Lisbon (6 page)

What she would do was lost as she caught her skirt in a berry vine and with a little exclamation stopped to wrest it free. It was but a little way farther to a rocky opening behind the old oak, from whence came a faint splashing of water—indeed it was curiosity about that faint musical sound that had first led Charlotte to discover this little sheltered spot, surrounded by rock walls on all sides, where a spring-fed waterfall tinkled down to a little circular trout pool below—a pool that shimmered away through a crevice in the rocks, to appear a few yards farther through the rock as one of the many small streams that laced this broken landscape.

Used to the place, she had scarcely looked around her, seating herself comfortably on a flat rock beside the trout pool. She immediately opened the book and began to read. Oblivious of everything but what was happening on its pages, she was dangling her bare toes in the trout pool and had just reached an exciting passage where the fictional hero discovered his wife’s infidelity, when some 
little extra sound arrested her. She looked up calmly—and her gaze froze.

A tall masculine figure had just stepped out from behind the concealing screen of the waterfall. A figure crowned by a shock of hemp-fair wet hair he was just in the act of tossing back—a gesture that sent out a shower of droplets over his broad muscular shoulders. His handsome face with its expression of total astonishment was familiar, as indeed was his deep bare chest.

It was Tom Westing.

And he was dripping wet and stark naked.

Charlotte s heartfelt gasp was cut into by his voice—not the commanding roar she had heard when she and Wend had broken in on his lovemaking at Fox Elve, but a ripple of pure amusement that seemed to come from the depths of him.

"Well, well," he said conversationally, seeming not in the least embarrassed by his daunting display of masculinity unveiled as he reached down behind a rock to bring up his smallclothes. "It s the little girl from Fox Elve. You
do 
seem to have a way of finding me without my trousers!"

Charlotte turned brick red and would have given anything she owned to just disappear. She muttered something incoherent as she scrambled to her feet and turned and darted for the entrance.

She was most of the way to Aldershot Grange before she realized that she had dropped her precious book back by the trout pool.

Nothing would have induced her to return for it. After all, suppose she found him calmly squatting there
au naturel
reading those passages she found most alluring? Especially the part where the hero bent tempestuous Lady Augusta to his will?

Oh, she would
die
if she ever met Tom Westing again!

Afraid she really
would
run across him, for he was obviously hanging around the neighborhood—probably to meet Maisey—Charlotte skulked in the house all that day and spent the next morning wandering around the little walled garden, long overgrown with weeds. Occasionally she would cast an anxious glance in the direction of Fox 
Elve, wondering if it would be safe now to go up and recover her book.

About noon Cook told her that the old woman who occupied a tiny cot south of Castlerigg Stone Circle was reported to be down with rheumatism again and remarked that it was a pity she could not spare Wend to take her some broth and rolls, since this was the day of the Great Wash, when all of the laundry for the month was done. Somewhat relieved to have something to do at last, Charlotte took the hint and soon set off with a pail of soup and a dozen rolls tied up in a linen square.

The way to the old woman’s house she knew well. It led up and along the side of a rocky crag that rose high above a stream that in spring became a raging torrent. Here the path was very narrow, and Charlotte had always edged along it very carefully, for the rushing stream gushed white and foaming at the base of an almost sheer cliff far below. This day she was cautiously negotiating her way along it when she looked up and saw a few steps above and ahead of her the insolent figure of Tom Westing.

A wave of embarrassment at seeing him again, this man she always seemed to stumble over when he was naked— and the thought of having to pass him at such close quarters, where she would literally have to squeeze by, brushing his body as she went—overcame Charlotte’s common sense. She whirled in panic to go back the way she had come, caught her foot on a rock outcrop, and with a wild scream plummeted over the edge, catching onto the only thing within reach—a sapling that had found a precarious hold in a cleft in the rocks. A sapling that now bent with her weight, barely holding her.

“Steady!” called Tom’s strong voice. She could hear the slap of his shoe leather as he raced toward her down the path. A moment later she felt his hands seize her in a firm grip. He pulled her shuddering body back over the edge just as the sapling’s roots began to tear free, and whirled her about to face him.

Overcome by terror—for she had been looking into death’s grinning face in that white water far below, where the linen square and the bucket of broth had long since 
plummeted—Charlotte felt her breath leave her and she clung to Tom’s sturdy form like someone drowning.

“There, there,’’ he said soothingly as he held her against his chest, letting her shiver there. “You’re not dead, but whatever made you turn about like that? Don’t you know this path is too narrow to turn where you did without the greatest care?’’

Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to tell Tom why she had spun about, any more than she could control her shivering. She was suddenly aware that she was being comforted in the arms of a strong man and that his masculinity called out to her. It registered on her with a kind of dazed shock that she
liked
being held, that she would be content just to stay here in the circle of those long protective arms forever.

Alarmed that such a thought could cross her mind, she tried to pull away from him.

“Ho, there!’’ he cried. “You’re about to do it again—and this time you may tip us both over!”

Charlotte subsided in shivering embarrassment, and when she could face him again, she looked up beseechingly. “I’m sorry,” she said faintly. “You saved my life,” she added on a note of wonder.

“Aye, I believe I did,” he agreed in a casual tone. “And there’s little doubt you will take a lot of saving if you go about in this fashion!” His tone was jocular but he was surprised at the impact her wide pleading violet eyes were having on him, and the feeling that had abruptly swelled through him as he clasped her skinny female body to his breast. She was a child, he reminded himself sternly, and put her away from him—most carefully. “Come,” he said, taking her hand. “I will escort you where you are going— just to make sure you get there.”

“There is no longer any point to my going,” she admitted a bit tremulously. “I was carrying a bucket of soup and some bread to old Mistress Meggs, who lives in the valley just beyond, and now”—she looked over the edge of the cliff with a shudder, down into the white cascading water far below—“the soup and the rolls are both flying away downstream.”

“Then I will take you back the way you have come,” he said firmly.

“Oh, there is no need. Really." She was all too conscious of a fluttering in her chest and of the warm steady pressure of his big hand enfolding her small one.

“Nonetheless ..." His tone was crisp.

He led her along the narrow path without speaking, pausing wherever there was a bad step to help her across, and Charlotte was embarrassed, because she had passed this way many times before—always without mishap.

“I have been reading your book."

Charlotte stumbled at this sudden announcement, and he steadied her with a curious look.

“You . . . you have?" she asked faintly.

“Yes. Books are hard for me to come by."

He was poor, then. She had guessed it by the worn look of his russet coat, although it was of a decent cut and fabric. His boots, too, had seen better days. But he could 
read.

“How do you like it?" she ventured.

“It is well enough," he told her restlessly. “I had rather there was more time spent on the hero s sailing ventures and less on toasting Lady Augusta s eyebrows."

“She had very unusual eyebrows," defended Charlotte. “They were—"

“I know. High and exalted." He sounded amused. He turned suddenly and peered down into her face with a grin. “Faith, who would have thought it? We have here a pair of exalted eyebrows!"

Despite her vexation, Charlotte laughed—and Tom laughed with her. He had a laughing face, she decided, sunny.

“Actually," he admitted on a sober note, “it was the tract that interested me most."

“Oh, Mr. Defoe's tract on trepanning?"

He nodded. “I was curious about it."

“So now you are planning to kidnap a young heiress and marry her at gunpoint?" Charlotte guessed merrily.

He gave her an odd look. “I might," he said carelessly.

She caught her breath and color flamed in her young 
cheeks.
But I am heiress to nothing
! she reminded herself quickly. And then the fleeting thought came:
Of course, Tom doesn’t know that. . . .

The slanted look she gave him through her lashes was suddenly arch. “They hang men for trepanning, Tom.”

“Ah, but it might be worth it,” he sighed, and looked out suddenly into the distance. He had seen a man hanged for trepanning once. A big blustering fellow who had swaggered all the way to the gallows. And from a coach he had seen a girl’s white face peering out to watch, and people had nudged each other and said she was “the one. ” Tom thought he had seen a glisten of tears on her cheeks before her head had been suddenly jerked back to disappear from view as the prisoner was strung up and left to jerk and dance in the air while the crowd stared and muttered. Tom had wondered then if it had been a real kidnapping, or had this pair actually been lovers? Anyway, the law was clear. Trepanning was indeed a hanging offense.

He turned back to gaze upon this lovely delicate young girl at his side—and found she was not looking at him but instead was intently studying the rocks. Her color was high. Although his tone had been bantering when he said “it might be worth it,” there had been something in the way he said it that had made her heart beat faster.

Charlotte was growing up.

By the time they had come within sight of Aldershot Grange they were the best of friends. And on Charlotte’s part at least, a little more than that—she had decided she adored him. His roguish smile lingered with her long after he had gone.

When Charlotte came into the kitchen to tell Cook she had lost her soup bucket and rolls into the gorge, she found Wend standing in the open doorway watching her.

“Well,” said Wend, leaning on her broom and considering Charlotte with new respect, “I see you went out and got him!”

“I did nothing of the kind!” protested Charlotte. “I nearly fell over into the gorge and he saved me.”

“Clever of you,” said Wend admiringly.

Charlotte flushed. “I wasn’t trying to be clever,” she 
told Wend stiffly. “I was trying to turn around because I thought I couldn’t get by him where the path was so narrow, and I—”

“Just fell naturally into his arms.” Wend chuckled. “I must remember to do that someday.”

“Don’t be silly, I’ll probably never see him again.”

Wend snorted her derision.

The next day Charlotte was adjusting the worn window hangings in her bedroom when she saw Tom striding down the slope to Aldershot Grange. As he walked, he was leafing idly through a book, which she guessed was the novel she had dropped in such haste. He cut a handsome figure, she thought with a pang, watching him swing along in the distance in his worn russet coat with his battered hat set at a cocky angle upon his shining fair head. When he came closer he looked up, and Charlotte instinctively stepped back, breathless lest he should see her watching him approach. When she dared to look again, he had disappeared—probably into the kitchen, she guessed from the angle at which he had approached the house.

She ran downstairs, suddenly alarmed lest flirtatious Wend should already have him seated at the kitchen table drinking a tankard of cider. But it was Charlotte he had come to see.

“Mistress Charlotte, I’m returning your book,” he said with a courtly bow, and Charlotte thought:
He
is
a gentleman for all his worn clothes. That bow had a practiced ease.

“I hope you enjoyed it,” she said stiffly, well aware that Cook and Wend were both watching them, bright-eyed. And then, to escape their surveillance, “Would you like to see our garden?” she wondered.

“Very much.”

Together they strolled out into the low-walled weedy patch, but neither of them was aware of their surroundings. In the soft air a bee buzzed around his head, but he seemed not to notice. She was giving him a luminous look. Charlotte’s heart would have beat faster if she could have known what Tom was thinking on his way over here; he had been wondering about the strange tug on his heart
strings this thin little waif had inspired, and had been chiding himself roundly for taking such an interest in one so young.