Lisbon

by Valerie Sherwood

  Cassandra was dragged out into a scene of terror. Up ahead, another building had collapsed and in the melee two carts and a large dray had collided. The horses’ lines were snarled, they were neighing and kicking, trying to free themselves, their drivers were howling at each other. People were running about frantically.

  And directly in front of her were, now nervous and dancing as the seconds tried to quiet them, the mounts that carried the two young men who had fought and died for her this day. She saw again their bodies.

  Cassandra felt a great shudder go through her. Her hand sought the front of her bodice and came away wet. The hackney’s overturn had caused her wound to start bleeding again.

  “Here!” cried someone. “This poor young girl’s been hurt by the earthquake!”

  “No,” gasped Cassandra. “No.”

  But it was useless to protest. She was promptly seized by well-meaning hands and taken to lean against the door of a chandler’s shop. Through the doorway she could see that the candles were rolling all over the floor, and at her feet an elderly flower vendor was scrabbling about the cobbles trying to retrieve her blooms and wailing as they were stepped on by flying feet.

  They got the hackney coach righted and Cassandra back inside and drove on. But chimneys all over town had come tumbling down with the sharp violent shake that had visited London, and here and there houses had collapsed, showering bricks and falling timbers into the street. The driver had to choose his path carefully, and sometimes turn back when he saw the way was blocked.

  They were a long time getting home to Grosvenor Square.

  From the window where he had been watching for her, Robbie saw Cassandra being helped from the hackney by the solicitous driver. He saw the blood on her dress.

  He had never moved so fast. He was downstairs and out into the street, receiving Cassandra from the beleaguered hackney driver, who said in a tired voice, “The young mistress had not enough coins to pay me."

  Robbie had enough coins to pay him. He scooped Cassandra up in his arms and carried her, half-fainting, into the house.

  “We were wondering what had happened to you," he said. “You were hurt in the earthquake?"

  “No," she said. “Oh, Robbie, no!" And as he, without asking whether he might, ripped open the front of her white velvet bodice to see to her wound, Cassandra, having left her modesty somewhere else, choked out the whole terrible story.

  “ Tis not so deep a wound," he said with satisfaction. “And twill teach you," he added on a sterner note, “not to step between men who are shooting at each other."

  “Oh, Robbie." The woeful face that looked up at him had eyes abrim with tears. “I only wish I could have taken all three shots. And then they'd all be alive."

  All but you, thought Robbie, and felt a lump in his throat. He swallowed. “Now to dress that wound," he growled, and bellowed for Cook. She had been hiding beneath the kitchen table in case the house was shaken again, but she came promptly and gaped at the sight of Cassandra leaning back on a velvet sofa in broad daylight wearing a ball gown and with her midriff bare where Robbie had cut away the fabric with his knife—and that midriff displaying a bleeding gash.

  “ 'Tis not so bad as it looks," Robbie admonished her, for he did not want Cook fainting on his hands. “Bring water and clean linen. I'm an expert at binding wounds," he told Cassandra. “Learned it in battle. Never expected to be binding up a bullet wound for a sixteen-year-old girl, though.’’

  “Seventeen,” corrected Cassandra. “Oh, Robbie, what am I going to do? I’m responsible for their deaths!”

  “You’ll go on as before,” he said crisply. “ ’Twas the lads who chose to fight. You but attempted to stop them.” His gaze on her was pitying. Life had crowded in on her—too fast, too young. She wasn’t able to adjust to it yet, all the excitement and triumphs and trouble her extraordinary beauty was going to bring her. She hadn’t adjusted yet to the fact that for beauty like hers men would always spatter their blood upon the grass.

  He wondered if he should tell her that this morning Rowan Keynes had come to him and said he had need of gold for a dowry and accepted his offer to buy Aldershot Grange. He had given Rowan a draft on his bank and the deed was signed and in his pocket.

  He did tell her that Rowan had left the house just before the earthquake to take her sister to the church “to get her married.”

  “Yes, I knew,” she told him. “Phoebe told me last night.” Rut she could not concentrate on Phoebe’s problems —not today. “I can’t stay here, Robbie, not the way things will be. I am sure to be turned away from both Tony’s funeral and Lance’s—and yet how in good conscience can I not go? I would wear black for them both, but I have no black clothes and I am sure my father would refuse to let me buy black weeds for a man to whom I was never officially betrothed and another to whom I was nothing at all.”

  “He would be right. You should not go about in mourning,” said Robbie sharply.

  Cassandra was not even listening. “And that spiteful Lady Whatever-her-name-is—the one who was Katherine Talybont—asked me if I did not bring the earthquake that struck as I arrived in London. I heard her say my father’s arrival brought on the one that struck a month later. She is sure to tell all who will listen that it was my wickedness in bringing on this duel that caused the earth to shake and the houses in London to fall!” Her voice rose to a wail. “And my father shut me up for over a year because he believed I was running away. When he learns of this scandal, he will shut me up in some dark hole forever!” Robbie had been about to pooh-pooh anything Lady What’s-her-name might have to say, but her last remark gave him pause. Rowan was a stern father. Who knew what he might do when he learned of this escapade?

  A wonderful new thought occurred to Robbie. He turned and bellowed for Cook, who came running.

  “This wound is worse than I thought,” he said. “The wench needs a doctor. And she cannot go to him half-dressed. Indeed, she may wish to change her clothes before she returns, firing me a box, woman, a large one! And then scurry out and find me a hackney coach and bring it here to the front door.”

  Cook blanched but hurried back with a large box.

  “I thought you said—” began Cassandra.

  “Hush. Pay no mind to what I say,” said Robbie. “Stay where you are and be quiet. I’ll be right back.” He raced upstairs and began stuffing Cassandra’s things into the box. She had a bag, and he swept the contents of her dressing table into it. With her cloak over his arm and lugging the box, the bag and a hat he had found, he reached the downstairs.

  By now Cook was back with the hackney coach, and expostulating with Robbie. “But Mistress Cassandra won’t need all those things! You aren’t taking her to hospital, are you? For her father—”

  “Quiet, woman!” roared Robbie. “How do I know what a young wench will want? ’Tis important she not be upset! Now, put these things into the hack. ” While she did so, he quickly penned a note and left it for Rowan in a conspicuous place on his desk.

  Cassandra herself he lifted in, depositing his cherished bundle on the seat beside him, where he could steady her.

  As the hackney coach took off, to the accompaniment of a small aftershock of the quake that made the driver up topside curse, Robbie said, “ ’Tis not your wound that worries me, lass. ’Tis your future.”

  “I have no future,” sighed Cassandra. “Lance would have done me a favor if he’d aimed a little higher and struck my heart." There were tears in her voice. “Oh, if only I could leave London, Robbie. If only I could go home—back to Aldershot Grange, where I belong. ”

  She had unwittingly given him the perfect opening. He took a deep breath.

  “And so you can, lass, and ’tis I who will take you there. You need never see any of them again. I will take you home to Aldershot Grange, for I bought it this morning—it now belongs to me.”

  Cassandra gave him a dazed look. “You bought Aldershot Grange?”

  “Aye, lass. Your father neede
d a fat sum of gold for a dowry.”

  So scheming little Phoebe had got her way. Last night she had said ruthlessly she would have both their dowries, and now it had come to pass. Oh, but what did it matter? Her own life was over. Two good men lay dead on her account.

  “But so that your father will not pursue me with powder and shot and lay me out dead on my own hearth, you must marry me, lass. We’ll fly away to Scotland and be wed at Gretna Green!”

  Cassandra gave him a hopeless look. “Oh, Robbie, dear Robbie, I do love you, but not . . . not in that way.”

  “Nor need you.” His voice was husky. “I do not ask you to be a true wife to me, little Cassandra. I only ask that I may take care of you and shelter you from harm. ”

  Aldershot Grange, the home of her childhood. ... A vision of the silvery Derwent Water with the trees garlanded in mist and the birds singing softly came to Cassandra—a brighter, happier life. The appeal was irresistible.

  “Then on those terms I’ll marry you, Robbie,” she choked. The Scot s chest expanded and his voice deepened. “I promise you, lass, that you’ll never be sorry.”

  So another man had promised Cassandra’s mother in much the same words when he spirited her away to Gretna.

  But this was different. Robbie Dunlawton, honest Scot that he was, meant every word he said. He wondered for a grim moment what Rowan Keynes would think when he opened Robbie s letter, written a little prematurely, to be sure, but now to come true:

  I am off with your daughter to Scotland, there to be wed. And on that day I will settle on her Aldershot Grange. I know I have not your blessing, nor do I expect it. If you choose to come after me, I will meet you with swords or pistols at the place of your choice. In any event, Cassandra will have the home that she loves.

  He had signed it in very large letters: Robert Dunlawton, Gentleman.

  “He might just as well have said, In any event, Cassandra will be free of you,’ ” mused Rowan Keynes when he read the letter. “For once she became a widow—should I follow Dunlawton to Scotland and make her a widow—I would have small control of her. ” He grimaced. His vision had been clouded by Cassandra’s myriad of young suitors— that the graying Scot should be one of them had entirely escaped him.

  He decided not to pursue the fleeing pair to Scotland. It seemed he had lost two daughters this day—both to men he would not himself have chosen for them. That, it seemed, was the way of the world. . . .

  But Cassandra and her unlikely suitor did not reach Gretna unscathed. They had almost reached Kendal when a wooden bridge over a small tributary stream made into a roaring torrent by the spring runoff collapsed beneath them, dumping them and their mounts into the icy waters. Cassandra’s wound was now healed enough that it caused her no trouble, but her unwieldy skirts did, and she would have drowned but that Robbie flailed through the flood to snatch at her skirts just as they would have dragged her under, and so pulled her to safety.

  They were both chilled to the bone as they shook out their wet clothes and found their mounts, which were shaking themselves off, having found downstream a bank up which to clamber. Cassandra bore no scars of the misadventure, but Robbie developed a hacking cough that deepened as they reached the Scottish border.

  Cassandra, looking ever southward, for she feared pursuit by her father, was impatient to be wed and thus removed from his domination.

  And so, like her mother before her, she spoke the vows of a loveless marriage before a blacksmith’s anvil at Gretna Green.

  30

  Aldershot Grange

  On the pretext that she needed to shop for clothes, Cassandra persuaded Robbie to spend three nights in Carlisle—actually, she hoped the rest would lend him strength, and it did seem to help.

  It was night when at last they reached Aldershot Grange and sounded the great iron knocker.

  It was Livesay, clad in a long nightshirt with a dishlike candleholder in his hand, who answered the door, peering out at them. At the sight of Cassandra, her hair covered by a large silk scarf against the damp, the color of her eyes made indeterminate by the wavering light, he fell back, pale.

  “Mistress Charlotte!” he gasped.

  “I know, I do look like her, Livesay,” the vision greeted him ruefully. “But I’m Cassandra.”

  “Oh, Mistress Cassandra.” Livesay sounded shaken but relieved.

  “Robbie, this is Livesay, who has been our butler forever. Livesay, you see before you my new husband and the new owner of Aldershot Grange—Robert Dunlawton. ”

  “No, you are the owner,” Robbie corrected her in a hoarse voice. “Remember, I have this day made the deed over to you.”

  Livesay looked stunned. He collected his wits. “Wend is with us again, Mistress Cassandra—but spending the night in Cat Bells at the moment.”

  “Is she?” Cassandra was overjoyed. “Oh, how is she, Livesay?”

  “She’s well.” He hesitated. “But much has happened to Wend since you’ve gone. She married and left us, you know. ”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “And then he left her after the child was born dead. She worked somewhere else for a while, but last month she came back to us.”

  “Then it’s lucky we are. I think we’ll need a fire made, Livesay, for I don’t like the sound of my husband’s cough. ” Nor did the doctor, when he was called at the end of the week. He proffered various potions and told Cassandra to apply poultices to Robbie’s chest, but nothing did any good. She and Wend both fussed over him, but any fool could see that his condition was worsening. And as time went by, his cheeks were no longer merely pink but quite flushed, although on the whole his skin seemed papery and pale. He lost weight all through that summer and autumn, and it was a mere shadow of his former self who celebrated, with all the heartiness he could muster, the Twelve Days of Christmas at Aldershot Grange.

  “He will not make another Christmas,” the doctor told Cassandra solemnly.

  “Oh, no, don’t say it,” said Cassandra brokenly. And she thought. Another death on conscience. For Robbie wore himself out trying to save me from the torrent and was exhausted and shivering when he pulled me out upon the bank. If he dies, it will be my fault. She did not tell the doctor that. Instead she went wearily off to plump Robbie’s pillows and try to make him eat some of the broth Cook had sent up to him.

  Spring came with a shower of blue heather matching the blue of the sky between the clouds, for it was a wet, rainy spring that brought out the blossoms and finished off the ill.

  One day Robbie called her to his bedside. “It’s sorry I am to leave you, lass,” he told her softly. “But leave you I must—and soon. Send Livesay to me. I'll make my own arrangements and spare you that, at least.”

  He died the next Sunday and was buried with the rain pattering down like tears upon his coffin and upon the old worn rocks of this ancient land. He had arranged for his own funeral service, and at the end was sung a Scottish Lowland song that he had instructed Livesay to say was ‘just for her, to tell her what she means to me.

  Cassandra listened as a sweet singer from Buttermere sang out:

  And I will love thee still, my dear,

  Till all the seas gang dry.

  She listened and her tears mingled with the rain that ran down her face.

  In all her life she would never find another man like Robbie, who had asked nothing of her, nothing. . . .

  She grieved for him, deep in her heart, for she had loved him like a father. And wore for him the widow's weeds she d been denied wearing for those she might have wed.

  ‘‘Will you go back to London now?” Wend asked her wistfully when the funeral was over.

  She was surprised at Cassandra's shiver, at her harsh, “"I'll never go back, never!" Indeed her memories of what had happened there were all too green.

  Men had died of loving her. She would allow no man to love her—ever again. But only to Wend did she confide all this.

  For a long time Cassandra tried to lose herself in
work. In recent years Rowan had let the house and outbuildings run down, and Robbie had left her a little money. For months she concerned herself with repairs to masonry and stonework and a new roof. But that could not last forever. Still, Aldershot Grange was a working estate; Robbie had planned to raise sheep here. Very well, she would raise sheep. The green-eyed blonde beauty became a familiar figure at livestock markets and fairs. She hired a shepherd. But it didn't fill her life.

  The big cream-colored Persian cat helped.. She found the cat limping on one of her long restless walks. It had run a thorn into its paw and was very thin, with burrs matted into its shabby tangled coat. She coaxed the cat home, got Wend to hold her while she extricated the thorn, very carefully removed the burrs and combed and fed the cat—now named Clover—to purring beauty. Sometimes, Wend thought whimsically, looking at the pair of them as Cassandra sat in the window seat looking out at the setting sun with the last rays touching her own pale blonde hair while she stroked the big cream cat on her lap, they looked as if they were blood relations—pale blonde woman and pale blonde cat.

  The horse helped too. A cream-colored mare she had named Meg, who took her on long wild rides through the low valleys and into the lofty fells up past Fox Elve, and gallops along the lake down toward Buttermere and Cat Bells.

  Sometimes she rode up past Castle Stroud, which was a beehive of activity, for the place had been sold and the new owner’s agent had a crew of plasterers and carpenters and stonemasons busy restoring it to its former beauty.

  And sometimes those gallops led her past neighboring Blade’s End, an ancient holding named for a formidable warrior who was reputed—like Richard the Lion Hearted —to have hacked men and horses in half with a single stroke on the field of battle, and which was now dominated by a beautifully proportioned dwelling which had been built in the Old Queen’s time in the last century. Blade’s End was occupied now, after being long vacant.