For a while they sat together in companionable silence. Then: ‘Sometimes I think he’ll come back. “The Boy”, I mean,’ said Henry shyly. ‘And then everything will be all right again.’

‘Isn’t it all right now?’

‘No. Because Papa has deserted us and Mama gets angry and the servants keep leaving and we have to have “Tea Ladies” going through the rooms.’

‘Yes, I see. That isn’t very nice.’

‘I don’t think it’s my fault?’ said Henry, his small face pinched and anxious once again.

‘How could it be your fault, Henry,’ she answered passionately. ‘How could it be?’

So far they had felt themselves quite alone, but now the voices of the agitated ladies calling her name seemed to be getting closer and, conscious of limited time, Harriet said, ‘Henry, you may think this quite incredible, but only a week ago I was offered a job to go out to the Amazon, as a dancer. To Manaus. To this very place.’ She pointed to the book, open once more at the picture of the ‘Golden City’. ‘Only they won’t let me go.’

Somehow it seemed perfectly natural to talk to this diminutive child as though he was a fully-fledged adult.

Henry turned towards her, a puzzled look on his face.

‘But Harriet,’ he said, pronouncing her name with professorial clarity and a certain reproach, ‘you’re grown-up, aren’t you? You can do what you like?’

She looked down at his russet head, tilted up at her trustfully as he proclaimed her adult status. And suddenly she was flooded with a feeling of the most extraordinary power and elation. So strong was this feeling that she rose to her feet and in a voice entirely different from the one she had used hitherto, she said, ‘Yes. You are perfectly right, Henry. I am grown-up.’

The change in her momentarily deflected Henry from his purpose. She looked so pretty all at once that he wondered if it might be possible, by achieving a sudden spurt in growth, to marry her. But more urgent than his matrimonial plans was the request he was about to make, and slipping down from the bench he came up to her and lifted his small hand to pluck gently at her sleeve.

‘Harriet, I think he’s there. “The Boy”… in the Amazon. I’m sure he is. Nannie says he was always talking about it. Will you find him and tell him to come back? Will you, Harriet? Please?’

And Harriet, now, did not say one of the things that came into her head. She did not say, ‘Henry, the Amazon basin is a million square miles — how can I find someone whose name I do not even know? And even if I found him, he would probably be a pompous empire-builder with a big moustache and refuse even to talk to me.’

She said none of these things; she said only, ‘I will try, Henry. I promise you that if I get there, I will really and truly try.’

But now the ladies, searching the grounds, had received some dreadful news. Questioning the surly gardener, they had elicited the information that Harriet was secreted in the maze with a young man. ‘Young Mr Henry,’ the gardener had admitted.

Here was disaster! After all their care and chaperonage, the salacious girl had eluded them!

‘Millicent! Eugenia! Go and deflect Edward,’ ordered Hermione Belper. ‘We don’t want a fight. The rest of us will get her out. Come, Louisa!’

And to a woman the ladies of Trumpington, with ancient Mrs Transom by no means in the rear, plunged into the maze.

3

What Marcus Aurelius had begun by causing Harriet to question the meaning of the word ‘good’, Henry with his trust and optimism completed. She determined to escape and to do so competently, and casting about for ways and means she remembered a girl called Betsy Fairfield who had been briefly at school with her in Cambridge, but now lived in London.

Betsy was pretty and a little silly and exceedingly good-natured. Harriet had written some essays for her and lent her some history notes and a friendship had developed. Now Betsy, who was a few months older than Harriet, was ‘doing the season’; she was already going to balls and was to be presented at court. Her mother was an easygoing, kindly society lady who had been kind to Harriet.

The afternoon after the visit to Stavely, accordingly, Harriet — finding herself alone — unhooked what Aunt Louisa still referred to as ‘the instrument’ from the dark brown wall of the hallway, asked for Betsy’s number and was eventually put through to her friend.

‘Betsy, this is Harriet.’

‘Harriet? How lovely!’ Shrieks of perfectly genuine if transient enthusiasm emitted from the cheerful Betsy. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m all right. Listen, Betsy, I want you to do me a very great favour. Will you?’

‘Yes, of course I will. Goodness, I always remember that essay you wrote for me about the Corn Laws. And the one about the “bedchamber question”. I got an “A” in both — the only time ever!’

‘Well, listen; I want you to get your mother to write a note to my Aunt Louisa, asking me to stay. I’d like her to write it straight away and I want her to ask me for three weeks. Do you think she would?’

‘Of course she would! Will you really come? That would be absolutely marvellous! You can help me with my court curtsey; you were always so good at dancing. Poor Hetty’s got water on the knee and we don’t know whether—’

It was a while before Harriet could interrupt the spate of words in order to say, ‘And Betsy, when your mother’s written the note could you telephone me yourself to arrange the journey? Ask for me personally? Would you do that? I promise not to be a nuisance.’

‘Goodness, you won’t be a nuisance. Mother really likes you; she’s often said—’ But at this point Betsy recollected what her mother had said about Professor Morton’s treatment of his daughter and the conversation was terminated.

Betsy was as good as her word and her mother wrote a charming note to Louisa requesting Harriet’s presence in London. That Mrs Fairfield’s uncle was a viscount helped to determine the issue; that and the fact that since the night of the unfortunate dinner-party, Harriet had not really been herself. Betsy rang up the day after the note arrived and when they had spoken, Harriet informed Aunt Louisa that the Fairfields would meet the 10.37 from Cambridge on Thursday morning. She packed her own suitcase and her aunt, reflecting on the fact that they would be saving on Harriet’s food for three weeks, actually suggested to the Professor that he might care to give his daughter a guinea, so that she would not be entirely dependent on her friend — and this he did. And so, at a quarter-past ten on Thursday morning, Harriet was assisted into a ‘Ladies Only’ carriage at Cambridge Station and put in charge of the guard.

That there was no one to meet her at King’s Cross was not surprising, since she had told Betsy that she would be arriving on the following day. Harriet gave up her ticket and posted two letters she had written in the privacy of her bedroom. One was to her aunt announcing her safe arrival at the Fairfields’; the other was to the Fairfields and was full of apologies and regrets. Her father’s cousin had been taken seriously ill in Harrogate and they were all leaving immediately for the north… She hoped so much to be able to join them later but at the moment, as they would understand, her aunt did not feel that she could spare her… She would post this letter on her way through London and remained their disappointed but affectionate Harriet.

This done, she stood bravely in line for a cab and when her turn came, gave the driver the address of the Century Theatre in Bloomsbury.

There were seventeen swans, an uneven number and a pity, but the mother of a girl Dubrov had engaged from the Lumley School of Dance in Regent Street had gone to Dr Mudie’s Library and looked up the Amazon in Chambers’ Encyclopaedia — and that had been that.

Now, in the dirty, draughty and near-derelict theatre in Bloomsbury he had hired for the last week prior to the Company’s departure, Dubrov was watching his maître de ballet rehearsing the corps in Act Two of Swan Lake. The moonlit act… the white act… the act in which the ravishing Swan Queen, Odette, is discovered by Prince Siegfried among her protecting and encircling swans…

The Swan Queen, however, was at the dentist and the premier danseur, Maximov, who played the Prince, was not on call until four o’clock. It was the swans that were at issue and here all was far from well. For from the swans in Swan Lake the choreographer demands not individuality or self-expression but a relentless and perfect unison. Above all, these doomed and feathered creatures are supposed to move as one.

‘Again!’ said Grisha wearily, turning his white Picasso clown’s face up to the heavens. ‘From the second entry. Remember heads down on the échappés and when you take hands it is to the front that you must face.’ He hummed, demonstrated, became — this comical wizened little man — for an instant a graceful swan. ‘Can you give me five bars before section 12?’ He nodded to Irina Petrova and the ancient accompanist stubbed out her cigarette in the discarded pointe shoe she had been using as an ashtray and lowered her mottled hands on to the piano keys.

And there’s still Act Three of Fille, thought Dubrov, watching out front — and Giselle and we’ve scarcely touched The Nutcracker, with five days to go. I must be mad, taking out four full-length ballets. But he hated the chopping and dismemberment that was so fashionable — plucking out an act here, a divertissement there… And his principals were good: not just Simonova and Maximov, but Lobotsky, his character dancer, and the young Polish girl whom Simonova feared but to whom she had ceded the Sugar Plum Fairy…

‘Cross over!’ yelled Grisha. ‘Both lines! And the legs are croisé behind you — all the legs!’ His voice rose to a shriek. ‘You there at the end! What is your name — Kirstin… Where are you going?

Where the slender sad-faced Swede was going, just as in earlier rehearsals, was upstage right, performing rather beautiful and mournful ports de bras as was invariably done at this point in the version of the ballet she had learned in Copenhagen. The petite and exquisite French girl, Marie-Claude, on the other hand, still carried a torch for the Paris Opéra version (which cut five minutes out of the Act Two running time to give the citizens time to refresh themselves) and had bourréed off altogether during a previous run-through to be discovered alone and puzzled in a corridor.

Even with the Russian girls who made up the bulk of the corps — marvellously drilled and strong-backed creatures who rightly knew that only in their country was the art of ballet seriously understood — all was not well. For the hallowed steps which Petipa and Ivanov had devised for Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece in St Petersburg had been wickedly tampered with by a rogue ballet master in Moscow and little Olga Narukov, finding herself en arabesque opposite a swan giving her all to her ronds de jambe, had stamped her foot and declared her intention of returning to Ashkhabad.

The disconsolate Kirstin was comforted by the girl next to her and the rehearsal was resumed. An hour later — exhausted, hungry and dripping with perspiration — they were still practising the fiendishly difficult pattern at the end of the act where the diagonal lines of swans cross over and dissolve to form three groups: unequal groups, since the number seventeen is notoriously difficult to divide by three.

It was at this point that a stage-hand came up to Dubrov and said, ‘There’s a young lady asking to see you. Said you said she could come.’

‘Oh?’ Dubrov was puzzled. ‘Well, bring her along.’

The man vanished and reappeared with a young girl in a blue coat and tam o’shanter, carrying a small suitcase. A schoolgirl, it seemed to him, with worried eyes.

‘I’m Harriet Morton,’ she said in her low, incorrigibly educated voice, ‘from Cambridge. You saw me at Madame Lavarre’s. You said.. ’ Her voice tailed away. She had made a mistake; of course he had not wanted her.

‘Yes.’ Dubrov had recognised her now and smilingly put a hand on her arm. ‘Grisha!’ he called. ‘Come here!’

The swans came to rest, the music stopped and Grisha, frowning at the interruption, came over to Dubrov.

‘This is Harriet Morton,’ said the impresario. ‘Your eighteenth swan.’

The ballet master stared at her. What was he supposed to do now, at the eleventh hour, with this English child?