Eva Ibbotson

“I don’t know what to say…” He put down the slide on the bench and stood shaking his head. “It’s a blow… the Mater…” Stunned and wretched, Edward saw years of careful planning brought suddenly to nought. The proposal at the May Ball; a visit to Goring-on-Thames to introduce Harriet to his mother… the little house in Madingley or Grantchester. “She has put herself beyond the reach of a decent man.”

“No, Edward,” said Louisa, “it may not be too late. She has been headstrong and foolish, but you may still be able to save her. Not to forgive her, perhaps—we do not ask that of you—but to restore her to safety and the parental home. We think,” she continued, coming down to earth, “that we could hush things up so that no one need know of her flight.”

Edward was silent, still, shaking his long head sadly from side to side. Images of Harriet floated through his mind: the demure brown head; the clear and docile brow; the small ears peeping—rather wistfully, he had always thought—through her hair. Harriet’s soft voice, her slow smile…

“How?” he said at last. “How could it be hushed up?”

The Professor fixed him with a steely look. “We want you to go after her, Edward. To bring her back. If you do this, we can avoid a scandal.” He explained about the Fairfields, while Edward stared at him dumbfounded.

“You want me to go to Manaus? But that’s impossible! It’s quite impossible. No one could ask it of me.”

“We would not expect you to marry her any longer, Edward,” said Louisa, laying her skeletal hand on his arm. “Nor even to forgive her. Only to save her from her folly… and to save her family.”

“To show yourself a man,” stated the Professor.

“No.” Edward was resolute. Yet as he stood there, images of Harriet continued to jostle each other in his brain. The way she had laughed when that little baby had set off in its nappies across the sacrosanct Fellows’ Lawn at King’s. The way she had pulled down a branch of white lilac behind St. Benet’s Church and let the raindrops run down her face. And now perhaps she was ill with some jungle fever… or abandoned. “Edward,” she would say when she saw him. “Oh, Edward, you have come.’”

“And in any case,” he said, “I have my work.”

But that was a mistake. Images of Harriet were replaced by others more lurid, more feverish and, to a professional entomologist, reekingly desirable. The Brazilian rhinoceros beetle which stretched the length of a man’s hand… the Morpho butterfly, like an iridescent blue dinner-plate, beating its way through the leaf canopy… fireflies by whose light it was possible to read. To say nothing of the wholly virgin territory of the Amazonian flea…

Implacable, with their characteristic look of having just stepped down from a cut-price sarcophagus, the Mortons stood before him.

“I would never be able to get leave,” said Edward.

That, however, was not necessarily true. He only had two practicals in the summer term; Henderson would do those for him and the head of his department was a great believer in field work—in getting what he called “nose to nose with the insect.”

The images came faster. The Goliath beetle, six inches from mouth to sternum… the “88” butterfly, a brilliant airborne hieroglyphic for which private collectors would give their ears… Harriet lying on a pillow, her hair spread out; her limp body acquiescent as he carried her to safety up the gangplank of the ship… And Peripatus—ah, Peripatus! Edward’s blue eyes grew soft as he thought of this seemingly insignificant creature, half-worm, half-insect, the world’s oldest living fossil, crawling—as it had crawled since the dawn of time—through the unchanging debris of the rain-forest floor.

Torn beyond endurance, he gazed into the tank where Henderson’s lone parsnip continued to respire silently in the cause of science. “Look at my fate,” the captive vegetable seemed to be saying. “Free yourself. Show yourself a hero. Be a man.” Making a final stand, Edward turned back to the Professor. “And there is the fare,” said Edward, “I cannot possibly afford the fare.”

A grimace, a convulsion of the thin lips, a kind of spasm—and then the Merlin Professor looked straight at Edward and said, “I will pay the fare.”

Chapter Six

“I look like a twig,” said Harriet a little sadly, gazing into the flyblown mirror of the room she shared with her friends in the Hotel Metropole.

Marie-Claude and Kirstin did not attempt to deny it.

“I would like to know what exactly she is like, this Aunt Louisa of yours,” said Marie-Claude. “How can someone actually enter into a shop and buy such a dress?”

It was the day after the opening night of Swan Lake and the girls were preparing for the party at Follina.

“Brown suits Harriet,” said Kirstin kindly.

“Oh, yes. Brown velvet in the winter with frogging, perhaps,” agreed Marie-Claude. “But brown foulard … and the sleeves.” She laid a bunch of artificial flowers against Harriet’s throat and shook her head. “Better not to draw attention…”