Eva Ibbotson

“I do rather wish it,” said Harriet. “I wish it like someone who has been lying in a cold grave might wish for the day of resurrection. Or like an extremely hungry lion might wish for a Christian. And I mean to be immensely respectable and wear a mob-cap and have quarrels with you about the coal bill to show how independent I am. Only there is one thing I so very much want to do, still, and it isn’t a very married thing. I know you don’t approve of it and I do understand that, but it would make me so happy because you know how interested I have always been in Suleiman the Great.”

He looked at her and felt the tears spring to his eyes, because after all she had been through she had kept the gift of laughter, could offer him what he longed for with such gallantry and grace.

“You want to creep from the foot of the bed into the presence?” he asked with mock severity.

Harriet admitted that this was so. “They weren’t abject, the odalisques,” she explained. “People have that wrong. They just worked very hard at love—it was all they had.”

But Rom, aware that the time for conversation was running out, was applying himself to the practical aspects of the problem.

“Under the counterpane or over it, do you wish to creep?” he inquired.

Harriet’s face crumpled into its urchin grin, acknowledging a hit. Then she raised her arms as does a child who wishes to be gathered up and in two strides he was beside her.

“We will creep together,” announced Rom idiotically and carried her—this lightest and most beloved burden—to his bed.

Epilogue

“Hurry, girls!” cried Hermione Belper. “The bus will be here in a minute.”

The “girls,” however, were not easy to hurry. It was not as in the old days, when a word from their president had the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle jumping to attention. Now, ten years since they had last been to visit Stavely, the changing times had taken their toll. Bobbed hair, a penchant for rag-time and radical ideas of all sorts had spread through the ranks. Even Eugenia Crowley, one of Harriet’s erstwhile chaperones, wore a skirt which cleared her ankles by a good nine inches.

But it was not the fact that the ladies no longer sprang to attention at her command which annoyed Mrs. Belper; it was the condescending and superior behavior of Louisa Morton, who had declined to accompany them.

“My dear, I regard Stavely as my second home,” she had said snootily. “It is hardly necessary for me to go there in a charabanc.”

The remark was quite untrue, of course. Harriet was polite and friendly to her aunt, as she was to her father, but Romain Brandon—who mercifully had come through the war with only an arm wound and a string of medals—always seemed to be absent or unavailable when the Mortons visited. What was true was that Louisa was compelled to spend more and more time looking after her brother, for since that extraordinary episode when his entire class had thrown him in the fountain and gone virtually unpunished, the Professor had become something of a recluse and now took almost no part in the life of the University.

The bus arrived. Mrs. Transom’s daughter had died of Spanish influenza in the last year of the war, as had Mr. Belper, the president’s undersized husband; but Mrs. Transom (now in her ninety-eighth year) seemed to grow younger every day and was easily hauled aboard by her attendant.

“This will be no ordinary outing, Cynthia,” explained Mrs. Belper to her god-daughter, who was paying her a visit. “As I have told you, I have known Mrs. Brandon since childhood. I understand we are to be shown around by a member of the family and that there is to be a sit-down tea!”

As they drove in between the tall gates, the ladies were amazed by the change in Stavely. The Hall had been a military hospital during the war but now, three years after the Armistice, all signs of the army’s occupation were gone. Making their way to the front door, the visitors passed through one of creation’s undoubted masterpieces: a lovingly tended English garden on a fine day in June.

And sure enough, a member of the family was waiting to show them around! Not Harriet Brandon, shortly expecting her third child, but a tall good-looking young man with russet hair—the owner’s nephew, who had grown up at Stavely and was to inherit Paradise Farm and a substantial parcel of land as soon as he came of age.

“That’s Henry Brandon, Cynthia!” hissed Mrs. Belper, pushing her god-daughter forward and wishing that the girl’s mother had had the sense to do something about her teeth. “Stay close by his side and ask questions. Gentlemen always like to tell you things.”