Eva Ibbotson

They married—the cosmopolitan woman with a tragic past (her father had died in a Tsarist jail) and the seemingly conventional British soldier, and he took her back to Stavely, where the County did their best with a woman who did not hunt but could be seen speaking to the horses tenderly in French, who used the Music Room for music and filled the Gallery with paintings by those mad and immoral Impressionists.

Gossip about the new Mrs. Brandon inevitably abounded, but even the most virulent of her detractors had to admit that she was exceptionally good to her stepson. She spent hours with young Henry Alexander, read to him, played with him, took him about with her and celebrated his seventh birthday with a party that was talked about for years. When her own son was born the following year, both she and the General redoubled their attentions to Stavely’s heir. The day after Rom’s birth, there appeared in the stables a white pony for Henry that a prince of the blood would have been proud to own.

No, it was Rom himself who did the damage, who ate into poor Henry’s soul. A dark-skinned, quicksilver child with high cheekbones and the flared nostrils that are supposed to denote genius or temper (and generally both), he had inherited also the thick, ink-black hair which had been his mother’s in her girlhood and her passionate mouth. Had it not been for the General’s wide gray eyes looking out of the child’s intense, exotic face, the County would have been inclined to wonder.

For it was not only Rom’s appearance that was dramatic. The child, brought down by his nurse to the drawing room at teatime, would throw his arms round his parents—round both of them—and speak to them of love. “I love you as much as the sun and the moon and the stars,” the three-year-old Rom said to his mother in the presence of Mrs. Farquharson who had come about the Red Cross Fête; and Henry, a decent, well-brought-up British boy, had to stand by and endure the shame.

Again and again, Henry’s despised half-brother revealed his “foreignness.” Rom chattered in French as easily as in English; he asked—he actually asked—to play the violin, and though Henry knew that forestry was respectable and that his father’s plant-hunting trips were nothing to hide, to see Rom helping the gardeners to plant flowers was almost more than he could bear.

And then, just when Henry had consoled himself by utterly despising the outlandish half-brother who seemed to have no idea how to conduct himself, Rom would confound him by some spectacular act of courage, climbing fearlessly to the top of a tree so slender that even under Rom’s light weight it bent and swayed as if it must break. It was Rom, not Henry (though he too was present) who jumped into the river by the mill-race to try to rescue a little village girl who had played too near the water’s edge—and even then Rom couldn’t behave like other children, for when he would have been a hero he lay down in front of the church door refusing to go inside because “God shouldn’t have let Dorcas drown.” It was Rom who found the black dog, snarling and wild, with his leg in a trap and who risked rabies and heaven-knows-what to free him—and soon Henry, dutifully walking his hound puppies, had the mortification of hearing Rom’s wonder dog—with his intelligence and fidelity—spoken of wherever he went. It was Rom—not Henry, the eldest son, the heir—who smelled burning one wild night in October and led the white Arab—Henry’s own horse, rearing and terrified—to safety.

No wonder Henry hated his younger brother, but there was nothing anyone could do. Mrs. Brandon’s efforts to shower her stepson with attentions began to border on the ludicrous; the General never betrayed by one flicker of his wise gray eyes that his younger son held his heart. Rom himself, at the beginning, looked up to Henry and longed for his companionship. It was useless. The jealousy that enslaved Henry was the stuff of myth and legend, and it grew stronger every year.

Then, when Rom was almost eleven, fate stepped in on Henry’s side. Mrs. Brandon felt ill; leukemia was diagnosed and six months later she was dead.

“Hadn’t you better pull yourself together?” said Henry (recalled from his last term at Eton for the funeral) to Rom, sobbing wildly in his mother’s empty room—and stepped back hastily, for he thought that Rom was about to spring at him and take him by the throat.

Instead Rom vanished with his dog, managing to go to ground in the Suffolk countryside as though it was indeed the Amazon in whose imagined jungles he had so often played.

When he came back he was different—quieter, less “excessive.” He had learned to consume his own smoke, but for the rest of his life he responded to loss not with grief but with a fierce and inward anger.