Lisbon

by Valerie Sherwood

  On one of those rides she met the nephew who had, after much litigation, inherited the estate. Charlotte had twice seen him at livestock markets—once he had bid against her and won—so she knew who he was when he came striding out of the big stone house and hailed her as she was riding by. Then as now, she had admired the easy grace of his tall athletic figure—then as now deplored the careless condition of his clothing, both the light gray velvet jacket and the darker gray cloth trousers, rent here and there and casually mended. Plainly there was no woman in his life!

  She drew rein, smiling down at him as he approached. “I’ve seen you ride by,” he said. “And wished my horse had not gone lame, so I could gallop after you! My name’s Drew Marsden. And you’ll be the beauty of Aldershot Grange, Cassandra Dunlawton. Will you not join me in a stirrup cup? ’Twill give you strength for your journey, I promise, wherever you’re bound!”

  Cassandra liked him at once. She liked his keen though not handsome countenance. She liked his friendly manner.

  “ ’Twould be most welcome,” she said. She tied her mare to the hitching post and accompanied her genial neighbor in through the two-story stone porch with its colorful Dutch stained glass, making patterns of colored light across the floor. There was more stained glass, medieval and mellow, in the tall windows that lighted the somber great hall into which he brought her. The arms of his mother’s family adorned the splendid fireplace before which a pair of white wolfhounds rose at her entrance.

  “Cromwell! Ireton! Stay,” he commanded in a deep voice, and the dogs obediently settled back. He turned to Cassandra. “I have named the dogs Cromwell and Ireton after the two great bedchambers upstairs,” he confided with a grin, “which my grandmother named for our two mighty Civil War generals who are supposed to have sheltered here.”

  That was typical of the laughing irreverence of his nature, Cassandra was to learn.

  “I could lend you a horse,” she offered as she sank down upon the tasseled red velvet pillow that covered a long carved bench, and watched him pour the wine, standing before the fireplace.

  “Could you indeed?” His gray eyes lit up as he handed her a goblet of ruby port. “I’d be obliged indeed, for the Bishop—that’s what I’ve named my horse because whenever he’s mischievous, which is often, he always gives me such a pious, blameless look—must needs rest his leg another two weeks, by my judgment.”

  “The Bishop?” Cassandra burst into laughter. “And to think I but named my mare Meg! D’you always use such inventive names?”

  “Aye. Naming runs in the family. I’ve even named you—before I met you, of course. I called you the Wraith of the Derwent Water because you were never in when I called.”

  Cassandra caught her breath. She had given strict orders to Livesay to turn away all gentlemen callers—but she hadn’t meant to include her neighbor just to the south in that order.

  “The Wraith will be home next time,” she promised penitently.

  “Good. Let us drink to that.” He lifted his glass and drained it. “You do light up this hall,” he murmured, studying her.

  After they had chatted for a while, he took her through the house, showing her the renovations he was making, and smiled when she said impulsively, “Oh, don’t change either of these,” when he showed her the two tapestry-hung bedchambers, “Cromwell” and “Ireton,” with their dark oak Jacobean furniture.

  “I don’t intend to,” he said softly, and she knew from the way his gaze caressed those rooms that he felt about them as she did.

  They were kindred spirits. And soon Meg and the great dappled gray stallion Drew called the Bishop were galloping across the blue heather and treading their way together through the lofty fells.

  Cassandra found it easy to relax with Drew, either at Aldershot Grange or in the paneled drawing room of Blade’s End with its portrait heads and gilded allegorical figures. She didn’t realize it, but she was falling in love.

  How he felt about her was brought home to her the day Meg tripped over a stone and Cassandra went headlong into the bracken. Drew was olf his horse instantly and bending over her, white-faced.

  “Are you hurt?” he demanded tensely.

  “No,” Cassandra gasped. “I don’t think so.”

  “Thank God,” he said, and cradled her in his arms, burying his face in her thick fair gleaming hair.

  It was unexpected and touching and Cassandra forgot for the moment her vow never to let another man love her. She lay back and let Drew kiss her and fondle her, and found life unutterably sweet.

  Until she remembered.

  Then she scrambled up without ceremony and insisted they ride on. She saw that Drew was puzzled but she did not explain.

  After that she tried to draw away from him, to interest herself in other things. She tried to stay away from the great E-shaped stone house to the south, with its steep roofs and dormers and tall chimneys. And especially she tried to stay away from the tall gray-eyed man who lived there.

  31

  London, England, 1755

  In Lady Sotherby’s handsome Georgian mansion a great ball was in progress and candles glittered from behind rain-spattered windows as a sudden downpour engulfed London. The ball was the social event of the season and everyone who counted was in attendance. Liveried footmen were all about, attending to the guests’ slightest needs. Wine flowed, and in the high-ceilinged mirrored ballroom silken skirts swirled against satin knee breeches and laughter and music drowned out the patter of the rain outside.

  Somewhere in that glittering throng was Tom Westing—a man in very different circumstances from when he had last seen his native land. His cynical gaze raked the crowd about him. Who would ever have thought that he—who had seemed more destined to be hanged than anything else—would be standing here today among diplomats and dukes, quaffing wine with the best of them?

  Someone jostled his arm, some viscount he had met earlier but whose name he couldn’t recall. Travers or something like that.

  “Well, Westing,” inquired that worthy in a somewhat nasal drawl, “enjoying yourself?”

  In point of fact Tom was having only an indifferent time, for to him this was a roomful of strangers all intent on their own pursuits, but he had learned to dissemble. “Very much,” he said heartily. “Travers, isn’t it?”

  The nasal voice cooled a trifle at the vagueness of Tom’s mention of his name. “Aye, Travers. Lady Sotherby introduced us early on, before this confounded rain started. We'll all be drenched by it, but then, I suppose that won’t bother you—you’re used to rain forests, they tell me.’’ “And other delights of the tropics.’’ Tom’s reply was ironic. He was thinking not just of the continuous downpours of the rainy season but about the teeming life that crawled and slipped and slithered over the jungle floor, of the snakes that draped themselves in the dripping trees, of claws and fierce open jaws that lurked in the bush. He wondered if Travers—or any of the rest of them here, for that matter—had any true conception of the Amazon in flood or what it was like to traverse the milky waters of the Orinoco wondering if a poisoned dart was going to pierce your sweating back from one of the dark figures lurking in that high green wall of dense undergrowth onshore. . . .

  “There’s a lady here who would like to meet you,’’ Travers said.

  “A lady?” Tom turned about. “What lady?”

  “Lady Scopes.” Travers nodded. “She’s right over there, the one in the black taffeta gown waving her fan about.

  Tom’s curious gaze studied the lady. She had luxuriant black hair and high color, and at this distance she appeared to be possessed of considerable beauty. She also appeared to be in mourning, for she was dressed solidly in black. He called Travers’ attention to that fact.

  “Oh, yes, she is.” Travers shrugged. “That is, she was. She’s just coming out of it now. She’s a friend of Lady Sotherby’s, and Blanche—that is, Lady Sotherby—can get the crepe off anyone’s sleeve. ”

  Tom doubted it. No one had been abl
e to get the crepe off his sleeve, even though he had worn none. The black crepe he wore for Charlotte was twined around his heart too tightly ever to be loosed, he thought.

  Had he been a religious man, he could have hoped to find her again in the hereafter. But he was not.

  He had only memories, golden and cherished, of a slender, splendid, tantalizing girl he had loved, gone forever. He had only the deepest sense of loss.

  At first during those days of despair in Portugal when he had visited Charlotte’s grave, Tom had promised himself that he would return to England and seek out Rowan Keynes and hack him to pieces: for having left him to die on Kenlock Crag, for having had him kidnapped aboard ship with orders to sew him in a sack and hurl him overboard. All the while he had waited impatiently for the carving of the great footstone he commissioned for Charlotte’s grave, he had been planning to seek out Rowan and finish him off. He had even made inquiries of what ships were leaving, bound for that part of the world.

  Rut then, on the very day the handsome footstone was finished and at last erected, he had stood staring at that stone and asking himself, What would Charlotte want? Would she want vengeance or . . . something else?

  He had recalled suddenly that Charlotte had two small daughters, children he had never seen, and that she had told him that Rowan loved the children, was good to them.

  That day he had felt very close to Charlotte, felt almost that she was watching him from somewhere beyond the clouds, approving of what he did. But would she approve of his depriving her children of a father, of leaving them orphaned and alone in the world?

  A cold sweat had broken out on his brow at what he had been about to do. True, Keynes had wronged him, had wronged them both. Rut . . . now at last he put himself in Rowan Keynes’ shoes, and tried to see it from Keynes’ point of view. Keynes had loved a woman and she had strayed; small wonder he had revenged himself on Tom. But Keynes had not revenged himself on Charlotte, not so far as Tom knew. Charlotte had died of a fever; the doctor in attendance had told him so, indeed had told him how the whole household had grieved, of her lavish funeral. And how Keynes had returned with his small daughters to London. Should Tom follow them there and forthwith make them orphans?

  He had leaned against the footstone he had erected to Charlotte and felt sick. For fate had been so unkind to Charlotte, and now he, who loved her better than he did his life, had been about to deal her one last hurt—he had been about to orphan her children.

  Charlotte would have wanted her children to have a father, a settled home, a happy life. Would he put his yearned-for personal revenge above her wishes?

  He would not! Nor would he return to England, where he might one day run across Rowan and be tempted to remove him from the earth.

  He went back to Brazil, and there he flung himself into work with renewed effort. Don Sebastião, in failing health, watched him with pride. His gaze upon the tall, powerful Englishman was fond. Tom was the son he had never had, who would one day fill his boots.

  He could ask no better.

  Save for one thing: he wished Tom would take a wife.

  When he brought up the subject, Tom gave a short bitter laugh. “I think I ve not much to offer a woman,” he said, to Don Sebastião’s astonishment. And even though pressed, he refused to discuss the subject. It was not manly to admit that he could not come to a marriage bed with a whole heart. And he would not offer a woman less—not a woman to whom he could give his name.

  There were women, of course, for Tom was no celibate. There were bright-eyed native girls who took his attentions lightly, there were brief dangerous liaisons with languorous married women in Rio de Janeiro or SãoPaulo that entertained him for a time, but nothing lasted, nothing endured. There was always that lovely lost face haunting his dreams.

  In Rio, marriageable young ladies sighed behind their fans and whispered that Don Tomas was handsome, yes, but that he had a heart of stone!

  And now, in a London ballroom a striking lady gowned in black was asking to meet him.

  ' Who is she?” he asked Travers curiously.

  "Well, she used to be Katherine Olney before she married Talybont. And then that husband died mysteriously in Portugal some years ago and she came back home and married some obscure West Country knight named Scopes that nobody ever heard of, and now she's back in London—husband-hunting, I believe they call it,” Travers told him cheerfully.

  But the word “Portugal” had piqued Tom’s interest.

  “I’d like to meet the lady,” he told Travers.

  And so it was that Tom found himself in conversation with Charlotte’s archenemy, the former Katherine Talybont. And on closer inspection, even by candlelight, which is kind to the complexion, he saw that the bloom was off the rose. Katherine’s figure was magnificent but her high color was strictly attributable to cosmetics, and up close her face had a hard look.

  “I am told you have been living in Brazil.” Katherine flirted her fan. “Tell me, what is it like, living there?”

  Brazil was a subject of which Tom never tired. He launched into it, noting that Katherine’s interest evaporated whenever the conversation strayed from cities and civilization. No jungle traveler she. . . . He asked her to dance.

  Katherine was a splendid dancer, and Tom cut a fine figure. Eyes followed them as they whirled about the floor.

  Katherine left the floor, announcing that dancing always made her thirsty. She began to drink wine. Too much wine. Tom suspected her of having to be carried insensible to bed at night by panting servants.

  Still, the evening was the better because of her company. Idly he asked her about Portugal. Had she spent much time there?

  “I was not there for long, but it was the worst time of my whole life!” Katherine’s beautiful dark eyes flashed balefully. “My husband was murdered there. ”

  Died mysteriously, Travers had said. Evidently the widow had a stronger word for it.

  “And there is the man who killed him!” Katherine’s sharp voice rose as she snapped her fan shut.

  Tom’s gaze followed in the direction that fan was pointing, and a stillness came over him. Not so much as an eyelash moved. There, arguing with an old gentleman who was shaking his head vehemently, and plainly visible through the throng, was Rowan Keynes.

  “Rowan Keynes killed your husband?” he asked wonderingly.

  “You know Rowan?” cried Katherine, startled.

  “I met him once.”

  “Once is more than enough!” snapped Katherine. “I was fool enough to become betrothed to him, and when I broke it off and married Eustace Talybont, Rowan took a bride and followed me to Portugal and there murdered my husband. Oh, I could never prove it, but Rowan did it all the same.”

  “You say he had taken a bride when he did this?” Tom asked slowly.

  “Yes. Some blonde girl from the Lake Country.”

  Charlotte. This woman must have known Charlotte!

  “Did you know her?” he heard himself ask, his cold eyes never leaving Rowan.

  “His bride? Oh, yes, I met her.”

  “I am told they had two children. ”

  “Two girls. Both turned out badly—but then, that was to be expected with such a father!”

  “Turned out badly in what way?”

  “The older one caused a rash of duels and amid the scandal ran away and married some Scot and lives on his estate somewhere in the north. The younger one married Lord Houghton and they both behave so scandalously that his family won’t accept them, I’m told.”

  Tom discounted duels and scandals. What he got out of Katherine’s answer was that one daughter was living on her husband’s north-country estate and the other had married a lord. Both Charlotte’s daughters had obviously left home and were doing well. Which left Rowan without his shield. . . .

  Nettled that Tom’s interest should stray from herself and focus so fixedly on a man she hated, Katherine added spitefully, “Blanche told me that not long after he married her. Rowan grew very
jealous of his bride here in London, and then quite suddenly she disappeared from London. Later we heard that he had taken her to Portugal again and come back without her, telling everybody she was dead. I don’t doubt he murdered her as well!”

  Tom’s green gaze swung round to Katherine with such intensity that she blinked.

  “What makes you think Keynes murdered her?” he demanded.

  “Because he is a devious man who never forgives anyone. He arranges devious things. He buys people, buys their lies.”

  Buys their lies. The old doctor had been very convincing, but perhaps he was a convincing liar—bought by Rowan Keynes. Tom s jaw hardened. He would have the truth, and he would have it from the one man who knew it best.

  Katherine was astonished at the swiftness with which Tom excused himself and left her, crossing the room in long strides after Rowan Keynes, who was already going out the door.

  Tom went out into the now slackening rain and saw Rowan just then climbing into a hackney coach and driving off through the puddled street. He hailed another hackney and followed him to a shabby district near the river, for Phoebe’s endless pleas for money had pushed Rowan under a sea of mounting debts and he had had to sell the house in Grosvenor Square and move into cheaper lodgings. He had attended Lady Sotherby’s ball tonight in the hope of securing a position of some sort through a friend of Walpole’s, but the evening had ended in disappointment. He was in a disgruntled mood as he paid off the driver, and paid scant attention to the tall gentleman in gray who had alighted from another hackney nearby.

  Both coaches swung off, their wheels turning behind the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves, and Rowan was about to insert a key into the door lock when a cold voice stopped him.

  “A word with you, Keynes.”

  Rowan was attuned to men’s voices and what some sounds meant. That voice from behind him had death in it. He dropped his key upon the threshold and whirled about, his hand seeking his sword.

  It was too dark for Rowan to see who it was, but he had not recognized the voice so he took it to be a stranger.