Eva Ibbotson

“She is English,” explained Marie-Claude, turning her incredible eyes on Rom and repressing a sigh. If things had been different… even without mustaches… But they were not and resolutely she continued, “And it is impossible to keep her inside. You know how it is: the fresh air, et tout ça. And naturally one would not wish her to be eaten by a boa constrictor.”

“English!” said Rom, amazed. “You have an English dancer?” No wonder he had been unable to visualize her in St. Petersburg or Kiev.

Dubrov nodded. “She only joined us just before we left, without any stage experience; she’s done very well. Last night was her debut.”

“Don’t worry,” said Rom. “I’m sure she’s perfectly all right. But I shall send someone to fetch her.”

This, however, he did not do. Briefing Lorenzo and his assistants, he slipped silently away and made his way down the steps.

She was not on the main avenue, not on any of the terraces, not in the arboretum, not by the pond…

He continued to search, not anxious but a little puzzled. Then from behind the patch of native forest he heard the great Caruso’s voice.

“Your tiny hand is frozen… is frozen… is frozen…” sang the incomparable tenor, for the record—the first he had ever bought his Indians—was badly cracked.

Che gelida manina … a record valued even above the “Bell Song” from Lakmé, but seldom played now owing to its fragile state. They had a visitor, then, and one they wanted to honor. With an eagerness which surprised him, Rom made his way between the trees.

The village was bathed in the last rays of the afternoon sun. Hammocks were strung between the dappled trees; a monkey scratched himself on a thatched roof… a small armadillo they had tamed rooted in a patch of canna lillies.

In the circle around the horn of the gramophone sat the women with their children, together with the few men too old to be busy in the plantations or helping at the house. Someone knowing them less well would have assumed that this was just the usual evening concert, but Rom—seeing the fruit set out on painted plates and the cassia juice in gourds on the low carved stool-knew they were welcoming a valued guest.

Only what guest? And where?

At first he could see no one unusual. Then, searching the listening faces, he saw a girl he had at first taken to be one of the tribe, for she wore a dress such as the missionaries forced on their converts and she was holding a baby, cupping a hand around its head—Manuelo’s three-day-old baby which they were taking to Father Antonio at dawn to be baptized.

Then they saw him; someone took off the needle from the record and as they came toward him, chattering in welcome, she lifted her head and looked directly at him… and over her face there spread a sudden shock of surprise, almost of recognition, as though he was someone she knew from another life.

“You must be the last of the company’s swans?” he said, coming forward. “I’m Romain Verney, your host.”

“Yes,” she replied, getting to her feet. “I’m Harriet Morton.” The voice was low; scholarly. Old Iquita took the baby from her and he saw how hard it was for her to part with its soft warmth; how she drew her fingertips across the round dark head until the last possible moment, just as Simonova had drawn her fingertips down the arm of her lover before she bourréed backward into the lake. “God must be very brave,” she said, “making babies with fontanelles like that. What if their souls should escape before they’ve joined? What then?”

“Oh, God is brave all right,” said Rom lightly. “You see Him all the time, chancing His arm.” But he was startled, for she had smiled as she spoke and everything he had thought about her gravity and seriousness was suddenly set at nought. There was nothing wistful or tentative about that smile. It came slowly, but ended in a total crunching up of her features as though a winged cherub had just flown by and whispered a marvelously funny joke into her ear.

They made their farewells and he began to lead her back.

“They’ve been so kind to me,” she said, still not quite in the real world after her hour in the garden and the conviction which had burst from her as he stepped from the trees that this was Henry’s “secret boy.” “Look what they gave me!” She took out of her pocket a small carving of a margay and held it out to him.

“They like to give presents.” But Rom was surprised, for the carving was one of old Josh’s, their best craftsman; it was a lovely thing. “How did you make yourself understood?” he asked curiously.

“I think if you want to, you can always understand people, don’t you? And the ones who had grown up in the mission could follow a little Latin.”

“Ah, yes; Latin,” he murmured. “A usual accomplishment in ballet dancers?”

“My father taught me,” she said briefly and a shadow passed over her face. But the next moment she was entranced again: “Oh, that tree! That color… and the way the flowers grow right on the trunk like that!”