Lisbon (23 page)

“When I saw that you were about to throw yourself into the sea ...” He brushed a hand across his face as if to shut out the memory. “I . . . Something came over me.” He leaned down. “It is my intention to bring you safe to dry land, and I will offer you no affront or repetition of last night’s performance. As God is my witness, Charlotte, I will bring you back to the land of the living. And when I have done that, you may walk away from me—I will not move to stop you.
I only want you to live.”

It was a very handsome declaration, she realized, and one she could not match, for perhaps he expected her at this point to assure him that everything was all right and that they could begin anew as man and wife.
But they could not begin anew, they could never be man and wife
— 
Tom's memory stood squarely between them.

Charlotte’s voice was barely a whisper, a wisp of sound. Rowan bent forward to hear it.

“I cannot be a wife to you, Rowan.”

As if she had slapped him in the face, he straightened up. “That much is clear,” he said harshly. “Nor do I ask it of you. I only ask that we strike up a truce. Can you unbend that much?”

“Where . . . did you sleep last night?” she asked him. “On the floor. ” He nodded at the door.

“I ... I will sleep on the floor,” she volunteered.

This time she was sure she heard his teeth grind together. “You will not!” he exploded. “You will sleep in that bed in which you now lie! And you will stay in it until I can find you a needle and thread, for it would seem that I have torn your present garments from your back.” He sighed. “I will be back presently, Charlotte, at least with some pins.”

He left, closing the cabin door rather hard behind him. Alone now, Charlotte covered her face with shaking hands and felt scalding tears trickle between her fingers. She had loved Tom so much and she had betrayed him. Worse, under the spell of Rowan's powerful physical attraction she had
enjoyed
her betrayal! God might forgive her, the world might forgive her, but she knew she would never forgive herself.

When Charlotte s guardian had booted Tom Westing's inert body over the cliff edge on Kenlock Crag, he had not gone personally to view from that edge where Tom Westing’s body had gone.

Rowan Keynes had done that for him—and what Rowan had seen there, he had chosen not to report.

In the moonlight he had seen Tom Westing's body, not as he had reported it later to Charlotte, lying with a broken neck at the bottom “athwart the stream,” but caught upon a narrow ledge some twenty feet below. He had actually opened his mouth to tell Russ to rest easy, Westing was not dead after all. Then abruptly he had closed his mouth again. The girl would not be tractable if she thought Westing were alive. And if they somehow managed to drag him up topside—though he doubted they could do that without ropes—she would fight for him like a tigress.

Better for all of them that she think Westing dead. So he had gone away with the others, callously leaving Tom Westing to die. And indeed for many hours Tom had lain like death where he had fallen.

At last his long body stirred. The rays of the hot afternoon sun seemed about to blister his back as he lay there prone on the warm stone floor of the ledge.

Confused as to his surroundings, he essayed to sit up 
and sank back with a groan as a pain like a scimitar seemed to split his skull apart. Indeed the very act of his sitting up had almost toppled him off the narrow ledge, and his vision, wavery and blurred by the pain in his head, gradually cleared and showed him the raging cataract far below. Clutching his head as if it might come off, he pulled back abruptly from that vision of impending death below— and felt his shoulder strike the hard rock wall that rose sheer above him.

After a while, as he slumped there, the pain eased and all that had transpired to bring him to this pass struck him with blinding force.

He remembered something, a weight—no,
someone
dropping on him from above, he had a flashing memory of two men—Charlotte s guardian and the tall man who had come to the garden with her the night she had fled with him from Castle Stroud—and he had seen her guardian’s arm drawn back to loose the stone that had felled him, but he remembered nothing after that.
Charlotte, what had they done with her?
The thought brought him staggering to his feet to lean weak and sick against the smooth stone wall from which the narrow ledge on which he stood jutted.

After a moment his wits began to work. He listened intently. No sound came from above; no murmur of voices broke the absolute stillness. His head turned slowly, scanning the countryside. There had been mounted men, flickering lights down below. Now it was light, but not a person, not a horse or a deer or a sheep moved throughout the long vista spread out before him.

They had taken her away. .
. .

Dizziness overcame him and brought him back down on his knees to the floor of the ledge. There was a thrumming in his skull like a background chorus to the pain that went through his head when he moved.

He must find Charlotte, save her.

He tried to stand again, and a great blackness came over him. His body crumpled to the floor of the ledge and lay there immobile while the shadows lengthened and the moon waxed and waned.

With the dawn he waked again, and this time he had more strength and he was very thirsty. On his feet now and moving with a sore shoulder where Russ had kicked him, he assessed the situation. Above him, twenty feet of sheer rock face mocked any efforts to ascend. On either side lay oblivion, for the ledge was a mere shelf created when last winter’s ice had collected in a long crevice and broken off in the spring. There was a tiny cleft now where it joined the rock face that told him that part or all of even this narrow shelf might not be here come next spring.

There was no way to climb up, that much was clear, no way out on either side. He considered trying to climb down, but the rock face below dropped away sheer and as smooth as glass—and in the depths below rushed the torrent, sending up plumes of white spray as it cascaded through the narrow gash between the rock walls.

His present situation was hopeless and there was no point in trying to hide. Better far to rot in some jail, where he would have at least a chance of escape, than to remain here immobilized.

He cupped his hands and called out a long halloo across the valley.

Only an echo answered, reverberating and diminishing until the sound died away and all was still again.

He took off his shirt and tried tying it to his belt to make a kind of flag to flutter in the breeze—but it was no good. The wind forced it back against the rocks.

His pockets yielded something better: a small piece of brilliantly polished metal which he had sometimes used as a mirror to shave or as a knife to hack off his hair when it grew too long to suit him. He had been shipwrecked once in the southern ocean with that piece of metal in his pocket and it had proved lucky for him—he had used it to signal a passing ship. Perhaps it would do the same for him here.

He took it in his hand and held it in the sunlight, turning it about to focus on the nearby hills and vales. Someone,
someone
must be down there in those wastes. Someone who would look up and be blinded for a moment and then become curious and investigate.

He sat there for half a day beaming that small beacon out into the empty spaces below, and now and again hallooing.

Nothing happened.

By the next day his voice was cracked with bellowing and his arms tired from holding and turning his shiny bit of metal for hours on end. Thirst tore at him and his throat was becoming too dry to make a respectable shout. He looked out into the blue distance and it came to him morosely that he was going to die here on this lonely crag, isolated from all the world, and he wondered if those who had brought him down had intended it thus. Probably so, he reasoned, for his death up here would save them the notoriety of a trial.

He began to think of death more quietly, remembering all the times he had eluded it—in the Bahamas, in Madagascar, aboard the
Shark,
where they had said Devil Ben’s son led a charmed life, and lately here in England. He tried to keep his mind from tormented visions of Charlotte struggling in the arms of Lord Pimmerston, visions that made his hands clench and his blood roar in his veins. He hoped that deflowering her had saved her from that, but it would not have saved her from her guardian’s wrath. Just thinking what form that wrath might take made his hands grow clammy with sweat.

Perhaps she had gotten away. Oh, Lord, he hoped she had, his brave and dainty lass. She deserved better than Pimmerston, better than himself for that matter. He grew a little light-headed just thinking about it.

On the night of the third day it rained and Tom took full advantage of it, thankfully soaking up water in his shirt, drinking greedily from a little rivulet that ran down over the edge of the cliff above.

Hunger assailed him. He chewed on the leather of his belt, but it did him little good. He was weakening and he knew it. Still he continued to force himself to flash the piece of shiny metal all about him at the nearby hills and to manage now and then a cracked halloo.

Above him now large birds circled lazily against the sun, 
riding the air currents on broad powerful wings. Vultures, probably, waiting for him to breathe his last. Perhaps not even waiting for that. One swooped down and landed suddenly on the ledge, staring at him with red eyes and taking off with a squawk when he lunged at it, trying desperately to catch it, for even a vulture was food.

That lunge nearly carried him over the side, and he lay there panting and discouraged. He pulled out the bit of shiny metal and tried again, flashing it all about. And then, tired of staring into the sun, he fell asleep.

What woke him, he was never sure. When he opened his eyes the vultures were still there, circling against the blue, but there was something else up there as well. Above him, stuck out over the edge of the cliff, were the faces of three sheep, peering down at him with woolly impassive dignity.

Where there were sheep, there must be a shepherd. Tom drew a deep breath and managed a respectable halloo.

He received a rather breathless halloo in return. And then, amid a scattering of stones—he decided that must have been what had waked him, the shepherd’s ascent— the shepherd’s face appeared. A friendly face, browned with the weather.

‘Fell, did you?” was his cheerful assessment from atop the cliff. And at Tom’s nod, “I almost fell off this place myself once—never came near it since. Wouldn’t have come near it this time except that I was looking for my sheep. Are you hurt?” And at Tom’s shake of the head, “You’re in luck. I’ve got a rope here—need it for the sheep. Sometimes they fall or get themselves wedged and I have to climb down and hoist them out.”

As he talked, he was letting down a coil of rope secured to a boulder. Seaman that he was, Tom had no difficulty making himself fast to the line, and marshaled his remaining strength for the climb up. He tumbled over the top exhausted and lay flat.

“Water!” he gasped.

The shepherd obliged with a water skin and watched Tom drink thirstily. “You must have been one of the 
search party looking for that heiress and her kidnapper, to get yourself stuck up here, ” he observed.

“I was left behind,” Tom acknowledged, taking another long draft from the water skin.

“Funny about that pair,” said the shepherd, who hadn’t seen this much excitement in these peaceful hills in years. “‘No sooner was the heiress found and her kidnapper fell off the crag to his death than she took up with someone else, one of Lord Pimmerston’s guests, I’m told, and rode away with him. ”

Here was his chance to learn what had happened to Charlotte!

“I was left behind when they were taking her down,” he improvised hoarsely. “I struck my head in the fall, and when I came to they’d all gone. They must not have missed me. You say she rode off with someone else?” he added, incredulous.

The shepherd nodded energetically. “Rode off with him and got married, they do say, in Scotland.”

Married!.
Tom’s gorge rose and he began to retch.

“Knew you’d do that, drinking that water as fast as you did,” was the shepherd’s cheerful comment.

Tom didn’t believe Charlotte was married. He didn’t believe it for a moment. The fellow had got it all wrong. When he left the shepherd, he made for Scotland—and found a tiny out-of-the-way inn tucked somewhere along the way. Hoping for news of Charlotte, he hurried to the inn door, but found the place deserted save for the landlord. He told the landlord he was just down from a visit to Edinburgh, where his purse had been lifted, and he’d never return again to such a wicked place, it was England forever for him.

With the quick sympathy of a border dweller for his own side of the border, the landlord nodded approval. “ ’Twill teach you,” he said briskly, “which side of the border to stay on.” He poured out some ale and slammed down a pewter tankard before Tom with a flourish. “Robbed or no, there’s no denying a draft to a thirsty man at this inn,” he said heartily.

Tom thanked him, lifted his tankard with a smile, and wondered what the news was in these parts.