Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

‘Oh!’ exclaimed Harriet, startled.

For sitting on a stone bench beside the mildewed statue of a faun was a hunched figure so small, so self-contained that it might have been the spirit of the maze itself. Then it looked up, as startled as she was, and Harriet saw a small boy with dark red hair and a pale, rather pinched little face almost covered by a large pair of spectacles. A child of about seven years of age trying to shield, with hands woefully too small for the task, a large black book.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Harriet in her low, soft voice. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you, I expect you wanted to be alone.’

‘Well, yes, I did,’ said the boy, now pressing the book against his diminutive sailor-suited chest. He looked at the girl standing in front of him. She was a grown-up — he could tell that because her blue skirt touched the ground — and grown-ups could make trouble; but as he stared at her anxiously, she smiled — a terribly friendly, crunched-up sort of smile — and he knew that it would be all right, that she would not betray him. ‘But I don’t mind as long as you don’t tell anyone. I’m not supposed to read this book, you see. It’s forbidden.’

‘I promise not to tell anyone,’ said Harriet. She came over and sat down on the bench beside him, noting with a pang the fragile, elderly-looking legs, the feet in their black strap-shoes hanging so high above the ground. ‘I was always reading books I wasn’t supposed to when I was little. I used to tie a piece of cotton to my toe and to the door-handle, so that when someone came in my toe twitched and I had time to put the book under my pillow before they saw it.’

‘Did you?’ The boy was impressed, lifting his spectacles a moment to look at Harriet. His eyes were unexpectedly beautiful: large grey eyes with a golden rim round the iris. ‘My name is Henry,’ he now offered. ‘Henry St John Verney Brandon.’

‘Mine is Harriet Jane Morton,’ said Harriet, realising without undue surprise that she was in the presence of Stavely’s heir. And solemnly, for they were both people of great politeness, they shook hands.

It was then, their credentials exchanged, that the child lowered the book and laid it carefully in Harriet’s lap, open at the title page.

‘Would you like to see it?’ he asked.

For a moment she could not speak. The coincidence was too uncanny, here in this dreamlike place.

‘Is anything the matter, Harriet?’ Henry’s russet head was tilted anxiously up at her, for she had given a little gasp and put one hand to her mouth.

‘No… it’s all right.’ She forced herself to speak calmly and sensibly. She did not know what she had expected Henry to have carried off into the secrecy of the maze — perhaps some pathetic explanation of the so-called ‘facts of life’. Instead, now she read:

‘It’s just so extraordinary, Henry. You see, I have been thinking and thinking about this place. For a whole week I’ve thought of nowhere else. And then I find you…’ she shook her head. ‘It’s a beautiful book,’ she said. ‘Absolutely beautiful.’

‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?`

Fellow bibliophiles, they looked with satisfaction at the thick pages with their wavy edges, the sepia illustrations protected by wafer-thin paper; drank in the smell of old leather and dust, while Henry — an impeccable host — led her into his promised land.

‘That’s an anaconda — it was twenty feet long before Colonel Bush killed it — and here’s a canoe full of Indians: friendly ones, not the kind that shoot you full of arrows. Those are terribly dangerous rapids in the background; the Colonel had to drag his boat out of the water and carry it over the hill when he got to them. And somewhere there’s a lovely one of a whole lot of capy… capy-somethings, like huge guinea-pigs. Look!’

They pored together over the herd of large, somewhat absurd rodents basking on a sand-bank. Not all the pictures were very clear, for the intrepid Colonel had wielded his Kodak under conditions of quite spectacular hardship, but to Harriet and Henry each and every one was of absorbing interest. There was one of a steamer of the Amazon Navigation Company going down the river; one of a rubber gatherer, a seringueiro, crossing a creek on a felled tree… And several of the author: a splendid man in a topee, lying in his hammock at a bivouac, standing with his gun astride a dead jaguar… arm-in-arm with an Indian chief in a lip-disc who came scarcely to his waist.

‘It doesn’t hurt them, having their mouths like that,’ explained Henry reassuringly. ‘They like it — they sort of stretch their lips gradually. It’s an honour.’

Harriet nodded, as entranced as the little boy. ‘Is there a picture of Manaus, Henry?’

‘Yes, there is.’ Enormously pleased to be able to oblige her, he turned the pages carefully, his square-tipped fingers uncannily like those of old General Brandon in the portrait the gloomy Mr Grunthorpe had shown them in the Long Gallery. ‘Look, here it is! It’s called the “Golden City”. Why is it called that, do you know?’

‘I think it’s because everyone there is so rich,’ answered Harriet thoughtfully. ‘But I’m not sure. People have always thought about gold in South America and searched for it. Golden cities with golden roofs; golden palaces where there’s hidden treasure. “Eldorado”, they call it.’

She gazed at the picture — an elegant cathedral, a flight of steps, a park with palm trees. In the distance, blurred, some other buildings. Was that faint crisscrossing in front of one of them a line of scaffolding? The book was dated 1890 — just about the time that the Opera House was begun… Avidly she began to read the text, only to be recalled by a small sigh from Henry. Glad as he was to have found for her the city she had requested, he yearned inevitably for the tree sloth and giant electric eel which awaited them.

‘What I don’t understand, Henry, is why you are not supposed to read this book,’ said Harriet when they had studied all the pictures. ‘Surely it’s a good book for someone young to read? A book about adventures?’

There was a pause while Henry pondered, evidently putting her through some final test.

‘It’s because it belonged to “the Boy”.’ He spoke with a curious awe, looking up at her to gauge the effect of his words. ‘He’s a secret, you see. No one’s allowed to talk about him and if I ask anyone, Mama gets cross. I took it from old Nannie in the Lodge, when she was asleep. It was his absolutely favourite book and he left it for her when he went away.’

‘He lived here, then?’

‘Oh, yes. But he did something bad, I think, and they sent him away. Before I was born, this was — about when Grandfather died. He had the book for his ninth birthday, Nannie said. Sometimes she tells me a bit about him when she’s had her medicine.’

‘Her medicine?’

Henry nodded. ‘It’s called Gordon’s Gin and it’s in a big bottle by her bed; when she’s had some, she tells me about him. She just calls him “the Boy”, as though there weren’t any other boys in the world. He was very wild and very brave. He climbed the oak tree by the gatehouse roof and swung over to the parapet — and he had a huge black dog that followed him everywhere and when he went away the dog stopped eating and died.’ The child’s eyes shone with hero-worship. ‘He had a cross-bow too and he could shoot for miles and he didn’t wear spectacles and he wasn’t afraid of the dark. At least, I don’t think he was — Nannie didn’t say.’

‘I expect he was older than you, Henry,’ said Harriet gently. ‘I expect when you’re his age you will be just like him.’

‘No.’ Henry shook a resigned head. ‘Cook says I’m as clever as a cartload of monkeys, but he was clever and brave. He could ride anything.’ He sighed. ‘I can’t ride anything. I fell off Porridge, who’s only a Shetland pony; the girths slipped. He made a tree-house in the Wellingtonia; that’s about a hundred feet high — you can still see some of the planks at the top — and he built a dug-out canoe like Colonel Bush’s and launched it on the river and got as far as Appleby Meadows before it sank.’

Harriet turned back the pages to glance at the flyleaf. ‘July 5th 1891’, she read. If ‘the Boy’ had been nine years old then, he would be a man approaching thirty now, but she said nothing, realising that to Henry it was necessary that this magical being should exist outside the rules of time.

‘Grunthorpe knew him. That’s our butler. He didn’t like him; he said he was a changeling.’

‘A changeling? Why, Henry?’

The child sighed. ‘Because he could talk to animals. It wasn’t natural, Grunthorpe said.’ There was a pause before Henry added in a carefully expressionless voice, ‘I told Grunthorpe I was going to be an explorer when I grew up and join an expedition, but he said I couldn’t because explorers don’t wear spectacles.’

Needing a few moments to control her anger, Harriet fixed her gaze on the mildewed statue of the faun. ‘I find that a most extraordinary remark, Henry,’ she said presently in a detached, calm voice. ‘Consider, for example, the insects. For you must admit that the insects are a trouble. The mosquitoes, the blackfly and this one here’ — she searched for the page in which Colonel Bush had devoted a paragraph to the ravages of the tabanid fly. ‘It would seem to me perfectly obvious that insects like that could get into a person’s eyes, and that would be very awkward if he was paddling a canoe. Now if I was in charge of an expedition, the man I would put in front — in the very front of any boat — would be the man with glasses.’