“I have been reading your book."
Charlotte stumbled at this sudden announcement, and he steadied her with a curious look.
“You . . . you have?" she asked faintly.
“Yes. Books are hard for me to come by."
He was poor, then. She had guessed it by the worn look of his russet coat, although it was of a decent cut and fabric. His boots, too, had seen better days. But he could read.
“How do you like it?" she ventured.
“It is well enough," he told her restlessly. “I had rather there was more time spent on the hero s sailing ventures and less on toasting Lady Augusta s eyebrows."
“She had very unusual eyebrows," defended Charlotte. “They were—"
“I know. High and exalted." He sounded amused. He turned suddenly and peered down into her face with a grin. “Faith, who would have thought it? We have here a pair of exalted eyebrows!"
Despite her vexation, Charlotte laughed—and Tom laughed with her. He had a laughing face, she decided, sunny.
“Actually," he admitted on a sober note, “it was the tract that interested me most."
“Oh, Mr. Defoe's tract on trepanning?"
He nodded. “I was curious about it."
“So now you are planning to kidnap a young heiress and marry her at gunpoint?" Charlotte guessed merrily.
He gave her an odd look. “I might," he said carelessly.
She caught her breath and color flamed in her young cheeks. But I am heiress to nothing! she reminded herself quickly. And then the fleeting thought came: Of course, Tom doesn’t know that. . . .
The slanted look she gave him through her lashes was suddenly arch. “They hang men for trepanning, Tom.”
“Ah, but it might be worth it,” he sighed, and looked out suddenly into the distance. He had seen a man hanged for trepanning once. A big blustering fellow who had swaggered all the way to the gallows. And from a coach he had seen a girl’s white face peering out to watch, and people had nudged each other and said she was “the one. ” Tom thought he had seen a glisten of tears on her cheeks before her head had been suddenly jerked back to disappear from view as the prisoner was strung up and left to jerk and dance in the air while the crowd stared and muttered. Tom had wondered then if it had been a real kidnapping, or had this pair actually been lovers? Anyway, the law was clear. Trepanning was indeed a hanging offense.
He turned back to gaze upon this lovely delicate young girl at his side—and found she was not looking at him but instead was intently studying the rocks. Her color was high. Although his tone had been bantering when he said “it might be worth it,” there had been something in the way he said it that had made her heart beat faster.
Charlotte was growing up.
By the time they had come within sight of Aldershot Grange they were the best of friends. And on Charlotte’s part at least, a little more than that—she had decided she adored him. His roguish smile lingered with her long after he had gone.
When Charlotte came into the kitchen to tell Cook she had lost her soup bucket and rolls into the gorge, she found Wend standing in the open doorway watching her.
“Well,” said Wend, leaning on her broom and considering Charlotte with new respect, “I see you went out and got him!”
“I did nothing of the kind!” protested Charlotte. “I nearly fell over into the gorge and he saved me.”
“Clever of you,” said Wend admiringly.
Charlotte flushed. “I wasn’t trying to be clever,” she told Wend stiffly. “I was trying to turn around because I thought I couldn’t get by him where the path was so narrow, and I—”
“Just fell naturally into his arms.” Wend chuckled. “I must remember to do that someday.”
“Don’t be silly, I’ll probably never see him again.”
Wend snorted her derision.
The next day Charlotte was adjusting the worn window hangings in her bedroom when she saw Tom striding down the slope to Aldershot Grange. As he walked, he was leafing idly through a book, which she guessed was the novel she had dropped in such haste. He cut a handsome figure, she thought with a pang, watching him swing along in the distance in his worn russet coat with his battered hat set at a cocky angle upon his shining fair head. When he came closer he looked up, and Charlotte instinctively stepped back, breathless lest he should see her watching him approach. When she dared to look again, he had disappeared—probably into the kitchen, she guessed from the angle at which he had approached the house.
She ran downstairs, suddenly alarmed lest flirtatious Wend should already have him seated at the kitchen table drinking a tankard of cider. But it was Charlotte he had come to see.
“Mistress Charlotte, I’m returning your book,” he said with a courtly bow, and Charlotte thought: He is a gentleman for all his worn clothes. That bow had a practiced ease.
“I hope you enjoyed it,” she said stiffly, well aware that Cook and Wend were both watching them, bright-eyed. And then, to escape their surveillance, “Would you like to see our garden?” she wondered.
“Very much.”
Together they strolled out into the low-walled weedy patch, but neither of them was aware of their surroundings. In the soft air a bee buzzed around his head, but he seemed not to notice. She was giving him a luminous look. Charlotte’s heart would have beat faster if she could have known what Tom was thinking on his way over here; he had been wondering about the strange tug on his heartstrings this thin little waif had inspired, and had been chiding himself roundly for taking such an interest in one so young.
Now in the weed-choked garden he was hanging on her words.
“We had beautiful flowers back in the Scillies,” she told him wistfully. “I can t quite get used to this north country, the hard winters, all the snow—I guess I'll always love summer too much. ’’
“I was brought up in the Bahamas,’’ he said surprisingly. “So I know what you mean. ”
“Oh? I thought Wend said you were from Carlisle.”
“Only since I was seventeen. My father . . . died and my mother remarried, a shipbuilder. He and I don’t get along. ”
She cast a sudden stricken look at his worn clothing, hardly that of a shipbuilder’s stepson. So that was why he had wandered down this way—trouble at home.
“Is that why you’re here instead of in Carlisle?” she asked steadily.
He gave her a quick wary look. Actually he had come here in pursuit of a girl—Maisey, whom he had met in Carlisle one market day. But the glow of that little affair was already ebbing, and anyway, he was not of a mind to tell her about that, this too-thin, big-eyed child who had such a strange appeal for him.
“What do you do?” she asked.
He looked out across the garden wall before he answered, and his gaze seemed to skim past the lake’s shining surface to the blue sea somewhere beyond their vision.
“By trade I am a navigator,” he said. No need to tell her of the slippery decks of the fast furtive ships where he had learned that trade.
“Did you go to sea early?” she asked eagerly.
“When I was ten,” he admitted. “I was a cabin boy.”
“That must have been a very difficult post to get for one so young,” she said admiringly. “I mean, so many lads in seafaring towns must seek it.”
“Not really difficult,” he said, still looking out to far vistas. “My father was the ship’s captain. ” No need to tell her that he was “Devil Ben’’ Westing’s son or that his father’s ship, the Shark, was the terror of the seas.
“What trade was he in?” asked the girl from the Scillies, who knew something of the sea.
“Trade?” He turned to look at her then. “Why, mostly the Far East, Africa, India.” That much at least was true. The Shark had ranged with other freebooters mostly from Madagascar.
“The spice trade!” Her violet eyes sparkled. “How exciting!”
His calm gaze managed to give her no hint of how exciting it had been. He still bor
e the scars of some of that excitement. “Yes, it was exciting,” he admitted, and there was irony in his tone.
She missed that irony. “I have always wanted to see the Spice Islands,” she told him.
Not the way I saw them, he thought grimly. With dead men hanging from the yardarm, half the sails rent and mutiny below! “They are very beautiful.”
“It must have been wonderful, growing up beside your father.” She sighed with envy. “Mine died when I was very small.”
It had not been wonderful. It had been pure hell. Tom could admire his father’s strength and courage, but there had been precious little else to admire. His father’s world was not the world of the buccaneers, with gallantry toward women and loyalty to country—privateers, really, whose only enemy was Spain. Tom had learned his trade in an evil world, a world of piracy, where any likely ship was prey if you were strong enough to take it. He had hated that world, and when he was seventeen he had left it, jumped ship and never gone back. Where his father was now, he did not know—and did not care. That Devil Ben would end his life at the end of a hangman’s rope, he had little doubt. And Tom had no intention of joining him there.
As he looked down into those trusting violet eyes, the truth trembled on his lips. He yearned to tell Charlotte all about it—of the blackguard his father had been even though he had come of good family once, of how his father had never really married his mother. How, when he was away on one of the long voyages from which he might never return, she had met a shipbuilder and married him and gone to live in Carlisle.
Tom had found out where she was and gone to Carlisle. There he had met a cold reception. He had shipped out, but was now back again—and the reception was just as cold. His mother had three children by the shipbuilder now and she wanted to forget the past—and Tom was part of that past.
“It is true I am by trade a navigator, but in truth I prefer the land,” he said. And meant it. Although he had grown up on the rough seas, it was really the land that beckoned him, land and forests and mines. He hoped someday to become a planter, somewhere far from Carlisle. Suddenly he wanted to tell this slip of a girl about that, to share all his dreams with her.
He cursed himself for a fool. She was a child, a wee wisp of a maid, a bud, not yet a flower.
But still he could not bring himself to leave.
They sat on the garden wall with the tall weeds blowing about them and the shining expanse of the lake behind them, and he told her stories—very much expunged—of the sea and the strange tropical lands to the south. Of jungle orchids and of the mahogany that men called rosewood because when it was fresh-cut it smelled like roses, of flying fish and coral beaches and spice-scented nights beneath the Southern Cross.
He talked to her soberly, as if she were a grown woman.
Charlotte was enthralled.
When Tom left that day, he took her heart with him.
He stopped by once more, two days later, and found her sitting on the garden wall looking dreamily out toward the lake. She turned and looked up rapturously at his approach, for all that he was both dusty and tired.
"I'll be sailing day after tomorrow,” he said brusquely. “On the Mary Constant. I’ve signed on for a long voyage.” And she was not to know that after that long talk with her in the overgrown garden, he had sat all night on the heights above Aldershot Grange, looking down at the dark pattern of its chimneys against the moon-silvered lake, and fought a great battle with himself. If he stayed, he would do what he had never in his life done—sully a child. For he saw the shining trust in those violet eyes and knew in his heart that she would be easy prey. He was shamed by the thoughts he had had of her—thoughts of bringing her to his bed—and with a wrench he had put them away from him.
And then he remembered her lovely smile, like the sun breaking through the mists above the crags of Helvellyn, and his resolve was shaken.
No, he told himself, he would not do it. He would leave Charlotte as he had found her. Untouched. She deserved to grow up sweet and pure and dreaming.
And the only way she was going to do that was for Tom Westing to put a distance between himself and her. To go away. To sea, preferably, where he could not easily get back in case he weakened. To sea, and on a long voyage. For this elfin half-grown girl with her violet eyes and her wonderful smile had taken such a hold on him as would not easily be broken.
The morning after his vigil on the heights above Aldershot Grange he had made his way back to Carlisle and had signed on the first vessel that needed a navigator.
And now she was looking at him as if her world had collapsed.
"I'll . . . miss you ...” She faltered.
“And I’ll miss you, Charlotte.” She would never guess how much! And of a sudden he swept her into his arms and planted a long kiss on those tremulous lips that responded so softly, so vibrantly to his touch.
Resolutely he put her away from him. He was looking down into her eyes, and for a moment he lost himself in their violet depths. Sternly he reminded himself once again of her youth and inexperience. “I brought you something from Carlisle,” he said, and gravely took from the pocket of his shabby coat a small gold locket on a delicate chain and clasped it around her neck.
“To remember me by,” he said.
As if she could forget!
“Oh, must you go yet?” she cried, distressed, when she saw he was really preparing to leave.
He gave her a wistful smile. “If I stay,” he said ruefully, “I’ll do something we’ll both regret. ”
She followed him through the garden for a few steps. “You’ll come back?” she asked anxiously.
He turned toward her, and all the depth of his yearning reached out to her like a warm soft wind. “Oh, yes, little Charlotte,” he said in a rich deep voice that seemed to whir through her senses. “I’ll come back.”
And then he was gone, swinging away jauntily, heading north along the lakeshore toward Carlisle.
Wend saw it all from the window.
“He’s in love with you,” she whispered when Charlotte came in. “Any fool can see that! Here, let me see, what did he give you?”
Charlotte held out the locket and gave Wend a misty look.
“He’s going far away, on a long voyage aboard the Mary Constant. Oh, Wend, do you think I’ll ever see him again?” she wondered with a little catch in her voice.
Wend was holding up the locket delightedly. “Oh, you’ll see him again,” she told Charlotte with a confident chuckle. “But who knows how soon?”
4
Winter 1730
In the great cavernous kitchen of Aldershot Grange, Cook had just burned the venison and the smoke from the big iron skillet was drifting upward past the hanging brass kettles to the blackened beams above. Perched on a three-legged stool beside the enormous stone hearth, where a bright fire was crackling, Charlotte had been listening with the same fascination as Cook and the others to the tale Wend was telling.
Ignoring the smoking mass that was to be their dinner, Wend was still speaking, leaning on her knuckles on the rude plank table, her eyes large and round.
“And when I come walking down by the lake on my way back from visiting my mother, there it was againl A woman’s white arm reaching up through the ice out of the Derwent Water and beckoning to me—beckoning! And I asked myself, where could it want me to go?”
Wend's sepulchral voice was accompanied by a sudden shriek of wind that had come down off the crags and was trying to tear off the roof slates, and Charlotte shivered pleasurably. Although she did not really believe in Wend's outrageous stories, it was always fun to hear Wend tell of demons and goblins that stalked the night.
“Where did it want you to go? Why, to the other side of the lake to that lad you’re always threatening to run away with!” said Livesay, the butler, who was sitting at his ease at the head of the kitchen board, smoking his long clay pipe. He winked companionably at Wend.
Wend threw him a hurt look, "I’ve told you twice now th
at I’ve broken off with him. Why won t you believe me?"
"But what happened then, Wend?” urged Ivy, the upstairs maid.
"Why, a kind of white light shone over the lake and it fair blinded me!”
"Sun on the ice,” suggested Livesay with a grin. "Blinds you every time.”
Sleet crashed in a solid sheet against the windowpanes and Livesay’s last words were lost in another vengeful howl of the gale.
"But then, Wend?” Ivy demanded. "What happened then?”
"When I could see again, the arm was gone,” Wend said sulkily with a dark look at Livesay, who had spoiled her story. "And I come on into the house. That makes twice I’ve seen it,” she added defiantly.
"Wend, you’ll be the death of me,” sighed Cook, clawing with a long fork at the burnt venison. "You with your tales!”
" Tweren’t a tale,” said Wend with spirit. "I saw it!”
Charlotte s slender arms were wrapped around her knees as she listened raptly. Wend's superstitious tales were always a delight. Last week Wend claimed she had seen a headless beast galloping off toward Cat Bells, and the week before that she had seen fierce blue devil's lights burning off Friars Crag. It was worth eating a burnt dinner just to hear her.
Charlotte s worn old-fashioned clothes had vanished, for on long evenings in the kitchen while Cook dozed by a fire that sputtered on the stone hearth, Charlotte, bending intently over her needle, had taught herself to sew. Not well enough to make her living at it as Wend's mother once had, but well enough to stitch up the simple home-spun gown she was now wearing. The cloth she had dyed herself with oak-galls—Cook had shown her how. And although the sunlight had faded it to a rather indeterminate buff, she hoped next year to get enough saffron crocus blooms to dye a dress saffron yellow to complement her red-gold hair.
But there was another difference between the girl who sat at table that December night and the girl who had run heedless along the watery tarns and becks in early summer. Now Charlotte’s violet eyes dreamed and a smile curved the corners of her soft mouth. For she carried in her heart the memory of a lover’s kiss—at least to her mind it had been a lover’s kiss, and that memory warmed her on bitter nights when the fire burned out on the hearth and icicles hung from the eaves and you could see your breath not just outside the house but inside as well.
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