A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson Read Free Book Online

bedrooms—past which the cadaverous Mr. Grunthorpe, enjoining silence, now led them bound for the Long Gallery on the top floor.
    Harriet had fallen a little behind the others, weary of the absurd antics of her "bodyguard" and planning, if a side staircase could be found, the rescue of the Transoms.
    She was thus alone when a door was suddenly thrown open and a woman's voice, high and imperious, cried out, "No! I don't believe it! It cannot be as bad as that!"
    Involuntarily, Harriet stopped. The luxurious room thus revealed, framed in the lintel of the door, might have come from a painting by Titian. There was a four-poster hung in blue silk, a dressing table with a silver-trimmed mirror, a richly embroidered chair… The covers of the bed were thrown back and beside it stood a woman in a white negligee with a river of dark red hair rippling down her back. She had brought up one of her arms against the carved bedpost as though for support, and a little silken-haired papillon lay curled on the pillow looking at her with anxious eyes.
    "Even my idiot of a husband could not have gone as far as that," she continued. "You are trying to frighten me."
    A maid moved about the back of the room, laying out clothes, but it was to someone unseen that the woman spoke—a man whose low-voiced answer Harriet could not make out.
    "Oh!" The rapt exclamation came from Louisa who had returned to admonish her loitering niece. Her long face was transfigured; her mouth hung slightly open with awe.
    A sighting! Here without doubt was the lady of the house, Isobel Brandon, in whose veins flowed some of the bluest blood in England. For while Harriet saw a beautiful and imperious woman driven to the edge of endurance by some calamity, Aunt Louisa saw only the granddaughter of the Earl of Lexbury whose wedding some ten years earlier at St. Margaret's, Westminster, had required a double page of the Toiler to do it justice.
    But Mrs. Brandon now had seen them.
    "For God's sake, Alistair, shut the door! You can't go anywhere until those wretched women have stopped trooping through the house. And anyway, I sent all the documents to—"
    The door closed. Harriet and her aunt joined the others. Mrs. Transom's daughter had discovered another stairway and pushed her mother up it—and the party entered the Long Gallery.
    A long, light room with a beautiful parquet floor… The walls nearest the door were taken up by family portraits of the Brandons. Among the dull paintings, varnished into uniformity, only two caught Harriet's attention: a likeness of the old General, almost comical in the obvious boredom and irritation shown by the sitter at being compelled to sit thus captive for the artist; and one of Henrietta Verney who had linked the Brandons to her illustrious house—a vivid intelligent face defying the centuries.
    "Is there no portrait of the present owner?" inquired Mrs. Belper.
    "No, ma'am. The present owner is abroad a great deal and has not yet sat for his portrait."
    And is not likely to either, thought Mr. Grunthorpe with gloomy satisfaction as he pointed out a view of Stavely's west front by Richard Wilson.
    Harriet wandered for a while, not greatly interested in the conventional landscapes and battle scenes. Then right at the end of the gallery she came across an entirely different group of pictures—chosen, surely, by someone outside the family. Light, sun-filled modern paintings: a Monet of poppies and cornflowers; a Renoir of two girls in splendidly floral hats sitting on a terrace… and one at which she stood and looked, forgetting where she was, forgetting everything except what she had lost.
    No one has understood the world of dance like Degas. The painting was of two ballet girls in the wings of the Paris Opera: one bending down to tie her shoe; the other limbering up, one leg lifted on to the bane, her head bent over it to touch her ankles. This painter who all his life was obsessed by the beauty of women at work had caught perfectly the