Eva Ibbotson

It was this passage which Simonova was rehearsing while Harriet—who should have been elsewhere-stood in the wings, unable to tear herself away. Almost a week had passed since Verney had stormed away from her at the Casa Branca and the ache of his rejection never quite seemed to go away, but now she forgot herself utterly as she watched… and saw the gaunt, eagle-faced woman turn into a tremulous young girl… saw her put on with reverence her wedding-dress… saw her pick up her first-born and rock it in her arms… count out the other children she would have—and chide them, as they grew, for disobedience.

There were no props and only ancient Irina Petrovna with her cigarette playing the upright piano. Simonova was in a tattered practice dress and hideous bandeau, but it was all there: the glory of married love and its marvelous and celebratory ordinariness.

“So! What are you doing here? There is no rehearsal for the corps!”

The ballerina, sweeping off, had encountered Harriet.

“I’m sorry, Madame… only I had to watch,” said Harriet, rising from her curtsey. “You were…” She shook a wondering head. “I shall never forget it. Never! It seemed so simple… there isn’t even really any dancing.”

“Oh yes, there is dancing,” said Simonova. “Make no mistake! Every finger dances.” She looked for a moment at Harriet’s rapt face. “It is one of the glories of our tradition, that mime. When Karsavina does it, it is impossible not to weep.”

“Nobody can do it better than you!”

Harriet’s husky-voiced adulation made the ballerina smile. “Kchessinskaya taught it to me. Perhaps one day I shall teach it to you, who knows?” She patted Harriet on the cheek, swept up her accompanist and was gone—but her words sang in Harriet’s head. It meant nothing of course, it was only nonsense; she would never dance Lise. But if just once in my life I could do that mime, thought Harriet—and still in a dream, she moved out on to the empty silent stage.

Thus Rom, coming to find her, stood in the wings and watched as she had watched Simonova. He had put out of his mind this girl who had been Henry’s creature: he would do nothing now except gently break to her the news he had brought, and leave her. Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theater, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.

Harriet was humming, trying to remember… After Simonova had stretched out her hand in church for her lover’s ring—had she knelt to pray? No, surely she must have looked up, lifted her face for the bridal kiss. Yes, of course she had. She had pushed back her veil, turned, lifted her head…

So Harriet turned, lifted her head… and saw Verney standing in the shadows.

“I must speak to you, Harriet.” His words were curt, his face guarded again. The insane desire to step forward into her dream had passed. “We can go to the trustees’ room; there will be no one there.”

He led her through a baize door, along a corridor… up a flight of steps to a richly paneled room dominated by a vast, satinwood table.

“Sit down.”

She sat obediently, looking very small in one of the twelve carved and high-backed chairs, like a studious pupil facing a board of examiners.

“What I have to say will upset and sadden you,” he began and she made a movement of acquiescence. Anything he said while he still looked so angry and bitter would do just that. “But I felt you should know while you were out here and had a chance to… forget a little. Henry is dead, Harriet. Henry Brandon. He died a week after you left England.”

Her reaction was worse than anything he could have imagined. The color drained from her face and she shrank back in the tall chair. She was completely stricken.

“No… Oh, no, he can’t be! God couldn’t…”

She had really loved him then, that pale deceitful slug of a man, thought Rom, noting with detached surprise the degree of his own wretchedness.

“I’m afraid it’s true, Harriet. I cabled for confirmation.”

“He was perfectly all right when I saw him… he was in the maze… he was reading your book,” she said wildly. “He admired you so much.” Her mouth began to tremble and she bit her lip with a desperate effort at control. “How did he die?” she managed to say. “What happened?”

He had decided to tell her only if she asked. “He shot himself.”

Her head jerked up. “Shot himself? But that’s impossible! How can a little child shoot himself? Did they let him play in the gun room? Surely even that horrible Mr. Grunthrope wouldn’t have let—”

“Wait!” Rom took a steadying breath. At the same time everything suddenly grew lighter—the room, the lowering sky outside. “Harriet, I am talking of Henry Brandon, the owner of Stavely—Isobel’s husband. A man of thirty-eight.”