Journey to the River Sea - 10th Anniversary Edition (2 page)

There was no doubt about it; Maia was a heroine, but not the kind that people envied; more the kind that got burnt at the stake. By the time her friends had clustered round her with ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aaahs’ and cries of distress, Maia wanted nothing except to run away and hide.

But she didn’t. She asked permission to go to the library after supper.

The library at the Academy was a good one. That night Maia sat alone on top of the mahogany library steps, and she read and she read and she read. She read about the great broad-leaved trees of the rainforest pierced by sudden rays of sun. She read about the travellers who had explored the maze of rivers and found a thousand plants and animals that had never been seen before. She read about brilliantly coloured birds flashing between the laden branches – macaws and humming birds and parakeets – and butterflies the size of saucers, and curtains of sweetly scented orchids trailing from the trees. She read about the wisdom of the Indians who could cure sickness and wounds that no one in Europe understood.

‘
Those who think of the Amazon as a Green Hell,
’ she read in an old book with a tattered spine,
‘bring only their own fears and prejudices to this amazing
land. For whether a place is a hell or a heaven rests in yourself, and those who go with courage and an open mind may find themselves in Paradise.’

Maia looked up from the book. I can do it, she vowed. I can make it a heaven and I will!

Matron found her there long after bedtime, still perched on the ladder, but she did not scold her for there was a strange look on the girl’s face as though she was already in another country.

Everyone came well-prepared to the Geography lesson on the following day.

‘You start, Hermione,’ said Miss Carlisle. ‘What did you find out about the Amazon?’

Hermione looked anxiously at Maia.

‘There are huge crocodiles in the rivers that can snap your head off in one bite. Only they’re not called crocodiles, they’re called alligators because their snouts are fatter, but they’re just as fierce.’

‘And if you just put one hand in the water there are these piranhas that strip all the flesh off your bones. Every single bit. They look just like ordinary fish but their teeth are terrible,’ said Melanie.

Daisy offered a mosquito which bit you and gave you yellow fever. ‘You turn as yellow as a lemon and then you die,’ she said.

‘And it’s so hot the sweat absolutely runs off you in buckets.’

‘Not sweat, dear, perspiration,’ corrected Miss Carlisle.

Anna described the Indians, covered in terrifying swirls of paint, who shot you with poisoned arrows which paralysed you and made you mad; from Rose came jaguars, silent as shadows, which pounced on anyone who dared to go into the forest.

Miss Carlisle now raised a hand and looked worriedly at Maia. The girl was pale and silent, and she was very sorry now that she had told the class to find out what they could.

‘And you, Maia? What did you find out?’

Maia rose to her feet. She had written notes but she did not look at them, and when she began to speak she held her head high, for her time in the library had changed everything.

‘The Amazon is the largest river in the world. The Nile is a little bit longer but the Amazon has the most water. It used to be called The River Sea because of that, and all over Brazil there are rivers that run into it. Some of the rivers are black and some are brown and the ones that run in from the south are blue and this is because of what is under the water.

‘When I go I shall travel on a boat of the Booth Line and it will take four weeks to go across the Atlantic, and then when I get to Brazil I still have to travel a thousand miles along the river between trees that lean over the water, and there will be scarlet birds and sandbanks and creatures like big guinea pigs called capa ... capybaras which you can tame.

‘And after another two weeks on the boat I shall reach the city of Manaus, which is a beautiful place with a theatre with a green and golden roof, and shops and hotels just like here because the people who grew rubber out there became very rich and so they could build such a place even in the middle of the jungle ... And that is where I shall be met by Mr and Mrs Carter and by Beatrice and Gwendolyn—’ She broke off and grinned at her classmates. ‘And after that I don’t know,
but it’s going to be all right.
’

But she needed all her courage as she stood in the hall a month later, saying goodbye. Her trunk was corded, her travelling cape lay in the small suitcase which was all she was allowed to take into the cabin, and she stood in a circle of her friends. Hermione was crying, the youngest pupil, Dora, was clutching her skirt.

‘Don’t go, Maia,’ she wailed. ‘I don’t want you to go. Who’s going to tell me stories?’

‘We’ll miss you,’ shrieked Melanie.

‘Don’t step on a boa constrictor!’

‘Write – oh, please write lots and lots of letters.’

Last-minute presents had been stuffed into her case; a slightly strange pin cushion made by Anna, a set of ribbons for her hair. The teachers too had come to see her off, and the maids were coming upstairs.

‘You’ll be all right, Miss,’ they said. ‘You’ll have a lovely time.’ But they looked at her with pity. Piranhas and alligators were in the air – and the housemaid who had sat up most of the night with Maia after she heard of her parents’ death, was wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron.

The headmistress now came down the stairs, followed by Miss Emily, and everyone made way for her as she came up to Maia. But the farewell speech Miss Banks had prepared was never made. Instead she came forward and put her arms round Maia, who vanished for the last time into the folds of her tremendous bosom.

‘Farewell, my child,’ she said, ‘and God bless you!’, and then the porter came and said the carriage was at the door.

The girls followed Maia out into the street, but at the sight of the black-clad woman sitting stiffly in the back of the cab, her hands on her umbrella, Maia faltered. This was Miss Minton, the governess, who was going to take care of her on the journey.

‘Doesn’t she look fierce?’ whispered Melanie.

‘Poor you,’ mumbled Hermione.

And indeed the tall, gaunt woman looked more like a rake or a nutcracker than a human being.

The door of the cab opened. A hand in a black glove, bony and cold as a skeleton, was stretched out to help her in. Maia took it and, followed by the shrieks of her schoolmates, they set off.

For the first part of the journey Maia kept her eyes on the side of the road. Now that she was really leaving her friends it was hard to hold back her tears.

She had reached the gulping stage when she heard a loud snapping noise and turned her head. Miss Minton had opened the metal clasp of her large black handbag and was handing her a clean handkerchief, embroidered with the initial ‘A’.

‘Myself,’ said the governess in her deep gruff voice, ‘I would think how lucky I was. How fortunate.’

‘To go to the Amazon, you mean?’

‘To have so many friends who were sad to see me go.’

‘Didn’t you have friends who minded you leaving?’

Miss Minton’s thin lips twitched for a moment.

‘My sister’s budgerigar, perhaps. If he had understood what was happening. Which is extremely doubtful.’

Maia turned her head. Miss Minton was certainly a most extraordinary-looking person. Her eyes, behind thick, dark-rimmed spectacles, were the colour of mud, her mouth was narrow, her nose thin and sharp and her black felt hat was tethered to her sparse bun of hair with a fearsome hat pin in the shape of a Viking spear.

‘It’s copied from the armour of Eric the Hammerer,’ said Miss Minton, following Maia’s gaze. ‘One can kill with a hatpin like that.’

Both of them fell silent again, till the cab lurched suddenly and Miss Minton’s umbrella clattered to the floor. It was quite the largest and ugliest umbrella Maia had ever seen, with a steel spike and a long shaft ending in a handle shaped like the beak of a bird of prey.

Miss Minton, however, was looking carefully at a crack in the handle which had been mended with glue.

‘Did you break it before?’ Maia asked politely.

‘Yes.’ She peered at the hideous umbrella through her thick glasses. ‘I broke it on the back of a boy called Henry Hartington,’ she said.

Maia shrank back.

‘How—’ she began, but her mouth had gone dry.

‘I threw him on the ground and knelt on him and belaboured him with my umbrella,’ said Miss Minton. ‘Hard. For a long time.’

She leant back in her seat, looking almost happy.

Maia swallowed. ‘What had he done?’

‘He had tried to stuff a small spaniel puppy through the wire mesh of his father’s tennis court.’

‘Oh! Was it hurt badly? The puppy?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘One leg was dislocated and his eye was scratched. The gardener managed to set the leg, but we couldn’t do anything about his eye.’

‘How did Henry’s mother punish him?’

‘She didn’t. Oh dear me no! I was dismissed instead. Without a reference.’

Miss Minton turned away. The year that followed when she could not get another job and had to stay with her married sister, was one that she was not willing to remember or discuss.

The cab stopped. They had reached Euston station. Miss Minton waved her umbrella at a porter, and Maia’s trunk and her suitcase were lifted on to a trolley. Then came a battered tin trunk with the letters A. MINTON painted on the side.

‘You’ll need two men for that,’ said the governess.

The porter looked offended. ‘Not me. I’m strong.’

But when he came to lift the trunk, he staggered.

‘Crikey, Ma’am, what have you got in there?’ he asked.

Miss Minton looked at him haughtily and did not answer. Then she led Maia onto the platform where the train waited to take them to Liverpool and the
RMS Cardinal
bound for Brazil.

They were steaming out of the station before Maia asked, ‘Was it books in the trunk?’

‘It was books,’ admitted Miss Minton.

And Maia said, ‘Good.’

The
Cardinal
was a beautiful ship; a snow-white liner with a slender, light blue funnel. She had two state rooms, a dining room and lots of deck space where people could lie about and drink beef tea or play games.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ said Maia, and she imagined herself standing by the rail with the wind in her face as she watched the porpoises play and the white birds wheel and circle overhead.

But the beginning of the voyage wasn’t at all like that because after the ship left Lisbon, the
Cardinal
ran into a storm. Great green waves loomed up like mountains, the ship rolled and shuddered and pitched. Hardly anyone got as far as the dining room, and the doors to the decks were closed so that any passengers still on their legs did not get washed overboard.

Maia and Miss Minton shared a cabin with two Portuguese ladies who spent their time in their bunks groaning, being sick, praying to the Virgin and begging to die. Maia thought this was going too far, but it is true that being seasick is so awful that people do sometimes wish that the ship would simply sink and put them out of their misery.

Maia was not seasick and nor was Miss Minton. They did not feel exactly hungry but they managed to get to the dining room, holding onto everything they could find, and to eat some of the soup which the waiters poured into the bowls fastened onto the table with a special gadget that came out in storms. It is difficult not to feel superior when everyone is being ill and you aren’t, and Maia couldn’t help being a bit pleased with herself. This lasted till Miss Minton, hanging onto the saloon rail with her long, black arms, said that this would be a good time to start learning Portuguese.

‘We shall be undisturbed.’

Maia thought this was a bad idea. ‘Maybe the twins would teach me. They must speak it if they’ve been there for so long.’

‘You don’t want to arrive in a country unable to make yourself understood. Everyone speaks Portuguese in Brazil. Even the Indians mix it with their own languages.’

But the lessons did not go well. Miss Minton had found a book about the family of Senhor and Senhora Olvidares and their children Pedro and Sylvina who did all the things that people do in phrase books, like losing their luggage and finding a fly in their soup, but fixing their eyes on a page when the boat was heaving made them feel definitely queasy. Trying to read when you are being tossed about is not a good idea.

Then on the second day of the storm, Maia made her way to the main state room, where the passengers were supposed to sit and enjoy their drinks and have parties. Miss Minton was helping the Portuguese ladies and Maia wanted to get out of the way.

It was a huge room with red plush sofas screwed to the floor and long gilt-edged mirrors lining the walls, and at first she thought it was empty.

Then she saw a boy of about her own age, peering into one of the mirrors on the far wall. He had fair hair, long and curly, and was dressed in old-fashioned clothes – velvet knickerbockers and a belted jacket too short in the sleeves – and when he turned round she saw that he was looking unhappy and afraid.