Lisbon (41 page)

The inn’s dining room was commodious and crowded, filled with satins and laces, perfumes and conversations. Charlotte was grateful that their host had not insisted on a private room. It was nice having other people around for a change, listening to laughter and the clink of glasses, instead of fidgeting under Rowan’s brooding stare as she toyed with her food. She looked with more approval upon corpulent Lord Claypool, leaning back resplendent in his bottle-green coat with its wide lettuce-green satin cuffs braided in gold.

“So you have brought your wife along this time, eh, Rowan?” But Lord Claypool was not looking at his lean dark friend, but at the lovely lissome woman in soft Chinese gold sipping her wine across from him. “Faith, if I’d known you had such a lovely wife, I’d have asked you where you were keeping her!”

“And how is
your
wife, Ned?” was Rowan’s silky response.

“Oh, Maggie’s fine, fine. But he answered absently, his gaze still on Charlotte.

“And where are you keeping
her?”
asked Charlotte, glancing around as if expecting to see Lady Claypool come suddenly into the room.

Across from her, Lord Claypool’s ginger brows lifted in surprise. “Oh, in Sussex,” he replied hastily. “She never leaves Sussex.”

So Lord Claypool—a chaser after skirts if ever she had seen one—kept
his
wife tucked away in the country too! Her warmth toward Lord Claypool abruptly cooled.

“Doesn’t she ever wish to accompany you?” she shot at him.

“Oh, sometimes she mentions it, sometimes.”

“And yet you never take her with you?” Charlotte persisted.

Lord Claypool’s shoulders moved restively inside his tight-fitting waistcoat. “She does well enough in Sussex,” he muttered.

Charlotte’s gaze met his squarely. “How sad for her!” was her comment.

By now Lord Claypool’s countenance had acquired a hunted look. He turned to Rowan for help. “What brings you to Portugal, Rowan?”

“A holiday.” Rowan shrugged.

His friend’s significant gaze passed over Charlotte and back again to Rowan with some commiseration.

He is signaling with that look his sympathy that Rowan had to bring me along!
thought Charlotte hotly, and her heart went out to Lady Claypool, stuck in Sussex, and to all other neglected wives.

Sensing her hostility to his friend, Rowan seemed to relax. Charlotte sighed inwardly. With Rowan it was always that way. He had a ferocious jealousy of her, which amounted to mania. She had begun to realize that while Lord Claypool, who was even now admiring a ravenhaired lady at the next table as if she were a sweetmeat to be devoured as dessert, might leave his wife at home in Sussex in order to pursue his womanizing without interference, it was different with Rowan.

He keeps me isolated in the north of England so that I will not meet anyone,
she realized suddenly.
If I do not meet any men, I cannot possibly fall in love with one of them and so be unfaithful to him. If we lived in the Near East, he would have me walled up in a seraglio, I suppose. 
The thought was depressing. She sighed and fell silent as she ate the sugared black pudding and the
lulas
Claypool had recommended, which turned out to be cuttlefish cooked in lemon butter.

By the time Charlotte, who had a sweet tooth, was eating her
crème caramel,
the two men, who had both refused dessert, were working their way through a second bottle of the ruby-red port wine that came from Oporto, to the north of Lisbon. And as he drank more, Rowan’s mood darkened.

“We should drink a toast to Portugal’s king!’’ Claypool exclaimed recklessly. “A fellow as stupid as was England’s own George I!”

Most Englishmen would have agreed with Claypool about the German George I, who had come reluctantly from Hanover to rule the English people—and had soon secured their ridicule by his odd habits, such as keeping turbaned Turkish servants rather than plain English ones, and by wondering aloud if he might not close down St. James’s Park to the public and plant it instead with turnips. Most Englishmen—but not Rowan. Across from Claypool, Rowan’s dark face flushed.

“I will drink a toast to his glorious majesty, our former and much-mourned King George I.” Rowan’s tone was menacing.

Oh, dear,
thought Charlotte.
This satin-clad fool has affronted one of Rowan s heroes, and the evening will be ruined
!

“As you like.” Claypool, far gone in his cups, shrugged, and his voice was slurred. “Only damme, Rowan, I can’t see how you—who took a beauty to wife—can champion a king who had an eye only for ugly women. And who sat about evenings cutting out paper dolls with one of his mistresses.”

Rowan’s scowl deepened, and Charlotte stepped quickly into the breach.

“Oh, come now, Rowan,” she chided reasonably. “Everyone talked about those women at the time, you know that! And cutting out paper patterns is harmless enough,” she added, “even if it isn’t very kingly. ”

She had diverted Rowan’s wrath from the inebriated Lord Claypool, who had settled back in his chair with a fuzzy expression on his slack-featured face, but now that wrath was turned upon her.

“One would suppose you had delighted in listening to amusing stories ridiculing our late majesty?” said Rowan stiffly.

His tone irritated her. “Some of the stories were not so pretty,” she said sharply. “And certainly not amusing!”

“Such as?” Rowan prodded.

“Such as his having his wife’s lover hacked to pieces and buried under the castle floorboards!” retorted Charlotte recklessly.

Rowan’s intense dark eyes were upon her. “Sophia Dorothea betrayed him,” he countered. “What he did was right!”

“Right? How can you say that, Rowan? To divorce his wife, keep her from her children forever, and confine her in the Castle of Ahlden
until she died?”

“She betrayed him with a Swedish colonel of dragoons. They both deserved their fate!”

Charlotte shivered. She remembered how in the Scillies when she was very small she had heard that the young Prince of Wales had flared up and said bitterly that he was eager for his father to die so that his mother could be released from her long imprisonment. And later Charlotte herself had piped up that she agreed with the prince—and so earned the enmity of one of her mother’s suitors, a gentleman from Cornwall whom her mother was considering marrying at the time.

“Your child is a loose talker,” the Cornish gentleman had told Cymbeline Vayle indignantly.

“Charlotte but speaks her mind,” her mother had an
swered him in her sweet light voice. “And I will tell you now that I encourage her to do so.”

“You should not encourage her, Cymbeline,” was her suitor’s blunt observation. “She will make trouble with her tongue one day.”

“For me perhaps, but not for you,” was his lady’s brisk reply, and that disagreement had put a wedge between them that was to last for a number of huffy months while Cymbeline fell out of love with him.

He had not been a bad man, that Cornish gentleman, and Charlotte had always later felt rather guilty that her aversion to the German George I should have come between them. As now it was coming between her and Rowan. But her distaste for the late king was such that she could not seem to help herself.

“I do not think
any
woman deserves to be locked up for thirty-two years merely because she happens to look at another man!” she protested.

“Merely?”
Rowan seemed to ponder that. His eyes narrowed. “Sophia Dorothea broke her marriage vows, and yet you would champion her?”

“Oh, how do you know she broke her marriage vows?” cried Charlotte in exasperation. “Were you there? The poor thing had a cruel, jealous husband and he may even have imagined all those things about her. Suppose there was no truth in them?” She shivered at the idea that poor Sophia might have been imprisoned all those years because of a misapprehension.

“Oh, there was proof enough of her adultery,” Rowan drawled.

“But
thirty-two years.
Rowan?” It seemed to Charlotte incredible. Surely the punishment did not fit the crime! “And what of George I, was he so pure?”

Rowan’s voice was heavy. “To have released her would have been a sign of weakness on his part. ”

Too late Charlotte realized how deeply she had become involved in this conversation and that somehow she had been made an adversary of the late king in Rowan’s mind. She held her ground.

“I do not consider mercy to be weakness, Rowan.”

“Do you not?” he mocked. “I am shocked that you would champion the Adulteress!”

“Oh, how can you call her that?” Charlotte threw prudence to the winds.

“You have insulted the good name of his late majesty—” “Oh, I have not! I have only repeated what others have said about him.”

“And if I do not have your apology here and now for this affront to him, I will take you home!” he finished threateningly.

“Then take me home,” sighed Charlotte. “For I will not praise a man I have always considered nothing less than a monster. ”

Infuriated by her defiance, Rowan rose with such speed that he knocked over his chair, and Claypool, far gone in drink, for he had been pouring and swallowing all the while this exchange had been going on, gave him a dazed look. “What, leaving now?” he asked in a slurred voice. “Egad, man, the evening’s just begun!”

“Not for my lady,” was Rowan’s curt rejoinder. “For her the evening has just ended. Come, Charlotte.” And when she did not at once respond to his icy command, he reached out a hand and jerked her to her feet. His cruel fingers numbed her wrist until he got her to the street and into a passing chair. Having seen her into it, he stalked along beside her through the night air, not speaking.

He was taking his erring lady home.

They did not speak all the way to the Portas del Sol. Charlotte felt humiliated. She was wild to retaliate, even though common sense forbade it. Life with Rowan was incredibly difficult at times, full of sharp corners and murky waters where even the most careless observation could take you beyond your depth. She did not speak to him when she alighted from the chair. Instead she ran upstairs and began undressing for bed in angry silence, turning her back when Rowan appeared in her doorway and stood staring at her.

“You have given me a headache,” she flung over her 
shoulder when he did not go away. “I would be obliged if you kept to your own room tonight.”

“A headache, you say?” As if that was the trigger that would set him off, he crossed the room in a quick stride and whirled her about to face him. “I still do not have my apology, Charlotte,” he said sternly.

“Nor will you get one!” she flashed. “For none is due!”

Too well she knew that look on his face. For a moment panic seized her, but she stood her ground, glaring back at him.

And that was her undoing. Rowan fell upon her, tore her clothing to shreds, and took her with a violence that left her reeling. How could a man treat his wife as an adored mistress one moment and a scorned waterfront whore the next? Rowan had not even bothered to remove his boots when he plunged on top of her—and she had the bruises to prove it. And all of this just when she had thought that somehow the magic of Lisbon would heal old wounds and bring them together again. . . . After he had gone back to his own room, Charlotte lay upset and trembling, letting the light breeze from the Tagus dry the tears that glistened on her cheeks.

And then she heard a crash as the front door slammed below. Rowan was going out. . . .

Harsh thoughts crowded in. Unbidden, the memory of a big black stallion rose up before her. Rowan had brought the great beast back with him from a trip to Ireland— another of those wanderings on which she had not accompanied him—and the horse had been his pride and joy. He had bragged about Midnight—for that was the name he had given the horse—everywhere. The horse was very high-spirited, but Rowan was an excellent rider and liked to demonstrate his control.

And then, before a crowd on market day in the little village of Cat Bells, Rowan had mounted the horse, prepared to ride him home to Aldershot Grange. Without warning, the horse had thrown him. And Rowan had landed on his splendid backside in the mud. A titter of amusement had rippled through the crowd as Rowan wrenched 
himself up from the mire that clung to his new suit—and his face had darkened. Charlotte knew that because Livesay had been there and had told her about it.

Rowan had ripped out a curse and then suddenly had pulled out the dueling pistol he carried and shot the horse between the eyes. The beautiful animal, standing there trembling, had dropped like a stone—dead.

It was only afterward that they found the burr that some prankster or ill-wisher had slipped beneath Midnight’s saddle.

Rowan had come home ashen-faced that day, speaking to no one, to lock himself in his room. Passing by his door, Charlotte had thought she heard muffled weeping, but there was a steady grumbling of thunder from the hills and she could not be sure. And when Rowan had come out of that room he had come out set-faced and dressed for travel and had ridden away into a blinding rainstorm without a word. Later she learned that he had gone to London.