Lisbon (39 page)

“Me in these new clothes—and you in silks and satins!” she marveled. “It’s a wonderful change, isn’t it?”

Charlotte smiled at Wend and kept her own counsel. She’d have traded her silks and satins for homespun any day, could she just have turned back the clock.

Summer slipped into autumn and Rowan disappeared again, going she knew not where. Back to London, she told everyone. Back to the house on Grosvenor Square, where Yates lorded it over Cook and the chambermaids. . . . And another Yuletide was celebrated at Aldershot Grange, celebrated quietly, for Charlotte was expected to give birth before Twelfth Night. She did. On the last day of December it began to snow, and with the first flakes Charlotte’s labor pains began. At first it was as if the pain walked round her, testing her—and then, as the snow outside deepened, the pain came in whirling gusts like the wind that shrieked down the chimney. A great gale from the cold North Atlantic tore through the Lake Country, 
snapping off tree limbs, blowing off roof tiles in a torrent of white. And in the big square bed in Aldershot Grange where Charlotte fought for her life, the all-consuming pain blotted everything out until her world became one long unending scream.

“She’s going,” muttered the sweating doctor. “I can’t bring it. And she’s weakening.”

“Here, let me.” With surprising strength, Wend pushed him aside. “Charlotte.” She gripped Charlotte’s hands in her own, and her anxious voice penetrated through the red sea of pain that roiled in Charlotte’s head. “Take strength from me,” whispered Wend. “I’ve got plenty.

And somehow Charlotte did seem to take strength from Wend. The doctor later said it was a miracle. He had been sure her failing strength would never be enough to bring forth the baby. But it was.

So Baby Phoebe, named for Charlotte’s grandmother, was born on the first day of January.

“I don’t think you’ll ever be able to bear another child,” the doctor told Charlotte as she lay back weakly with her eyes closed, pale and soaked with perspiration from her endeavors. “Nor should you,” he added sternly.

Nobody had to tell Charlotte that Death had brushed her with its dark wings. She was grateful to live to face the new day—and to clasp her new daughter in her arms. A daughter as dark as Cassandra was fair.

Rowan came home on a freezing February day. He never wrote, so it was always a surprise to see him. This time Charlotte could greet him with a child who was truly his.

“She has your coloring,” she said. “I think she looks like you.”

“God help her then!” He grinned. But he picked up the baby and studied her approvingly, and when he gave her back to Charlotte, his dark eyes glowed.

He had brought her a gift, a beautiful red-embroidered white shawl carefully folded up in his saddlebag.

“Would you like to go back to London with me?” he asked.

Charlotte thought about that gloomy silent house on Grosvenor square. “Not yet,” she hedged. “The doctor feels I am still too frail.”

So Rowan went back alone.

In the years that followed, Charlotte ventured down to London only twice—and both occasions ended in disaster.

The first time, as they were leaving a music hall, that famous womanizer Lord Kentridge, more than a little drunk, had detached himself from a noisy group and swayed to a stop before Charlotte. Entranced by her beauty, he turned to Rowan and hiccuped. “You’re Keynes, aren’t you? Heard your wife was smashing—and she is!”

Rowan had promptly seized the opportunity to strike up an acquaintance with Kentridge, and he and Charlotte had accompanied the reeling peer home to his house in George Street, where he told them he was “batching it” while his wife sojourned in Bath.

Rowan evinced an interest in his lordship’s library and told Charlotte in an undertone to maneuver Kentridge to the music room and keep him occupied.

Flustered and confused by this strange request, Charlotte nonetheless endeavored to do so. She succeeded far too well.

Rowan came back—from searching Kentridge’s desk for some papers that interested Walpole—to find that Kentridge had a burning-cheeked Charlotte backed up against the spinet and was trying to pull her bodice down by main strength. Rowan, who had not found the papers and was in a bad mood, wrenched Kentridge off so roughly that his lordship’s handsome mauve silk coat split clean down the back. Indeed Rowan thrust Kentridge away from Charlotte with a force that sent his amorous lordship careening through the music room’s open French windows into the thorny arms of a rosebush in the garden outside. His lordship, sobered by his fall and all too keenly aware of Rowan’s reputation for swordsmanship, had prudently fought his way free of the thorns, dusted himself off, and returned without a word to put on another coat.

Back at Grosvenor Square, the incident had put Rowan into a black rage.

“I told you to
distract
Kentridge, not
seduce
him!”

“You told me to keep him    ,”Charlotte flashed.

“And I did! He had chased me all about the room and finally cornered me at the spinet. I was about to slap his face and make my escape when you arrived. ”

Rowan only growled.

“I will take you north,” he said stiffly. “To a background where you will be better suited.”

“Perhaps that would be best,” sighed Charlotte. “For I do not seem to get on in London.”

Charlotte’s next London venture was equally disastrous. Young Lord Stamford, whom they met at a rout held at one of the big German-style houses in fashionable Hanover Square, promptly fell head over heels in love with Charlotte and followed her about, calf-eyed. This irritated Rowan out of all conscience. Since Lord Stamford was more a contemporary of Charlotte than of Rowan—he was but twenty and singularly handsome in a melancholy, poetic sort of way—Rowan could not justify challenging him to a duel, but the young lord’s desperate infatuation with Charlotte, which produced titters everywhere, became a source of bickering between them.

“Must that boy always follow us about?” Rowan demanded testily.

“I have done nothing to encourage him,” Charlotte insisted.

“He writes odes to your eyelashes, your lips, your lovelocks, your earlobes!”

“Oh, don’t be anatomical, Rowan! He fancies himself to be a poet. ”

“He sends copies to his friends. They are read and laughed at in the taverns.”

“If they are, it is no fault of mine. ”

But came the night London would never forget. At a large ball in Burlington House, Lord Burlington’s recently erected Italian-style
palazzo
in Piccadilly, just as Charlotte descended the grand staircase, young Lord Stamford, the worse for wine and frantic at Charlotte’s most recent rejection, lurched forward from the crowd, fell to his knees, 
and reverently kissed the hem of her petticoat while loudly imploring her to pity him.

Charlotte, gone scarlet with embarrassment, snatched her skirt away and ordered Lord Stamford to get up on his feet
at once.
But the incident made juicy reading in the 
Gazette
and convulsed London.

It was too much for Rowan. Again they retired to the north. Never again did he take her back to London.

On the whole, Charlotte was glad. Her little girls absorbed her time—Cassandra, bright and sparkling and adventurous with her thick shock of luminous pale hair and her brilliant green eyes, little Phoebe, dark and tempestuous and cunning like her father—and Charlotte was rather relieved to be free of arguments with Rowan, who, although he doted on the children, spent less and less time with his family. As time went by, stories of Rowan s mistresses and chance alliances drifted north, but Charlotte ignored them, reminding herself that Rowan was a man with many enemies.

And that was how matters stood in the spring of 1739 when Cassandra was barely six years old and Phoebe not yet five.

It had been a harsh winter in Cumberland and those who lived along the Derwent Water had shivered through it, keeping close by blazing hearths when the wind howled down through the chimneys. Now spring had burst like a green blessing upon the land and the damp fragrant earth seemed sweet and fresh and full of promise.

And into that land of cold nights and crisp clear days and singing birds came Rowan, riding north from London to greet a family he had not seen for six months.

Hardly did he pause to greet Charlotte. Brusquely he ordered her to pack. They were leaving at once for Portugal.

Coming out of the blue as it did, it took Charlotte s breath away. But after the bitterness of last winter s weather, she looked forward to a land that seemed to her one of perpetual sunshine and flowers. She and Wend made haste to pack, and with the children in tow departed Aldershot Grange—departed so swiftly that Charlotte was tempted 
to ask Rowan if this sudden move meant that he was
fleeing
England, perhaps for his life?

But on shipboard his lowering mood had changed abruptly. There Rowan seemed to relax. He was of a sudden almost the lover he had been those first golden days in Lisbon—teasing, beguiling, and always somehow with a dramatic flair that caught at her senses. A man of whom a woman could never tire, for there was always a freshness in the way he took her.

This was the old Rowan, the man who once had been. Charlotte felt as if she were greeting again someone who had been away a long time, someone she had not expected to meet again. But in the seven stormy years of their marriage, she reminded herself, nothing had lasted. Despite endless truces, they had always been back at each other’s throats.

Like a great white bird the tall ship fled across the sea-green wastes of the North Atlantic and Charlotte leaned silent upon the rail, watching the prow cut through the water. The tangy salt wind whipped her wide skirts and her golden hair as she tried to put aside her dark memories and come to grips with the future. Perhaps in Lisbon, that city of light, she and Rowan could recapture—and this time hold—the magic they had so briefly known there . . . before the dark beauty Katherine Talybont had come into their lives and everything had changed. Perhaps . . .

But Charlotte had a strong streak of fatalism in her nature. What would be, would be. And whatever her fate, for her all roads had led to Lisbon.

Lisbon, Portugal, Summer 1739

On a glorious day, with seabirds screaming and diving from an endless vault of blue above the white sails, their ship made its stately way up the Tagus River, past the gray rococo structure of the Tower of Belem, rising in embattled beauty to guard the entrance to the town.

Wend's eyes rolled as the skyline of Lisbon, topped by the tall gray ramparts of the Castelo de SãoJorge, rose up before them.

“Remember, I told you you’d be surprised!” murmured Charlotte.

Around them the ship’s passengers crowded forward, eager to disembark. Rowan stood little dark-haired Phoebe upon the ship’s rail and with his arm around her pointed out the magnificent churches whose towers and steeples rose above the palaces and pastel-painted houses.

Cassandra, in a yellow dress, clamored to get up on the rail too, but Rowan took no notice. Charlotte wondered when Phoebe had become his favorite; she hadn’t noticed it before. Still, she supposed it was but natural, for Phoebe was truly blood of his blood—and so like him, bright and beguiling and often infuriating. Between them she and Wend boosted Cassandra up, and her yellow hair ribands blew through her frosty blonde hair as they steadied her to get a better view of the fast-approaching port city.

“We'll get lost there,” predicted Wend darkly, and Char
lotte laughed. Indeed, just seeing this City of Light gave her spirits a lift.

She had assumed that they would disembark with the other passengers, but Rowan would not allow that. He said the town might be crowded and he would not drag the children about in the hot sun from inn to inn as he made inquiries. He did not ask Charlotte to go with him, and although she was disappointed, she did not insist.

He came back at dusk and told them he had found a place for them at an inn but they must stay on board ship tonight. The English party who were vacating the rooms would not be leaving until tomorrow.

Wistfully Charlotte watched the lights of Lisbon shining gold against the velvet blackness, for after dinner Rowan went into the town again—alone.

As they climbed, bag and baggage, into a coach next morning. Rowan remarked that the inn was rather far out.

“Rather far out indeed!” said Charlotte when their coach finally seemed to lose the city altogether and lumbered out into the countryside. “Good heavens, Rowan, are we on the road to Evora?”

“The only accommodations I could find in town were not suitable for the children,” he explained. “I think you will like the place I have found—it is very picturesque.” Picturesque it certainly was. And isolated. The low whitewashed building with shutters painted a dull blue was almost hidden in a grove of eucalyptus trees. But it was scrupulously clean, and the food, he promised, was good—he had already lunched here.

Charlotte did not want to complain before Wend and the children. “But this is so far
out,
Rowan,” she protested when they were alone. “The children will want to see everything, and it will take us
forever
to get into town!” “The sights can wait. All of you need rest after our long voyage. I will hire a horse and ride back and forth, but you will stay here.”