Eva Ibbotson

Light, now, sparkling and dancing on the tiaras of the women as they entered; on the diamond and sapphire choker of Mrs. John P. Lehmann, on Colonel de Silva’s Brazilian Star…

The seats were filling up; row upon row of bejewelled bosoms, of bemedalled chests. The stout Baltic princesses entered the canopied box reserved for the President and stood, dowdy and gracious, bestowing kind waves. In the orchestra pit, the musicians were ready.

But the performance could not begin yet; all the citizens of Manaus were aware of that. For the box next to that of the President was still empty—the box that belonged to Mr. Verney, the chairman of the Opera House trustees. Until Rom Verney came from Follina the curtain would stay lowered—and knowing this, the audience settled down to wait.

Verney woke early, as he always did, on the morning of the gala; he stretched in the great jaruna wood bed and pushed aside the cloud of white mosquito netting to go to the French windows and look out on his garden.

There was no garden like it in all of Amazonia. Only the gardens of the Moghul emperors—of Akbar and his heirs—had the same vision, the same panache. Only those despots—like this wealthiest of all the rubber barons—had the tenacity and labor to make real their dreams.

On the terrace below him, orchids and hibiscus and the dizzying scarlet flame-flowers which the humming birds loved to visit rioted in flamboyant exuberance from their urns, but elsewhere he had maintained a savage discipline on the fast-growing plants. In the avenue of jacarandas, shiveringly blue, which stretched to the distant river, each tree grew distinct and unimpeded. Beneath the catalpas in his arboretum he had planted only the white, star-petalled clerodendron, so that the trees seemed to grow from a drift of scented snow.

By the aviary which his Indians, somewhat to his dismay, had built for him when he was absent on a journey, Manuelo was already sweeping the paths. Two other Indians worked by the pool with its golden waterlilies, scraping derris root into the water against mosquitoes. Old Iquita, Manuelo’s mother-in-law, wearing a frilled petticoat left behind by an opera singer whose favors he had enjoyed, and a boa of anaconda skins, was poking her forked stick into a flower bed, busy with her self-appointed task of keeping his garden free from snakes. From the patch of forest behind the house, deliberately left untouched, where his Indians built their village, came the faint, disembodied sound of Dame Nellie Melba singing the “Bell Song” from Lakmé. However many records he bought them, this remained their favorite.

He showered, slipped on a khaki shirt and trousers and made his way downstairs—a most un-English-looking Englishman, lithe and dark-skinned, his black hair (though he was not yet thirty) exotically streaked with silver—to be waylaid as he crossed the terrace by the first of the many animals to whom he offered the hospitality of his home: a coatimundi with a great bushy tail who jumped off a chair and demanded to be stroked.

Moving on down the steps, Verney made his way between banks of glossy-leaved gardenias, through a trellised arcade of jasmine and passion flowers, toward the orchard where he grew mangoes and plantains and avocados to feed his workers. He missed nothing—a new patch of fungus, an infinitesimal split in the stem of a pineapple, a procession of ants endeavoring to set up a colony in his coffee bushes—all were instantly observed and silently assessed. And the little nose bear trotted along behind him, for this morning inspection of the estate was something which the coati regarded as very much his affair.

As he came to the bridge over one of the many igarapes that flowed through his land, an aged blue and yellow macaw flopped from an acacia branch on to his shoulder and screamed at the coati in jealous rage. The river was close by now, with his boats: the schooner Amethyst, which he used to convey guests to and from Manaus; the Daisy May, a converted gun-boat he had stripped almost to the hull to carry his botanical specimens… And the first boat he had ever owned, the little Firefly, rakish and indestructible, beside the dugouts of his Indians.

It was in the Firefly on a morning such as this that he had found Follina.

He had been beating his way up the mazed waterways of the Negro during his second year on the Amazon when he found, between two floating islands, the hidden entrance to a river. A light, clear river down which he traveled for perhaps a mile, entranced by the skimming kingfishers, the otters playing around his boat—and pulling into a sand-bank, he tied up to a cassia entirely covered in rich gold blossoms.