A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson

instant everything before him vanished and he was back in the orchard at Stavely. It was late October, the frost had turned the long grass into silvered spears and he was reaching out for one last apple hanging on the bare bough: an Orange Pippin with its flushed and lightly-wrinkled skin.
    Once they came, these images of England, it was best to let them have their way… to let himself walk through the beech copse where the pheasants strutted on the russet leaves… to ride out between Stavely's April hedges or climb, wind-buffeted, up the steep turf path to the Barrows while the black dog played God among the scuttling rabbits.
    And soon it was over—this sudden burst of longing, not for England's customs and manners, but for the physical look of her countryside—and he was aware again of the heat on his back, the whirr of the cicadas and the coati peering at him expectantly from a dump of osiers.
    "Yes, you're quite right; it's time for breakfast," said Rom, and turning away from the river he made his way back to the house.
    He had been christened Romain Paul Verney Brandon, but the Frenchified Christian name had been too much for the locals. He was known always as Rom—and for the first nineteen years of his life the woods and fields of Stavely were his heritage and his delight.
    He was the son of General Brandon by the General's late second marriage to the beautiful foreign singer, Toussia Kandinsky: a most unnecessary marriage, the County thought it, having planned for the General—who was already well into middle age—a decorous widowerhood. He was, after all, not alone—there was his five-year-old son, young Henry Alexander, a sensible child who would make Stavely an excellent heir.
    But the General, a distinguished soldier who had shown enormous personal courage during the bitter Afghanistan Wars and risked his life even more spectacularly during his leaves while pursuing rare plants in the cracks and crevices of the Karakorum mountains, failed to oblige them.
    Eighteen months after the death of his wife, he went to a flower show in London and afterward allowed a musical acquaintance to take him to a concert where a half-French, half-Russian singer was giving a recital of Lieder. The General did not care greatly for the Lieder, but for the woman who sang them he conceived a romantic passion which ended only with her death.
    Toussia Kandinsky was in her thirties—a mature, warm woman with sad dark eyes, an extraordinarily beautiful mouth and one feature which made her face spectacular: hair which since the age of twenty had been as white as snow.
    They married—the cosmopolitan woman with a tragic past (her father had died in a Tsarist jail) and the seemingly conventional British soldier, and he took her back to Stavely, where the County did their best with a woman who did not hunt but could be seen speaking to the horses tenderly in French, who used the Music Room for music and filled the Gallery with paintings by those mad and immoral Impressionists.
    Gossip about the new Mrs. Brandon inevitably abounded, but even the most virulent of her detractors had to admit that she was exceptionally good to her stepson. She spent hours with young Henry Alexander, read to him, played with him, took him about with her and celebrated his seventh birthday with a party that was talked about for years. When her own son was born the following year, both she and the General redoubled their attentions to Stavely's heir. The day after Rom's birth, there appeared in the stables a white pony for Henry that a prince of the blood would have been proud to own.
    No, it was Rom himself who did the damage, who ate into poor Henry's soul. A dark-skinned, quicksilver child with high cheekbones and the flared nostrils that are supposed to denote genius or temper (and generally both), he had inherited also the thick, ink-black hair which had been his mother's in her girlhood and her passionate mouth. Had it not been for the General's wide gray eyes