Oh, but you do, she thought, although in her exhaustion she was now too wise to say it. You hate me for something that happened long ago and that neither of us can ever change. You love me and yet you hate me too, and that hatred washes over you in waves when 1 least expect it. .. .
And yet last night he had been a tender lover, wooing her with his body as if it were a song of love.
Hurt and confused, she turned her head away from him. “I am very tired, Rowan. ” She moved restively as his lips now found her stomach, moved across it. 1 am tired of your incomprehensible moods, your sudden angers. If it is going to be like this between us, I wish you had left me in England. She did not say any of this, of course—it would only bring on another explosion and recriminations and then perhaps her bruised body must endure another bout of frenzied lovemaking. “Very tired,” she murmured. “I want only to be allowed to go to sleep. ”
He straightened up at her tone, all too aware that he had been rebuffed.
“You are a coldhearted wench,” he said bitterly, flinging away from her.
She heard him cross the room, banging the door to her bedchamber shut behind him. She waited tensely but he did not return. She relaxed as she heard from below a crash as the front door slammed behind him.
Her husband, having had what he wanted from her, had gone out to enjoy the night life of Lisbon without her, Charlotte thought bitterly. She tossed and turned and at last fell into a heavy exhausted sleep—from which Rowan had shaken her awake and told her to dress, that they would be off to Evora within the hour.
Now beside her she felt Wend's slight shiver. “I wish we hadn’t come with him to this foreign place,” Wend muttered. “I wish we had stayed back home at Aldershot Grange.”
“Oh, but how could we stay, Wend? What excuse could I possibly have given, when Rowan came north specifically to take me to Portugal?”
“He didn’t come north to do that,” Wend objected doggedly. “He met Livesay on the road when he was riding in and told him that he planned to stay at Aldershot Grange a month and then go back to London.”
Charlotte’s breath caught. “Did Livesay tell you this, Wend?” Livesay was the butler at Aldershot Grange.
“Yes. I thought he told you too.”
“No, he didn’t.” Charlotte’s mind was racing. What had happened to make Rowan suddenly change his mind?
Abruptly she remembered something that had not seemed odd at all at the time. She had been looking out the window and had seen Rowan riding toward the house in the distance. And then, just as she was about to turn away, intending to change from the housedress she was wearing into something more fashionable in which to greet the husband she had not seen for all of six months, she had seen another man riding hard over the brow of the hill on a lathered horse—she could see the foam even at that distance. She had recognized the rider as old Conway from Carlisle, a man who occasionally transacted business for Rowan. The two of them had talked for some time and then Rowan had spurred his mount toward the house and almost collided with his wife in the doorway, ordering her brusquely to pack for Portugal. And looking at her with inexpressible anger.
What had happened between the time he had spoken to Livesay and the time he had burst into the hallway of Aldershot Grange without even a greeting, demanding that she pack at once?Could old Conway on his lathered horse have been racing to tell Rowan something? And if so, what?
What had happened to make him suddenly decide to take her abroad? All at once it seemed to Charlotte of major importance that she find out. There had been something so threatening in Rowan’s manner toward her at dinner tonight. And at times this week—alternating with periods of, for him, unusual tenderness—he had glowered at her for no reason at all and she had had the eerie feeling that he was about to burst out with some unwarranted accusation. . . . What could it be?
What did she really mean to Rowan? she asked herself, troubled. Sometimes, when he was on good behavior, she had even been persuaded that he loved her. Or had he married her only for her lissome body that had caught his fancy, her face that caused men to catch their breath and turn and watch her wherever she went? Rowan collected beautiful things . . . and sometimes, in those uncontrollable rages of his, he smashed them beyond repair.
Her husband was a formidable and ofttimes frightening man.
She turned now to Wend and sighed. “I’ll never be able to go back to sleep now, and I don’t feel hungry. ” This to ward off Wend, who, having been brought up on near starvation, thought food was the answer to everything. “I think I’ll walk down to the fish market. It should be crowded at this hour.”
“What, walk alone?” Wend was scandalized. “You’ll be set upon by cutpurses!”
“No, I won’t. Dawn is breaking now, the city is waking up. And perhaps I’ll find a chair and have myself carried down to the waterfront.”
Wend looked alarmed. “Wait till I dress! I’ll come with you. ”
“No need. Go back to bed, Wend. You need sleep too.”
She left Wend frowning over the guttering candle she had brought downstairs with her and went out again, clutching a light embroidered shawl around her slim shoulders.
Outside she found Vasco, the servant with the torch, still leaning sleepily against the wall beside the front door. Although he spoke fair English, he chose not to understand, and she found she could not wave him away. Stubbornly he insisted on coming with her, lighting her way with the torch, and it occurred to her that perhaps Wend was right, there might be cutpurses abroad in the Lisbon night.
There was no chair to be found.
Coming down from the heights of the Portas del Sol with the high ramparts of the Castelo de São Jorge looming above her, there was a softness in the morning air that reminded Charlotte vividly of her childhood in the Scillies, those fortunate sunny isles off the southern coast of England some twenty-five miles from Land’s End. She was suddenly achingly homesick for her life there and for her mother, frail charming Cymbeline, who had seemed to move in grace and laughter through the open-windowed low granite house she had bought just outside Hugh Town on St. Mary’s Isle a year after her husband s accidental death.
Charlotte passed the twelfth-century Romanesque cathedral and realized that she was now traversing the steep twisting streets of the Alfama, where she had strolled with Rowan and Lord Claypool yesterday. And here again were those ever-present sounds of her childhood, the strident voices of the seabirds piercing the morning air, the winged whir of kittiwakes and gannets and cormorants and puffins and gulls swooping above her. Even the steep terrain brought back the memory of clambering over the rocks of the Scillies.
But that life was gone now, gone forever. It had been replaced long since by life with unpredictable Rowan, who rose from his bed by night to pace restlessly. She could hear him walking back and forth in the next room.
Why? she asked herself bluntly. It was a question she would never dare to ask Rowan. They were married but they had never really been close. It was like a truce between them, this marriage. It always had been. With Rowan watching her with keen burning eyes across the breakfast table as if to penetrate into her mind and discover if she had been unfaithful to him in her dreams.
As indeed she had. The thought no longer brought a blush to Charlotte’s cheeks, for theirs was a marriage not made in heaven, but, she sometimes thought, designed in hell.
Still, they had endured together thus far—couples of their class seldom divorced—even though Rowan could not help knowing that she had never loved him, and he had found mistresses, so many of them, for gossip about his wild and wastrel ways in London had a way of reaching even into far-off Cumberland. Charlotte had turned a deaf ear. She was never completely comfortable in Rowan’s presence, so it was good to have him away from her, although she was always careful to mask her feelings and to play the devoted wife whenever he returned.
The salt air that blew from the Atlantic up the mouth of the Tagus River rippled Charlotte’s blonde h
air—that golden hair in which Rowan had seemed to take such delight early in their marriage, never allowing her to cut so much as a wisp of it. Now she brushed it back away from her face with an expensive embroidered peach kid glove, for Rowan, although he neglected her, lavished money unstintingly on her wardrobe.
Concentrating on keeping her footing on this dim narrow balconied street, so steep it seemed to be made up mainly of steps that wound down through the Alfama toward the waterfront, Charlotte puzzled, trying to sort it all out.
Why had Rowan’s lovemaking, which had been careless and desultory in this last year before their departure from England, almost condescending at times, suddenly become so fierce? That first night in Lisbon he had taken her in his arms as if he would destroy her, bombarding her with a passion that left her weak and bruised and shaken.
On the ship he had not been like that. Their embarkation had wrought a marvelous change in him. He had seemed lighthearted, as if some great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. And his lovemaking had again been tender and considerate.
When they were at last settled into their house in the Portas del Sol, his lovemaking had become totally unpredictable—a tender lover one night, a bruising brute the next. It was not love, and certainly not affection that drove Rowan, but something else, something that made him cry out in his sleep, angry indistinguishable words that degenerated into restless muttering. Something sinister. And now she felt that something like a prickling in her spine as she held up her skirts to avoid a heavy flowerpot.
It was that prickling of dread that had driven her out in the dawn to think.
Now, in the tortuous twisting of the narrow alleyway, a cat, one of the typical striped tabbies that abounded in Lisbon, darted beneath Charlotte’s feet and dashed away with a yowl as she gave a lurch to avoid stepping on it. Now it crouched on the stone steps nearby, looking up at her, its knowing green eyes in its long pointed face flickering in the torchlight. From a distance came the screeching sound of caterwauling cats making love and perhaps war, and the striped tabby sat up alertly.
‘Puss,” murmured Charlotte ruefully, “I hope your lover doesn’t treat you like that.”
As if finding the sound unbearable, the cat plunged down the steps and then began to walk more decorously, swishing its tail. Charlotte watched it.
Who knew what the cat had been through the night before? Maybe, like her, the cat needed to get away and try to puzzle out life. Certainly she had needed to get away this morning, to clear her head, for her body was still aching from Rowan s punishing style of lovemaking of the night before.
She passed a stone fountain tiled in blue-and-white azulejos depicting garden scenes. Beside it two heavyset women—stolid early risers in the pale Portuguese dawn— were filling water jugs. Half-dressed ragged children tugged at their skirts, and cats sidled around them, rubbing against their substantial legs. Charlotte was tempted to sit on the edge of the fountain and view this little panorama of life in an exotic city.
But she decided against it. His torch extinguished now in daylight, Vasco still lounged along behind her, though walking now at a respectful distance. Suppose he took it upon himself to clear these people away for the wealthy senhora? She could not chance it, she decided ruefully, and moved on toward the busy waterfront.
Ah, this was just what she needed—a brisk uncaring crowd and healthy pandemonium. Around her in the fish market, weathered-looking fishermen were selling their catch to the olive-skinned varinas, the fishwives who would pile them in big flat baskets and hawk them lustily throughout the awakening city. How their wide black skirts swished over the cobbles, what brilliant smiles they flashed at their customers as the gold loops bobbed in their ears and the dripping fish they carried in those flat baskets on their heads trickled down to splash on a golden necklace or a cross worn between ample breasts. Here among the varinas and the men in their cross-stitched red shirts, unnoticed in the hubbub, she would try to face her problems and understand at last why her husband made love to her as if he were scourging her.
From the waterfront fish market as she wandered through it, the water glistened and white-winged gulls were turned to pink or lavender in the early-morning sky. Myriad craft were moored in the harbor—rakish red and brown fishing smacks, beautiful barges with lateen sails, called every kind of sailing ship seemed to be represented. One big potbellied merchantman caught her eye, for it flew the English flag. The ship’s passengers were just then disembarking, and a wave of homesickness drew Charlotte toward them.
Suddenly in that crowd she was startled to see a familiar face—a man’s face, a strong face, bronzed and weathered, with hair so blond it gleamed Viking-white in the pale breaking sunlight. The face was gone almost before she glimpsed it, lost in a sea of disembarking passengers, but the momentary sight of it had caused her heart to lurch violently in her chest. For that was a face she had thought never to see again this side of paradise. And just that one brief glimpse of it had sent her blood racing to old wild rhythms and sent a hope akin to panic skittering throughout her woman’s body.
For the man she had just glimpsed—and surely she must be mistaken, for he was long dead—had meant more to Charlotte Vayle than anyone else in this world. Her love for him was deep and tormenting and had haunted her to this day. Indeed, just the sight of a man who only looked like him brought back to tantalizing life the memory of green eyes that had smiled into hers, of longfingered hands that had caressed her, of lips that had melted tenderly against her own.
It was—no, it couldn’t possibly be Tom Westing!
But even in her disbelief, Charlotte found herself running mindlessly forward, for she must know, she must know.
Blindly she bumped into a cart and barked her shins. She scarcely noticed the pain. A black-skirted varina carrying a load of fish in a basket on her head swore at her as she stumbled away from the cart, fighting her way toward the disembarking passengers.
For the sight of the blond stranger—and stranger he must certainly be—had brought back to Charlotte a vivid searing past that she had tried so desperately to forget. She was swept into a maelstrom of memory of a love that had had its tender beginnings among the crags and lakes of Cumberland just below the Scottish border and had flared into disaster in the golden summer of 1732.
Table of Contents
Book 1 Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
chapter 26
Book 11 Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Book 111 Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Author's Note
2
Cumberland, England, Summer 1730
Charlotte Vayle would never in her life forget the moment she had first laid eyes on Tom Westing. It had actually been, she later supposed in retrospect, the day she had first realized what it could really be like between a man and a woman, the day she had first given serious thought to having a man s warm arms enfold her naked body and let his fervor transport her to another world and joys undreamt of. . . . But that was later. At the time, her girlish embarrassment had known no bounds.
Charlotte was fifteen—a thin and gangling fifteen with wide expressive eyes that seemed too large for her delicate heart-shaped face. She and Wend, the new serving girl (a feckless time-waster, according to Cook), had strayed from the kitchen and gone idly looking
for birds’ nests. They were walking barefoot (to save their worn shoes) over warm stones and soft grasses, making their way down from Friar s Crag, a low wooded promontory that rose above the eastern shore of the glistening expanse of that ancient glacial lake men called the Derwent Water. And Wend had been telling Charlotte how at home—waving vaguely toward the countryside in the direction of the Greta— they always hung withered birch twigs over the door to keep out witches.
Although she had been brought up among the dolmens and standing stones of the far-off Scillies, Charlotte had no real belief in witches, and had laughed.
‘Are you troubled with so many then?” she asked.
And Wend, who was two years older, big-boned and surefooted, had turned with a sniff. “You never know what lies in store,” she warned. “That’s what my ma always says!”
That had certainly been true of her own life thus far, Charlotte had felt like saying. If she had known back in the Scillies what waited for her in the north of England, she would have wept! Watching Wend's browned muscular bare legs move out ahead, Charlotte could not help thinking whimsically that from the condition of their clothes, none would have guessed that Charlotte was ostensibly the mistress and Wend the maid. On the whole, red-haired Wend was the better-dressed, for Charlotte, childishly small for her age when she had first come to Cumberland three years before, had shot up like a weed this past year and her present clothing, for all its good linen cloth and fine stitching, was much let out and had long since gone threadbare. The contrast was painful, for Wend’s cheap petticoat beneath her tucked-up skirt was of a flaunting red color and practically new (bought with her first wages), while Charlotte’s ragged skirts, once sky-blue above her mended white petticoat, had faded from many washings down to an indeterminate bluish gray.
Here at the roof of England, where long-forgotten volcanoes slumbered, their hard green slates scarred by frost and ice, was the great central massif of the Lake District, rising majestically just south of the pleasant Vale of Carlisle. Around the silvery waters of the lake the tops of cathedrallike mountains disappeared mysteriously into the mist on this day of drifting clouds that made a shifting pattern of shadows across the storied hills. It was a magical day and there was a kind of solemn stillness about it, as if all the world were waiting for some great message to roll sonorously down from the peaks.
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