‘Me?’ said Bill, ‘Why should I hear them speak? I haven’t got time to stand around chattering. Got me work to do, I have.’

Bowing to the inevitable, the Professor felt in his pocket and extracted a half-crown, which he laid on the counter. ‘Wasn’t there just one girl who spoke to you? Said good morning, perhaps?’

Bill moved the coin slowly across the counter, but did not yet pocket it. Taking a tip could tie you…

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Come to think of it, there was one — a real smasher. Great goo-goo eyes, blonde hair and curves.’ He sketched the delectable Marie-Claude in the air with deliberate crudity.

Louisa shuddered. ‘That is not the girl we are looking for.’

‘Now look here, my man; I am the girl’s father and this is her aunt. If you know anything about her and conceal the fact, we shall have not the slightest hesitation in reporting you to the police.’

Bill lifted his eye-patch to scratch his forehead. Then slowly he slipped the half-crown into his pocket. It was doubtful if the old gaffer could do much, but there was never any point in getting mixed up with the police.

‘The girl we want is plain,’ said Louisa firmly. ‘With straight brown hair and brown eyes. A plain girl.’

‘Aye, there was a girl like that. Little thin thing. But she wasn’t plain.’ Bill remembered her well — had done so from the start. She had brought a large mutton bone for Griff all the way from the hostel where she was staying and talked proper sense to the dog. Griff had let her put the bone right into the bowl for him and that was rare enough. She was the one who stayed behind too, on the last night, helping the stage-hands get the stuff packed. ‘Nothing plain about her,’ he said, inexplicably furious with the pair. ‘Had the sweetest smile you’ve ever seen.’

‘Where is she, man? Hurry! Where is the Company staying?’

Over Bill’s face there now spread a look of unalloyed pleasure. Even his eye-patch seemed to lighten.

‘On the Atlantic Ocean, sir,’ he said. ‘They’ve been gone the best part of a week…’ and shut the hatch.

‘There must be something we can do,’ said Louisa, ‘without making it public that she has gone.’

The Mortons had not slept well and now sat at breakfast in their dining-room, removing with bony fingers the tops of their slightly sulphurous boiled eggs.

The Professor did not answer. While the possibility had existed that Harriet was in danger his rage had been modified by anxiety. Now sheer choler made it difficult for him to speak.

‘You don’t think… I mean, if she is so desperately keen to be a dancer, should one… simply wash one’s hands of her?’ asked Louisa.

The Professor put down his napkin. ‘Are you suggesting that I permit my daughter — my daughter — deliberately to flout my wishes? Do you want me to be the laughing-stock of the University? Harriet is under age; she will be brought back and she will be punished.’

‘Yes, dear. Of course. You are perfectly right. Only how?’

There was a pause, then the Professor gave a bark of inspiration.

‘Edward!’ he pronounced. ‘Edward must show himself in his true colours.’

Identical furrows appeared on the long pale foreheads of the Mortons as they considered the true colours of Edward Finch-Dutton.

‘You mean—’

‘I mean,’ said the Professor, ‘that he must go in pursuit of Harriet and bring her back. He is young. I myself,’ he lied, ‘would have welcomed such an opportunity at his age.’

‘But, Bernard, surely that could not be considered respectable? If he were to return with Harriet, everyone would think… The gossip would be unendurable. She would be ruined.’

‘She is ruined already,’ said the Professor savagely. ‘In my eyes she has put herself beyond the pale. But it shouldn’t be impossible to think of something.’

‘Mrs Fairfield would be willing to say that Harriet has been with them all the time in London — I am sure of it; she hinted as much on “the instrument”. So that if we met the ship and brought her back to Cambridge, everyone would simply think we had been fetching her from her friend,’ said Louisa, mercifully unaware of the rumours even now flying round the city.

‘And Edward would only need to say he had been on an entomological expedition,’ put in the Professor. ‘Those natural scientists think nothing of wasting months in pointless field trips. But there is not a moment to lose — she already has nearly a week’s start and who knows where that scoundrel might take her next — Rio de Janeiro, even New York… We have no evidence that he means to bring her back to England. Edward must leave at once.’

‘Let us go to him,’ said Louisa.

This was not a suggestion she would normally have made, and as they passed down long laboratory corridors and into rooms where Edward might have been — but wasn’t — she was continually affronted by sights which she would have preferred to be spared. Young men in running shorts pedalled on stationary bicycles while pointers inscribed the furious zig-zag of their heartbeats on smoked drums… An appallingly identifiable yellow liquid bubbled fiendishly through a system of flasks, filter funnels and rubber tubing… In a glass-fronted altitude chamber, a bearded research assistant was slowly turning blue.

Term was over, but Edward was in the teaching lab sorting out demonstration slides. However, one glimpse of the Mortons advancing with set faces caused the colour to drain from his face.

‘Harriet!’ he said. ‘She is ill? She has had an accident?’

The Professor looked round the lab to make sure that it was empty before saying, ‘It might be better if she had.’

Five minutes later, Edward, still holding the slide of a liver fluke he had been putting away when disaster struck, leaned against Henderson’s parsnip tank, a broken man. Harriet had done this thing! Harriet whom he worshipped, whom he had selected from all the girls he knew for her gentleness and docility… Harriet had run away, had defied her father and was even now perhaps kicking up her legs in some hot theatre while greasy dagos watched her and licked their lips.

‘I don’t know what to say.. ’ He put down the slide on the bench and stood shaking his head. ‘It’s a blow… the Mater…’ Stunned and wretched, Edward saw years of careful planning brought suddenly to nought. The proposal at the May Ball; a visit to Goring-on-Thames to introduce Harriet to his mother… the little house in Madingley or Grantchester. ‘She has put herself beyond the reach of a decent man.’

‘No, Edward,’ said Louisa, ‘it may not be too late. She has been headstrong and foolish, but you may still be able to save here. Not to forgive her, perhaps — we do not ask that of you — but to restore her to safety and the parental home. We think,’ she continued, coming down to earth, ‘that we could hush things up so that no one need know of her flight.’

Edward was silent, still, shaking his long head sadly from side to side. Images of Harriet floated through his mind: the demure brown head; the clear and docile brow; the small ears peeping — rather wistfully, he had always thought — through her hair. Harriet’s soft voice, her slow smile…

‘How?’ he said at last. ‘How could it be hushed up?’

The Professor fixed him with a steely look. ‘We want you to go after her, Edward. To bring her back. If you do this, we can avoid a scandal.’ He explained about the Fairfields, while Edward stared at him dumbfounded.

‘You want me to go to Manaus? But that’s impossible! It’s quite impossible. No one could ask it of me.’

‘We would not expect you to marry her any longer, Edward,’ said Louisa, laying her skeletal hand on his arm. ‘Nor even to forgive her. Only to save her from her folly… and to save her family.’

‘To show yourself a man,’ stated the Professor.

‘No.’ Edward was resolute. Yet as he stood there, images of Harriet continued to jostle each other in his brain. The way she had laughed when that little baby had set off in its nappies across the sacrosanct Fellows’ Lawn at King’s. The way she had pulled down a branch of white lilac behind St Benet’s Church and let the rain-drops run down her face. And now perhaps she was ill with some jungle fever… or abandoned. ‘Edward,’ she would say when she saw him. ‘Oh, Edward, you have come!’

‘And in any case,’ he said, ‘I have my work.’

But that was a mistake. Images of Harriet were replaced by others more lurid, more feverish and, to a professional entomologist, reekingly desirable. The Brazilian rhinoceros beetle which stretched the length of a man’s hand… the Morpho butterfly, like an iridescent blue dinner-plate, beating its way through the leaf canopy… fireflies by whose light it was possible to read. To say nothing of the wholly virgin territory of the Amazonian flea…

Implacable, with their characteristic look of having just stepped down from a cut-price sarcophagus, the Mortons stood before him.

‘I would never be able to get leave,’ said Edward.

That, however, was not necessarily true. He only had two practicals in the summer term; Henderson would do those for him and the head of his department was a great believer in field work — in getting what he called ‘nose to nose with the insect’.

The images came faster. The Goliath beetle, six inches from mouth to sternum… the ‘88’ butterfly, a brilliant airborne hieroglyphic for which private collectors would give their ears… Harriet lying on a pillow, her hair spread out; her limp body acquiescent as he carried her to safety up the gangplank of the ship… And Peripatus — ah, Peripatus! Edward’s blue eyes grew soft as he thought of this seemingly insignificant creature, half-worm, half-insect, the world’s oldest living fossil, crawling — as it had crawled since the dawn of time — through the unchanging debris of the rain-forest floor.