Lisbon (48 page)

Although England had stubbornly refused to follow Europe’s lead, and still celebrated the New Year on April 1 as they had for so many centuries, Charlotte—who loved light and life—felt bitter at being cut off from what little gaiety there was. Tears glittered on her lashes as she heard all over the city church bells clanging in the New Year.

The torchlight parade of the Feast of St. Anthony reached her in glimmers through the louvered shutters. And on Twelfth Night there would be the famous battle of flowers at Louie in the Algarve—she remembered hearing Rowan telling someone that if they were still in Portugal in January they would go to Louie to see it. . . .

Charlotte’s spirits ebbed even lower when Easter found her still confined to her darkened room. Holidays were always the worst, for Alta loved holidays and never failed to report glowingly about the parades and frivolities— enjoyments Charlotte was never permitted to share. The 
Bilbao family knew on which side their bread was buttered. They sympathized with her lot but they had their orders and they were faithful to the coins tbat reached them monthly, their payment for holding a madwoman captive.

On Whitsunday Charlotte took to her bed and refused to leave it. She turned her face to the wall and refused food.

The Bilbaos hastily held a council of war. If the
senhora
died, their income would cease. Alta explained this carefully to Charlotte and was rewarded by a short bitter laugh.

Alta warned that they would force food down her throat.

“It will not matter.” Charlotte shrugged. “For I will surely die if I am allowed no sunshine. ”

After much debate, Charlotte remaining adamant, her captors were helped in their decision by nature. A great storm visited Lisbon and a flying roof tile broke some of the louvers out of the shutters in Charlotte’s room. With this excuse, the Bilbaos, father and son, promptly pulled the nails and unlocked the balcony doors, and Charlotte, blinking at the glare of sunlight after her long confinement, was carried—for she was by now too weak to stand alone—to a cot on her third-floor balcony.

On that balcony Charlotte ate her first solid food in a week. She looked down at the carts and people threading by in the narrow street below and pondered hurling herself headfirst to her death on the cobbles below.

But that was exactly what Rowan wanted—-for her to take her own life. He had said so!
Her frail resolve strengthened. No matter how desirable death seemed,
she would not do it.

Besides, the sunshine was working a magic in her feelings. Of a sudden she wanted not to die but to live ... to live and find her children wherever they were, and, if he had perchance escaped death, to see Tom again, somehow, somewhere, no matter how impossibly long it took.

Once that day she thought she saw someone she knew— florid Lord Claypool, whom Rowan called Ned, striding over the cobbles below in his ginger wig and bottle-green 
satins. Before she realized that the man below was a stranger, she had risen on one elbow and called down to him—at which point Alta seized her and dragged her back inside and slammed the shuttered doors, blocking out the sun.

Charlotte was too weak to resist, but she wanted to be outdoors in the sunshine. To gain strength. To escape this place.

“If I promise not to call out, will you open the doors?” she asked Alta.

Angry, Alta tightened her lips and shook her head.

“Then I will not eat, I will die, and your money will stop.”

Charlotte threw herself facedown on the bed.

Alta stood, biting her lips, considering the mad
senhora.
She stood thus for a long time.

But when Charlotte heard the doors to the balcony creak open and sunshine flooded in, she knew that she had won. She had won the battle but not the war.

Two years after he had been carried off as a prisoner aboard the
Douro
, Tom Westing came back to Lisbon.

For him, all things had changed. Captain Yarbrough, content with a ransom for his wealthy Portuguese prisoner, had sailed away over the horizon, perhaps to Madagascar. But Tom had accompanied Sebastião da Severa deep into the green interior of Brazil to the rich mines that were the major source of da Severn’s wealth. And there he had quelled an uprising and once again saved the older man’s life. And gotten a poisonous arrow in the leg for his pains. It had been a near thing, and even amid the comforts of Sebastião’s handsome plantation house, Tom had been a long time getting well. When he had taken ship at last, Sebastião had clapped him on the shoulder and told him in an emotional voice that if he chose to return to Brazil he could come back as his son and heir. It was a dazzling prospect.

“I’ve first to find a lady,” Tom told him, gripping his friend s hand, his sun-browned face smiling beneath its shock of white-blond hair.

“Find her and bring her back with you,” said Sebastião sincerely.

“Aye, that is what I intend,” was Tom s hearty response.

His ship had crossed the equator, sailed northwest across the Atlantic’s Cape Verde Basin, crossed over the sub
merged Great Meteor Seamount, with the Canaries and Madeiras off to starboard, and beat its way at last over the dangerous undersea Gorringe Bank, where incredible pressures were building up as deep beneath the sea the European Plate strained against the African. Neither Tom nor the other mariners knew that this vast undersea world existed. To Tom the ocean was made up of soundings that told him they would not come aground, just as the night was made up of stars that guided his way by night, and winds—
winds that were carrying him back to her,
 his heart sang with the wail of the winds in the rigging. Charlotte, Charlotte once again!

He trembled that she would be all right—but of course,
of course she would
! Hadn’t fate done enough to them? She would be waiting, loving him still, and now he had money, he could sweep her away with her children, he could give them all a good life—in Brazil.

And if Keynes stood in his way . . . Tom’s square jaw hardened. If Keynes stood in his way, this time he would kill him.

And so it was that Tom came ashore in Portugal with a springy step.

Only to find the great flat-fronted mansion in the Portas del Sol shuttered and closed.

Eventually he found the owner. Keynes? Yes, he remembered leasing to a man named Keynes. An Englishman. He had let him out of his lease because he wanted to return home to England. His young wife had died and his country was girding for war.

“Died?’’ asked Tom incredulously.
“Died,
you say?”

The owner looked perplexed. “Yes, something about a fever, I think. I remember there was quite a handsome funeral procession.”

That was not good enough for Tom. Charlotte could not be dead! Records were not good enough for him either. He found the doctor who had certified to her death, fully expecting to find there had been some mistake, a wrong name, a servant girl—Wend perhaps.

The old doctor—who for all he had the face of a plaster saint was an inveterate gambler who had squandered three 
fortunes and would do anything for money—looked uneasily at this square-jawed Englishman. Nervously, he confirmed that Charlotte was indeed dead.

Keynes has murdered her
, was Tom’s first thought. A rush of blood came to his head. Aghast, he seized the doctor by the throat. “How did he kill her?” he said gratingly. "Tell me,
how?
’ For if it was by the sword, he would slash Keynes to pieces. If it was . . . ! He shook the doctor violently. "
How?
’ he demanded hoarsely.

The old doctor had seen death in other men’s eyes, and he knew he was seeing it now as he looked into Tom’s gray face.

"I swear to you,’’ he gasped. "Keynes did not kill her.’’ "Who then?’’ Tom shook him so hard his teeth rattled. "No one! No one!” He was afraid to add,
I know Keynes did not kill her because she was alive and well when I attested to her death
! Instead he gasped out beneath Tom’s crushing fingers, "She died of a malady—you are choking me, young sir!—of a sudden fever that carried away many.” Best not to mention madness to this dangerous fellow! Out of sheer fright he added, "Her husband was most grieved, I can tell you. He broke down completely.” His gratuitous lie had worked. Tom had guessed Keynes loved his beautiful young wife—he just didn’t know the tortuous way that Keynes’ mind worked. His fingers relaxed their grip on the doctor’s throat. "You were there when she died?”

"Oh, yes, yes!” was the eager response. "A lovely young woman, her death was most tragic. ”

Lovely indeed. . . . And more than tragic—this confirmation that she was gone had blasted Tom’s world apart. "Where does she lie now?” he asked dully.

"Lie?” Alarm sprang again to the doctor’s features. "Oh, you mean where does she lie buried? I was not informed, but I can direct you to the most likely place.” He gave Tom directions to a cemetery and quaked in his heart, hoping the Englishman Keynes had raised a stone to her.

The Englishman had. Tom found it, a simple stone giving only her name and the dates. Tom knelt beside that 
stone and grieved. He felt as if the very heart was being torn from his body.

At last, gray-faced, he rose and hied himself to a stonecutter. That simple stone was not enough to mark the resting place of his wonderful Charlotte. He commissioned the fashioning of another stone, a footstone of whitest marble, a delicate spire pointing toward heaven, whose gates, he was certain, would have opened wide to receive her. And he ordered carved upon it—no matter what Keynes thought if he viewed it later—a message that came straight from his heart: “Here lies Charlotte, beloved of Thomas,
ate o fim do mundo.”
Until the end of the world. . . .

While that stone was being carved and erected, Tom prowled south through the countryside where he and Charlotte had been so briefly happy. He slept in the tiny inn where she had lain in his arms beneath a crescent moon— and wept for her. He wandered on to the village of Azeitao and rested beside the stone fountain where they had shared ewe's-milk cheese and drunk muscatel wine, and on to Palmela. There he climbed up toward the battlements of the ancient Knights Templars’ Castle that crowned the heights, where he and Charlotte had made their fateful decision to return to Lisbon, and looked out upon the glitter of the Sea of Straw. If only he had taken her away—carried her off by force if necessary—she might be alive today.

Through the drifting sweet scent of the orange groves he made his way back to the Tagus and across it to Lisbon. But for him the lights of the city had dimmed. Moodily he wandered the streets, gazing on sights she too must have seen—as if that would bring him closer to her. His feet carried him through the steep winding ways of the Alfama. Walking in the Alfama made him feel closer to her somehow; he could not imagine why. After all, Charlotte had lived in the handsome Portas del Sol, not in the old Moorish quarter.

Once he lost his bearings, inquired his way, and was told he was on Nowhere Street. A grim smile flickered 
across his grief-ravaged face. Nowhere Street. . . . Perhaps that was where he belonged.

Halfway along, he paused and for no reason suddenly looked up at a third-floor balcony. He would at that moment have given all that he owned or would ever have and all hope of heaven just to see her once again. . . .

The balcony was empty. Jorge Bilbao had limped home in a hurry and told his wife to get Charlotte off the balcony, for he had just sighted the Messenger at the end of the street. The Messenger’s orders had been strict: if the Bilbaos wanted to go on receiving their monthly coins, then the mad
senhora
must get no sight of the Messenger.

Had Tom come by just minutes before—or indeed a few minutes later—he would have seen Charlotte, pensive, on that balcony, and their entire future would have been altered.

As it was, Tom stared at the empty balcony, felt a tug somewhere inside him, and then was jostled by a donkey struggling through with a load of oranges. He moved on.

That afternoon he took ship for Brazil. After a brief but joyful reunion with Sebastião da Severa, who now looked upon him as a son, he plunged deep into the interior. To forget her. He combed the wilds of the Minas Gerais looking for gold.

Instead he found diamonds.

Charlotte had finally given up hope for Tom. He was dead, he
must
be dead or he would somehow have found her. At night she dreamed of him, of course, and by day she longed. Just as she longed for her children and trembled for their welfare.

But now she no longer pinned her hopes on a miracle— that Tom would save her. Instead she pinned her hopes on the Messenger who brought the Bilbaos their money every month—if she could only talk to this man, win him over, make him
understand
! And perhaps the Bilbaos feared she would do just that, for she had overheard their muttered conversations in the hallway when Jorge told Alta that Charlotte must be gotten out of sight—the Messenger was coming.

At last, on the day the Messenger was to arrive, she managed to kick off one of her shoes as Alta hurried her inside, so that the shutters Alta promptly slammed shut before she left the room did not quite close. Alertly Charlotte listened for the front door, heard it open and close behind someone—the Messenger! She dashed to the balcony, closed the shutters behind her, and leaned over the railing, peering down to see who would come out onto the cobbles.