A Company of Swans

2

Harriet had always loved words: tasted them on her tongue, thought of them as friends. The word serendipity was one she valued especially, its meaning rooted in the world of fairy tales: ‘The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.’

It was this word she thought of later when she remembered her encounter with a small boy called Henry in the maze at Stavely Hall. All her subsequent adventures stemmed from this one meeting and from the trust she saw in the child’s eyes; nothing she experienced afterwards was more unlikely or more strange.

The visit to Stavely, which occurred a week after the ill-fated dinner-party, was the climax of the year for the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle. Weeks of preparation had gone into the expedition, for Stavely was forty miles to the west in the rolling Suffolk countryside and had awaited the benison of motor transport to make it a comfortable day’s outing. Letters had been sent, the substantial fee mentioned by Mrs Brandon for a tour of the house and permission to picnic in her gardens had been agreed. Now as they waited outside the house of their president, Mrs Belper, for the arrival of the charabanc, the ladies found it necessary to remind Harriet again and again of her good fortune in being included in the party.

These ladies of the Tea Circle had presided over Harriet’s young life like a flock of black birds in a Greek play. There were some thirty of them who had met originally in the home of Hermione Belper, the full-bosomed wife of St Philip’s meek and undersized bursar, in protest against the carryings-on of the Association of University Wives, which not only admitted coloureds, foreigners and Jews, but had raised money — in a series of coffee mornings — for the purpose of enabling the Fitzwilliam Museum to buy a painting which had turned out to be of a lady not only nude, but crudely and specifically naked.

Mrs Belper had proposed the formation of a new Tea Circle to uphold the values of old-fashioned womanhood and of the Empire, and since her house — only a stone’s throw from Louisa’s — was named Trumpington Villa, the unsuspecting suburb of Trumpington found itself lending its name to the new association.

It was the Tea Circle ladies who, through Louisa, decided what Harriet should wear, which families were suitable for her to visit and where she could go unchaperoned; it was they — scattered like an army of secret agents through the town — who reported to Louisa when her niece removed her gloves in public or had been seen talking in far too friendly a manner to a shop assistant.

In the eyes of these ladies, Harriet’s good fortune was all the greater because Edward Finch-Dutton, too, was to come to Stavely Hall.

The decision to include a man in the party was one which Mrs Belper and Aunt Louisa had debated for hours. The advantages of inviting Edward were clear: his mother had been on visiting terms with old General Brandon (the owner of Stavely) when he was alive and this fact, if mentioned in advance, would greatly increase their chances of being welcomed in person by his daughter-in-law, who in the continuing absence of her husband was Stavely’s reigning mistress. Both Mrs Belper and Louisa were passionate visitors of stately homes and lived in constant hope of converting a mere ‘sighting’ — that of a distant marquis crouched over his herbaceous border or a viscountess entering her carriage, for example — into an actual meeting during which sentences were exchanged. And Isobel Brandon, a grand-daughter of the Earl of Lexbury, was rumoured to be red-haired, beautiful and elegant beyond belief.

As against this, there were the obvious dangers of allowing the ‘young people’ to get out of hand. Stavely was reputed to be the most magnificent and romantic of East Anglia’s great houses and the thought of Edward and Harriet disappearing into some impenetrable yew arbour or lingering behind a carved oak screen was too horrible to contemplate.

‘But we shall be able to prevent that, Louisa,’ Mrs Belper had decided, coming down in favour of Edward. ‘After all, there are more than thirty of us. I shall talk to the girls.’

So Mrs Belper had talked to them — not to eighty-seven-year-old Mrs Transom, the widow of the Emeritus Professor of Architecture, a ‘girl’ of whom little could be expected, but to Millicent Braithwaite, who single-handed had pulled three drunken undergraduates from a high spiked wall as they tried to climb into Trinity, and to Eugenia Crowley, who was amazingly fleet-footed from cross-country running with her pack of Guides — and they had promised that the young couple would never be out of sight.

Edward accordingly had been invited and now, sensibly deciding to mix business with pleasure, he stood beside Harriet, dressed for the country and holding his butterfly-net, a strong canvas sweep-net for those insects which preferred to hop or crawl along the ground, and a khaki haversack containing his pooter, his killing bottle and his tins.

The omnibus arrived; rugs, parasols and hampers of food were loaded on. Miss Transom climbed aboard and began to heave her aged, cantankerous mother on to the step. Eugenia Crowley, twitching with responsibility, and Millicent Braithwaite — a deeply muscular figure in a magenta two-piece and kid boots — performed a neat pincer movement, placing themselves one in front of and one behind the seat which contained Edward and Harriet — and the bus set off.

Harriet had not wanted to come; she could imagine nothing less enjoyable than trailing round a great house in the company of the Tea Circle ladies, and Edward’s presence was an added burden for present always in her mind was the dread that one day she would be driven to yield — to accept, if it came, his offer of marriage. If she married Edward, she could have a garden in which flowers actually grew; a dog; a pond with goldfish. She could sit in the sun and read and have her friends. But at this point always she stopped her thoughts, for somewhere in this imagined garden there was a pram with a gurgling baby: her baby, soft and warm.

But not only hers. And as so often before Harriet gave thanks for Maisie, the melancholy and eccentric housemaid who had given her, when she was six years old, such a comprehensive and unadorned account of what people did to bring babies into the world. Harriet had lain awake in her attic for many nights trying to comprehend the complicated unpleasantness of what she had heard, but now she was glad of Maisie’s detailed crudity. Too easy otherwise, when she read of Dante’s sublime passion for his Beatrice or (in melting and mellifluous Greek) of the innocent Daphnis’s pursuit of Chloe, to imagine love as some glorious upsurge of the human spirit. It was of course, but not only, and now as she gently drew away her arm from Edward’s — which was growing warm in the crowded bus — she knew that that way out was barred.

But what way was open? Her father, the night after the dinner-party, had himself gone to Madame Lavarre and stopped her dancing lessons once and for all. There was nothing left now: nothing.

Only I must not despair, thought Harriet. Despair was a sin, she knew that: turning one’s face away from the created world. And resolutely she forced herself not just to look at, but really to see the greening hedges, the glistening buttercups, the absurd new lambs — setting herself, as unhappy people do, a kind of pastoral litany.

And presently she succeeded, for the gentle peaceful countryside under the light wide sky was truly lovely and it was spring and there had to be a future somewhere, even for her. So that when Edward said, ‘This is very pleasant, Harriet, is it not?’ she was able to turn to him, pushing back her loose hair behind her ears, and smile and agree.

But when at last the bus turned in between the stone lions on the gate-posts and they drove down Stavely’s famous double avenue of beeches towards the house, Harriet’s soft ‘Oh!’ of pleasure owed nothing to the deliberate exercise of will. She had expected grandeur, ostentation, pomp… and found instead an unequivocal and awe-inspiring beauty.

Stavely was long and low, built of a warm and rosy brick: a house which had no truck with fortifications and moats and battlements, but proclaimed itself joyously as a place for living in — for music and banquets and the raising of fine children. Sheltered by a low wooded hill, the Hall faced serenely south into the sun and with its stone quoins, mullioned windows and graceful chimneys most gloriously avowed the principles of the Tudor Renaissance; ‘Commoditie, Fitnesse and Delight’.

‘Out we get, girls!’ cried Mrs Belper. ‘We have just ten minutes to stretch our legs and then we meet at the front door at twelve o’clock sharp for a tour of the house.’

The ‘girls’ got out. Mrs Transom was lowered down and tottered away on the arm of her daughter, while — followed at a discreet distance by their conscientious chaperones — Edward and Harriet made their way through the gatehouse arch towards the formal gardens.

If Harriet’s first impression of Stavely had been of overwhelming beauty, her second was of neglect. The fine trees of the beech avenue were indestructible, as was the parkland where clumps of cattle moved slowly over a sea of grass. But here, close to the house, where everything depended on a careful husbandry, it was clear that something was wrong. Weeds straggled over the gravel paths; the yews in the topiary, the formal lines of the knot-garden were blurred for want of trimming. This was a sleeping house, its decline masked by the tenderness of the green creeper hiding a garden door, by the young leaves of an unpruned rose laying its tendrils across a window. A house awaiting the kiss of a prince — a rich prince, Harriet corrected herself, guessing at the multitude of gardeners and groundsmen that would be needed to succour Stavely’s loveliness.

‘Was it like this when you used to come here, Edward?’ asked Harriet. ‘So overgrown and neglected?’

‘No, I don’t think so. But remember I was very small and after Colonel Brandon died we never came again. His son — the present owner — was not at all friendly to Mama.’

By the main door where all the ladies were now assembled, a disappointment awaited them. Although Aunt Louisa, who acted as the Circle’s secretary, had specifically mentioned Edward Finch-Dutton’s presence in the party in her confirmatory letter, there was no sign of Mrs Brandon. Instead a gloomy, ancient and cadaverous-looking individual with a bald and liver-spotted pate introduced himself as Mr Grunthorpe, the family butler, and leading them into a huge, panelled room he immediately began his patter.

‘The room we now find ourselves in is known as the Great Hall. You will please observe the outstanding examples of Elizabethan plasterwork and panelling. Above the archway we see a carving of the twelve apostles…’

‘Very fine,’ said Mrs Belper.

‘Note also the chimney-piece surmounted by the Brandon arms impaling those of Henrietta Verney, who was united to the family by marriage in the year 1633,’ droned the patently uninterested Mr Grunthorpe.

Harriet noted them… but noted too the dust that lay on the backs of the carved chairs, noted the dull streakiness of the long refectory table… the cold creeping through the room as though it was years since a fire had burned in that splendid grate.

They moved on down a corridor and into the Drawing-Room — a delightful room filled with Hepplewhite furniture — but here too was the same neglect. One yellow damask curtain was half-drawn across the window as though the effort of pulling it back had been too much for some indifferent housemaid. The fender was unpolished, the crystal chandelier lacklustre and dull.

In the Dining-Room, with its walls of dark Cordoba leather, there was an unfortunate diversion.

‘I want to go to the lavatory,’ announced the ancient Mrs Transom in a surprisingly loud, firm voice.

‘No, you don’t, Mother,’ hissed her daughter. ‘Not now, you don’t — you’ve been.’

‘What do you mean, no, I don’t?’ said the old woman angrily. ‘I may be old, I may be useless, I may be someone whom everyone would like to see dead and laid out on a slab, but I still know when I want to go to the lavatory and I want to go to the lavatory now.’

A hurried consultation followed. The butler, more bored than pained, issued instructions, holding out his mottled hand in case the information rendered might produce a tip. Mrs Transom was led away on the arm of her unfortunate daughter — and the party trooped into the Library.

Oh, the poor books, thought Harriet, running her handkerchief surreptitiously along the dusty, calf-bound volumes on an open shelf. Here was Horace who had so loved the foolish Lesbia and Sappho who had turned loneliness into the most moving verses of the ancient world — and here Harriet’s own special friend, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius whose Meditations she now pulled out and opened at random, to read:

Live not as though a thousand years are ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

Only, what is good? wondered Harriet. She had thought of it as submission, virtue, not setting up her will against others. But might it mean something else? Might it mean making yourself strong and creative? Might it mean following your star?

The butler glared at her and she replaced the book. However poor I was, reflected Harriet, I would always dust the books. And I would always find flowers, she thought, remembering the drifts of wild narcissi she had seen as they came up the drive. And once again she wondered what ailed this marvellous house.

They trooped up the grand staircase, admiring the carved newel posts, while from below came the anguished baying of Mrs Transom’s daughter, who had taken a wrong turning and lay becalmed in a distant hallway. Here were the private apartments of the family — the upper Drawing-Room, the bedrooms — past which the cadaverous Mr Grunthorpe, enjoining silence, now led them bound for the Long Gallery on the top floor.

Harriet had fallen a little behind the others, weary of the absurd antics of her ‘bodyguard’ and planning, if a side staircase could be found, the rescue of the Transoms.

She was thus alone when a door was suddenly thrown open and a woman’s voice, high and imperious, cried out, ‘No! I don’t believe it! It cannot be as bad as that!’

Involuntarily, Harriet stopped. The luxurious room thus revealed, framed in the lintel of the door, might have come from a painting by Titian. There was a four-poster hung in blue silk, a dressing-table with a silver-trimmed mirror, a richly embroidered chair… The covers of the bed were thrown back and beside it stood a woman in a white negligée with a river of dark red hair rippling down her back. She had brought up one of her arms against the carved bedpost as though for support, and a little silken-haired papillon lay curled on the pillow, looking at her with anxious eyes.

‘Even my idiot of a husband could not have gone as far as that,’ she continued. ‘You are trying to frighten me.’

A maid moved about the back of the room, laying out clothes, but it was to someone unseen that the woman spoke — a man whose low-voiced answer Harriet could not make out.

‘Oh!’ The rapt exclamation came from Louisa, who had returned to admonish her loitering niece. Her long face was transfigured; her mouth hung slightly open with awe.

A sighting! Here without a doubt was the lady of the house, Isobel Brandon, in whose veins flowed some of the bluest blood in England. For while Harriet saw a beautiful and imperious woman driven to the edge of endurance by some calamity, Aunt Louisa saw only the grand-daughter of the Earl of Lexbury whose wedding some ten years earlier at St Margaret’s, Westminster, had required a double page of the Tatler to do it justice.

But Mrs Brandon now had seen them.

‘For God’s sake, Alistair, shut the door! You can’t go anywhere until those wretched women have stopped trooping through the house. And anyway, I sent all the documents to—’

The door closed. Harriet and her aunt joined the others. Mrs Transom’s daughter had discovered another stairway and pushed her mother up it — and the party entered the Long Gallery.

A long, light room with a beautiful parquet floor… The walls nearest the door were taken up by family portraits of the Brandons. Among the dull paintings, varnished into uniformity, only two caught Harriet’s attention: a likeness of the old General, almost comical in the obvious boredom and irritation shown by the sitter at being compelled to sit thus captive for the artist; and one of Henrietta Verney, who had linked the Brandons to her illustrious house — a vivid intelligent face defying the centuries.

‘Is there no portrait of the present owner?’ enquired Mrs Belper.

‘No, ma’am. The present owner is abroad a great deal and has not yet sat for his portrait.’

And is not likely to either, thought Mr Grunthorpe with gloomy satisfaction as he pointed out a view of Stavely’s west front by Richard Wilson.

Harriet wandered for a while, not greatly interested in the conventional landscapes and battle scenes. Then right at the end of the gallery she came across an entirely different group of pictures — chosen, surely, by someone outside the family. Light, sun-filled modern paintings: a Monet of poppies and cornflowers; a Renoir of two girls in splendidly floral hats sitting on a terrace… and one at which she stood and looked, forgetting where she was, forgetting everything except what she had lost.

No one has understood the world of dance like Degas. The painting was of two ballet girls in the wings of the Paris Opéra: one bending down to tie her shoe; the other limbering up, one leg lifted on to the barre, her head bent over it to touch her ankles. This painter who all his life was obsessed by the beauty of women at work had caught perfectly the weariness on the girls’ faces, the pull of their muscles, the fierce, unending discipline that underlies the tawdry glitter of the stage.

And even Edward, coming up to Harriet with his usual proprietary air, saw her face and left her alone.

Ten minutes later the tour was completed and the ladies back in the entrance hall. It was here that Mr Grunthorpe met his Waterloo. Aunt Louisa, the Circle’s secretary, advanced towards him and thanked him on behalf of her group for showing them round. Mr Grunthorpe, his rapacious hand curved in expectation, murmured that it had been a pleasure. He was still staring at his empty hand in total disbelief as Louisa, following the other ladies, disappeared through the front door.

There now followed the selection of a suitable site for the picnic. This was not a simple matter, but at last they were settled in a sheltered spot in the sunken garden, the hampers brought from the charabanc, rugs spread and parasols arranged, and the ladies fell to.

Edward was at first pleased to sit beside Harriet enjoying the excellent food they had prepared. Though exceptionally quiet even for her, she looked very pleasing in her blue skirt and white blouse and he particularly liked the way she was wearing her hair: taken back under a velvet band and loose on her shoulders. But after a while he grew restive; he was, after all, an entomologist and here not only for pleasure.

‘Come, Harriet,’ he said presently. ‘I want to replenish the laboratory teaching specimens. Will you help me?’

She nodded and rose and they moved off in the direction of the croquet lawn, while at a discreet distance the stalwart Millie Braithwaite, eschewing her after-luncheon nap, pursued them.

For nearly half an hour Edward, bent almost double, moved absorbedly across the grass, flicking the heavy sweep-net to and fro over the ground.

‘Pooter, please, Harriet,’ he would say from time to time, straightening up, and she would hand him the little glass tube with its rubber pipe into which he would suck the hopping, wriggling, jumping little creatures; then, ‘Killing bottle!’, and that too Harriet would put into his hand so that the miniature flies and bright bugs and stripy beetles could find, among the fumes of potassium cyanide, their final resting place.

As they moved slowly towards the terrace Edward suddenly perceived, on a blossoming viburnum bush, a large and golden Brimstone butterfly. At once he became transformed and the heavy cumbersome sweep-net, the crouching position were abandoned. Plucking the gossamer butterfly-net from Harriet, he almost danced up the steps. This was a new Edward: a lithe and entomological Ariel. For a few moments he hovered, measuring his prey — then, with a magnificent sideways sweep of the net, he struck!

‘Got it!’ he announced with satisfaction and as Harriet approached, he pinched the fluttering creature’s thorax between his forefinger and thumb.

A neat and expert movement: an instant and humane death. But it made a noise which Harriet had not expected — a small but distinct ‘crack’ — and it was now that she told Edward he must excuse her for a while and left him.

Walking unthinkingly, she found herself in a small copse through which there ran a stream, its banks carpeted with more primroses than she had ever seen.

If the first butterfly you see is a yellow butterfly, then it will be a good summer, Harriet knew that. But if the first butterfly you see is a dead butterfly, what then?

She had come to an orchard. The lichened pear trees were in blossom, the apples still in pink-tipped bud. What a heavenly place, thought Harriet, for here Stavely’s neglect only added to its loveliness, and as if in echo to her thoughts she found herself on a wide track which must have branched off from the main avenue, in front of a sign saying: ‘To Paradise Farm’.

She hesitated, not uninterested in the idea of Paradise, but the glimpse of tall chimneys and tiled roofs half-hidden in the trees suggested a house far more important than an ordinary agricultural dwelling and, not wishing to trespass, she retraced her steps. Finding a door in an ivy-covered wall, she entered a walled garden and here for the first time encountered a gardener — a bent old man pottering among the broken frames who acknowledged her greeting so ill-temperedly that she went out again, walked through the stable yard, passed an overgrown tennis court — and saw behind it a curiously shaped clump of yew hedges, irregular and dark.

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:

‘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.