"Didn’t find them none too soon!’’ Wend chuckled, holding up a pink taffeta apron with an admiring "Look at this!”
Charlotte, rummaging delightedly in this treasure trove, flung it over Wend's shoulder, “You can have the apron, Wend.” And stopped as she found a little broken fan bearing a painted scene of clouds and cupids. Her mother’s fan, beyond a doubt, for her mother had always loved cupids. Charlotte’s eyes misted with tears as she held the little fan against her cheek. She carried it downstairs atop a pile of lavender-scented clothing, and got it out and looked at it whenever she felt downhearted, for somehow that little broken fan seemed to bring her mother—and that lost life of the Scillies—closer to her.
The items from the trunk kept Charlotte from going about in tatters, but they were hopelessly unfashionable with their great puffed sleeves, and Charlotte, who was taller than her tiny mother, found herself promptly outgrowing them—and eventually even they grew threadbare. When she asked her uncle if she might not be allowed some portion of her inheritance to purchase new clothes, he barked that his sister Cymbeline had had many debts of which Charlotte knew nothing and the estate had barely been able to pay them.
Charlotte doubted that last, but she was in no position to find out—she would simply have to wait until she came of age.
Or married.
The latter seemed hopelessly far away.
And then Wend—laughing, joking, superstitious Wend— had come into her life, hired to replace old Glynis in the kitchen. Wend was noisy and good-natured and she came like a bright spirit into this new world of the pale unhappy child from the Scillies. Lonely and lost and sure that she would never become accustomed to life amid these forbidding northern crags, Charlotte was forever persuading Wend—who didn’t need much prodding—to slip away with her and go exploring some new or seldom-trodden path.
As for instance today, when they had come upon the unrepentant lovers lying in the sunken grave. . . .
The two girls had been out for a long time and they made their way back into the house stealthily and by different routes—Wend because she hoped Cook might not have noticed her absence, Charlotte because she had spotted a strange horse tethered near the house and wondered who their caller might be.
She was not long in finding out. A sharp-featured swarthy gentleman was lounging on a long wooden bench in the hall as if stationed there to prevent anyone coming in from the outside without his seeing them.
“Where is Mistress Charlotte, wench?” he demanded of Charlotte in a harsh impatient voice as she came in. “I’ve been waiting for her these past two hours.”
Humiliated that he should consider her a servant, Charlotte came to a halt before him and rose to her full— though not very great—heightserving. "I am Charlotte Vayle,” she announced menacingly, the effect somewhat marred by her sudden realization that there was a new long rent in her skirt and hastily trying to cover it.
Startled or no, the sharp-featured gentleman came swiftly to his feet. “Your pardon, Mistress Charlotte,” he said smoothly. “It is so dark in this hall ...”
“That you took me for a wench, ” supplied Charlotte bitterly.
“Oh, never that!” He swept her a gallant bow. “Arthur Bodine, at your service.” He straightened up and Charlotte’s mouth tightened mutinously as a pair of cynical brown eyes raked up and down her thin still-childish figure.
He is criticizing my clothes! she thought hotly, her fingers clutching the worn faded material of her torn skirt.
But it seemed that was not precisely what Arthur Bodine had in mind.
Over supper, which was served in haste in the dusty long dining room—Mr. Bodine having refused to take so much as a bite until the lady of the house was home—he told her that he was “looking in on her” at the behest of her uncle in London.
“Uncle Russ is too busy to come north this year?” Charlotte guessed, giving her caller a steady look.
“That’s right,” Bodine agreed affably. He studied her small face, looking peaked and pale beneath the starched ruffled cotton cap that completely hid her luxuriant blonde hair, with a sigh. “Not for a couple of years, I imagine.” He sighed again, peering at her.
“Why? Why did he say that?” Charlotte demanded fiercely of Wend when Arthur Bodine had departed. “How could he know what Uncle Russ would do?” For there had been something in Bodine’s manner that alarmed and upset her, something she could not quite put her finger on.
Wend, who had served the hasty supper, cast a thoughtful glance at the door through which Arthur Bodine had departed.
“He was looking at you as if you were a horse he wanted to buy,” she mused shrewdly.
Charlotte shivered.
“Perhaps your uncle sent Bodine to see if you were ripe enough for marriage?” suggested Wend.
Charlotte gave Wend a shocked look. “But I’m only fifteen!”
“My two sisters were both married before they were thirteen,” Wend informed her.
“Yes, but ...” But they were of the servant class and she, Charlotte, was of the gentry. Charlotte couldn’t quite bring herself to say that but Wend guessed and her young face hardened.
“The gentry sells their daughters,” she said truculently. “They just don’t call it that.”
Charlotte swallowed. Perhaps Wend was right. Perhaps Bodine had been looking her over with that in mind. She gave an involuntary shiver.
“Don’t worry,” said Wend more kindly. “Maybe you’ll find someone for yourself before your uncle gets around to it. Maybe you found him today! Tom Westing was looking at you more than at Maisey!”
“Wend!” sputtered Charlotte. “That’s not true!”
“Isn’t it?” Wend went away laughing.
But it gave Charlotte something to think about, and that night in her big square bedchamber beneath a threadbare coverlet—for her mother’s bed linens had all been sold on St. Mary’s, and Uncle Russ never thought to buy anything new for the house, so even the window hangings were in tatters—Charlotte dreamed that she was the Golden Maiden and Tom Westing her Viking Lord. She dreamed that she was taller, more filled out, that she was wearing a white dress, a sinuous gown of finest silk that moved as she moved, and that they had sunk down together in the dappled shadows of the copse. His handsome face was very near, his breath hot upon her cheek. She felt his strong hands caressing her white skin, heard his low laugh.
And waked with her heart racing, to realize it was the next morning and that what had waked her was Ivy, the upstairs maid, laughing with Wend outside her door.
Wend, who was always seeking some way to get out of work, came into the room as Charlotte was dressing.
"Wend, you should knock," Charlotte reproved her. "I might have had my clothes off, and someone going by in the hall—"
"Nobody upstairs but us womenfolk," Wend corrected her breezily. She flopped down on the unmade bed and watched Charlotte dress in silence for a moment. Then, "Didn't they look funny?" she said.
"Who?" asked Charlotte, but she knew.
"That pair we interrupted making love yesterday," said Wend patiently. "Didn't they look funny, though, interrupted like that? Maisey coming out of her dress and that butter-yellow hair all tangled! And Tom Westing mad as a hornet! He'd probably have jumped up and chased us away if he'd had his pants on, which I'll wager he hadn't!" Her hazel eyes sparkled.
Charlotte looked up from pulling on her petticoat over her chemise.
"Wend, you can't talk about them," she said with decision. "It would be too embarrassing for us both to say what they were doing when we found them. Besides," she challenged, "why should we make trouble for them?"
Wend stood up and considered the shorter Charlotte from her superior height.
"That's so," she agreed. "Why should we make trouble?" Then she grinned. "Perhaps you liked what you saw?" she suggested slyly. "And you don't want to see Tom Westing's handsome face get bruised?"
Hot color raced to Charlotte's cheeks. "That's rid
iculous, Wend,” she snapped. “I hope to heaven I never see Tom Westing again—indeed, I think I should die of embarrassment if I did!”
“Oh, you’ll see him again. Wend laughed. But perhaps not with his pants off!”
And as it happened, she did.
The very next day.
3
The day was hot and beautiful, with fluffy white clouds floating in an endless blue. Charlotte had come alone to what she called her “secret place.” Although it was not really far from the house, up near Fox Elve, it could be entered only through a cleft in the rocks and its entrance was fully concealed by the branches of an ancient gnarled oak tree. Charlotte had found it quite by accident during her first miserable year at Aldershot Grange and had formed the habit of going there whenever she wanted to be alone—or when life at the big gray house became too insupportable. She had never even brought Wend here.
Today she had no companion. Cook had called Wend a lazy wench and threatened to take a broom to her rump if she disappeared again when there was work to be done. Without Wend for company, the “secret place” had seemed the perfect spot to while away a lazy summer s afternoon. Charlotte had brought along a leather-bound volume (it was in reality a racy novel called The Cuckold's Revenge), and to mark her place she had carelessly slipped in a well-thumbed tract by Daniel Defoe that had been written six years ago in 1724. The tract was provocatively entitled “Conjugal Lewdness: A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed, and Married Whoredom,” and it dealt at length with a subject Charlotte found enormously fascinating: trepanning, which was the crime of kidnapping heiresses and marrying them against their will (possibly with the encouragement of guns held at their breasts) in order to gain control of their fortunes. Charlotte had read the tract with big eyes and imagined herself snatched from her bed by a trepanner, bundled into a coach, and whisked away to be married in Scotland at gunpoint. She had imagined herself on such a wedding night—not cowering timorously in her bed, but leaping up dramatically and holding the trepanner at bay with his own pistol, which she had thought to snatch up before she made a dash for the door and freedom.
But of course, Charlotte realized regretfully that she was unlikely to be sought out by a trepanner, since she was not an heiress and had no hope of becoming one. The best she could look forward to was that her uncle would trot out some prosaic suitor and tell her that she must be content with him. Her violet eyes gleamed rebelliously. She would chose her own suitor, that she would! She would not let herself be forced to marry against her will, as were so may aristocratic young girls. She would . . .
What she would do was lost as she caught her skirt in a berry vine and with a little exclamation stopped to wrest it free. It was but a little way farther to a rocky opening behind the old oak, from whence came a faint splashing of water—indeed it was curiosity about that faint musical sound that had first led Charlotte to discover this little sheltered spot, surrounded by rock walls on all sides, where a spring-fed waterfall tinkled down to a little circular trout pool below—a pool that shimmered away through a crevice in the rocks, to appear a few yards farther through the rock as one of the many small streams that laced this broken landscape.
Used to the place, she had scarcely looked around her, seating herself comfortably on a flat rock beside the trout pool. She immediately opened the book and began to read. Oblivious of everything but what was happening on its pages, she was dangling her bare toes in the trout pool and had just reached an exciting passage where the fictional hero discovered his wife’s infidelity, when some little extra sound arrested her. She looked up calmly—and her gaze froze.
A tall masculine figure had just stepped out from behind the concealing screen of the waterfall. A figure crowned by a shock of hemp-fair wet hair he was just in the act of tossing back—a gesture that sent out a shower of droplets over his broad muscular shoulders. His handsome face with its expression of total astonishment was familiar, as indeed was his deep bare chest.
It was Tom Westing.
And he was dripping wet and stark naked.
Charlotte s heartfelt gasp was cut into by his voice—not the commanding roar she had heard when she and Wend had broken in on his lovemaking at Fox Elve, but a ripple of pure amusement that seemed to come from the depths of him.
"Well, well," he said conversationally, seeming not in the least embarrassed by his daunting display of masculinity unveiled as he reached down behind a rock to bring up his smallclothes. "It s the little girl from Fox Elve. You do seem to have a way of finding me without my trousers!"
Charlotte turned brick red and would have given anything she owned to just disappear. She muttered something incoherent as she scrambled to her feet and turned and darted for the entrance.
She was most of the way to Aldershot Grange before she realized that she had dropped her precious book back by the trout pool.
Nothing would have induced her to return for it. After all, suppose she found him calmly squatting there au naturel reading those passages she found most alluring? Especially the part where the hero bent tempestuous Lady Augusta to his will?
Oh, she would die if she ever met Tom Westing again!
Afraid she really would run across him, for he was obviously hanging around the neighborhood—probably to meet Maisey—Charlotte skulked in the house all that day and spent the next morning wandering around the little walled garden, long overgrown with weeds. Occasionally she would cast an anxious glance in the direction of Fox Elve, wondering if it would be safe now to go up and recover her book.
About noon Cook told her that the old woman who occupied a tiny cot south of Castlerigg Stone Circle was reported to be down with rheumatism again and remarked that it was a pity she could not spare Wend to take her some broth and rolls, since this was the day of the Great Wash, when all of the laundry for the month was done. Somewhat relieved to have something to do at last, Charlotte took the hint and soon set off with a pail of soup and a dozen rolls tied up in a linen square.
The way to the old woman’s house she knew well. It led up and along the side of a rocky crag that rose high above a stream that in spring became a raging torrent. Here the path was very narrow, and Charlotte had always edged along it very carefully, for the rushing stream gushed white and foaming at the base of an almost sheer cliff far below. This day she was cautiously negotiating her way along it when she looked up and saw a few steps above and ahead of her the insolent figure of Tom Westing.
A wave of embarrassment at seeing him again, this man she always seemed to stumble over when he was naked— and the thought of having to pass him at such close quarters, where she would literally have to squeeze by, brushing his body as she went—overcame Charlotte’s common sense. She whirled in panic to go back the way she had come, caught her foot on a rock outcrop, and with a wild scream plummeted over the edge, catching onto the only thing within reach—a sapling that had found a precarious hold in a cleft in the rocks. A sapling that now bent with her weight, barely holding her.
“Steady!” called Tom’s strong voice. She could hear the slap of his shoe leather as he raced toward her down the path. A moment later she felt his hands seize her in a firm grip. He pulled her shuddering body back over the edge just as the sapling’s roots began to tear free, and whirled her about to face him.
Overcome by terror—for she had been looking into death’s grinning face in that white water far below, where the linen square and the bucket of broth had long since plummeted—Charlotte felt her breath leave her and she clung to Tom’s sturdy form like someone drowning.
“There, there,’’ he said soothingly as he held her against his chest, letting her shiver there. “You’re not dead, but whatever made you turn about like that? Don’t you know this path is too narrow to turn where you did without the greatest care?’’
Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to tell Tom why she had spun about, any more than she could control her shivering. She was suddenly aware that she was being comforted in th
e arms of a strong man and that his masculinity called out to her. It registered on her with a kind of dazed shock that she liked being held, that she would be content just to stay here in the circle of those long protective arms forever.
Alarmed that such a thought could cross her mind, she tried to pull away from him.
“Ho, there!’’ he cried. “You’re about to do it again—and this time you may tip us both over!”
Charlotte subsided in shivering embarrassment, and when she could face him again, she looked up beseechingly. “I’m sorry,” she said faintly. “You saved my life,” she added on a note of wonder.
“Aye, I believe I did,” he agreed in a casual tone. “And there’s little doubt you will take a lot of saving if you go about in this fashion!” His tone was jocular but he was surprised at the impact her wide pleading violet eyes were having on him, and the feeling that had abruptly swelled through him as he clasped her skinny female body to his breast. She was a child, he reminded himself sternly, and put her away from him—most carefully. “Come,” he said, taking her hand. “I will escort you where you are going— just to make sure you get there.”
“There is no longer any point to my going,” she admitted a bit tremulously. “I was carrying a bucket of soup and some bread to old Mistress Meggs, who lives in the valley just beyond, and now”—she looked over the edge of the cliff with a shudder, down into the white cascading water far below—“the soup and the rolls are both flying away downstream.”
“Then I will take you back the way you have come,” he said firmly.
“Oh, there is no need. Really." She was all too conscious of a fluttering in her chest and of the warm steady pressure of his big hand enfolding her small one.
“Nonetheless ..." His tone was crisp.
He led her along the narrow path without speaking, pausing wherever there was a bad step to help her across, and Charlotte was embarrassed, because she had passed this way many times before—always without mishap.
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