Eva Ibbotson

This peaceful state of affairs was shattered on the last day of April, when a concerned and friendly note arrived for Aunt Louisa from Mrs. Fairfield. She and Betsy had been so sorry, she wrote, that Harriet had had to postpone her visit, but if the Professor’s cousin was now recovered and they were returned from Harrogate, it would give them great pleasure if Harriet could come up for Betsy’s dance. It was quite a small affair, nothing grand, but Betsy would be so very pleased to see her friend…

Aunt Louisa, reading the letter which came by the afternoon post, did not scream or faint. She controlled herself with masterly skill, but she went to “the instrument” and telephoned the lodge of St. Phillip’s to ask the porter to find Professor Morton and request him to come home—something she had never done before in her life. After that, and perhaps unwisely, she telephoned her friend Mrs. Hermione Belper at Trumpington Villa.

The Professor—arriving in an extremely unpleasant mood, for he had been interrupted while giving what he regarded as one of his most brilliant lectures—found Louisa’s icy hand being chafed by the Tea Circle’s president while other ladies offered sal volatile, tea and commiseration in voices from which they found it impossible to remove an undercurrent of glee.

“What has happened, Louisa?” he inquired sternly—and the ladies, responding to his manhood, withdrew into a corner.

Louisa held out Mrs. Fairfield’s note and the Professor paled. “I don’t understand this. Can Harriet have deliberately deceived us—or has she been abducted?”

“She has deliberately deceived us, Bernard! I have spoken to Mrs. Fairfield on “the instrument” and the note they received with all that tarradiddle about Harrogate was definitely in Harriet’s writing. Betsy knows it well.”

“Have you informed the police?”

“No, Bernard, please, not the police. The scandal… Surely there has to be some way of hushing it up? We must think. I suppose someone could have forced her to write that letter, but I don’t feel it was that—she has been so strange lately. Oh, Bernard, I know! I’m sure I know!” Louisa sat up suddenly and the smelling-salts clattered to the floor. “She has run away to that ballet company! She must have done. Do you remember how weirdly she spoke at that dinner party? About it being the thing she had wanted all her life? That dreadful Russian who came to Madame Lavarre’s…”

“Try not to be ridiculous, Louisa! My daughter would never disobey my specific orders.” But his daughter clearly had done so and cracking his pale knuckles, he said, “I agree we must hush this up if we can. My position in the University if it got about… Of course, there may be a perfectly simple explanation…”

“The white slave traffic,” said Miss Transom, rendered authoritarian by the blessed absence of her mother.

“I’ve always thought the girl was no better than she should be,” hissed Millicent Braithwaite in a stage-whisper. She had not forgiven Harriet for making them look foolish at Stavely. For hours they had blundered about in that maze and then found her with a little red-haired boy and both of them laughing their heads off.

“We must go to see Madame Lavarre at once,” said the Professor. “She will know the whereabouts of that Russian scoundrel.”

“If it is not too late!”

“Now remember,” said the Professor sternly, pointing his finger at the ladies, “no word of this must get about. Not one single word!”

“Of course not, Professor,” said Mrs. Belper soothingly. “You can rely on us.” And so Herculean were the efforts of the ladies to restrain themselves that it was a good twenty-four hours before the milkman, whom Louisa had not tipped in twenty years, was in a position to inform the man who kept the paper shop in Petty Cury that stuffy Professor Morton’s daughter had run away to become a belly-dancer in a “house of ill-fame” in Buenos Aires—and serve the old so-and-so right!

Madame Lavarre—when Professor and Miss Morton were announced—smiled the happy, relaxed smile of a well-fed cougar. She had had a note from Dubrov and knew that the Mortons were too late.

“No, I know nothing about Harriet, I am afraid,” she said. “Since you have said that she may not come to my classes anymore, I have not seen her.”

“We have reason to think that she may have tried to join the ballet company of that Russian who came to see you—the man who was going up the Amazon. You will oblige me by giving me his name.”

“Certainly.” Madame smiled and puffed a cloud of Balkan Sobranie into the Professor’s face. “His name is Dubrov. Sasha Dubrov. We are very old friends. In St. Petersburg we have often been skating together on the Neva and also riding horses, although of course I could not do very much sport because at the Imperial Ballet School they did not permit it in case of injury to the legs.”

“His address, please,” fumed the Professor. “You will instantly give me his address!”