Lisbon

by Valerie Sherwood

  By now Charlotte was fully awake. Living as she did in the almost inaccessible reaches of England’s North Country, she found it difficult to keep track of the political intrigues of the time, but she knew as did everyone else, of the great uproar caused last year when an Englishman named Captain Jenkins had brought one of his ears in a box to the House of Commons—an ear he claimed was cut off by Spaniards who had illegally boarded and searched his ship, then scornfully bidden him to take his severed ear and his grievance to the English king!

  As she pulled on her clothes, she realized with a little surge of excitement that Rowan, out late and alone, had learned something—received some message, perhaps from Spain. And was acting on it with characteristic swiftness. How unlike him to have told her about it. And how doubly unlike him to be taking her with him on such a mission. Her fingers paused momentarily in the act of hooking up her apricot silk gown. Could it be that Rowan was sorry for the way he had treated her, and this sudden confiding, this taking her with him, was an olive branch that he was holding out to her?

  Enlivened by that thought, Charlotte hurried downstairs. Her lacerated feelings were eager for a reconciliation initiated by him. Long ago she had thought she could make a success of this marriage—with time, with effort. Lately—and especially last night—she had begun to despair. Yet now it seemed, incredibly, there might be a chance. . . .

  She had reached the front door and was just in the act of pulling on her peach kidskin gloves when she came to a halt—there was no coach waiting. And Rowan appeared to tell her sardonically that he was not taking her with him after all. He had changed his mind!

  Speechless, Charlotte stared at her bewildering husband. Then from behind her came Wend's grumbling protest: "Why did you wake Mistress Charlotte if you wasn't taking her with you?”

  The dark eyes in that satanic face swung toward the speaker with such intensity that Wend's ruffled cap retreated into the darkness of the doorway.

  "If you raise your voice to me again, Wend,” came Rowan s warning voice, "I will dismiss you without notice!”

  "Be silent, Wend. ” Charlotte spoke sharply, for she was all too aware that Rowan, with his mercurial moods and sudden wild tempests, was entirely capable of doing just that—dismissing Cumberland-bred Wend on the spot and driving her away to fend for herself in an alien city. "I am wondering the same thing, Rowan. Just why did you change your mind about taking me with you?”

  Rowan's daunting gaze played over Charlotte for a few moments before he spoke. Then abruptly he laughed. "Perhaps I decided that I did not desire your company after all, Charlotte.” And added negligently, "I leave you to imagine why.”

  When Charlotte said that she did not know why, he admonished her for quarreling before the servants. And followed that up by telling her that he would be gone at least a week, maybe longer, and that she was not to roam around Lisbon, but to stay indoors until he returned.

  Pale with rage, Charlotte watched him go clattering off over the cobbles into the darkness with the mounted servant João following. Charlotte and Wend talked for a while—but that resolved nothing. And Charlotte was too keyed up to go back to bed, as Wend urged.

  "I think I'll walk down to the fish market,” she said abruptly, noting that dawn was just now breaking. Adding that perhaps she could find a chair for hire and have herself carried down.

  Ignoring Wend's protests that there might be cutpurses about, Charlotte clutched her light embroidered shawl around her and went outside. There she found Vasco, still holding his torch, leaning sleepily against the wall by the front door. Good servant that he was, Vasco insisted on following her, lighting her way with the torch as she made her way down from the heights of the Portas del Sol.

  Still confused and upset as she picked her way downhill, Charlotte was trying to get her thoughts straight, asking herself what she could have done differently, how she could have made this impossible marriage work.

  Rowan had been such a tender lover on shipboard, she had been lulled into a false sense of security. She had been totally unprepared for the change that had come over him on dry land, for on arrival at the inn he had dragged her to bed right after supper every night and leapt upon her almost before she could get into her nightdress, sweeping her protesting form across the inn floor and into the lumpy bed to throw his full weight upon her and maul her—yes, that was the word, she thought resentfully, he mauled her. And last night—!

  Last night he had left marks upon her body that made her grateful for three-quarter sleeves and long skirts. Last night he had not even taken his boots off but had taken her like some whore in a waterfront brothel, and her shapely calves bore bruises which—thank God!—were covered by the silk of her stockings.

  Was there no common meeting ground with Rowan? Must he always leave these wounds upon her heart? Oh, she would gladly forgo all the material things Rowan gave her, she thought wildly, if only he would change, if only . . .

  But she knew in the depths of her that it was not to be. Rowan could not change just as she could not change. They would both always be what they were today—with the rift between them widening, widening, until it became a chasm no one could cross.

  Down through the twisting streets of the Alfama she hurried, with Vasco in attendance behind her. Past tiny patios and private gardens, beneath overhanging balconies and dangling forgotten laundry, sidestepping sleeping dogs and occasional prowling cats, walking sometimes on cobbles and sometimes on steps, for the streets were steep and so narrow that in some places she doubted two stout men could pass abreast.

  Down into the hubbub of the fish market she went, thinking, worrying, wondering what she should do—if indeed there was anything she could do. Her feelings were rubbed raw and smarting and she needed to be made whole again. If there had been even a straw of hope at that moment, she would have snatched at it.

  And then in that crowd of strangers disembarking from a vessel in the harbor she saw a face she had never expected to see again this side of paradise. Tom’s face. It surfaced for an instant and then was lost in the crowd. But Charlotte was running blindly toward the spot where he had been, mindlessly crashing into people as she went. “Desculpe-me, excuse me!” she kept crying as she burst through, thrusting people aside.

  And then her frantic gaze found him again. A tall broad-shouldered man clad in a scarlet wide-cuffed coat encrusted with gold braid and brass buttons. His profile was toward her now as he shouldered his way through the crowd, and she could see that his face was deeply tanned, in sharp contrast to his shock of fair hair that gleamed in the early-morning light. There was the stamp of the adventurer about him—Charlotte did not need to see the serviceable sword that swung against his lean thighs to know that it was there.

  And now he was breaking free of the crowd with that long, familiar stride. Charlotte, enmeshed in a swirl of people, knew that she would never catch him. In another moment he would be gone from view, vanished from sight just as her dreams of him were gone with the early-morning light. . . .

  Of course it couldn’t be Tom. Tom was dead. This had to be just some handsome look-alike, but the resemblance was so striking and the effect on her heart so devastating that . . .

  “Tom!” she wailed despairingly, one peach-gloved hand held out in mute appeal. “Tom Westing!”

  The tall figure swung about, his alert gaze raking the crowd. And there he was, looking at her from that dear familiar face, his green eyes glazing with delighted recognition.

  “Charlotte!”

  The blood left Charlotte s face in a single rush, she felt her knees give way, and even as he sprinted toward her, she crumpled in a billow of apricot silk against a stand of oranges, whose owner, astonished, caught her as she fell.

  24

  When Charlotte came back to consciousness, there was Tom’s face above her, Tom pressing a flask of a burning liquid she identified as brandy to her lips.

  “I don’t believe it,” she whispered. “They told me you were dead!” />
  He shrugged. “Only left for dead.”

  Charlotte swallowed. “How is that possible?” she protested. “Rowan told me he saw your body down below on the rocks, that your neck was broken.”

  “Do I look as if my neck was broken?”

  So Rowan had lied to her even then. . . .

  “I still cannot believe it is really you,” she marveled. “Why, have I changed so much?” he countered, smiling. “Oh, no,” she said hastily. “You haven’t changed at all.” “Nor have you. ” The words were a caress.

  “Haven’t I, Tom?” Charlotte’s gaze on him was wistful. She felt so battered by life. Tom helped her up and she smoothed out her apricot skirts. “Oh, I must have changed,” she sighed.

  “Not to me,” he said in a timbred voice. And it was true. She was lovelier than any woman had a right to be, he thought. So lovely it hurt his heart. “Come, Charlotte.” He attempted to cover that sudden huskiness in his voice with brisk cheerfulness. “If you are restored enough, we can walk about the market and you can tell me how you have fared since last we met.” With what he hoped would seem casual gallantry, he offered her his arm and Charlotte promptly took it.

  Together they strolled through the big open market. Charlotte's fair head was tilted backward, looking up into Tom’s face, and she could not keep the soft light out of her violet eyes. For his part, he stared down at her, enchanted, enmeshed as he had always been by her nearness, by all she was or had ever been. Thus with gazes locked they moved through the busy stalls unseeing, as if caught up in a dream, and those who observed them imagined them to be newlyweds or lovers.

  They had indeed gone back in time. And between them the tension of a sharp physical awareness was building, building. Charlotte had never felt so vibrant, so alive. When a hurrying fishwife dashed by so that Charlotte had to take a quick step toward Tom to avoid being brushed by the tray of fish, and her slim hip came into sudden contact with Tom’s lean thigh, she found herself starting violently at the encounter.

  “Have you breakfasted, Tom?” she asked hastily, to cover that sudden start and the fact that her nerves were strained to the breaking point, for she was hastening to remind herself that while she had remained visible, it was Tom who had disappeared, had let people account him dead, Tom who had neglected to let her know all these years that he was still alive.

  “No, I’ve not breakfasted yet—I was tired of shipboard food.”

  “Ah, then you must try one of these figs—they are from the Algarve, to the south of us.” She gave him a hurt look. “Why did you not let me know you were alive, Tom?” “Because I was told you had married. ” He bit into a fig. “And I had nothing to offer you, Charlotte.”

  Nothing to offer! She looked at him wistfully. “There was yourself,” she pointed out.

  He laughed. “That’s little enough!” He peered down at her keenly. “The man you married, was he the tall fellow I saw you with that night in the garden at Castle Stroud?” She nodded. “His name is Rowan Keynes—we have two children. ” This was not the moment to say. One of them is yours, Tom! “Have you married?”

  “No.” And then, perhaps because he still harbored a little resentment that she had so swiftly forgotten him in another man’s arms, “My circumstances never warranted it.”

  His cool response chilled her a little. She looked away, toward one of the stalls. “Ah, there are some peaches from Alcobaca—you must try one, Tom, they are delicious.”

  She, in her apricot gown with her peach-bloom cheeks, looked more delicious to Tom than any peach, but he bit into an Alcobaca peach to please her. “Have you been happy, Charlotte?” he asked softly.

  She looked away, not meeting his gaze. “Sometimes.” She pushed away thoughts of her miserable life with Rowan. “But what of you, Tom? Where have you been all this time?”

  “In the Bahamas mostly. I slipped back into my father’s trade. It has its ups and downs.”

  His fathers trade of piracy—oh, he must have hated that. Her heart went out to him.

  “Take me somewhere and tell me about it,” she said steadily.

  With alacrity Tom found a nearby inn, and over coffee in a comer of the low-ceilinged common room, Charlotte considered him. Now, on closer inspection, she could see that although his scarlet coat was fashionable, the seam of one cuff was pulling apart, the brave gold braid was a trifle tarnished, and one of the brass buttons was missing. Plainly no woman was looking after him, she thought with a catch in her heart.

  She studied him yearningly as she stirred her coffee, drinking him in. Light poured over him through a small-paned window beside her, showing him to be even broader of shoulder than she remembered, deeper of chest. His eyes, though, were just the same, steady, brilliant as emeralds, and as startling against the bronze of his tan as was the sudden flash of his even white teeth when he smiled. The same casual jauntiness she recalled so well still clung to him. But there was a rakish look to him now, a cynical worldliness that made him seem older than his years. There was a new scar on his cheek—Charlotte did not need to be told it had been made by a sword or cutlass. She resisted the urge to trace its short length with gentle fingers.

  "How did you come by your scar, Tom?”

  He shrugged. "I think I told you I was never cut out for the trade, Charlotte. We were cruising Bahamian waters and having indifferent luck when we chanced on a small merchantman foundering off the eastern coast of Cat Island. We got her people and her cargo aboard before she sank, and by nightfall our crew was drunk on stolen rum. One of the passengers we'd rescued was a beautiful girl. ” Charlotte felt a twinge of jealousy go through her. "Despite our captain s promise to ransom her unharmed, around midnight our first mate”—his somber voice recalled the size of that great hulking brute—"decided to take her to his bed. ” His jaw tightened. "By force. I stopped him—with six inches of steel through his heart. But not before he raked me with his knife.”

  "What happened to the girl?” wondered Charlotte.

  "I was guarding her when a storm came up in the night. As I said, our crew was dead drunk, and we broke up on a reef off Eleuthera. Everybody drowned—it was a miracle that the girl and I got through.” Not quite a miracle—he could remember nearly drowning himself as he plowed through crashing waves dragging her senseless form with him. He could remember sagging down with her, battered and half-dead, upon the wet sand of a strange beach . . . he could remember the gold he found the next morning, washed ashore in a wooden box that had broken open and deposited gleaming coins across the sand. And that was the gold that had brought him to England, and now had brought him here. . . .

  But Charlotte was interested only in the girl, alone with Tom in a tropical paradise.

  "This girl you saved, was she . . . grateful, Tom?” she asked ironically.

  Tom gave her an amused look. "Not very. Mistress Prudence was a spoiled schoolgirl returning to Spanish

  Town, Jamaica, where her father was a planter. She blamed me for everything—the storm, the sea, the breakup of both ships.” He began to laugh. “I managed to salvage food from the wreck, and I rigged up a boat of sorts from the debris that washed ashore and sailed us to a port where I could send her back to her father. ” Some of those golden coins had gone to that. . . . “And I realized then that the trade wasn't for me, never had been. So I didn't go back.”

  He hadn't cared about the girl after all! Charlotte felt unreasonably heartened.

  “Out of the trade you may be.” She smiled. “But with that scar, Tom, you still look like a brigand!”

  His answer was flippant. “Call me, rather, an opportunist.''

  No . . . Charlotte had married one of those. And now she was wiser about men. This dangerous-looking fellow across from her wasn't that. She cocked her head at him. “Perhaps a rake,” she suggested humorously.

  Tom laughed. A laugh that had lost its bitter tinge, gone suddenly young and carefree. Just as his heart had rebounded with joy on seeing her again.

  She
leaned toward him, serious again. “But I do not understand how you escaped, Tom. I saw Russ kick you over the edge of the crag as you lay unconscious on the rim.”

  He watched her face go white as he told her how he had lain on a ledge some twenty feet below the rim, how he had shouted himself hoarse, how he had weakened, how he had despaired of ever escaping the trap into which he had fallen.

  “Oh, Tom!” Charlotte's voice came in a soft sorrowful rush. “You are telling me I left you to your death!”

  “Not you,” he said quickly, his big hand closing warmly over hers. “For you didn't know.” She looked so shaken that he was afraid she might faint.

  As the truth of what had happened that night on Kenlock Crag surged over Charlotte, the depths of the trap into which she herself had fallen appalled her. Rowan had lied to her, maneuvered her every step of the way. “Arranger” that he was, he had arranged that she would fall willingly into his arms. In that moment she hated herself for being such a blind fool, a pawn of his masterly game—and a wave of impotent fury at Rowan for his callous deception engulfed her.

  But to Tom, even as he worried over the effect all of this was having on Charlotte, this was a moment of triumph. It had wounded him deeply that she would so soon forget, but now he knew why she had so quickly wed. They had deceived her into thinking him dead! His lady had not forgotten him after all. The thought floated by on bright wings. It was easy now to tell her about the days when he had not cared what happened to him, about the long nights at sea without her. Listening, swept up by him, by his nearness, by the love she had always borne him, Charlotte tried to force herself to remember that she had another life now which did not include Tom—and found she could not. Tom was her very life.

  She moistened her lips, tried to control the emotions that surged through her.

  “What brings you to Portugal, Tom?”