Eva Ibbotson

“No.” But he smiled, for one cannot entirely choose one’s obsessions and since his ninth birthday his had been that vast, wild place of mazed rivers and impenetrable jungle. “There’s a fortune to be made there, but you would hate the climate. In North America-California, perhaps. Or Canada—wherever you please!”

He stretched out his hands to her, for he no more doubted her than he doubted his own right arm, but she shook her head. Isobel had seen her mother humbled when the great Lexbury estate was broken up. She was afraid—and she wanted Stavely.

Thus it was Isobel who succeeded where Henry had failed; it was she who broke Rom. A month after the General’s death, she withdrew from her engagement. That night Rom found her in the Orangery with Henry and knew what she would do.

The next day he was gone and nobody at Stavely ever heard from him again.

Crossing the courtyard behind the house with the coati at his heels, Rom’s way was barred by Lorenzo, his butler and general factotum, beaming with pleasure and surrounded by a duster of indoor servants who had left their preparations for tomorrow’s party for the ballet company in order to share their master’s impending joy.

“It has come, Coronel!” said Lorenzo, throwing out an annunciatory arm. “Roderigo has sent word from Sao Gabriel and Furo has gone to fetch it in the truck.”

There was no need for Rom to ask what had come. Follina was connected by a rough road, passable by motor in the dry season, to Manaus where he had his main office and warehouse. Another, much shorter track led to the tiny village of Sao Gabriel on the Negro where he had built a floating jetty, storehouses and a rubber smoking shed; it was there, rather than at his private landing stage, that goods for Follina were unloaded.

But though Rom could pioneer a dozen new enterprises, could import grand pianos from Germany, American motor cars, carpets from Isfahan, nothing excited his men so much as the arrival of the washing basket from Truscott and Musgrove in Piccadilly containing his freshly-laundered shirts.

To add to the stories of ludicrous and extravagant behavior among the rubber barons had not been his intention. Mrs. Lehmann who washed her carriage horses in champagne, or young Wetherby who walked a jaguar with a diamond collar through the streets, had Rom’s utmost contempt. Yet unwittingly he had created a legend which outclassed them all. The travels of his laundry to and from London’s most exclusive valeting service were spoken of in Rio and Liverpool, in Paris and Madrid.

Rom ran Follina entirely with a native staff. He found that his Indians could be taught to do anything except perhaps to count; certainly they washed and ironed entirely to his satisfaction. His shirts traveled to England to be laundered because of a promise he had made to a generous and lovely woman and it was her memory, now, that softened his face.

Had it not been for Madeleine de la Tour, Rom’s midnight flight from Stavely might have ended very differently. Arriving penniless in London, half-crazed with rage and pain, he had gone to the house of the only relative he knew his mother to possess: a distant cousin; Jacques de la Tour, who had a number of business interests and who Rom hoped might give him work.

Jacques was away on an extended tour of the East, but his wife Madeleine took Rom in. She took him in in all senses: into her house, her mind, her heart and—with marvelous flair and intelligence—into her bed. She soothed the appalling hurt that Isobel had dealt him; she civilized him and left him with a sense of gratitude that had never faded. In the end, sensing his need to start on his adventure, she insisted on lending him money for his fare to Brazil.

“Only don’t turn into a savage, Romain,” she had said, standing at Euston brave as a grenadier—and much more beautiful—to see him go. “Be particularly careful of your shirts—the starch must be just so. No thumping them on flat stones, promise?”

“I promise.”

Then the train went and she cried a little in the ladies’ room and went on to the Summer Exhibition at Burlington House in a splendid herbaceous border of a hat because she was as gallant as she was good and knew that English ladies must not make a fuss.

Rom never repaid the money that she lent him. He waited two years and then went down to the Minas Gerais, that strange mineral-rich region of Brazil famous for its ornate and treasure-stocked churches, to seek out a hunchbacked craftsman who wrought precious stones into jewelry for the processional Madonnas. And a few months later a messenger arrived in Grosvenor Place and delivered a package which Madeleine opened to find—wrapped around a laundry receipt from Truscott and Musgrave—a necklace. A diamond necklace, each stone set in an intricately wrought halo of platinum, which her sensible husband—after a gasp of incredulity—fastened without too many questions around her lovely throat.