I will really and truly try.’

  But now the ladies, searching the grounds, had received some dreadful news. Questioning the surly gardener, they had elicited the information that Harriet was secreted in the maze with a young man. ‘Young Mr Henry,’ the gardener had admitted.

  Here was disaster! After all their care and chaperonage, the salacious girl had eluded them!

  ‘Millicent! Eugenia! Go and deflect Edward,’ ordered Hermione Belper. ‘We don’t want a fight. The rest of us will get her out. Come, Louisa!’

  And to a woman the ladies of Trumpington, with ancient Mrs Transom by no means in the rear, plunged into the maze.

  3

  What Marcus Aurelius had begun by causing Harriet to question the meaning of the word ‘good’, Henry with his trust and optimism completed. She determined to escape and to do so competently, and casting about for ways and means she remembered a girl called Betsy Fairfield who had been briefly at school with her in Cambridge, but now lived in London.

  Betsy was pretty and a little silly and exceedingly good-natured. Harriet had written some essays for her and lent her some history notes and a friendship had developed. Now Betsy, who was a few months older than Harriet, was ‘doing the season’; she was already going to balls and was to be presented at court. Her mother was an easygoing, kindly society lady who had been kind to Harriet.

  The afternoon after the visit to Stavely, accordingly, Harriet – finding herself alone – unhooked what Aunt Louisa still referred to as ‘the instrument’ from the dark brown wall of the hallway, asked for Betsy’s number and was eventually put through to her friend.

  ‘Betsy, this is Harriet.’

  ‘Harriet? How lovely!’ Shrieks of perfectly genuine if transient enthusiasm emitted from the cheerful Betsy. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m all right. Listen, Betsy, I want you to do me a very great favour. Will you?’

  ‘Yes, of course I will. Goodness, I always remember that essay you wrote for me about the Corn Laws. And the one about the “bedchamber question”. I got an “A” in both – the only time ever!’

&
nbsp; ‘Well, listen; I want you to get your mother to write a note to my Aunt Louisa, asking me to stay. I’d like her to write it straight away and I want her to ask me for three weeks. Do you think she would?’

  ‘Of course she would! Will you really come? That would be absolutely marvellous! You can help me with my court curtsey; you were always so good at dancing. Poor Hetty’s got water on the knee and we don’t know whether—’

  It was a while before Harriet could interrupt the spate of words in order to say, ‘And Betsy, when your mother’s written the note could you telephone me yourself to arrange the journey? Ask for me personally? Would you do that? I promise not to be a nuisance.’

  ‘Goodness, you won’t be a nuisance. Mother really likes you; she’s often said—’ But at this point Betsy recollected what her mother had said about Professor Morton’s treatment of his daughter and the conversation was terminated.

  Betsy was as good as her word and her mother wrote a charming note to Louisa requesting Harriet’s presence in London. That Mrs Fairfield’s uncle was a viscount helped to determine the issue; that and the fact that since the night of the unfortunate dinner-party, Harriet had not really been herself. Betsy rang up the day after the note arrived and when they had spoken, Harriet informed Aunt Louisa that the Fairfields would meet the 10.37 from Cambridge on Thursday morning. She packed her own suitcase and her aunt, reflecting on the fact that they would be saving on Harriet’s food for three weeks, actually suggested to the Professor that he might care to give his daughter a guinea, so that she would not be entirely dependent on her friend – and this he did. And so, at a quarter-past ten on Thursday morning, Harriet was assisted into a ‘Ladies Only’ carriage at Cambridge Station and put in charge of the guard.

  That there was no one to meet her at King’s Cross was not surprising, since she had told Betsy that she would be arriving on the following day. Harriet gave up her ticket and posted two letters she had written in the privacy of her bedroom. One was to her aunt announcing her safe arrival at the Fairfields’; the other was to the Fairfields and was full of apologies and regrets. Her father’s cousin had been taken seriously ill in Harrogate and they were all leaving immediately for the north . . . She hoped so much to be able to join them later but at the moment, as they would understand, her aunt did not feel that she could spare her . . . She would post this letter on her way through London and remained their disappointed but affectionate Harriet.