Journey to the River Sea

  Nothing less like breakfast at the Carters could be imagined. The light, luxurious house, the friendly servants, the Keminskys themselves. Sergei had already left; he now went to the cadet school in Manaus. To teach only Maia and Olga would be a delight.

  ‘But I must hurry back,’ said Miss Minton now. ‘I don’t like to leave Maia too long with the twins. Professor Glastonberry has kindly agreed to store my trunk, so Maia and I will be able to come down on the rubber boat next week.’

  ‘No, no – my husband will send a boat for you,’ said the countess.

  Miss Minton had not planned to spend a night at the Keminskys. Mademoiselle Lille had begged her to stay for her farewell party, but Miss Minton had stood firm until the count had pointed out that if she stayed, she could sign her contract with his lawyer the following morning, naming her as their new governess.

  Knowing how little the Carters were to be trusted to pass on messages, Miss Minton had sent the note for Maia to Furo, and one of the count’s servants was ordered to take it to his hut.

  Good news, Miss Minton had written. I’ll tell you everything in the morning. I’m staying overnight at the Keminskys’ because I have some business to see to in the morning. Tell the Carters I’ll be back at midday – but tell them nothing else!

  Furo would make certain that Maia got the note. She had seen how the Indians guarded Maia since Finn went away.

  She was rolling up her napkin when there was a commotion at the door, and the count, who had been supervising the loading of one of his ships, came quickly into the room, followed by Professor Glastonberry, already badly out of breath.

  The count went straight to his wife and spoke to her hurriedly in Russian – but Miss Minton had caught the word ‘Carter’ and risen to her feet.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ the countess turned to her. ‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid. There has been a fire in the Carters’ bungalow; the house is destroyed – but everyone has been rescued, I understand. They have been taken to the Municipal Hospital.’

  Miss Minton was already by the door. Every trace of colour had vanished from her face.

  ‘The count’s carriage is waiting to take us to the hospital,’ said the professor.

  Miss Minton turned to the count.

  ‘Thank you,’ she managed to say, before she followed the professor out into the street.

  The twins were crying. Their beds in Ward C of the hospital were close together because the ward was very full, and they lay on their sides facing each other, and gulped.

  ‘It’s gone; it’s just gone!’

  ‘All of it’s gone. There’s nothing left; not a single milreis.’

  The nurses had at first been very kind. Neither of the girls was badly hurt. Beatrice’s hair was singed, she had a small burn on her leg; Gwendolyn had fallen on the gravel path as she ran out of the house and had sprained her ankle. But there was always shock and smoke inhalation to consider, and for a while a nurse sat by their beds and tried to comfort them.

  ‘Your mother’s safe; she’s going to be all right. She’s in the next ward; you can go and see her.’

  But the twins were not crying for their mother.

  ‘It’s our money,’ sobbed Beatrice.

  ‘The money for the reward. Twenty thousand milreis each – and it’s all burnt!’

  ‘Perhaps you will get it again, from the insurance?’

  But the Carters, of course, were not insured, and the twins went on snivelling till the nurse became impatient and walked away.

  Mrs Carter was in the next ward. Her arm was bandaged and she had inhaled a lot of smoke. Even so, she found time to complain about the way the hospital was run, the lack of hygiene, and the patients whose young children were allowed to visit them and run all over the ward.

  ‘And there’s a fly on my water jug,’ she said fretfully. ‘Two, in fact.’

  She was still complaining when a smartly dressed Englishman came to her bedside. He was the British consul’s assistant.

  ‘Mrs Carter, the consul has asked me how we can help you to return to England. There seems to be little future for you here.’

  ‘You mean you’d pay our fares?’

  ‘For you and your daughters, yes. Do you have anyone you could go to in England? Relatives or friends?’

  Mrs Carter frowned. She did not actually seem to have any friends. Then her face cleared. ‘Lady Parsons, in Littleford. She would take us in, I’m sure. She is my mother’s cousin . . . well, almost. Her address is Grey Gables, The Promenade, Littleford-on-Sea.’

  The young man wrote this down. Then he said, not meeting her eye, ‘Your husband won’t be returning to England, just yet, I’m afraid.’ And as gently as he could, he told her that when he came out of hospital, Mr Carter faced a trial and possible imprisonment for fraud and embezzlement. Just as he had cheated the bank in England, so had he done out here. It wasn’t only Gonzales to whom Mr Carter owed more money than he could ever hope to repay.

  Miss Minton ran up the hospital steps and the professor, mopping his brow, ran behind her.

  ‘The Carter family,’ she said at the desk. ‘The girls from the fire. Where are they?’

  ‘Ward C,’ said the receptionist, and they hurried up two flights of stairs.

  The twins were still whimpering, but they stopped to stare at Miss Minton.

  ‘You’re not badly hurt, I understand,’ she said. ‘I hope you’re not in pain.’

  ‘Our money’s gone,’ sniffed Beatrice.

  ‘Yes. But you might have lost your lives.’ And then: ‘Where’s Maia?’

  The twins shrugged. ‘Daddy went back to find her. We don’t know where she is. She didn’t come in with us.’

  Miss Minton’s heart began to pound. The professor put a hand under her arm. ‘I’ll go and ask the Sister.’

  He made his way down the corridor and came back with a set face.

  ‘She said there were only the two girls and their parents in the ambulance. She didn’t know there was another girl.’

  Miss Minton took a deep breath, trying to steady herself.

  ‘But Mr Carter went back for her, the twins say. She must be here.’

  The Sister had come out of her office to join them. Now they all hurried to the men’s ward.

  Mr Carter’s burns were serious. His hair and eyebrows were singed, his face was swollen, both arms were bandaged. He lay still with his eyes closed. But Minty had no thought to spare for him.

  ‘Mr Carter, where is Maia? Your daughters say you went back for her. Did you bring her out safely?’

  ‘I . . . tried . . .’ lied Mr Carter. ‘I went right to her door, but it was impossible. An inferno . . .’

  Miss Minton swayed. ‘I am not the kind of person who faints,’ she said as the Sister moved towards her.

  But there she was wrong.

  Chapter Twenty

  For a few hours the bungalow had been beautiful. Orange and crimson and violet flames lit up the night sky; showers of golden sparks flew upwards as the fire danced and played on the dying house.

  Then it was over, and there was nothing left – only grey ash and those strange objects which survive disaster. The nozzle of a flit gun, a splintered washbasin ... and in what had been Mr Carter’s study, a single eye, cracked by the heat, staring creepily at the heavens.

  So when Finn sailed back down the Negro at dawn, he saw no flames and heard no roaring as the house was destroyed. Everything at first seemed as it had always done; the big trees by the river, the huts of the Indians, the Carters’ launch riding at anchor.

  Then the dog, standing beside him, threw back his head and howled.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Finn.

  But now he too smelled the choking, lingering smell of smoke.

  And as he sailed towards the landing stage, he saw it – the space, the nothingness where the Carters’ house should have been. Not even an empty shell. Nothing.

  He had thought that the news of his father’s death was the worst thing that h
ad happened to him, but this was worse because he was to blame. If he had taken Maia as she had begged . . .

  He was shivering so much that it was difficult to steer the Arabella to the jetty and make her fast. There was no point in searching the ruins; it was so obvious that no one could survive such a blaze.

  But there was one last hope. The huts of the Indians had been spared. Perhaps they had got Maia out; perhaps he would find her sleeping there.

  He pushed open the door of the first hut and went inside . . . then the second and the third. They were completely empty. Even the parrot on his perch had gone, even the little dog. A broken rope in the run outside showed where the pig, terrified by the flames, had run back into the forest.

  There was no doubt now in Finn’s mind. They had let Maia burn and fled in terror and in shame.

  What would it be like, Finn wondered, going on living and knowing that he had killed his friend?

  The howler monkeys had been right to laugh when he said he wasn’t going back. He had turned downriver again almost at once to fetch Maia, and he had made good time, travelling with the current – but he had come too late.

  Finn went outside again and stood on the square of raked gravel that had been the Carters’ garden.

  His mind seemed to have stopped working. He had no idea what to do. Should he go in to Manaus and see if he could find anything out – from the hospital perhaps?

  After a while he found himself walking back along the river path to where he had left the Arabella. As he came to the fork in the path which led back into the forest, the dog put his head down excitedly into a patch of leaf mould. Finn pushed him aside and saw a smear of blood . . . and then a little way off, another . . . and another.

  He almost fell over her, she lay so still, hidden in the leaves and creepers, almost as if she had burrowed into the forest to die.

  But she was not dead. She lay stunned, still in her nightdress, breathing lightly with closed eyes. The blood came from a gash in her leg. He could see no burns on her skin. She must have fainted from loss of blood.

  Then when he said her name, she opened her eyes. One hand went out to his sleeve.

  ‘Can we go now?’ she whispered.

  And he answered, ‘Yes.’

  Maia opened her eyes and saw a canopy of trees and, shining through the topmost leaves, a high, white sun.

  She could smell the rich, heady smell of orchids and hear a bird whose single piercing cry came clearly over the puttering sound of an engine.

  Then the overhanging trees disappeared. She was looking up at a pale, clear sky; and the light was suddenly so dazzling that she closed her eyes because she did not want to wake up or to stop. She wanted what was happening to her to go on and on and on.

  She was lying on a groundsheet on the bottom of a boat. They were moving steadily through the water, not fast, not slowly; the perfect speed to lull her back to sleep. She was covered by a grey blanket; she pushed it off and saw that her leg was bandaged. It throbbed but not unpleasantly . . . it seemed to belong to someone else.

  She closed her eyes and slept again.

  When she woke once more it was to find that something was resting against her side, snoring gently: a dog the colour of dark sand . . .

  So then she turned her head and saw behind her Finn, sitting quietly in the stern, with his hand on the tiller – and knew she was on the Arabella and safe.

  It was the Indian side of Finn that had taken over when he found her in the wood. That managed to carry her to the landing stage and lay her down in the Arabella. That bandaged her leg and made her swallow one of his bark potions, and then cast off, telling her to sleep and sleep and sleep . . . Sometimes the European side of him protested and told him that he ought to take her to the hospital for proper treatment.

  But he took no notice; he knew now what was best for Maia, and he was right – for now, as she woke beside the dog, she was herself again. The fear and exhaustion had gone from her face.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said, and smiled at him.

  She had escaped through her high window; the gash on her leg was made by the broken glass as she scrambled through. The doors were already smouldering when she woke.

  ‘I don’t remember much after that. It was the smoke, I think. I know there wasn’t anyone in the huts.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Finn fiercely. ‘They promised they’d look after you.’

  ‘There was a wedding – an important one. They all went. And Minty, she went somewhere too,’ said Maia. ‘She’s left me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, no? She wasn’t there – she didn’t come back from her day off.’

  ‘Maybe. But she won’t have left you. That isn’t what will have happened. What about the others?’

  ‘They escaped. I saw the river ambulance take them away, but I hid. I couldn’t bear to be with them any more. They were all quarrelling and screaming. So I hid in the trees. I didn’t notice my leg at first, but then . . .’ She shook her head. ‘But it doesn’t matter, Finn, none of it matters because you came back.’

  They set a course back up the Negro, then turned into a smaller river, the Agarapi, which flowed north-west to the lands where the Xanti had last been seen.

  It was a beautiful river. They travelled between small islands where clumps of white egrets roosted, or clouds of tiny pearl-grey bats flew up from fallen logs. What amazed Maia was how varied the landscape was. Sometimes they sailed through dark, silent jungle where all the animals were out of sight in the topmost branches; sometimes the river wound through gentle countryside, almost like England, where swamp deer grazed in grassy clearings. Once they passed into a patch of scrubland and saw a range of bare, brown hills in the distance before they plunged into the rainforest again.

  ‘If this is the “Green Hell” of the Amazon, then hell is where I belong,’ said Maia.

  She was completely happy. When she took the bandage off her leg she found a mulch of some strange green mould, which Finn had put there, and beneath it, a wound which was almost healed.

  ‘You really ought to be a doctor,’ she said. ‘Or a witch doctor perhaps?’

  ‘It’s often the same thing.’

  She had cut the bottom off a pair of Finn’s trousers and borrowed one of his shirts – and Finn had pilfered a roll of cotton, meant for the Indians, from which she’d made a kind of sarong for when she was in the water. The nightdress she had escaped in had been torn up for cleaning rags.

  Everything she owned had been destroyed in the fire, and she missed nothing except her toothbrush. Scrubbing one’s teeth with twigs was not the same.

  She trusted Finn completely. If he said a pool was safe to swim in, she dived in without a second thought, and the dreaded piranha fish did not tear at her flesh, nor did a cayman come at her with snapping jaws. If he told her a mushroom was safe to eat, she ate it.

  ‘My father had this thing he used to say to me,’ she told Finn. ‘It was in Latin. Carpe Diem. “Seize the day”. Get the best out of it, take hold of it and live in it as hard as you can.’ She pushed back her hair. ‘After he died, and my mother, I couldn’t do it too well. There never seemed to be a day I wanted to seize all that much. But here . . .’

  ‘Yes, some places are right for one. Your mother was a singer, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. But she never made a fuss about it. I never remember her saving her voice for the performance or gargling with eggs and all that stuff. She’d just sing – in the house, in the garden, anywhere.’

  ‘Everyone says you ought to get your voice trained,’ he said, and frowned because if she had a future as a singer, perhaps she shouldn’t be taking off into the unknown.

  She shook her head. ‘I’m all right like this.’

  ‘But won’t you miss music?’

  ‘There’s always music. You just have to open your mouth.’

  They’d stopped to make a fire in a little bay and cook the fish they’d caught earlier.

  ‘You
had good parents,’ said Finn.

  ‘So did you.’ She steadied the pan on the flames and poured in the oil. ‘Do you think there’ll be someone in the Xanti who’ll remember your mother?’

  Finn blew on the embers. ‘I don’t know. We may not find the Xanti,’ he warned her.

  Maia shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. But if we do, will they accept me? I don’t have any Indian blood.’

  ‘If they don’t, we won’t stay. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you; I’ve got my gun.’

  ‘I’m not scared,’ said Maia. And she wasn’t. She’d been scared of the nastiness of the twins and of being shut up in the Carters’ bungalow, but she wasn’t scared of travelling through unknown lands with a boy hardly older than she was herself. She thought perhaps she wouldn’t be scared of anything ever again if she was with Finn.

  They did not hurry. Their route led to the west, and the forests of Japura, and each night Finn laid out such maps as he had, and the notes his father had given him. One thing stood out. In a fork of the river was a small island with a jacaranda tree standing between two tall kumu palms. If they found this marker they were in Xanti country – but how far or how near it was they did not know.

  All the same, they stopped again and again. Finn wanted to collect the plants he knew he could sell, and he was teaching Maia. He climbed to the top of the leaf canopy and came back with clusters of yellow fruits which could be boiled up to treat skin diseases. He found a tree whose leaves were made into an infusion to help people with kidney complaints, and brought back a silvery fern to rub on aching muscles. Most of these plants had Indian names, but as they sorted their specimens and put them to be dried and stored in labelled cotton bags, Maia learnt quickly.

  ‘You’d be amazed how much money people give for these in the towns,’ said Finn.

  But not everything he collected was for sale. He restocked his own medicine chest also – and every day he bullied Maia about taking her quinine pills.

  ‘Only idiots get malaria in the dry season,’ he said.

  ‘I think I ought to cut my hair off,’ said Maia, one morning, as she tore yet another tooth out of Finn’s comb.