Journey to the River Sea

The three of them travelled back on the same boat as Maia and Minty had come out on: the Cardinal, with her blue funnel and snow-white hull.

Maia had thought that having Finn with them would make it easier – at least they could all be miserable together – but it didn’t. Finn had disappeared into himself. He was very quiet and stood hunched up over the rail, looking out at the grey sea. The cold surprised him; he would shiver suddenly in the wind.

He had decided that Westwood was to be his fate.

‘It’s what you said in the museum,’ he told Miss Minton. ‘ ‘‘Come out, Finn Taverner and be a man.’’ I thought I could run away for ever, but if Clovis is in trouble, I’ve got to help him.’

It was his time with the Xanti which had changed him. They thought that everyone’s life was like a river; you had to flow with the current and not struggle, which wasted breath and made you more likely to drown. And the river of life seemed to be carrying him back to Westwood.

He had left his dog behind with Furo because of the quarantine. Rob would never endure six months shut up in kennels. As soon as they knew Maia was safe, the Carter’s servants, with Old Lila, had returned, offering to work unpaid, and Miss Minton had set them to repaint the spinach boat which she had christened River Queen.

As for Maia, she was to go back to school.

‘She will be safe there for a few years till she is ready to go out into the world,’ Mr Murray had written to Miss Minton.

So now Maia was collecting her memories.

‘We mustn’t only remember the good bits,’ she said. ‘We must remember the bad bits too so that we know it was real.’

But there weren’t really any bad bits once she had escaped from the twins. The fried termites which the Xanti had cooked for them hadn’t tasted very nice, and there had been a tame bush turkey which woke them up at an unearthly hour with its screeching.

‘But it was all part of it,’ said Maia. ‘It belonged.’

Miss Minton knew she was going to be dismissed, and she thought this was perfectly fair. A governess who let her charges sail up the rivers of the Amazon and live with Indian tribes could hardly expect to keep her job.

She missed the professor.

‘Would you like to marry me?’ he had asked her politely before they sailed, and she had thanked him and said she did not think she would be very good at being married.

When the boat docked at Liverpool they went their different ways. Finn was determined to go to West-wood quite alone. He had never bought a train ticket nor looked at a timetable, but he seemed to know what to do and he would let no one help him.

‘I wish he didn’t look as though he was going to have his head cut off,’ said Maia.

The moment when the children said goodbye passed quickly. Finn was taking the train to York; Maia and Minty were bound for London. The bustle of getting their luggage on and finding their seats muffled everything. Only when the train steamed out did Maia realize that she might not see Finn again – and heard the snap of Miss Minton’s handbag as she had heard it on the day they left England, and was again handed Minty’s large white handkerchief to wipe her eyes.

The school, as they drove up to it, was just the same. The brass plate saying THE MAYFAIR ACADEMY YOUNG FOR LADIES; the row of desks she could see through the window. In Classroom B, Miss Carlisle was probably still teaching the source of the river Thames.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ said Miss Minton, and drove quickly away. Mr Murray was coming to interview her at the school on the following afternoon.

Everyone was so welcoming and friendly, and somehow that made it worse. The girls clustered round Maia; Melanie had painted a picture of her with a boa constrictor round her neck, and they’d made a banner saying: welcome back. Some of them had read about the police boat sent to find her and thought she was a heroine.

‘What was it like being rescued?’ they wanted to know.

‘It was like being rescued from Paradise,’ said Maia, but no one believed her.

They listened while she tried to describe the journey in the Arabella, and life with the Xanti, but they couldn’t take it in.

‘Aren’t you glad to be back?’ they kept asking her. ‘It must have been so scary!’ and they told her that she had been given her old bed back and that there was a new history teacher who dyed her hair.

So Maia gave up. She realized that adventures, once they were over, were things that had to stay inside one – that no one else could quite understand.

The headmistress, Miss Banks, and her sister Emily, understood a little better. They were happy to take Maia back, but they thought it might not be easy for her to settle down again.

‘You must give yourself time,’ they said kindly, and Maia patted the spaniel and remembered the howls of Finn’s dog as he was left behind with Furo.