Lisbon (51 page)

Alarmed now, he began an intensive search for her.

She was not to be found. There were several who said that a blonde woman in peach-colored rags had been seen dancing for coins in the public square. Hearing that, Rowan winced
—he
had brought her to this. His mouth closed in a grim line as he asked what had become of her.

Nobody knew. A crowd had collected, an officer of the law had arrived upon the scene, he had been about to take her away, but a fight had erupted in the crowd and he had turned about to settle it. When the combatants had been 
separated and he turned back, the woman was gone. Everyone was vague about what had happened to her. One man was of the opinion that she had slipped away during the altercation. Another thought a large woman, a well-known local madam, might have hurried her away. One beggar lad thought she had been whisked into a black-and-gold coach.

Nobody knew for sure.

Half-mad now with fear that something terrible might have happened to Charlotte, Rowan was looking for her. There was not an unsavory place in Lisbon that he did not visit. Yet at the end he came away empty-handed.

Nobody had seen the beautiful blonde woman with the violet eyes and the ragged peach silk gown.

He would have gone to the authorities, but how could he do that? Could he say that he was looking for a woman whose funeral he had arranged five years ago? Dared he admit in this strange land that he had forcibly imprisoned his wife and kept her all that time against her will locked up in a house in the Alfama? The doctor who had signed the death certificate would of a certainty not admit the deed—he was more likely to call Rowan mad and offer to certify him! The Bilbaos would deny it and flee in terror of the law.

He was caught in a trap of his own devising.

Now he spread his search out into the countryside. He was convinced that Charlotte had somehow gotten out of Lisbon—but where could she have gone? North to Oporto he ranged, and into the pine woods and the gorse-covered hills and blue hydrangea hedges. Through the cool reaches of the stream-laced Bucaco forest and into the tall grass country he roamed, and into the wide meadows where the fighting bulls were bred. Southward into the lush Algarve he went, searching for her through Moorish-looking villages until at last he reached Lagos, where the great sixteenth-century caravelles had begun their long voyages to India. Past purplish rock cliffs he made his way to that southernmost tip of Portugal—squall-racked Sagres, where in the wild countryside Prince Henry the Navigator had charted the voyages that had built an empire.

And it was in the wild grandeur of those storm-lashed headlands that Rowan at last gave up. He looked out hopelessly over the forked and rocky promontory that seemed to point an arrow out into the Atlantic, and was chilled by the knowledge that he had combed the length and breadth of Portugal and had not found her.

He, the man who had made a fortune finding the un-findable, who had sniffed out the trail of those who had arranged their escapes and set up their hiding places with gold long months before, had been defeated by a tired, disheveled, penniless wench just free of a five-year imprisonment, loosed suddenly in a city where she had not a single friend. Impossible—but it had happened.

For him it was a nightmare come true.

A chilling thought occurred to him. Charlotte might be dead—and by her own hand. Perhaps, after his last brutal treatment of her—and he now admitted to himself that it had been brutal, and felt remorse—she might have preferred death to letting him find her again, this woman he had mauled and scorned and imprisoned. The thought seared him.

Defeated, he made his way back past almond trees bent by the ever-blowing strong winds, past stunted figs, but the glorious scenery went by him in a blur. Back in Lisbon, he searched for her again, but he no longer believed he would find her. She was gone, gone forever.

Only then, as he stared in desolation at the stars gleaming down over Portugal, did he realize that he loved her. Truly loved her. He had loved her, without realizing it, all the time.

And now she was gone. Vanished forever.

Into the dark alleyways of Lisbon. . . .

There was the promise of snow in the biting wind that whipped down from the North Sea, rocking the body of the green-painted stagecoach that was lumbering steadily down the Great Essex Road, making the Colchester-to-London run. In Chelmsford, where they had changed horses at a coaching inn while the passengers ate, that promise had become a reality. But despite a sudden flurry of windblown snow that had nearly obscured the square tower of the parish church as the passengers clambered back onto the stage, the cheery red-nosed driver had bellowed out, “We'll be in London on schedule, good sirs and ladies.”

“I should hope so,” muttered one elderly lady in an aggrieved voice. “I’m black and blue already!”

And indeed she had reason to groan. Devoid of springs, the stagecoach careened down that ancient roadway built by the Romans some sixteen centuries before, lurching and jolting from side to side in a manner that caused the passengers to be thrown in a heap against each other and against the sides of the coach. As they approached London, the snow grew deeper, the road more treacherous, and the driver perforce had to slow his pace in the gray dusk as the horses’ hooves fought for purchase on treacherous deep ruts made slippery by hard ice. But inside the coach there was one young passenger who hardly felt the bumps.

Oblivious to the protests of the other passengers, Cassandra Keynes, who would be seventeen in March and should
not
, at her age, the elderly lady s disapproving gaze told her, be traveling alone, lifted the leathern flap designed to keep out the wind. With her other gloved hand holding her hat clapped to her head, she peered out at the big old trees that grew perilously close to the road and the six thundering coach horses.

The dark branches of those massive oak and hornbeam trees seemed to bend down over the road in the whipping wind and to swish menacingly close in the gathering darkness, but she could still make out their sturdy trunks, and in between, the countryside about. Her long green eyes were brooding as she studied them. It had happened about . . . here. Yes, there was the stile over which she had tripped. Head out of the window now, unmindful of the steaming breath of the horses raising a white mist ahead, or of the lurching coach wheels or the iron horseshoes that sometimes struck a bright spark from a rock laid bare of ice by the biting wind, unmindful of the cursing coachman or the crack of the long whip, unmindful of everything until one of the passengers pulled her back inside with a snarl, she was remembering the event that last year had got her exiled to Colchester and the strictest school for young ladies her father could find.

Cassandra’s lovely young face was pale as she sat back in her seat, letting the leathern curtain flap against the window until the passenger who had pulled her back in quickly bent over and secured it. She was glad of the dimness inside the coach, for she knew that a tumult of emotions must be pouring over her all-too-expressive features.

She had been afraid of what this strip of road would do to her, for it brought it all back—the accident, everything.

Oh, why couldn’t they have stayed at Aldershot Grange, where she and Phoebe had spent most of their childhood? 
she asked herself, heartsick.

Indeed, it was at Aldershot Grange that Rowan Keynes had brought his small daughters when in 1739 he had left Charlotte imprisoned in the Alfama and sailed back to England. He had left them there in the care of Wend and 
gone back to London alone, there alternately to brood and to carouse.

But England’s war with Spain—or “The War of Jenkins’ Ear’’ as it was popularly called—had begun a conflagration which had gradually reached out to embroil most of Europe. And when in July of 1745 Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, had landed in Scotland and in August raised the royal standard in Glenfinnan, Rowan Keynes had ridden up from London. He arrived on a lathered horse and told Wend brusquely that Aldershot Grange might lie along the route south of an invading Scottish army and he was taking twelve-year old Cassandra and eleven-year-old Phoebe with him to Cambridge, there to enroll them in Mistress Endicott’s School for Young Ladies. She was to get them ready at once.

Wend was desolate. Cassandra and Phoebe were like her own daughters and she bade them a tearful good-bye. Indeed she and Livesay had had to be surrogate parents for both children, except on their rare visits to London or even rarer visits from their father.

It had been a mistake, bringing his daughters to Cambridge. Rowan, thinking only of their safety and need for a genteel education—and not wanting to enroll them in a London school where they might drop in unexpectedly at number forty-three Grosvenor Square and find him engaged in some debauchery unfit for their tender years— had completely overlooked the fact that Cambridge was a university town, brimming over with virile young men, many of them aprowl for whatever skirts seemed to lift easiest, all of them agog for a pretty girl.

In such a place slim young Cassandra with her moonlight-blonde hair and emerald eyes and heart-stopping beauty was hardly likely to be overlooked.

“Boys have been mooning around this school like cats on a back fence ever since that tow-haired Keynes girl got here,’’ grumbled Cook. “It’s got so every time Maud throws out the slops I hold my breath waiting to hear a howl as someone gets spattered in the face!”

Dot, the new and perky seventeen-year-old chambermaid, chimed in: “What with all the little tips I get from 
boys who want me to slip notes to her, I’ll be able to retire at twenty-three!”

There was general laughter in the school’s commodious kitchen.

That Cassandra with her elegant good looks should be the center of all this commotion had made her younger sister restive. For Phoebe, with a wisdom beyond her years, realized full well that she would never be the blazing beauty her sister was. She had inherited her father’s looks—and his features fit better on a man than on a woman. Her nose, for instance, she considered too long, too narrow, her dark brows too straight, her lips a trifle thin. Not even in her first bloom would she have Cassandra’s heartstopping loveliness, her wonderful winning smile. “Piquant” was the word they would use for her, never “beautiful” spoken on a long indrawn sigh. Everyone loved serene smiling Cassandra—all but Phoebe. Phoebe loved only herself.

Totally selfish and wrapped up in her own affairs, Phoebe told herself contemptuously that she didn’t Cassandra’s beauty, she had something better—she was smart.

Cassandra’s impression on Cambridge and its students had been very lighthearted at first, just notes and smiles and waves and sometimes tossed kisses. But at Mistress Endicott’s the girls were growing up. By the time Cassandra was fifteen, Jim Deveney, a university student whose family lived in the town, managed to wangle an introduction to Cassandra through his mother’s long friendship with Mistress Endicott. And Cassandra sometimes on Saturdays found herself having tea with Jim’s mother and sisters while Jim sat in the background beaming at her with his irrepressible grin. Jim was bluff and open-hearted. Cassandra was all too aware of his adoration—indeed the whole school tittered when Jim arrived looking like an eager puppy to carry her off to tea—and she idly considered that one day she might marry Jim ... or someone like him.

There were lots of candidates for that honor, including Jim’s wild and handsome distant cousin Tony Dunn, who had descended on Cambridge—having already been sent down from Oxford and two other schools—when Cassandra was fifteen. Tony fell madly in love with her too.

Phoebe, now fourteen and with the school s smartest hairdo—Phoebe was slim and ultra-fashionable even if she’d never be pretty—had grown tired of living in her beautiful sister’s shadow. She decided to do something about it. With gifts of pomade and perfume and hair ribands, she managed to corrupt Dot into staying up and letting her in and out of the school’s side door by night. Cassandra and Phoebe shared a room, but it was easy enough to wait until Cassandra was asleep and slip away to some tavern and there drink wine with the university students, who were eager enough to buy drinks for any of Mistress Endicott’s closely chaperoned young ladies—and especially the sister of beautiful blonde Cassandra.

Cassandra found out about it when she woke to find Phoebe, fully dressed at four in the morning, staggering tipsily into a chair and falling onto the bed.

“Where have you been?” she asked, still half-asleep.

“At the Rose and Thorn.”

“The Rose and ...” Cassandra sat bolt upright in bed, staring at Phoebe in the moonlight. “Phoebe, that’s a 
tavernl”

“So it is.” Phoebe’s voice was slurred. She lay back, making no effort to undress.

“And you’re drunk!”

“That’s possible too,” agreed Phoebe cheerfully.

“How did you get out?”

“Why? Want to come along next time?”

“No, I don’t. Anything could have happened to you, wandering the dark streets alone by night. Phoebe, you’re only fourteen years old!”

Phoebe gazed up at her owlishly. “I’m aging fast.” 

“Phoebe, have you done this before?” And when Phoebe giggled, “Well, you aren’t going to do it again! Do you hear me?” Cassandra was taller, stronger. She grasped her younger sister by the shoulders and shook her for emphasis.
“You aren’t going to do it again!’’