Lisbon (8 page)

She was overjoyed when Wend spoke up.

“Why don’t you come home with me for the holidays?” she asked Charlotte. “We’d be more than glad to have you.”

Wend's home was on the south shore of the Greta and they were to arrive on Christmas Eve.

It began to snow shortly before they started out, but that did not deter them. They were wearing stocking caps and warm mittens and Cook had prepared for them a bountiful lunch of cold meat and thick slabs of bread and scones, which they would eat along the way. She stood in the kitchen door and waved good-bye as Livesay, who in this household did far more than “buttle,” took them on the first lap of their journey in the cart.

He let them out hastily when the way worsened, muttering that he’d best get back before the snow got deep or he’d never make it to Cat Bells this night.

Undaunted and in high spirits, the two girls slogged on with determination through the snow and made a breath
less stop for lunch at Castlerigg Stone Circle, which Wend declared was haunted, even though she promptly brushed the snow from one of the stones and sat down upon it to eat her lunch.

Charlotte did the same, and looked around her with interest at the outer circle of thirty-eight snow-capped stones surrounding the inner circle of ten. Around her the mountains brooded. She had been here in summer, of course, when there were soft grasses growing round the lichened stones, but now in winter they looked different. Bleak, unforgiving . . . like gravestones.

She wondered stabbingly if Tom would ever come back. So many men didn’t; they were lost at sea. The tall ships weren’t called “widowmakers” for nothing. Suddenly the currant-filled scones lost their flavor and Charlotte’s thoughts turned grayer than the wintry sky.

“We’d best be off,” decided Wend, jumping up with her mouth full. “Snow’s getting deep.”

It was indeed. They trudged on toward Wend's home cottage, arriving exhausted and grateful to see the smoke from its single stone chimney appear as a smudge through the drifting white flakes. It was a one-room affair with a curtained alcove where Wend's parents slept, and when Charlotte and Wend swept in, bringing with them a shower of snow, that room seemed too small to contain the people in it.

There were shouts of welcome from the children, who clustered around their skirts brushing off the snow. And Wend's mother, who was bent over the hearth stirring up the fire with a poker, turned about to beam at them. Wend's father, crippled from a fall while leading a party up the heights of Helvellyn, tried to rise from his chair— and fell back with a grimace of pain. But his eyes, hazel like Wend’s, sparkled through the smoke from his long clay pipe as Wend threw her arms around both her parents, greeting them as if she’d been living as far away as China instead of just down the way at Aldershot Grange.

“And you’ll be Mistress Charlotte,” said Wend’s mother comfortably. “I told Wend to bring you along for Christmas. ”

Charlotte instantly liked the woman, who seemed lik 
an older edition of Wend. She told her hostess shyly how much she’d been looking forward to this visit. Wend’s mother seemed pleased—it was the first time she’d ever had a visit from “the gentry,’’ and she took Charlotte’s mittens and stocking cap and scarf with care and hung them up to dry by the hearth. Charlotte felt deep sympathy for Wend’s mother, saddled with all those small mouths to feed, trying to survive on a tiny plot of land in this lonely place with a man who could not help her.

On Christmas Eve, when they sang Christmas carols, Charlotte remembered achingly her Christmases in the Scillies, with her mother gaily playing the spinet and everybody singing, and her eyes filled with tears. If only her mother were here . . .

But her mother was gone, the old happy life in the Scillies was gone, and it was never—any of it—ever going to return. Just as Wend’s two brothers who had gone away to sea were never going to return. The singing died away, the supper dishes were cleared, and everybody bedded down, wrapped in heavy wool blankets with snow hissing down the chimney into the dying fire.

They woke to Christmas morning with hugs and kisses and the giving of little homemade gifts—and snow piled up so deep outside that it drifted in over their feet when they opened the door.

They were snowbound the whole week.

Then, just before Twelfth Night there was a brief thaw, which turned all the white surfaces to treacherous glistening ice. And the day after a Twelfth Night celebrated mainly with hot broth and singing, Charlotte and Wend tugged on their stocking caps and mittens and prepared to trudge back to Aldershot Grange.

Just as Wend’s mother, who had come outside with a shawl wrapped around her thin shoulders to give Wend a last good-bye hug, cautioned them to be careful, she herself slipped on the ice and fell sprawling, unable to rise.

They got her inside, put her to bed, and decided to postpone their leave-taking until the next day. But the next day Wend’s mother was no better; she still could only creep about, stooped over and groaning.

At the door, with her breath making a cloud in the cold air, Wend told Charlotte good-bye. “I’ve got to stay with Ma,” she said. “Else who’ll take care of things here?” She hugged her friend and watched Charlotte start out toward Aldershot Grange.

Livesay shook his head when he heard Charlotte’s excited scheme of taking Wend's place.

“It won’t do,” he insisted doggedly. “The master—” “Uncle Russ needn’t know about it!”

“But, Mistress Charlotte, it’s not right that you should fetch and carry like a—”

“Wend needs our help, Livesay! She’ll be back in the spring—maybe sooner. And Uncle Russ won’t even know she’s been gone, because you’re going to keep on paying her wages and take them over and give them to her.” When still he hesitated, she gave him a defiant look. “You don’t think I’m strong enough to do Wend's work, but I am—you’ll see!”

Livesay shook his head in perplexity and conferred with Cook—as he often did when things got too much for him.

“Mistress Charlotte has a good heart,” sighed Cook. “She saw how things were with Wend at home.”

“A good heart but not much sense,” retorted Livesay. “If the master finds out I went along with this scheme—”

“No need for him to find out,” said Cook briskly. Not if we all swear not to tell. ”

Livesay groaned, but in the end he agreed that Wend should have her wages, although he remained adamant about not letting Charlotte take Wend's place. Young though she was, he reminded Cook dourly, Mistress Charlotte was still the lady of the house.

That winter and spring marked a time of growing up for Charlotte. Before, she had been a pretty child in a fey half-elfin way. Now she was on her way to becoming a blazing beauty. Even the servants who had known her so long they hardly looked at her anymore remarked it.

And when Wend came back in early summer on a day of blue skies and fleecy clouds and birdsong, she stared at Charlotte and took a step backward in surprise.

“Well, look at
you!”
she marveled.

The two girls eyed each other with new delight, but Charlotte had grown up in other ways too. She no longer teased Wend into slipping away for hours from her job, realizing that Wend's livelihood depended on it. Alone now, even though Wend had returned, Charlotte wandered the glens or climbed the steep rocky paths—and sometimes, as she always had ever since she had found it, she took a book and went to her “secret place” by the waterfall to read and laze the summer days away.

Only now she often found herself laying aside her book to dream.

She dreamed of a tall young man with a laughing face and eyes as green as the sea beyond the Scillies. A man with a magnificent physique and the look of a wanderer to him. A man she knew in her heart she could count on through all the years.

I'll miss you
, she had told him, forlorn.

And I'll miss you, Charlotte.
The fervor with which he had said that, the vibrant note in his voice, the sudden intensity of his gaze—ah, she would never forget them!

She fingered the gold locket he had given her—and she dreamed of wonderful tomorrows.

Fall came with its crisp days and winter with its mists and snows and howling winds. When blizzards whipped across the Derwent Water and gusts of icy wind nearly toppled the chimneys of Aldershot Grange, when the servants all huddled together by the hearth in the kitchen, Charlotte took long walks in the snow, coming in redcheeked to stamp the snow off her boots.

Charlotte spent the Twelve Days of Christmas with Wend again that year, but this time they left with more than a light lunch to be eaten at the circle of standing stones. They arrived laden with a whole stuffed goose and wheaten bread and damson preserves and all the apples they could carry from the deep bins in the Grange’s cellars— and Charlotte was pleased to find Wend's mother entirely recovered.

Winter whistled by, a harsh winter that froze the lakes and blanketed the valleys in white. Then spring burst 
forth and Charlotte could again stroll to her favorite haunts, now released from winter’s grip, and dream of Tom.

It was on returning from such a walk that she saw Arthur Bodine again. He had come by Aldershot Grange, calling at the house to “look in on her,’’ and from the window he had watched Charlotte strolling back from Friar’s Crag, swinging along in her faded homespun dress with her blonde head held proudly, her gait as graceful as the soft-footed deer’s.

Bodine, seeing her, marveled. Could this be the thin half-child, half-woman of whom he had reported with a shrug to her uncle, “She is not yet ready—she would make no impression on any man”?

Now, watching her descend the slope, Bodine found that he himself was impressed.

“The wench walks as though her head should wear a crown,” he muttered to himself, “though she is dressed more like a serving wench. ” He frowned thoughtfully, his mind racing.

Hat in hand, he strode toward the door and swung it open to admit this fresh-faced young beauty.

Charlotte stopped at the sight of him. She greeted the swarthy Bodine warily. He had remembered her as frail, but there was a strength in her slenderness, a confidence that surprised him.

Regal,
he thought again.

“Mr. Bodine.” Charlotte curtsied gravely and with enchanting grace. Then her head lifted and those beautiful violet eyes narrowed. “To what do I owe the honor of your visit, sir?”

Well-spoke,
he thought in reluctant admiration.
I am being challenged.

“I have but stopped by to inquire of your health so that I may report it to your uncle when next I see him,” he told her smoothly.

“You may tell my uncle that I am very well but in need of new clothes,” said Charlotte crisply.

Bodine’s practiced eyes passed over the faded home-spun gown, inexpertly made, that Charlotte was now wear
ing. "Are you saying that you have no better garments than this?” he demanded in surprise.

"That is exactly what I am saying. And I am sure that is the reason I have never received an invitation to attend a ball—I am not presentable!”

"Are there so many balls in these parts?” Bodine asked, dark brows elevated in amusement.

Charlotte flushed, eyes snapping. She was not to be mocked on this subject! "I will admit there are none to speak of.” None at all, she might have said, for on either side of Aldershot Grange were absentee owners who seldom appeared and never really opened their large houses for entertaining. "
But I should have the proper attire if one chanced to be given!”

She looked so pretty saying that, with her young face flushed and earnest, that Bodine was tempted to laugh. "Indeed you should, Mistress Charlotte; I am sure you would grace any ball. I promise to tax your uncle with it,” he added easily. “It may be that my opinion will carry some weight.”

"I do hope so.” But she looked on him more kindly now. "Will you not stay to sup?” she asked courteously.

"No, I must be getting on while the light lasts.” He swept her another urbane bow. But he cast a last lingering look backward as he left.
I shall have something to tell Russ this time
, he was thinking.
The wench is ready!

The dress arrived at Aldershot Grange shortly after, brought by a lad who said he could not wait.

Charlotte received the large box in surprise. The most she had expected from Bodine was to mention her need for clothing to Uncle Russ—but since the box had arrived so quickly, Bodine had obviously taken the matter in hand himself. She chided herself for misjudging her uncle’s swarthy friend—never guessing Bodine intended to charge Russ double what he’d paid.

The dress the box contained was to Charlotte a miracle. It was of lissome white voile and very modish, with a skirt that swirled around her graceful young legs as lightly as a butterfly’s wings. A wide band of heavy white lace at the base of the three-quarter-length sleeves was finished with 
a froth of white voile ruffles from which her slender forearms emerged. Below the tight bodice, remarkably low-cut (indeed Bodine had ordered it cut lower, while the seamstress had tightened her lips and muttered darkly that something would “pop out”), the long full skirt of the white voile overdress swung out fashionably, split down the center and both sides decorated with heavy white point lace trailing four inches wide down the length of the skirt, over a bell-shaped white linen petticoat embroidered in white silk and encrusted with lace. Charlotte gasped to see the wide top panniers of the whalebone structure that gave the wide skirt such elegance. Not since she had lived in the Scillies had she seen anything like that. And besides that there was a tiny white lace cap edged with white ribands that fell through her long blonde hair down below her shoulders. And a pair of soft white slippers that actually fit (a lucky guess of Bodine’s) and white gloves and a white-painted fan.