A Company of Swans Read Online Free PDF Page B

"I think you heard me!"
    "Yes." But she remained perfectly still, looking at her father, and in a moment of aberration he had the mad idea that she was pitying him.
    Then she gave a little nod as though some transaction was now completed, and with the fluid grace that was her legacy from that damnable dancing place, she rose, walked to the door and was gone.
    Everyone now made Herculean efforts, but it had to be admitted that even by Morton standards the dinner party was not proving a conspicuous success. Edward, torn between fear lest Harriet after all should turn out to have "ideas," and regret that she had been punished like a naughty child, was not his usual self. Mrs. Marchmont in her thin dress was so busy trying not to shiver that she contributed little. It was left to valiant Mr. Marchmont to sustain the conversation, which he did heroically until, biting into his mutton, he inexplicably encountered a lead pellet and broke a tooth.
    Alone in her attic, Harriet threw herself down on the bed. Growing up in this gloomy house, she had taught herself a discipline for survival in which the weakness of tears played no part.
    Yet now she cried as she had not cried since her mother's death. Cried for her lovely, lost adventure, for the unattainable forests and magical rivers she would never see; cried for the camaraderie of fellow artists and a job well-done.
    But her real grief lay deeper. She was honest enough to admit that few girls in her position would have been allowed to travel to the Amazon. It was not her father's refusal that so devastated her now; it was his bigotry, his hatred, his determination not to understand. And lying there, her hair in damp strands across her crumpled face, Harriet gave up the long, long struggle to love her father and her aunt.
    It was for this loss above all that she wept. She had learned, during the long years of her childhood, to live without receiving love. To live without giving it seemed more than she could bear.
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    Chapter Two
    Harriet had always loved words: tasted them on her tongue, thought of them as friends. The word serendipity was one she valued especially, its meaning rooted in the world of fairy tales: 'The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.'
    It was this word she thought of later when she remembered her encounter with a small boy called Henry in the maze at Stavely Hall. All her subsequent adventures stemmed from this one meeting and from the trust she saw in the child's eyes; nothing she experienced afterward was more unlikely or more strange.
    The visit to Stavely, which occurred a week after the ill-fated dinner party, was the climax of the year for the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle. Weeks of preparation had gone into the expedition, for Stavely was forty miles to the west in the rolling Suffolk countryside and had awaited the benison of motor transport to make it a comfortable day's outing. Letters had been rent, the substantial fee mentioned by Mrs. Brandon for a tour of the house and permission to picnic in her gardens had been agreed. Now as they waited outside the house of their president, Mrs. Belper, for the arrival of the charabanc, the ladies found it necessary to remind Harriet again and again of her good fortune in being included in the party.
    These ladies of the Tea Circle had presided over Harriet's young life like a flock of black birds in a Greek play. There were some thirty of them who had met originally in the home of Hermione Belper, the full-bosomed wife of St. Philip's meek and undersized bursar, in protest against the carryings-on of the Association of University Wives which not only admitted coloreds, foreigners and Jews, but had raised money—in a series of coffee mornings—for the purpose of enabling the Fitzwilliam Museum to buy a painting which had turned out to be of a lady not only nude, but crudely and specifically naked.
    Mrs. Belper had proposed the formation of a new Tea Circle to uphold the values of