Eva Ibbotson

He went over to her then and, taking out his handkerchief, very gently wiped away her tears. And then his fingers moved slowly down, brushing her throat, until they found their object; the buttons on her negligee.

And in that moment, when rape and ruin was upon her… was inevitable… Harriet’s terror melted like snow in the sun and she knew with absolute certainty that no ruin was possible here; that what this man wished she could wish also, and would always wish—and she moved toward him with a little sigh and lifted her face with perfect trust to his.

Which made it difficult for Rom to do what he intended—more difficult than he would have believed. But he mastered himself, and smiled down at her and smoothed her rumpled hair. Then carefully, methodically, he did up the small round button at the top of her negligee and kissed her once briefly on the tip of her nose.

“Now,” he said, taking her hand as one would take the hand of a child, “I’m going to send you home. Tomorrow I shall come into Manaus and we’ll talk, but now you must go.”

“Must I?”

“Yes, my dear. At once.” And his voice suddenly rough, “No breath of scandal shall touch you while I live.”

Chapter Seven

The letter which Stavely’s young bailiff had brought to Isobel Brandon’s room on the day that the Trumpington Tea Circle ladies were touring the house came from Hathersage and Climpton, the London accountants who had looked after the Brandons’ financial affairs for many years, and accompanied a detailed report the results of which were unequivocal. As the result of the present owner’s extravagances and speculations, the estate was now encumbered to the point of no return. If bankruptcy and disgrace were to be avoided, Stavely must be sold and sold immediately.

This letter, which drew from Isobel the exclamation that Harriet overheard, was in fact only a copy of the original which reached Henry Brandon in the Toulouse lodgings to which he had retreated in order to avoid his creditors. After which, conventional to the last, he retired to his bedroom, took out his father’s army revolver and blew out his brains.

It was thus as a widow of ten days’ standing that Isobel Brandon sat in front of the mirror in her suite at the Hotel Astor in London, pinning up the rich red braids of her hair. Black suited her, thank heavens, for she would be in mourning for at least a year; the velvet jacket, bought in one of the few shops where her credit still held good, brought out the whiteness of her skin; she was one of those fortunate redheads untroubled by freckles.

But the sight of her reflection was the only thing of comfort in the bleak wilderness that her life had become, for it did not occur to her to find solace in the small, bespectacled child curled up in an armchair with his nose, as always, in a book. Henry, with his pale, pinched little face, his unmanly terrors, was not at all the kind of son she had hoped for—and suddenly exasperated by his concentration, his inability to see what she was enduring, she said, “Really, Henry, you don’t seem to realize at all what is at stake. It’s your heritage I’m trying to save. Do you want us to go and live in a sordid little hut somewhere?”

With a tremendous effort of will, Henry rose twenty thousand leagues from the bottom of the sea, abandoning brave Captain Nemo who had just sighted a frightful monster with bristling jaws, and considered her question.

“Yes,” he said, “I’d like that. With a palm-leaf roof. The ubussu palm is best; it keeps the hut cool when the weather’s hot and doesn’t let in the rain at all. I’d go out every day and shoot animals for food. And I’d fish in the river. I’d look after you,” said Henry to his mother.

“Oh, God!”

The child’s face fell. He’d got it wrong again; his mother didn’t believe he could provide for her. Harriet would have believed it… Harriet, who had said that spectacles were an advantage…

For a while he waited, wondering if this was the moment to ask what “sordid” meant—was it some kind of hut—but his mother’s face had that closed look again, and with a small sigh Henry sank back and rejoined his companions on the ocean bed.

Why did that plain little son of hers have to inherit the General’s wide gray eyes, thought Isobel—eyes that her husband had missed, but that had so curiously lightened Rom’s vivid dark face. But here she veered away, as always, from the memory of that quicksilver, brilliant boy she had loved so idiotically. It was ten years since anyone had heard from Rom and he might as well be dead.

Had it been such a crime to marry sensibly, thought Isobel, jabbing pins into the fiery coils of her hair? To want Stavely? Land outlasted passion, everybody knew that. Henry, then, had seemed a wise choice. Dear God, to let the mind overrule the heart—was that something she should have paid for with such misery only to be left a pauper at the end?