Eva Ibbotson

Now she threw her last crust of bread, narrowly missing the head of the Provost of St. Anne’s who appeared suddenly in a punt beneath her, poling his blonde wife and pretty daughters down-river. To have hit the Provost would have been a particular disaster for he was her father’s enemy, having criticized Professor Morton’s entry on Ammanius Marcellinus in the Classical Dictionary, and his wife—whose friendly wave Harriet could not help returning—was even worse, for she had been found (while still secretary of the Association of University Wives) unashamedly reading a book by someone dirty called Sigmund Freud while in a hansom parked outside Peterhouse.

“Poor child!” said the Provost when they were out of earshot.

“Yes, indeed,” agreed his wife grimly, looking back at the forlorn little figure on the bridge. “How such a charming, sensitive child came to be born into that household of bigoted pigs, I shall never understand. It was a crime to take her away from school. I suppose they regard it as a perfectly fitting life for her—arranging flowers in a house where there are no flowers, taking the dog out when there isn’t any dog.”

“There is a young man, one hears,” murmured the Provost, expertly shooting beneath Clare Bridge, and raised his eyebrows at his wife’s most unladylike snort.

The Provost was correct: there was a young man. His name was Edward Finch-Dutton; he was a Fellow of the Professor’s own College, St. Philip’s, and though his subject was Zoology—a new and upstart discipline of which it was impossible to approve—the Mortons had permitted him to come to the house. For there had been “unpleasantness” about the decision to keep Harriet at home. Even the Master of Trinity, who ranked slightly below God, had taken the Professor aside after the University sermon to express surprise.

“After all, you have made quite a little scholar of her yourself,” he said. “I had a most enjoyable chat with her the other day. She has some highly original views on Heliodoras—and a delightful accent.”

“If I taught Harriet the classics, it was so that she could make herself useful to me at home, not so that she could become an unfeminine hoyden and a disgrace to her sex,” the Professor had replied.

Still, the encounter had rankled. Fortunately, in her dealings with her niece, Louisa had one unfailing source of guidance: the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle who had seceded from the Association of University Wives when it became clear that the parent body could no longer be relied upon to uphold etiquette and protocol. It was these ladies—headed by Mrs. Belper, Louisa’s special friend—who had suggested that the best solution for Harriet might be an early marriage. Seeing the sense of this the Mortons, rejecting various men who had shown an interest in Harriet (for unaccountably the child seemed to have the gift of pleasing), had selected Edward Finch-Dutton. He had a First, was sensible and ambitious and was related—albeit distantly—to the Master of St. Swithin’s, Oxford. Not only that, but his mother—a Featherstonehaugh—had been accustomed to visit Stavely, the district’s most beautiful and prestigious home.

It was the long, serious face of this excellent young man that Harriet saw now as she looked into the water; and as always, his image brought a stab of fear.

“Don’t let me give in, God,” she begged, tilting back her head, sending the long soft hair cascading down her back as she searched the quiet, dove-gray sky of Cambridge for some portent—Halley’s comet; the pointing finger of Isfrael—to indicate deliverance. “Don’t let me marry Edward just to get away from home. Don’t let me, God, I beg of you! Show me some other way to live.”

A church dock struck four, and another… and suddenly she smiled, the grave little face utterly transformed as she picked up her case. Somehow her dancing lessons had survived; those most precious times were left to her. And abandoning the resolutely silent firmament, she quickly made her way beside the verdant lawns towards King’s Parade.

Ten minutes later she entered the tall, shabby building in Fitzwilliam Street which housed the Sonia Lavarre Academy of Dance.

At once she was in a different world. The streets of Cambridge with their bicycles and dons might never have existed and she could be in St. Petersburg in the Tsar’s Imperial Ballet School in Theater Street, where Madame Lavarre—then Sonia Zugorsky—had spent eight years of her childhood. A tiled stove, incorrectly installed by a baffled Cambridge plumber, roared in the hallway; the sad Byzantine face of St. Demetrius of Rostov stared at her from the icon corner…