Eva Ibbotson

Isobel thanked him and promised to let him know about the Stavely damask. Inquiries would have to be made, of course, but that should not be difficult; Bertie Freeman worked in the Consulate at Rio and a cable to him should elicit the necessary facts. But if it was Rom—and really she had no doubt of it—then all her troubles were over. If Rom lived and was rich, her future glittered as brightly as a star. Rom would save Stavely—she had never seen in anyone such a feeling for a piece of land—and he would save her! Even if there was a dreary wife somewhere, she would not be able to prevent it. And as she made her way out of the shop, Isobel’s lips curved into the special smile which belonged to her time with that extraordinary and brilliant boy.

Henry was standing obediently where she had left him and when he saw her his face lit up in a way which tugged at her consciousness, absorbed as she was. There was something not unpleasing about Henry-something a little wistful. A man with Rom’s protective instincts might well be moved by the plight of such a fatherless young child.

“Would you like to go on a journey, Henry?” she asked now. “A long one?”

And Henry said, “Yes.”

Chapter Eight

“Thank you,” said Harriet tenderly to the waiter, who was placing before her a fried egg swimming in grease and a mound of peppery beans. “Obrigado. Gosto muito!”

Breakfast at the Hotel Metropole was not normally a beautiful experience; the same food appeared at all meals, the sluggish fan scarcely stirred the fetid air, swollen black flies buzzed on the overcrowded flypapers. But the morning after the party at Follina the world, for Harriet, was bathed in an all-embracing golden light.

She had returned unnoticed the night before; both Kirstin and Marie-Claude had been fast asleep—her adventure was unknown to anyone but herself. And Mr. Verney had said that today he would come to find her. She must not depend on it… but he had said it.

“It is not necessary to give thanks for such a breakfast,” said Marie-Claude, shuddering. But she herself was in a good mood for her encounter with Harry Parker, the secretary of the Sports Club, had turned out to be extremely fortunate. She had been offered, and at very little personal inconvenience, a chance to augment by an appreciable sum the savings she and Vincent were amassing for the purchase of the restaurant.

“In two weeks’ time,” she said now, lowering her voice, for the rest of the company was sitting at tables close by, “I am going to burst at the Sports Club! From a cake! For seven hundred and fifty milreis in cash.” And as Kirstin and Harriet looked at her with raised eyebrows, she added, “Mr. Parker invited me: it is a thing that is very much done in gentlemen’s clubs when there is a special dinner of some kind. This one is for the Minister for Amazonia, who is coming from Rio to discuss the organization of river transport or some such thing. The cake is wheeled in for dessert and—hoop la!” She put down her fork to sketch in the air the deliciously titillating eruption which would follow.

Harriet was impressed. “From a real cake, Marie-Claude?”

“No, idiot! It’s an enormous wooden affair—generally pink and decorated with candles. Sometimes they release white doves at the same time, though then of course there are problems with the feathers and the excretion and so on. Sometimes there are men with trumpets who accompany the cake and a chef who plunges in the knife… and of course always balloons and streamers and a great deal of champagne.”

“Will Vincent like it?” inquired Kirstin.

“It is precisely for Vincent that I am doing it,” flashed Marie-Claude. But a pensive look spread for a moment over her heart-shaped face, for it was true that she had not precisely explained to Vincent the means she employed to increase their joint savings. Vincent himself was strait-laced and his family—notably his cousin Pierre under whom Vincent had trained—was positively gothic. Still, what could one do? It was necessary to be practical. “You won’t mention it to anyone?” she pleaded. “The dinner begins very late; after the curtain goes down. No one at the theater need know.”

“Of course not,” Harriet was overawed. Thus, she was sure, had Messalina erupted in the last days of Imperial Rome. “Only, Marie-Claude, when you come out of the cake won’t the gentlemen become overexcited and—you know?”

“Overexcitement is something I do not permit,” said Marie-Claude, pushing away her egg with a moue of disgust. “I made this absolutely clear to Mr. Parker. I burst; I dance a little on the table; I sit for a moment in the lap of the Minister—and that is all.”

“What will you wear?” asked Kirstin.