Lisbon Read Free Page B

out again, clutching a light embroidered shawl around her slim shoulders.
    Outside she found Vasco, the servant with the torch, still leaning sleepily against the wall beside the front door. Although he spoke fair English, he chose not to understand, and she found she could not wave him away. Stubbornly he insisted on coming with her, lighting her way with the torch, and it occurred to her that perhaps Wend was right, there might be cutpurses abroad in the Lisbon night.
    There was no chair to be found.
    Coming down from the heights of the Portas del Sol with the high ramparts of the Castelo de São Jorge looming above her, there was a softness in the morning air that reminded Charlotte vividly of her childhood in the Scillies, those fortunate sunny isles off the southern coast of England some twenty-five miles from Land’s End. She was suddenly achingly homesick for her life there and for her mother, frail charming Cymbeline, who had seemed to move in grace and laughter through the open-windowed low granite house she had bought just outside Hugh Town  on St. Mary’s Isle a year after her husband s accidental death.
    Charlotte passed the twelfth-century Romanesque cathedral and realized that she was now traversing the steep twisting streets of the Alfama, where she had strolled with Rowan and Lord Claypool yesterday. And here again were those ever-present sounds of her childhood, the strident voices of the seabirds piercing the morning air, the winged whir of kittiwakes and gannets and cormorants and puffins and gulls swooping above her. Even the steep terrain brought back the memory of clambering over the rocks of the Scillies.
    But that life was gone now, gone forever. It had been replaced long since by life with unpredictable Rowan, who rose from his bed by night to pace restlessly. She could hear him walking back and forth in the next room.
    Why ? she asked herself bluntly. It was a question she would never dare to ask Rowan. They were married but they had never really been close. It was like a truce between them, this marriage. It always had been. With Rowan watching her with keen burning eyes across the breakfast table as if to penetrate into her mind and discover if she had been unfaithful to him in her dreams.
    As indeed she had. The thought no longer brought a blush to Charlotte’s cheeks, for theirs was a marriage not made in heaven, but, she sometimes thought, designed in hell.
    Still, they had endured together thus far—couples of their class seldom divorced—even though Rowan could not help knowing that she had never loved him, and he had found mistresses, so many of them, for gossip about his wild and wastrel ways in London had a way of reaching even into far-off Cumberland. Charlotte had turned a deaf ear. She was never completely comfortable in Rowan’s presence, so it was good to have him away from her, although she was always careful to mask her feelings and to play the devoted wife whenever he returned.
    The salt air that blew from the Atlantic up the mouth of the Tagus River rippled Charlotte’s blonde hair—that golden  hair in which Rowan had seemed to take such delight early in their marriage, never allowing her to cut so much as a wisp of it. Now she brushed it back away from her face with an expensive embroidered peach kid glove, for Rowan, although he neglected her, lavished money unstintingly on her wardrobe.
    Concentrating on keeping her footing on this dim narrow balconied street, so steep it seemed to be made up mainly of steps that wound down through the Alfama toward the waterfront, Charlotte puzzled, trying to sort it all out.
    Why had Rowan’s lovemaking, which had been careless and desultory in this last year before their departure from England, almost condescending at times, suddenly become so fierce? That first night in Lisbon he had taken her in his arms as if he would destroy her, bombarding her with a passion that left her weak and