Lisbon (5 page)

Then abruptly her face had lost its color and her lips turned blue. “I don’t . . . feel so well,” she gasped.

Before nightfall she was dead and the rustling indigo silk had become her funeral gown.

Uncle Russ had seemed to feel no grief at his young sister’s loss.

Only Charlotte felt this blinding grief for her laughing young mother. Bereft of his bride-to-be, John Foster had promptly disappeared from Charlotte’s life. And Uncle Russ, her mother’s bachelor brother, simply arrived from the north and took over. He had himself appointed Charlotte’s guardian, stripped the house in St. Mary’s and sold 
everything, and swept twelve-year-old Charlotte and her few personal possessions north to his own home of Aldershot Grange near the Scottish border.

Charlotte s first winter there was bleak. With clothing far too thin for the biting cold, she had shivered in the big drafty house, wrapped herself in shawls, and hovered by the hearth. Hopelessly she had watched freezing rain and sleet chatter down on the roof, and snow and ice storms obscure the gray landscape. Like her mother, she was a child of the sunshine, and this land of cold gray mists and frosty air depressed her.

Sometimes that winter she had felt she would die at Aldershot Grange, alone and unloved, for her uncle had simply brought her home and left her there and gone down to London, leaving her with an unsuitable wardrobe in the company of servants. Remembering the warmth and gaiety of the palm-fringed house in the Scilly Isles, Charlotte had night after night cried herself to sleep.

She was to learn in the next three years that her uncle was rarely in residence at Aldershot Grange, that he spent almost all his time carousing in London. And on the few occasions when he was home, he was cold and harsh and in the main ignored her. He seemed to think she needed nothing save food and shelter, and gave her so small an allowance that she could barely buy pins with it. It was fortunate that she had learned to read and write and do sums in the Scillies, for schooling was now out of the question. Gradually Charlotte’s clothes wore out, and she would have been left in tatters had not she and Wend one rainy day decided to explore the large attics of Aldershot Grange. Tucked away in a dusty corner, festooned with cobwebs, they found an old forgotten trunk, and when Wend pried open its curved lid, they both gasped. There, carefully packed away in lavender, were some dresses Charlotte’s mother had worn as a girl—and left here long ago when she married and moved away.

"Didn’t find them none too soon!’’ Wend chuckled, holding up a pink taffeta apron with an admiring "Look at 
this!
”

Charlotte, rummaging delightedly in this treasure trove, 
flung it over Wend's shoulder, “You can have the apron, Wend.” And stopped as she found a little broken fan bearing a painted scene of clouds and cupids. Her mother’s fan, beyond a doubt, for her mother had always loved cupids. Charlotte’s eyes misted with tears as she held the little fan against her cheek. She carried it downstairs atop a pile of lavender-scented clothing, and got it out and looked at it whenever she felt downhearted, for somehow that little broken fan seemed to bring her mother—and that lost life of the Scillies—closer to her.

The items from the trunk kept Charlotte from going about in tatters, but they were hopelessly unfashionable with their great puffed sleeves, and Charlotte, who was taller than her tiny mother, found herself promptly outgrowing them—and eventually even they grew threadbare. When she asked her uncle if she might not be allowed some portion of her inheritance to purchase new clothes, he barked that his sister Cymbeline had had many debts of which Charlotte knew nothing and the estate had barely been able to pay them.

Charlotte doubted that last, but she was in no position to find out—she would simply have to wait until she came of age.

Or married.

The latter seemed hopelessly far away.

And then Wend—laughing, joking, superstitious Wend— had come into her life, hired to replace old Glynis in the kitchen. Wend was noisy and good-natured and she came like a bright spirit into this new world of the pale unhappy child from the Scillies. Lonely and lost and sure that she would never become accustomed to life amid these forbidding northern crags, Charlotte was forever persuading Wend—who didn’t need much prodding—to slip away with her and go exploring some new or seldom-trodden path.

As for instance today, when they had come upon the unrepentant lovers lying in the sunken grave. . . .

The two girls had been out for a long time and they made their way back into the house stealthily and by different routes—Wend because she hoped Cook might not 
have noticed her absence, Charlotte because she had spotted a strange horse tethered near the house and wondered who their caller might be.

She was not long in finding out. A sharp-featured swarthy gentleman was lounging on a long wooden bench in the hall as if stationed there to prevent anyone coming in from the outside without his seeing them.

“Where is Mistress Charlotte, wench?” he demanded of Charlotte in a harsh impatient voice as she came in. “I’ve been waiting for her these past two hours.”

Humiliated that he should consider her a servant, Charlotte came to a halt before him and rose to her full— though not very great—height
serving
.  "
I
am Charlotte Vayle,” 
she announced menacingly, the effect somewhat marred by her sudden realization that there was a new long rent in her skirt and hastily trying to cover it.

Startled or no, the sharp-featured gentleman came swiftly to his feet. “Your pardon, Mistress Charlotte,” he said smoothly. “It is so dark in this hall ...”

“That you took me for a wench, ” supplied Charlotte bitterly.

“Oh, never that!” He swept her a gallant bow. “Arthur Bodine, at your service.” He straightened up and Charlotte’s mouth tightened mutinously as a pair of cynical brown eyes raked up and down her thin still-childish figure.

He is criticizing my clothes!
she thought hotly, her 
fingers clutching the worn faded material of her torn skirt.

But it seemed that was not precisely what Arthur Bodine had in mind.

Over supper, which was served in haste in the dusty long dining room—Mr. Bodine having refused to take so much as a bite until the lady of the house was home—he told her that he was “looking in on her” at the behest of her uncle in London.

“Uncle Russ is too busy to come north this year?” Charlotte guessed, giving her caller a steady look.

“That’s right,” Bodine agreed affably. He studied her small face, looking peaked and pale beneath the starched ruffled cotton cap that completely hid her luxuriant blonde 
hair, with a sigh. “Not for a couple of years, I imagine.” He sighed again, peering at her.

“Why? Why did he say that?” Charlotte demanded fiercely of Wend when Arthur Bodine had departed. “How could he know what Uncle Russ would do?” For there had been something in Bodine’s manner that alarmed and upset her, something she could not quite put her finger on.

Wend, who had served the hasty supper, cast a thoughtful glance at the door through which Arthur Bodine had departed.

“He was looking at you as if you were a horse he wanted to buy,” she mused shrewdly.

Charlotte shivered.

“Perhaps your uncle sent Bodine to see if you were ripe enough for marriage?” suggested Wend.

Charlotte gave Wend a shocked look. “But I’m only fifteen!”

“My two sisters were both married before they were thirteen,” Wend informed her.

“Yes, but ...” But they were of the servant class and she, Charlotte, was of the gentry. Charlotte couldn’t quite bring herself to say that but Wend guessed and her young face hardened.

“The gentry
sells
their daughters,” she said truculently. “They just don’t call it that.”

Charlotte swallowed. Perhaps Wend was right. Perhaps Bodine had been looking her over with that in mind. She gave an involuntary shiver.

“Don’t worry,” said Wend more kindly. “Maybe you’ll find someone for yourself before your uncle gets around to it. Maybe you found him today! Tom Westing was looking at
you
more than at Maisey!”

“Wend!” sputtered Charlotte. “That’s not true!”

“Isn’t it?” Wend went away laughing.

But it gave Charlotte something to think about, and that night in her big square bedchamber beneath a threadbare coverlet—for her mother’s bed linens had all been sold on St. Mary’s, and Uncle Russ never thought to buy anything new for the house, so even the window hangings were in tatters—Charlotte dreamed that
she
was the Golden Maiden 
and Tom Westing her Viking Lord. She dreamed that she was taller, more filled out, that she was wearing a white dress, a sinuous gown of finest silk that moved as she moved, and that they had sunk down together in the dappled shadows of the copse. His handsome face was very near, his breath hot upon her cheek. She felt his strong hands caressing her white skin, heard his low laugh.

And waked with her heart racing, to realize it was the next morning and that what had waked her was Ivy, the upstairs maid, laughing with Wend outside her door.

Wend, who was always seeking some way to get out of work, came into the room as Charlotte was dressing.

"Wend, you should knock," Charlotte reproved her. "I might have had my clothes off, and someone going by in the hall—"

"Nobody upstairs but us womenfolk," Wend corrected her breezily. She flopped down on the unmade bed and watched Charlotte dress in silence for a moment. Then, "Didn't they look funny?" she said.

"Who?" asked Charlotte, but she knew.

"That pair we interrupted making love yesterday," said Wend patiently. "Didn't they look funny, though, interrupted like that? Maisey coming out of her dress and that butter-yellow hair all tangled! And Tom Westing mad as a hornet! He'd probably have jumped up and chased us away if he'd had his pants on, which I'll wager he hadn't!" Her hazel eyes sparkled.

Charlotte looked up from pulling on her petticoat over her chemise.

"Wend, you
can't
talk about them," she said with decision. "It would be too embarrassing for us both to say what they were doing when we found them. Besides," she challenged, "why should we make trouble for them?"

Wend stood up and considered the shorter Charlotte from her superior height.

"That's so," she agreed. "Why should we make trouble?" Then she grinned. "Perhaps you liked what you saw?" she suggested slyly. "And you don't want to see Tom Westing's handsome face get bruised?"

Hot color raced to Charlotte's cheeks. "That's ridicu
lous, Wend,” she snapped. “I hope to heaven I never see Tom Westing again—indeed, I think I should die of embarrassment if I did!”

“Oh, you’ll see him again. Wend laughed. But perhaps not with his pants off!”

And as it happened, she did.

The very next day.

3

The day was hot and beautiful, with fluffy white clouds floating in an endless blue. Charlotte had come alone to what she called her “secret place.” Although it was not really far from the house, up near Fox Elve, it could be entered only through a cleft in the rocks and its entrance was fully concealed by the branches of an ancient gnarled oak tree. Charlotte had found it quite by accident during her first miserable year at Aldershot Grange and had formed the habit of going there whenever she wanted to be alone—or when life at the big gray house became too insupportable. She had never even brought Wend here.

Today she had no companion. Cook had called Wend a lazy wench and threatened to take a broom to her rump if she disappeared again when there was work to be done. Without Wend for company, the “secret place” had seemed the perfect spot to while away a lazy summer s afternoon. Charlotte had brought along a leather-bound volume (it was in reality a racy novel called
The Cuckold's Revenge), 
and to mark her place she had carelessly slipped in a well-thumbed tract by Daniel Defoe that had been written six years ago in 1724. The tract was provocatively entitled “Conjugal Lewdness: A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed, and Married Whoredom,” and it dealt at length with a subject Charlotte found enormously fascinating: trepanning, which was the crime of 
kidnapping heiresses and marrying them against their will (possibly with the encouragement of guns held at their breasts) in order to gain control of their fortunes. Charlotte had read the tract with big eyes and imagined herself snatched from her bed by a trepanner, bundled into a coach, and whisked away to be married in Scotland at gunpoint. She had imagined herself on such a wedding night—not cowering timorously in her bed, but leaping up dramatically and holding the trepanner at bay with his own pistol, which she had thought to snatch up before she made a dash for the door and freedom.

But of course, Charlotte realized regretfully that she was unlikely to be sought out by a trepanner, since she was not an heiress and had no hope of becoming one. The best she could look forward to was that her uncle would trot out some prosaic suitor and tell her that she must be content with him. Her violet eyes gleamed rebelliously. She would chose her own suitor, that she would! She would not let herself be forced to marry against her will, as were so may aristocratic young girls. She would . . .