More important, a sudden flash in the darkness told him that the stranger s sword had already left its scabbard. There was nobody about, the street was deserted. On this rainy night shutters were closed, curtains drawn; everybody had gone to bed.
“What are you, a footpad, to come up behind a man in the dark?” Rowan snarled, snaking out his own blade.
“No,” was the imperturbable answer, but the tone was still as deadly. “I am come to ask you about Charlotte. I want to know how she died.”
The rain had ceased now, but a sudden flash of lightning illuminated Tom’s tall gray-clad figure, that shock of distinctive pale hair. Rowan recognized his adversary.
“Westing!” he growled. “You have more lives than a cat!” He tilted his head upward. “Yates!” he roared. Upstairs a window casement promptly opened and a big head stuck out.
Tom saw that reinforcements were about to arrive.
“You will tell me how she died. ” Blade outstretched, he advanced upon Rowan.
By now Yates was clattering down the stairs. Rowan was backing warily away over the wet cobbles. Tom had a sudden heartfelt wish for a pistol, but one does not usually feel the need to carry guns at gatherings such as Lady Sotherby’s, and he had neglected to wear one upon his person. Hearing Yates’ crashing approach, he cast about him for some weapon other than his short dress sword— and the next lightning flash showed him one. A loose brick that had fallen from a nearby chimney. He was edging toward it even as Rowan leapt for him, thrusting.
Tom parried. Both blades slid down each other. They closed, then Tom knocked Rowan away.
“Tell me how she died.”
Yates was at the door now, brandishing a pistol. Tom swooped down upon the brick, collecting it in his left hand even as Rowan danced away from him to give Yates a clear shot. But it was very dark now and Yates stood foursquare, carefully drawing a bead upon his victim. His big body was silhouetted against the light in the doorway.
With all the force of his left arm, Tom threw the brick.
It caught Yates full in the forehead and dropped him like a stone. Used to fighting on slippery decks, Tom sprang nimbly over the cobbles to close again with Rowan, who was cursing as he met this sudden assault.
As swordsmen they were well-matched. Both were strong and muscular, both used to street fighting. As they closed again, Rowan tried to knee Tom in the groin and was rewarded by having the hilt of Tom’s sword brought upward against his chin hard enough to make his teeth snap together with a crunch. Rowan made an inarticulate sound and Tom guessed grimly that Rowan had bitten off the end of his tongue.
The duelists rebounded from each other again. They circled warily once more, both panting from their violent exertion. Again they clashed, lunge and parry, parry and thrust. Now once again Tom had the advantage as Rowan’s foot slipped upon the treacherous slippery cobbles. In a flash he had flicked Rowan’s blade from his hand and pinned Rowan’s long body against a wet brick house wall with the point of his blade pressed into Rowan’s chest.
“Now you will tell me how Charlotte died,’’ he said softly.
Rowan glared back at him. This was the man Charlotte had loved, this nine-lives fellow who refused to die, who kept coming back. Would he tell him that Charlotte still lived? He would not!
He was a dead man anyway, Rowan reasoned, with that sword point pricking through his shirt front—but he could still give his enemy one more blow. Contemptuously he stuck out his jaw.
“How do you think she died?’’ he snarled. “I killed the lying wench!”
Terribly, slowly, those words sank in on Tom, draining the blood from his face, leaving it gray. And with it drained away any mercy he might have had in him.
“Then accept this from Charlotte,” he said between his teeth—and drove his blade home. Into Rowan’s heart.
For a moment Rowan stood, impaled but sneering, apparently unmoved. Then his long body sagged downward along the wet brick wall.
With his breath rasping in his throat, Tom stood towering over his fallen opponent. Charlotte had died by this mans hand—had the fellow not said so? With slow deliberation he drew out his wet blade and wiped Rowan’s blood from it on Rowan’s cuff. Then abruptly he sheathed his sword and swung away, leaving his fallen foes like carrion to be dealt with by whoever cared to do it.
No one had seen the fight. Tom did not report it. Rowan and his faithful henchmen Yates were pronounced slain by person or persons unknown. And Tom, his business in England at an end, sailed away.
At least he had avenged her, he told himself as he stared from a haggard face over the departing ship’s rail.
32
Aldershot Grange
For years now Cassandra had not thought much about her mother, gone like a childhood dream. But now, here at Aldershot Grange where her own earliest childhood had been spent—and especially as she tried to keep her thoughts away from Drew and her attraction to him—she began again to think about her mother and what her life must have been like here as a young girl.
Here in these very echoing halls her mother had lived her breathless youth, had fallen in love, had married—and undoubtedly against her guardian s wishes, for had her mother not told her once that she had been married "across the border” at Gretna Green?
Cassandra began to ask questions about her mother, idly at first and then with more interest as she sensed that people were holding something back.
It was Livesay who told her—reluctantly—about the young lovers and Tom s fall from Kenlock Crag, and how, to everybody’s surprise, her mother had immediately married Rowan Keynes.
It was a tale Cassandra had not heard before. And having heard it, she found herself somehow unsatisfied. Nagging flickers of memory sparked in her mind, like half-seen shadows flitting through, telling her nothing. But having heard the tale, she could not let it alone.
She found one of the pair of climbers who had guided Charlotte s guardian and Rowan Keynes up Kenlock Crag that night, and she persuaded him to take her up there.
It was a wild afternoon. A brisk wind blew from the north, and down below stretched a lovely valley—the same valley her mother must have traversed on the way to Scotland and Gretna Green.
Moodily Cassandra walked about the little "alcove” where the lovers had been found embracing.
"And here was where Tom Westing went over the edge,” her guide told her tonelessly.
Cassandra looked in the direction he pointed. "And then?” she whispered.
"Then?” His bushy brows elevated. "Why, then the young lady screamed.” He could still hear that scream, sometimes in his nightmares. "And fainted.”
Cassandra shuddered. Reluctantly she approached that edge, looked down, and saw some twenty feet below her a narrow ledge where a body might have been caught, saving it from a dizzying descent down the sheer rock face to the rushing white water of the cascade far below.
"But if he had fallen here?” She swung about to face the climber, who had now sat down on a rock of the low "terrace wall” over which they had come to reach this place, and was contemplating her steadily. "It was night, you say? And dark? Nobody looked over?”
He frowned. "I didn’t look over, and neither did Waddy. We were both hanging on to the young lady in case when she came to herself she tried to throw herself over after him.”
"But somebody must have looked? You said there was moonlight. ”
"That fellow we were told she married later, he looked over and said Tom Westing was gone.” His tone held finality. "That be all I can tell you, young mistress.”
Even if he knew more, he would not tell her, Cassandra sensed.
Wordlessly she returned to her silent contemplation of the ledge below. How could a falling body not have come to rest there instead of making the long deadly journey down the cliff face? In her mind she could almost hear the rattling stones tumbling downward into the depths. . . .
Her gaze swept upward into the cloudless sky. Overhead, hawks were soarin
g—or were they vultures? They seemed to be converging on something just beyond the nearest peak.
A terrible certainty surged over her, and with it her forehead and her palms went damp and her breath came shallowly.
Rowan Keynes had wanted her mother. And when she had run away with Tom Westing, Rowan had joined her guardian in pursuing her. And when Tom s body had gone over the edge to presumed certain death, Rowan had come to the edge to make sure—and looked over and seen his rival lying insensible on the ledge below. And he had turned to the others and told them Tom Westing was gone.
And left him there to die! For the cliff face along that first twenty-foot drop was perfectly smooth. She knelt down and peered over to study it. No man could have found a handhold there. Tom Westing, if he had survived the fall, would have found himself trapped in this lonely place where no one would have heard him cry out. She looked up again at the wheeling birds and shuddered, thinking of their sharp beaks and rending talons.
Her damp hands clenched. Murder had been done here! And by her father, Rowan Keynes!
And then her mother, doubtless dragged away unconscious, had promptly married Rowan. . . . Why?
Pale and unsatisfied, she turned away and accompanied the guide back down to the base of Kenlock Crag.
But back at Aldershot Grange she found it hard to sleep. Flitting memories flashed through her mind, memories of a night in Portugal when the candlelight had wavered on the stairs and she had heard her mother scream. She had been waked by something, some sound, some cry, something that nagged at her memory. And heard voices in the hall outside. She had pattered to the door barefoot, opened it a crack, and peered out. And seen the wavering candlelight and heard her mothers wild scream, suddenly choked off—and then a scuffling sound and footsteps on the stairs. It had frightened her and she had run back to bed and pulled the covers over her head.
The next morning Wend had told her she must have had a nightmare.
And then they had told her that her mother was dead and never coming back, and she and Phoebe had cried.
Now, remembering, Cassandra sat straight up in bed. That sharp sudden sound that had waked her that night, had it been her mother’s voice? And had her mother not called out a name? Was that what lay hidden that she could not quite remember? Yes! Her mother had called out a single word, “Tom!” And then the voices, and then the screams that sounded choked off, and that scuffling on the stairs.
There in the darkness of her bedchamber at Aldershot Grange, with her arms clasped around her knees, Cassandra stared at the truth:
They had told her that it had all been a dream, but it had not been a dream. The night her mother disappeared, she had been calling to her lover!
And that meant . . . that he was still alive. Or at least alive then. And her mother, how had she ?
Ever a woman of quick decisions and reckless action, Cassandra threw back the covers and stepped down from her bed in the graying light of dawn. She would go down to London, she would confront her father, she would make him tell her!
Her mare was already saddled and Cassandra was eating her breakfast preparatory to leaving, when the messenger came.
Rowan Keynes was dead.
Shaken but dry-eyed, Cassandra unpacked her saddlebags. The father who had never really loved her—and whom she had been unable to love—was gone with all his secrets. She would never know what had happened to her beautiful young mother. Had she really died of the green sickness, as her father had told her? Or ... hands?
The thought rocked her. And of a sudden she needed to have Drew’s strong arms around her. She did not even stop to put on a hat or pull on a pair of riding gloves. She did not wait to have Meg saddled. She threw herself on the mare’s sleek cream-colored back and rode away like the wind itself to Blade’s End.
Drew was outside explaining what he wanted to the men who were repairing a break in the garden wall. He heard the mare’s hooves pounding over the turf and came running forward to catch Cassandra in his arms as she slipped from Meg’s back.
“Cassandra, what—?”
“Oh, don’t ask me any questions. Drew! My father is dead.’’
His arms closed about her in compassion. She realized that he was comforting her for the wrong reasons—he assumed it was grief for her father’s passing that was making her tremble, not fear for what he might have done while he lived. But whatever had happened, it was too late now to change it, she told herself dully. Only Drew’s arms were comforting and real. They shut out the world. She could lose herself in them.
“Oh, Drew,’’ she choked. “Drew, hold me, hold me.”
And he did, that whole night through. And although he ached to make love to her, he did not. He held himself in check, for he felt it would be taking unfair advantage of Cassandra at a time when she faced him with all her defenses down. He wanted her to come to his arms willingly, deep in love.
And Cassandra, sobbing in his arms, let herself be comforted and finally fell asleep, exhausted, like a child.
The next morning he brought her home to Aldershot Grange and his cold expression dared any of the servants there to so much as blink an eye.
“I will see you tonight, Cassandra.” He bent down to kiss her hand, and when he lifted his head the look he gave her was so caressing that she was shaken by it.
Oh, Drew, she thought in panic. Don t fall in love with me. I can't let you. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you. There was an odd little ache in her heart and her throat was dry as she whispered, “Not tonight, Drew, it's too soon. Tomorrow . .
“Tomorrow, then.” His warm smile flashed and she watched him stride away and mount the Bishop.
He is riding out of my life, she thought, desolate. Only he doesn't know it . . . not yet. A veil of tears obscured her vision.
She turned blindly to seek out Wend.
“Wend,” she asked in a brooding voice, “I want you to tell me the truth. What happened to my mother? How did she really die?”
Now that Rowan Keynes was dead, Wend was not afraid to answer that question.
“She didn’t,” Wend said slowly. “At least, I don’t think she did. I know there was a hearse and a coffin, but I never thought she was dead.”
“But I ... I heard her scream that night, Wend. On the stairs. You told me it was just a nightmare.”
“And so it may have been.” Wend nodded. “But days before that, I saw her ride away in a coach. With him.” “With . . . who did she ride away with Wend?”
“With Tom Westing.”
Cassandra drew in her breath sharply.
As if expecting Cassandra to attack that statement, Wend said defensively, “She loved Tom before she even knew Rowan Keynes. He was the man she’d have married if she could. I know Tom was supposed to be dead, but the morning Rowan Keynes said he was leaving for Evora, she walked down into the town. She came back riding in a coach and she says to me, ‘Wend, I’ve met some old friends, the Milroyds, and they’ve asked me to stay with them for a while.’ And she packed a bag. And when I looked out the window, I could see Tom Westing in the coach that took her away. I’d know him anywhere. I couldn’t be mistaken. And when that coach clattered away, I knew Rowan Keynes had lost her. She’d run away with Tom Westing, that’s what. Oh, I know there was a funeral procession and all that, but that was because he was too proud to admit his wife had run away with another man and wasn’t coming back!”
“Couldn’t you have been mistaken? Perhaps it wasn’t Tom Westing.’’ Cassandra’s voice was strained.
Wend shook her head vigorously. “I knew I’d made no mistake when we came back from Portugal and Livesay told me Tom Westing wasn’t dead, as we’d all thought, that he’d come to Aldershot Grange right after we left, asking to see Mistress Charlotte, and when Livesay told him she’d gone to Lisbon, Tom was off like a shot. ”
“Why didn’t Livesay tell me Tom Westing had come back?” Cassandra was bewildered.
Wend hesitated. Livesay had undoubtedl
y looked at Cassandra’s almost-white-blonde hair and vivid green eyes—so exactly Tom’s coloring—and been afraid that she’d worm out of him what both he and Wend had already guessed, that Cassandra was Tom’s daughter. But what good to tell her that now? “Livesay was probably afraid for his job,” she muttered. “Afraid you’d say something to Rowan Keynes.”
“So you think she’s still alive?” said Cassandra slowly.
Wend nodded her head vigorously. “I think she’s over there somewhere—with him.”
It was a marvelously romantic tale and it explained a lot. But somehow Cassandra couldn’t quite credit it.
She puzzled over it, but as the day wore on, something more pressing occupied her thoughts.
Drew Marsden had said he would be back tomorrow— and she knew he would keep that promise. Her face grew wistful, thinking of him, wanting him even though she tried to force her thoughts away.
Wend had asked her if she would go back to London now. Perhaps that was the answer, perhaps she should go back to London now, today, make a clean break with everything she so ardently desired.
For if she stayed here, she knew that before tomorrow night’s moon had waned she would be in Drew’s arms, she would forget her fears and know only her dreams. . . . She would be too deeply involved ever to draw back.
She would bring him to disaster!
Her blonde head dropped in defeat and she pressed her hands against her cheeks, her burning eyes, trying desperately to think.
Wait! There was a way, an honorable way, to leave him, to give him time. Time to forget her. . .
She betook herself downstairs.
“Wend,” she said decisively, “come upstairs, we must pack. Tm going to Portugal.”
Wend opened her mouth to protest.
“And before you say what you’re about to,” Cassandra added dryly, quenching the expected outburst from Wend that it was unseemly for a lady to travel alone, “"I'll be taking you with me.”
She would go to Lisbon. She would find out for herself what had happened to her wayward young mother.
Lisbon Page 44