‘Go on.’ He had moved still closer, but the moment of her doom was seemingly not yet upon her and she took a gulp of air and went on:

‘I only mean… that I’m not trying to… get out of anything. If what I did… staying behind to talk to you… telling Marie-Claude I was taking the other boat… thinking I could go back with Manuelo’s wife when she takes the baby to be christened…’ She broke off and tried again. ‘Only I think you are going to be very disappointed because I don’t know what to do.’ Her voice was rising dangerously. She was very close to tears. ‘For example, if you were Suleiman the Great it would be correct for me to creep from the foot of the bed into your presence. Only I can’t believe…’

‘I would prefer you not to creep,’ he said gently.

But the return of the kindness he had shown her in the garden made everything somehow worse, and it was with tears trembling on her lashes that she said desperately, ‘I only mean that at Scroope Terrace there was never any opportunity for being… ruined and ravished… and so on. And I don’t know how to behave.’ She could hold back no longer now and the tears ran steadily down her cheeks. ‘I didn’t even know that you had to go to bed with the top button of your nightdress undone,’ sobbed Harriet, ‘not until Marie-Claude told me.’

Rom made no attempt to comfort her. Instead he turned abruptly away from her and walked over to the window in the grip of a fierce and unremitting joy. She is good, he thought exultantly. I was right to feel what I felt. She is innocent and virtuous and good!

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 negligée.

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 would wish also, and would always wish — and she moved towards 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 negligée 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.’

7

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 arm-chair 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 realise 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 grey 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?

Who could have foreseen that this prudent marriage would turn out to be the kind of nightmare it had done? That she, who had hardly been able to let Rom out of her sight, would be unable to endure the caresses of his half-brother. And who could have foreseen that Henry, faced with her disgust, would go to the dogs as thoroughly and conventionally as he had formerly played the country gentleman? Even before she had shut him out of her bedroom he had begun to drink, to gamble, and afterwards…

She lifted her hand to the bell in order to ring for the manicurist who usually did her nails but dropped it again, remembering the appraising glance of the maître d’hôtel as he had noted — even while he bent over her hand, murmuring condolences on her loss — that she had come without her maid or a nurse for the child. He knew, as did the rest of London, that the sands were running out for the Brandons. Not that she had actually been refused a room, but there were none of the attentions she was accustomed to when she came to the Astor: no bowls of fruit or baskets of roses… and in the dining-room she had been shown to an obscure table in the corner.

Oh, God, it was impossible, intolerable! There had to be some way out of the trap. And like one of those awful recurring dreams from which one thinks one has awoken, only to find it start again, she recalled the interview she had had with old Mr Hathersage the previous day in his fusty office behind St Paul’s.

‘I’m afraid there is absolutely no help for it, Mrs Brandon. You must know that if there was any other way my accountants would have found it. But the figures are inescapable. You must sell, Mrs Brandon; you must sell for what you can get, and you must do so quickly.’

She finished buffing her nails and rose. ‘We’re going shopping, Henry,’ she said. ‘Come here while I make you tidy.’

‘Could I stay here and read?’

‘No, you couldn’t. We’re going to the dentist afterwards.’

Henry nodded. Shopping and the dentist. A sombre prospect, but not more than he had learned to expect, and he stood patiently while Isobel tugged at his Norfolk jacket with unpractised hands and jammed his cap on his head. The impertinence of that nursemaid, simply walking out without warning just because she had not been paid for a few weeks!

Usually there was nothing Isobel liked better than to shop and her mourning provided an excellent excuse for several new outfits, but there were only a few places now where her credit still held good. To these — little glove shops and hatters in the discreet, quiet streets round St James’s whose owners, accustomed to serving the Brandons, had not learned to defend themselves — she now repaired. If she knew that the exquisite black kid gloves, the jet-beaded reticule and velvet toque she purchased would not be paid for, she concealed any anxiety she might have felt with remarkable success.

It had been hard for Henry to abandon the Nautilus and Captain Nemo, but now he trotted obediently beside his mother studying with scholarly attention the posters on the hoardings, the men digging a hole in the road, the passers-by.

‘Why do they make “Little Liver Pills”?’ Henry wanted to know. ‘If they made them big, wouldn’t people’s livers get better more quickly?’ And: ‘If those men in the road dug and dug and dug, would they be the right way up when they got to Australia, or would they be upside-down?’