“I told you to distract Kentridge, not seduce him!”
“You told me to keep him ,”Charlotte flashed.
“And I did! He had chased me all about the room and finally cornered me at the spinet. I was about to slap his face and make my escape when you arrived. ”
Rowan only growled.
“I will take you north,” he said stiffly. “To a background where you will be better suited.”
“Perhaps that would be best,” sighed Charlotte. “For I do not seem to get on in London.”
Charlotte’s next London venture was equally disastrous. Young Lord Stamford, whom they met at a rout held at one of the big German-style houses in fashionable Hanover Square, promptly fell head over heels in love with Charlotte and followed her about, calf-eyed. This irritated Rowan out of all conscience. Since Lord Stamford was more a contemporary of Charlotte than of Rowan—he was but twenty and singularly handsome in a melancholy, poetic sort of way—Rowan could not justify challenging him to a duel, but the young lord’s desperate infatuation with Charlotte, which produced titters everywhere, became a source of bickering between them.
“Must that boy always follow us about?” Rowan demanded testily.
“I have done nothing to encourage him,” Charlotte insisted.
“He writes odes to your eyelashes, your lips, your lovelocks, your earlobes!”
“Oh, don’t be anatomical, Rowan! He fancies himself to be a poet. ”
“He sends copies to his friends. They are read and laughed at in the taverns.”
“If they are, it is no fault of mine. ”
But came the night London would never forget. At a large ball in Burlington House, Lord Burlington’s recently erected Italian-style palazzo in Piccadilly, just as Charlotte descended the grand staircase, young Lord Stamford, the worse for wine and frantic at Charlotte’s most recent rejection, lurched forward from the crowd, fell to his knees, and reverently kissed the hem of her petticoat while loudly imploring her to pity him.
Charlotte, gone scarlet with embarrassment, snatched her skirt away and ordered Lord Stamford to get up on his feet at once. But the incident made juicy reading in the Gazette and convulsed London.
It was too much for Rowan. Again they retired to the north. Never again did he take her back to London.
On the whole, Charlotte was glad. Her little girls absorbed her time—Cassandra, bright and sparkling and adventurous with her thick shock of luminous pale hair and her brilliant green eyes, little Phoebe, dark and tempestuous and cunning like her father—and Charlotte was rather relieved to be free of arguments with Rowan, who, although he doted on the children, spent less and less time with his family. As time went by, stories of Rowan s mistresses and chance alliances drifted north, but Charlotte ignored them, reminding herself that Rowan was a man with many enemies.
And that was how matters stood in the spring of 1739 when Cassandra was barely six years old and Phoebe not yet five.
It had been a harsh winter in Cumberland and those who lived along the Derwent Water had shivered through it, keeping close by blazing hearths when the wind howled down through the chimneys. Now spring had burst like a green blessing upon the land and the damp fragrant earth seemed sweet and fresh and full of promise.
And into that land of cold nights and crisp clear days and singing birds came Rowan, riding north from London to greet a family he had not seen for six months.
Hardly did he pause to greet Charlotte. Brusquely he ordered her to pack. They were leaving at once for Portugal.
Coming out of the blue as it did, it took Charlotte s breath away. But after the bitterness of last winter s weather, she looked forward to a land that seemed to her one of perpetual sunshine and flowers. She and Wend made haste to pack, and with the children in tow departed Aldershot Grange—departed so swiftly that Charlotte was tempted to ask Rowan if this sudden move meant that he was fleeing England, perhaps for his life?
But on shipboard his lowering mood had changed abruptly. There Rowan seemed to relax. He was of a sudden almost the lover he had been those first golden days in Lisbon—teasing, beguiling, and always somehow with a dramatic flair that caught at her senses. A man of whom a woman could never tire, for there was always a freshness in the way he took her.
This was the old Rowan, the man who once had been. Charlotte felt as if she were greeting again someone who had been away a long time, someone she had not expected to meet again. But in the seven stormy years of their marriage, she reminded herself, nothing had lasted. Despite endless truces, they had always been back at each other’s throats.
Like a great white bird the tall ship fled across the sea-green wastes of the North Atlantic and Charlotte leaned silent upon the rail, watching the prow cut through the water. The tangy salt wind whipped her wide skirts and her golden hair as she tried to put aside her dark memories and come to grips with the future. Perhaps in Lisbon, that city of light, she and Rowan could recapture—and this time hold—the magic they had so briefly known there . . . before the dark beauty Katherine Talybont had come into their lives and everything had changed. Perhaps . . .
But Charlotte had a strong streak of fatalism in her nature. What would be, would be. And whatever her fate, for her all roads had led to Lisbon.
23
Lisbon, Portugal, Summer 1739
On a glorious day, with seabirds screaming and diving from an endless vault of blue above the white sails, their ship made its stately way up the Tagus River, past the gray rococo structure of the Tower of Belem, rising in embattled beauty to guard the entrance to the town.
Wend's eyes rolled as the skyline of Lisbon, topped by the tall gray ramparts of the Castelo de SãoJorge, rose up before them.
“Remember, I told you you’d be surprised!” murmured Charlotte.
Around them the ship’s passengers crowded forward, eager to disembark. Rowan stood little dark-haired Phoebe upon the ship’s rail and with his arm around her pointed out the magnificent churches whose towers and steeples rose above the palaces and pastel-painted houses.
Cassandra, in a yellow dress, clamored to get up on the rail too, but Rowan took no notice. Charlotte wondered when Phoebe had become his favorite; she hadn’t noticed it before. Still, she supposed it was but natural, for Phoebe was truly blood of his blood—and so like him, bright and beguiling and often infuriating. Between them she and Wend boosted Cassandra up, and her yellow hair ribands blew through her frosty blonde hair as they steadied her to get a better view of the fast-approaching port city.
“We'll get lost there,” predicted Wend darkly, and Charlotte laughed. Indeed, just seeing this City of Light gave her spirits a lift.
She had assumed that they would disembark with the other passengers, but Rowan would not allow that. He said the town might be crowded and he would not drag the children about in the hot sun from inn to inn as he made inquiries. He did not ask Charlotte to go with him, and although she was disappointed, she did not insist.
He came back at dusk and told them he had found a place for them at an inn but they must stay on board ship tonight. The English party who were vacating the rooms would not be leaving until tomorrow.
Wistfully Charlotte watched the lights of Lisbon shining gold against the velvet blackness, for after dinner Rowan went into the town again—alone.
As they climbed, bag and baggage, into a coach next morning. Rowan remarked that the inn was rather far out.
“Rather far out indeed!” said Charlotte when their coach finally seemed to lose the city altogether and lumbered out into the countryside. “Good heavens, Rowan, are we on the road to Evora?”
“The only accommodations I could find in town were not suitable for the children,” he explained. “I think you will like the place I have found—it is very picturesque.” Picturesque it certainly was. And isolated. The low whitewashed building with shutters painted a dull blue was almost hidden in a grove of eucalyptus trees. But it was scrupulously clean, and the food, he promised, was g
ood—he had already lunched here.
Charlotte did not want to complain before Wend and the children. “But this is so far out, Rowan,” she protested when they were alone. “The children will want to see everything, and it will take us forever to get into town!” “The sights can wait. All of you need rest after our long voyage. I will hire a horse and ride back and forth, but you will stay here.”
“Well, the children can stay here, but I would certainly prefer to spend my days shopping or sightseeing. ”
“Charlotte, spare me.” He held up his hand. “I will find us a house, and speedily. In the meantime, please remember that Wend is a green girl in a foreign land where she does not speak the language. You must stay with her, of course. Suppose one of the children is hurt or gets sick? Wend would not know how to find a doctor. ”
“You are right, of course,” Charlotte murmured, biting her lip. But she looked out the window longingly as she watched Rowan ride away toward the city.
The children were delighted, playing among the eucalyptus trees, sending Wend scurrying after them as they broke into the open and raced toward one of the squat round-towered windmills that dotted the countryside.
On the third day of this rustic life in an inn where they seemed to be the only guests, Rowan reported that he was still looking for a house.
How she would enjoy helping him do that!
“Wend and the children are well-settled-in now,” she told him. “I could go with you, Rowan. Indeed I would like to.”
“No.” He was very firm on that.
Charlotte gave him a mutinous look. “I do not know why you brought me along at all,” she mumbled.
“Walpole s power is tottering,” he told her gloomily. “He has made a treaty with Spain to indemnify our English sailors who have been harassed on the high seas, but his opposition—Bolingbroke and the rest—mocks it. If war comes—and it may come sooner than we think—he may well be forced out of office. If he goes, I go with him, of course.”
“Go . . . where?” she asked, wondering if he was planning to follow Walpole into some other endeavor.
“To perdition, I suppose, for I will not work for Bolingbroke and his cohorts. ” A shadow of a smile crossed his face. “Not that they would have me, of course. ”
“So what will happen to us?”
“Nothing, I hope. I have some money put away, and this present mission should gain me more.”
Mission? That put a different light on things.
“But you never take me along on your missions!” She peered at him. “You were afraid to leave me in England,” she said in an altered voice.
He frowned. “If the wrong men came to power and I were away at the time . . . They could come north seeking me, and finding me not in Cumberland, they might take you away for questioning.” He spoke reluctantly.
Taken away for questioning! Charlotte could almost hear chains clanking. “But . . . but I know nothing. Rowan,” she protested.
“They do not know that,” he said dryly. “And Lord Kentridge, who once tried to force his attention upon you, is one of them. Not to mention young Lord Stamford’s grandfather, a man of power. ”
“But I have never harmed either of them!” she cried, bewildered. “It was not my fault that foolish boy fell in love with me!”
“We know that, but that ‘foolish boy’s’ widowed mother chooses not to believe it. She tells everyone who will listen that you led her son astray. Being a woman, I cannot call her out—and young Stamford has been banished to Oxford, so he can’t refute it.”
“Are you saying”—Charlotte moistened her lips—“that we cannot return home, Rowan?”
“No,” he said equably. “I am saying that I did not wish to leave you in England alone.” She looked so upset that he spoke more gently. “I have heard of a house in the Portas del Sol that may be to let. Tomorrow I intend to look into it.”
Four days later they moved in.
It was an impressive house, quite new—and the Portas del Sol was a fashionable district looking down upon the terraced labyrinth of the Alfama. Charlotte drew in her breath as they drove up before the flat-fronted stone mansion, and felt a little shiver of delight go through her as the massive oak door was swung open by a wiry dark fellow.
“This is Vasco,” Rowan fold her. “Our other footman is named João. You will meet him presently; he is bringing our luggage.”
Besides which there were a cook, a scullery maid, and two chambermaids. Rowan had indeed been busy, she thought—he had already hired a staff. Wend was upset that they spoke only Portuguese, but Charlotte knew enough Portuguese to give simple orders.
Relations between herself and Rowan had been strained these days, for on arrival in Lisbon he seemed to have turned into a different man. He had been ever the gentle lover aboard ship, but his lovemaking now often had a ferocity that frightened her. There seemed to be a caged tiger inside him, fighting to get out. Charlotte had tried to tell herself his nerves were jangled from worrying about matters back in England, about Walpole’s probable loss of power, about his mission—doubtless an important one— and it must be irritating to him to have to ride back and forth such long distances every day. Now, as she roamed through the airy high-ceilinged rooms, eager to see everything and pleased by what she saw, she was filled with hope. This was a beautiful house; the furnishings—for Rowan had taken it furnished—were handsome enough even for Rowan’s impeccable taste. From its spaciousness she gathered that he wanted to entertain—and she would do that too, graciously, happily, for the staff was more than adequate. If Rowan wanted, for his own purposes, to fill their house with the elite of Lisbon and perchance travelers from foreign lands, she was ready to do it with a flourish!
Bubbling over with enthusiasm, she turned to tell Rowan, “We should go out to dinner tonight and celebrate finding this wonderful house!”—and found him gone.
He did not return until after the dinner dishes were long cleared away. And he returned filled with some inner anger that lashed out at her through his body after they had gone to bed. His body crushed hers with a fever of desire—but it was a rough taking, bruising but swiftly over, and one from which Charlotte knew no fulfillment.
She lay in the dark, her body pulsing and unsatisfied, and her hopes, which had been so high, wavered within her.
Now that they had a house of their own, Charlotte had confidently expected to find herself driving out next day to see the sights of Lisbon, while Wend supervised the servants in setting things to rights.
Rowan, it seemed, had other plans for her. He insisted that the house needed her personal touch, and Charlotte, feeling it was his right to demand that, spent the next few days supervising her small staff in bringing the pleasant sunny rooms to the peak of perfection. Rowan remained unpredictable, going restlessly in and out—indeed, if the idea had not been so ridiculous, Charlotte would almost have been persuaded that he was checking up on her.
With the house at last in perfect order, they sat down to dinner across a gleaming board and Charlotte spoke eagerly of all the places she wanted to visit—then stopped, puzzled, for across from her Rowan’s brows had drawn into a straight line and he had fidgeted, eventually oversetting his wineglass.
“Time enough for all that when we are settled,” he muttered.
“Settled?” Charlotte stared at him. “Rowan, I should think we were settled enough already. ”
“We will see,” he said restlessly, his gaze roaming the heavy-framed oil paintings that the owners had left behind, looking somehow stark against the soft chrome-yellow walls. “Meantime, Charlotte, I have ordered the drapers for tomorrow, and I am not sure what time they will arrive.”
“Drapers?” Charlotte was amazed. “Rowan, these draperies are well enough. After all, we do not expect to live here for years and years. We are only visiting Lisbon!” “Nevertheless, the drapers are coming, and I expect you to be at home to receive them and to select something more attractive than this faded buff brocade. �
�� He shrugged toward the tall dining-room windows with an expression of contempt, and Charlotte was reminded sharply of Rowan’s love of beauty, of fine things, of perfection.
She sighed. “Very well, Rowan, I will do as you ask.” But the drapers had not come. Rowan had suggested indifferently that they would come the following day, and then the day after that he said that he had forgotten to tell her that he had told the tardy drapers not to come at all, that he had sent for other drapers. Those did not come either. And after that it was the erection of new shutters for her bedchamber—these present ones were a disgrace, and Charlotte must see to them, for it was well known that workmen never did anything right without supervision. Every day some new excuse to keep her there.
Finally, she had exploded.
“I am tired of sitting in this house looking out at the world,” she had told him despairingly. “Indeed I do not care if the drapers never come or if we have new shutters or old. If you will not take me, I am going out alone. Now!”
In a surprisingly pliant mood, Rowan had quickly agreed. And together, in a hired coach—Rowan was ever extravagant —they toured the city, revisiting the parts she liked best, clip-clopping past palaces trimmed with gold leaf and magnificent homes that owed their existence to the spice trade and the great caravelles manned by Portuguese sailors who had made the long treacherous voyage to India. Past buildings washed in pale colors, muted pastel shades of pink and apricot and gold, they rode, past overhanging ironwork balconies filled with flowers, past stone fountains where fishwives scrubbed the fish baskets they carried about on their heads.
At her insistence Rowan took her to view the wide lagoon the natives called the Mar de Palha, or Sea of Straw, that lay northeast of the city. Sparkling blue in the sun, it was alive with the beautiful lateen-sailed barges know as fragatas.
And when finally at a street corner Charlotte, enchanted anew by Lisbon’s beauty, threw open the door of the coach and leapt down to the cobbles, she was reminded poignantly of the good times in the early days of their marriage, when he had seemed a different man, lighthearted, almost boyish, in love.
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