Journey to the River Sea - 10th Anniversary Edition (9 page)

‘Yes, but there’s no need to make a fuss.’

But when Miss Minton tried to get up there was a blind look in her eyes, and she gave up and let Maia turn down the bed.

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Maia. ‘I’ll go and read on the veranda.’

But though the book was
David Copperfield
and she’d got to the part where Betsy Trotwood was chasing the donkeys out of her garden, she couldn’t concentrate. She kept seeing Clovis’ face and hearing him say, ‘You will come, Maia, won’t you? You will be there?’

After a while she went along to Minty’s room and very quietly opened the door. Miss Minton was fast asleep in the darkened room, and Maia knew she would not wake for a long time.

She went into her own room. On her work table was the map she had got from Mr Carter. She picked it up and studied it. She had managed to push back the heavy bolt on the door to the compound at the back several days ago. According to the map there was a path running from the back of the house along the water channels which eventually came out behind the docks in Manaus. The channels themselves were as tangled as boa constrictors, but if she kept the sun on her right ... Today there really was some sun, not only the dark rain that fell so often.

It was only ten o’clock. The play didn’t begin till two o’clock. Even if it took her a long time, she should still get there – and at least she would have tried.

She changed into walking shoes and buttoned her purse into the pocket of her dress.

Then slowly, carefully, she pulled back the bolt.

She had looked at the Indian huts so often from her window that it was strange to be walking past them. The little rootling pig was there, tethered, and a few chickens, but the Indians were all away, working in the forest or the house.

The beginning of the path was exactly where it should have been, with a narrow plank over the stream it followed. Maia plunged into the forest.

Away from the compound, the great trees grew more thickly; dappled creepers wound round the trunks searching for the light; a scarlet orchid, hanging from a branch, glowed like a jewel in a shaft of sun.

‘Oh, but it is beautiful!’ she said aloud, and drew the damp, earthy, slightly rotten smell into her lungs.

But it was a mistake to be so rapt about the beauty of nature because the path was not quite as simple as it had appeared on the map. She knew she had to keep the sun on her right; but the sun could not be relied upon: sometimes the canopy of leaves was so dense that she seemed to be walking in twilight. And the streams kept branching ... She stayed beside the widest of them, but the path made by the rubber-gatherers was overgrown; she stumbled over roots of trees, trod on strange fungi, orange and mauve ... Sometimes a smaller stream cut across her path and she had to jump it or paddle. Once something ran through the trees ahead of her, a grey snuffling creature ...

She couldn’t have told the exact moment at which she knew she was lost. First there was just doubt, as she took one path rather than another. Then doubt became fear and fear became panic, and she had to take deep breaths to stop herself from crying out. At the same time the clouds began to cover the sun. Even those rays of light she had had to steer by had gone.

They’re right, the beastly Carters; the jungle is our enemy, she thought. Why didn’t I listen?

She would have done anything to be back in the gloomy bungalow eating tinned beetroot and being glared at by the twins. Trying to pull herself together, she walked faster. The stream she was following was quite big; a river really and the current was fast: it must lead to Manaus.

Blinking away tears, she trudged on. Then her foot caught in a liana, a long branch hanging like a rope from the top of a tree, and she fell.

It was a heavy fall; her foot was trapped – and in putting out her hand to save herself she had clutched a branch of thorns. Furious with herself, hurt, lost, she lay for a few moments helpless.

When she sat up again something strange had happened. The stream by which she had fallen disappeared behind her in a curtain of green; more than a curtain, a wall of reeds and creepers and half-submerged trees. Yet from this green barrier there had appeared a canoe, coming towards her silently like a boat in a dream.

The canoe was being poled by an Indian boy who stood in the prow and was steering it in an unhurried, easy way so that the water seemed scarcely to be disturbed.

Maia watched for a moment, not quite believing what she saw; then she stumbled to her feet.

‘Please can you help me?’ she shouted, stupidly in English, then desperately in her few words of Portuguese.

The boy looked at her; he seemed surprised by her look of agitation. Then he brought the canoe silently alongside. Still he did not speak.

‘I have to get to Manaus. I have to,’ Maia said, and pointed to where she thought the city was. ‘Manaus is there?’

The boy smiled, and suddenly he seemed just a boy of about her own age; not a mysterious and possibly threatening stranger, emerged from a curtain of green.

He shook his head. ‘Manaus,’ he said, and pointed almost in the opposite direction.

She was utterly crestfallen. So much for her map, her understanding of the jungle – and her hand was bleeding.

‘I have to get to Manaus. I promised a friend ...
amigo
. . . I have to ...’ she repeated. What little Portuguese she had learned seemed to have gone from her. She could only look at him and entreat.

The boy did not answer. He was dressed in the work clothes worn by the local Indians: a blue cotton shirt faded from washing and cotton trousers – but round his head he wore a broad band which partly covered his thick, coal-black hair, and a pattern of red zigzags was painted on his cheekbones. His skin was a light bronze and his eyes the same colour as Maia’s own, a deep dark brown.

For a moment he stood upright in the canoe, thinking. Then he stretched out his hand and made a movement of his head which was unmistakable. She was to get into the canoe.

‘Will you take me? Oh will you!’

She did not know if he understood, but her instinct was to trust him. As he pulled her into the canoe, she winced and he looked down at her hand. Then he took out a big thorn embedded in her palm and she thanked him.

‘Sit,’ he said in Portuguese.

He took the pole and the boat moved with surprising speed down the river. As soon as they were under way, she thought what an idiot she had been. He would hit her on the head ... he would take her off to his tribe as a slave ... or worse ...

I am thinking like the Carters, Maia told herself.

The boy had stowed the pole now and was using a paddle. She moved to take the other one but he shook his head, pointing to her injured hand. As he pulled on the paddle, she saw on the inside of his wrist a small, red mark, like a four-leafed clover. A good luck sign? The mark of his tribe?

But even this sign of his foreignness couldn’t frighten her for long. He moved so gracefully; he was so quiet and companionable. She was an idiot to trust him but she did.

‘Thank you,’ she said – in English, in Portuguese. She even remembered the word for ‘thank you’ in the Indian language that the servants spoke. ‘I have to go to the theatre. The Teatra Amazonas.’

He nodded and they glided on down the river. Sometimes they moved between lush green trees which leant so far over the water that she felt as though they were travelling between the roots of the forest. Birds rose as they went past: scarlet ibis, white herons flapping in slow motion ... As they took a side branch of the river, Maia cried out because the boy was steering between gigantic leaves from which piebald frogs flopped into the water.

‘That’s the Victoria Regia lily, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I’ve read about it.’

It was difficult to believe that he did not understand her; he had such a listening face.

Then in an instant the worst happened. The boy gave a wild shout; a shout of pure rage. He put down the paddle, threw himself on top of her, pressing her down against the floorboards of the boat, and kept her there pinioned. She felt his breath on her cheek.

Then he released her and pointed. They had passed underneath a wicked-looking branch with spikes the size of knives. If he hadn’t forced her down Maia would have been knocked unconscious or even blinded. As he clambered back and picked up the paddle, he was still muttering furiously in his own language and glaring at her. Without deciphering a single word, she knew he was scolding her for her carelessness, trying to explain that one had to be alert the whole time in the jungle.

‘Idiota
!’ he said finally, and though Senhor and Senhora Olvidares in the phrase book had not used the word, Maia understood it well enough.

She was very careful after that, keeping a proper look-out, but nothing could quite quell her delight in the beauty she saw about her. It was as though she was taking the journey she had imagined on top of the library ladder the day she heard about her new life.

Then the stream became wider, the current stronger, and she caught a glimpse of low, colour-washed houses and heard a dog bark.

‘Manaus,’ he said. He drew up to the bank and helped her out. She took out her purse but he wouldn’t take her money, nor would he listen to her thanks. ‘Teatra Amazonas,’ he said, pointing straight ahead.

He would go no further towards civilization.

The boy watched her as she ran off. She looked back once and waved but he had already turned the boat.

He poled swiftly back through the maze of waterways. When he reached the place where he had found Maia, he smiled and half shook his head. Then he set the canoe hard at the curtain of green and vanished into his secret world.

The police chief was in a bad temper. He had hoped to go to the matinée of
Little Lord Fauntleroy.
Colonel da Silva was in his fifties, a crack shot, and a man of steel with an amazing moustache, but he loved the theatre. Opera, ballet, stories about little boys melting the heart of ancient earls, it was all the same to him.

But he had had a cable from police headquarters in London asking him to give help to Mr Low and Mr Trapwood, who had come to the Amazon to find a missing boy and bring him back to England. The detectives were acting for an Important Person in Britain, the message had said, and he was to do everything he could to make their search easier.

It wasn’t the first time that the unpleasant Englishmen had been to see him. They had asked him to put up notices in the police station, and on hoardings in the city, asking for news of the son of Bernard Taverner, and they had made him put the amount of the reward on the notice. Not that he expected anyone to come forward.

‘I am not prepared to go on like this any longer,’ said Mr Trapwood, whose face had turned a livid puce in the heat. ‘We’ve talked to a hundred people and no one knows about the boy. It’s ridiculous! It’s a conspiracy!’

‘We have to get back to England,’ croaked Mr Low in a hoarse voice. He had swallowed the backbone of a spiny fish in his breakfast stew and it had scratched his throat. ‘The boy
must be brought to Westwood.
There’s no time to be lost.’

Both men glared at Colonel da Silva who looked at the clock and realized that he was going to miss the play.

‘I tell you, no one knows of such a boy. Unless... perhaps – ah yes ... wait ... I think I heard something; I didn’t tell you because I wasn’t sure ... There is a boy living with the Ombuda Indians. Some say he is Mr Taverner’s son and he left him there to be looked after.’

‘To be looked after by Indians!’ Both men stared at him, outraged. ‘Let me tell you, sir, that Taverner may have been a wastrel, but he was born a British gentleman.’

The Colonel opened his mouth and shut it again. The less the crows knew the better. Then: ‘I too am a gentleman,
senhors
, and I have an Indian grandmother; a woman of great wisdom who brought me up. There are many mixed marriages here and we are proud of all our ancestors.’

Mr Low and Mr Trapwood put their heads together. ‘You have good evidence that the boy might be Taverner’s son?’

Colonel da Silva shrugged. ‘It is rumoured. He is said to be a handsome boy, and fair. I will show you the place on the map. It is only two days on the riverboat, it will not take you long to find out. And the Ombuda people are very gentle,’ he said, producing a crumpled chart and wondering why he hadn’t sent them to the Curacara who had been cannibals for generations. ‘The boat goes at nine in the morning,’ he said. ‘I will send an interpreter with you and I hope your journey will be a success.’

When they had left, the Colonel picked up a toothpick and watched them out of the window. At least that would get them out of the way for a few days. Not that he expected anyone to give Finn away. What Westwood had done to Bernard Taverner was well-known to his friends. Taverner had been fearless in the jungle, but those who had camped with him on his collecting trips remembered nights when he had woken in terror after a dream, with the name ‘Westwood’ on his lips.

After a while the Colonel opened the door to his office.

‘Go to the museum and tell Professor Glastonberry that I’ve sent the Englishmen upriver,’ he said to the policeman there. ‘But he’s to tell Finn to stay where he is – I don’t know how long they’ll be away.’