But such was not his intent. In his murderous rage and disappointment, he told himself he was merely assuaging his passions, using her as he might have used a soothing lotion to anoint a wound. He told himself he cared nothing for the woman herself as he drove deep within her. It was her wonderful body he craved, the delights of her flesh that he had yearned for—so he told himself as he stormed her small fortress and tried deliberately to hurt her, as she had, he thought vengefully, hurt him.
But when it was over, stormily over, to his alarm he found that she was lying limp in his arms. For a terrified moment he was afraid that he had killed her. And he began desperately blowing air into her lungs, now that he had had his way.
A shiver of relief went through him when she stirred. But with her revival his anger at the wench washed over him once again.
“Get up,” he commanded.
And when she was so faint that she still could not stand, he jerked her upward and held her dizzily upon her feet and lightly slapped her face.
“There,” he said callously. “That will restore the color to those pale cheeks.”
“How could you?” she whispered. “Your own wife, and here in a dirty alley . . . ?” His unspeakable behavior had left her bereft of words, for she was still trying to gasp in enough air to keep alive while her limbs trembled.
And now she dared to remonstrate with him, she who had driven him to this! Well, he would show her a darker side of the world!
“Oh, I have learned much from you,” he drawled.
“Never! The devil taught you!” Her voice was shaky but her spirit was unbroken.
“You taught me the ways of hell,” he said roughly. And then, looking down at her more calmly as she leaned trembling against the building wall while he fastened up his trousers and brushed himself off, “You seem to have dropped something. Here, I will get it for you. ”
Charlotte’s gaze flashed downward. The miniatures! She must have dropped them from nerveless fingers as she struggled with him upon the cobbles! She tried to reach out for them, but he snatched them away with a nasty smile, held them tantalizingly just out of reach. His words were brutal. “I have just shown you how you will earn your living,” he said heavily.
“Never!” she gasped.
His cold laughter jarred her. “Here and in worse places than this—and with worse men,” he mocked, but he let her snatch the miniatures on their grosgrain riband away from him.
Charlotte looked her tormentor full in the face. “There are no worse men,” she said evenly.
His face contorted and he fetched her a light cuffing blow across the face that snapped her head to the side. She almost lost her footing as she reeled to the side, but another cuff brought her upright. Now she stood before him with her back against the whitewashed wall. Her face was very pale and her violet eyes were dark pools of anger and reproach.
He had driven her past the point of no return, but still her rejection of him drove him on. “You will have to grow used to being cuffed,” he advised, baiting her. “Street women are often pummeled and beaten by their customers. You must learn to take rough treatment with a smile.”
He waited but she made no answer, merely stared at him woodenly.
“You will notice that the backs of the miniatures are made of gold?” he pointed out.
The barest flicker of her lashes told him she had indeed noticed.
“I had the china miniatures affixed in such a way that they will almost certainly be broken should the gold backing be removed,” he added conversationally.
“They will remain unbroken,” she told him in a toneless voice.
“Oh, I wonder if they will?” He was smiling a terrible smile now. “You have no money, you have not eaten since breakfast, you will soon be growing terribly hungry—and what of tomorrow? If tonight some footpad does not get you and perhaps drive a knife through your ribs for disdaining him, you will find yourself hungrier still. I wonder how long it will take before you are hungry enough to pry the gold from the back of those miniatures?”
Charlotte took a deep breath and her delicate chin lifted. “You can count upon it, Rowan,” she said unsteadily. “I will never be that hungry!”
His brutal laugh rang out, but there was grudging admiration in his eyes for this woman he had tricked and degraded. Another man, a normal man, would have felt his heart melt at her gallantry in the face of such overwhelming odds, and felt sympathy for her plight. But not Rowan—her humiliation of him demanded vengeance.
He studied her for a long smoldering moment, as if memorizing her features. Then he turned without a goodbye and took himself off. First to walk off his rage, then to find a tavern and there drink himself into forgetfulness.
Charlotte waited, her back stiffened with pride, until Rowan was out of sight. Then her aching body seemed to wilt and she sank down to the cobbles as if she had no strength, leaning against the house wall, eyes shut and body quivering.
She drew a long shuddering breath. Her lawful husband had just had his way with her and she felt dishonored.
In that moment she thanked God that she could no longer bear children. To have carried Rowan’s child in memory of these hateful moments in a dirty alley would have been unbearable.
She sat there for a long time while the shadows lengthened. Looking up through her lashes at the sky, she realized that people would soon be coming out of their houses. The evening festivities would be beginning; soon the night would resound with song and the wailing of stringed instruments.
She could not face it, not any of it, not tonight.
There in the shadow of the stairway she pulled the wooden boxes around her in such a way that she was concealed beneath the stairway, and curled up for the night.
Across the city Rowan had found a tavern. He seated himself on a wooden bench and drank steadily into the night until he lay sodden. Realizing him to be a person of quality—such a man as might bring down the law upon a house that let him come to harm—the tavern keeper allowed him to remain, slumped over a table well into the next day, when he lifted his aching head with a groan and demanded more wine.
Fortified by that drink, he lurched out of the place and made his way blindly to the waterfront.
There the brisk salt air, the cries of the varinas selling fish, the whole normal scene, restored him to himself. His anger melted and he faced at last his true feelings toward Charlotte:
She had deceived him, she had abused his trust, he told himself, and yet . . . and yet . . .And yet she was a fire in his blood he now knew would never be quenched.
Pale and haggard now, he turned about. Whatever she had done, he was going to forgive her. Not because she deserved forgiveness but because his desire for her consumed his mind when he was away from her.
He walked faster now, looking for a conveyance to take him back to the alley where he had left her. Finding none, he broke almost into a run. He would sweep her up, he would kiss away her tears, he would take her back to England, he would restore her to her children! Oh, God, anything was better than living without her! He had had enough of that, certainly.
But when he returned to the alley where he had left her among the piled-up boxes, Charlotte was not there. He checked the house on Nowhere Street, thinking she might have retreated to that safe haven, but the Bilbaos had not seen her. He combed the narrow alleys of the Alfama, but turned up no trace of her.
Alarmed now, he began an intensive search for her.
She was not to be found. There were several who said that a blonde woman in peach-colored rags had been seen dancing for coins in the public square. Hearing that, Rowan winced—he had brought her to this. His mouth closed in a grim line as he asked what had become of her.
Nobody knew. A crowd had collected, an officer of the law had arrived upon the scene, he had been about to take her away, but a fight had erupted in the crowd and he had turned about to settle it. When the combatants had been separated and he turned back, the woman was gone. Everyone was vague ab
out what had happened to her. One man was of the opinion that she had slipped away during the altercation. Another thought a large woman, a well-known local madam, might have hurried her away. One beggar lad thought she had been whisked into a black-and-gold coach.
Nobody knew for sure.
Half-mad now with fear that something terrible might have happened to Charlotte, Rowan was looking for her. There was not an unsavory place in Lisbon that he did not visit. Yet at the end he came away empty-handed.
Nobody had seen the beautiful blonde woman with the violet eyes and the ragged peach silk gown.
He would have gone to the authorities, but how could he do that? Could he say that he was looking for a woman whose funeral he had arranged five years ago? Dared he admit in this strange land that he had forcibly imprisoned his wife and kept her all that time against her will locked up in a house in the Alfama? The doctor who had signed the death certificate would of a certainty not admit the deed—he was more likely to call Rowan mad and offer to certify him! The Bilbaos would deny it and flee in terror of the law.
He was caught in a trap of his own devising.
Now he spread his search out into the countryside. He was convinced that Charlotte had somehow gotten out of Lisbon—but where could she have gone? North to Oporto he ranged, and into the pine woods and the gorse-covered hills and blue hydrangea hedges. Through the cool reaches of the stream-laced Bucaco forest and into the tall grass country he roamed, and into the wide meadows where the fighting bulls were bred. Southward into the lush Algarve he went, searching for her through Moorish-looking villages until at last he reached Lagos, where the great sixteenth-century caravelles had begun their long voyages to India. Past purplish rock cliffs he made his way to that southernmost tip of Portugal—squall-racked Sagres, where in the wild countryside Prince Henry the Navigator had charted the voyages that had built an empire.
And it was in the wild grandeur of those storm-lashed headlands that Rowan at last gave up. He looked out hopelessly over the forked and rocky promontory that seemed to point an arrow out into the Atlantic, and was chilled by the knowledge that he had combed the length and breadth of Portugal and had not found her.
He, the man who had made a fortune finding the un-findable, who had sniffed out the trail of those who had arranged their escapes and set up their hiding places with gold long months before, had been defeated by a tired, disheveled, penniless wench just free of a five-year imprisonment, loosed suddenly in a city where she had not a single friend. Impossible—but it had happened.
For him it was a nightmare come true.
A chilling thought occurred to him. Charlotte might be dead—and by her own hand. Perhaps, after his last brutal treatment of her—and he now admitted to himself that it had been brutal, and felt remorse—she might have preferred death to letting him find her again, this woman he had mauled and scorned and imprisoned. The thought seared him.
Defeated, he made his way back past almond trees bent by the ever-blowing strong winds, past stunted figs, but the glorious scenery went by him in a blur. Back in Lisbon, he searched for her again, but he no longer believed he would find her. She was gone, gone forever.
Only then, as he stared in desolation at the stars gleaming down over Portugal, did he realize that he loved her. Truly loved her. He had loved her, without realizing it, all the time.
And now she was gone. Vanished forever.
Into the dark alleyways of Lisbon. . . .
BOOK II:
Cassandra
27
London, England, February 8, 1750
There was the promise of snow in the biting wind that whipped down from the North Sea, rocking the body of the green-painted stagecoach that was lumbering steadily down the Great Essex Road, making the Colchester-to-London run. In Chelmsford, where they had changed horses at a coaching inn while the passengers ate, that promise had become a reality. But despite a sudden flurry of windblown snow that had nearly obscured the square tower of the parish church as the passengers clambered back onto the stage, the cheery red-nosed driver had bellowed out, “We'll be in London on schedule, good sirs and ladies.”
“I should hope so,” muttered one elderly lady in an aggrieved voice. “I’m black and blue already!”
And indeed she had reason to groan. Devoid of springs, the stagecoach careened down that ancient roadway built by the Romans some sixteen centuries before, lurching and jolting from side to side in a manner that caused the passengers to be thrown in a heap against each other and against the sides of the coach. As they approached London, the snow grew deeper, the road more treacherous, and the driver perforce had to slow his pace in the gray dusk as the horses’ hooves fought for purchase on treacherous deep ruts made slippery by hard ice. But inside the coach there was one young passenger who hardly felt the bumps.
Oblivious to the protests of the other passengers, Cassandra Keynes, who would be seventeen in March and should not, at her age, the elderly lady s disapproving gaze told her, be traveling alone, lifted the leathern flap designed to keep out the wind. With her other gloved hand holding her hat clapped to her head, she peered out at the big old trees that grew perilously close to the road and the six thundering coach horses.
The dark branches of those massive oak and hornbeam trees seemed to bend down over the road in the whipping wind and to swish menacingly close in the gathering darkness, but she could still make out their sturdy trunks, and in between, the countryside about. Her long green eyes were brooding as she studied them. It had happened about . . . here. Yes, there was the stile over which she had tripped. Head out of the window now, unmindful of the steaming breath of the horses raising a white mist ahead, or of the lurching coach wheels or the iron horseshoes that sometimes struck a bright spark from a rock laid bare of ice by the biting wind, unmindful of the cursing coachman or the crack of the long whip, unmindful of everything until one of the passengers pulled her back inside with a snarl, she was remembering the event that last year had got her exiled to Colchester and the strictest school for young ladies her father could find.
Cassandra’s lovely young face was pale as she sat back in her seat, letting the leathern curtain flap against the window until the passenger who had pulled her back in quickly bent over and secured it. She was glad of the dimness inside the coach, for she knew that a tumult of emotions must be pouring over her all-too-expressive features.
She had been afraid of what this strip of road would do to her, for it brought it all back—the accident, everything.
Oh, why couldn’t they have stayed at Aldershot Grange, where she and Phoebe had spent most of their childhood? she asked herself, heartsick.
Indeed, it was at Aldershot Grange that Rowan Keynes had brought his small daughters when in 1739 he had left Charlotte imprisoned in the Alfama and sailed back to England. He had left them there in the care of Wend and gone back to London alone, there alternately to brood and to carouse.
But England’s war with Spain—or “The War of Jenkins’ Ear’’ as it was popularly called—had begun a conflagration which had gradually reached out to embroil most of Europe. And when in July of 1745 Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, had landed in Scotland and in August raised the royal standard in Glenfinnan, Rowan Keynes had ridden up from London. He arrived on a lathered horse and told Wend brusquely that Aldershot Grange might lie along the route south of an invading Scottish army and he was taking twelve-year old Cassandra and eleven-year-old Phoebe with him to Cambridge, there to enroll them in Mistress Endicott’s School for Young Ladies. She was to get them ready at once.
Wend was desolate. Cassandra and Phoebe were like her own daughters and she bade them a tearful good-bye. Indeed she and Livesay had had to be surrogate parents for both children, except on their rare visits to London or even rarer visits from their father.
It had been a mistake, bringing his daughters to Cambridge. Rowan, thinking only of their safety and need for a genteel education—and not wanting to enroll them in a Londo
n school where they might drop in unexpectedly at number forty-three Grosvenor Square and find him engaged in some debauchery unfit for their tender years— had completely overlooked the fact that Cambridge was a university town, brimming over with virile young men, many of them aprowl for whatever skirts seemed to lift easiest, all of them agog for a pretty girl.
In such a place slim young Cassandra with her moonlight-blonde hair and emerald eyes and heart-stopping beauty was hardly likely to be overlooked.
“Boys have been mooning around this school like cats on a back fence ever since that tow-haired Keynes girl got here,’’ grumbled Cook. “It’s got so every time Maud throws out the slops I hold my breath waiting to hear a howl as someone gets spattered in the face!”
Dot, the new and perky seventeen-year-old chambermaid, chimed in: “What with all the little tips I get from boys who want me to slip notes to her, I’ll be able to retire at twenty-three!”
There was general laughter in the school’s commodious kitchen.
That Cassandra with her elegant good looks should be the center of all this commotion had made her younger sister restive. For Phoebe, with a wisdom beyond her years, realized full well that she would never be the blazing beauty her sister was. She had inherited her father’s looks—and his features fit better on a man than on a woman. Her nose, for instance, she considered too long, too narrow, her dark brows too straight, her lips a trifle thin. Not even in her first bloom would she have Cassandra’s heartstopping loveliness, her wonderful winning smile. “Piquant” was the word they would use for her, never “beautiful” spoken on a long indrawn sigh. Everyone loved serene smiling Cassandra—all but Phoebe. Phoebe loved only herself.
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