Lisbon (32 page)

Katherine stared at him. She seemed suddenly to collapse. “Murderer,” she whispered, glaring at Rowan. “You will burn in hell for this night s work!”

“No doubt the devil will find us both, Kate. But if anyone charges that I murdered Talybont . . . ”—his voice rang out and his dark head swung about, challenging everyone in the room—“you'll find dozens of people who'll remember us in the taverns right up to dawn, when we came over here.”

“And I'll tell you where to find those dozens”— Milroyd hiccuped—“for I bought every last one of them a drink!” He wagged a finger in officialdom's face and began to enumerate the taverns they had visited and the names of some of the men they had talked to.

Rowan, content that he was not to be charged with anything despite Katherine's outburst, was counting out money into the landlord's hand. When he had finished he told Milroyd, “We'll meet you out front. I must take Charlotte up to look for her lost glove.”

A chambermaid accosted them outside their bedroom door. “Is it true, sir, that the people down the hall were murdered last night and that the lady's maid has fled?” she asked, big-eyed.

“No, only the gentleman was murdered,” Rowan re
plied irritably. “And how do they know the maid has fled? It is early, perhaps she has found a softer bed elsewhere in the inn and is loath to leave it!”

The chambermaid giggled and Charlotte gave her a look of distaste. She herself was still very shaken by what had occurred downstairs.

“Open the door, please, Rowan,” she said crisply. “I have not the key.”

The bronze glove was lying on the bed where Annette had apparently left it. Charlotte stared at it, confused. She had a distinct memory of that coverlet being smooth and empty when she had left yesterday.

She picked the glove up. One of the fingers seemed to be stiff, stuffed with something.

Before she could investigate, Rowan took the glove gently from her fingers. “I will take charge of this until we get back to the Iron Crest,” he told her calmly. “We cannot have it getting lost again. God knows what new excitement may lie in store!”

“I can’t understand why Katherine would accuse you,” Charlotte said unsteadily. “I mean, you might kill him in a duel, but not . . . not like this. It was dreadful of her. ” “Yes, she has her dreadful moments, has Katherine,” he agreed cheerfully. “Come, we will go out the side door and avoid another scene with her.”

Charlotte followed him reluctantly, for in that direction lay a corpse. There was a grim-looking servant standing guard beside it. She tried to move on by very fast, but she was caught up short by Rowan stopping to gaze down at the body. Very still it lay in its travel-stained brown clothing, with a worn brown tricorne lying over the face, obscuring it from the view of passersby.

Very deliberately Rowan reached down and removed the tricorne, looked into that dead face.

When it came into view, Charlotte thought for a moment she was going to faint.

The man who lay there was the same man that Rowan had stared at so intently at the waterfront just before he had bought her that enormous bouquet of flowers that now adorned their room.

At that moment Milroyd came round the corner of the Inn and joined them. He was sobering up in the clear morning air. He stared down curiously at the body of the footpad. “Villainous-looking fellow, isn’t he?” he remarked cheerfully.

Rowan nodded and dropped the hat back down to cover that dead face. “Villainous,” he agreed.

“Awful of that woman to accuse you of her husband’s murder,” Milroyd said as they rode back toward the Iron Crest. “Poor hysterical creature, she couldn’t have known what she was saying. ”

“Katherine was overwrought,” said Rowan. “We were betrothed once and she has a vengeful nature. I am afraid her tirade has quite upset Charlotte.” He looked down at his pale young wife, sitting silently beside him.

When they were at last alone, back in their big front bedchamber at the Iron Crest, Charlotte gave her husband a level look.

“Rowan,” she said, “what have you done?
What have I helped you do?”

He was looking down at her with a mixed expression on his face. “Charlotte,” he said, and there was an earnestness in his voice, “I have done nothing. I swear to you that I did not know that footpad who waylaid Eustace Talybont.” His voice held such a ring of truth that Charlotte was hard put not to believe him.

“Do you swear to me before God that you had never seen that man before?” she demanded.

“Seen him before? Certainly I had seen him before. Yesterday morning at the docks I saw him—so did you, I think. He stood there in that motley crowd looking like a stranger in a foreign land, and for a moment I thought I had seen him before. But I had not. He sounded almost regretful. “I took a good look at him just now and he was a complete stranger to me.”

“And Annette is missing,” she added bitterly.

“We don’t know that. He sounded impatient. “But under the circumstances I think I will stay away from the Royal Cockerel. I do not wish to seem to be conspiring with Katherine Talybont’s maid.”

Charlotte closed her eyes. She had to believe him. She had to or she would surely go mad.

But that remembered sight of Rowan—or of a man who looked precisely like Rowan—in a blue suit and hat that were the very mirror of Eustace Talybont’s, entering the Royal Cockerel yesterday, would not leave her.

She fingered the bronze glove that Rowan had given back to her. All of its fingers were quite supple now— empty of whatever the glove had contained.

In spite of herself, she had begun to feel afraid. “Charlotte.” Rowan interrupted her thoughts. “I am glad that we have struck up an acquaintance with the Milroyds, for I will feel safe leaving you in their care.”

“Leaving
me?” She felt dizzy.

“Yes. I told you I must go to Evora. The trip would be arduous for you, and since you do not ride, arduous for me also. I will be back in a week, possibly two. I have paid for your accommodations in advance and I will leave you in pocket money. Milroyd has promised to take care of you. ” “When are you going?”

“This afternoon—but do not worry, I will take you to lunch first, and after that Milroyd seeks my advice on some tiles he wishes to ship home to his estate in Lincolnshire.”

Lunch hardly seemed to be the problem—the world was moving too fast for her.

“What will I tell the Milroyds?” she demanded. “About the reason for your leaving so suddenly?”

“Oh, say that it concerns an inheritance and that I was startled to learn of it and have told you nothing because I cannot yet believe it myself, and if it turns out to be true, I want to surprise you with it.”

He was so glib, she thought wonderingly. Lies rolled so readily off his tongue.

But squiring his wife to lunch and helping Milroyd select tiles were not all Rowan chose to do that day. Indeed he and Charlotte spent the day very publicly, going about everywhere. Charlotte had an uneasy feeling that was the reason Rowan was escorting her to so many places—to be seen. Perhaps to appear to be above re
proach, a man with nothing on his conscience. And the day wore on into dusk.

The lamps were already lit and candles flickering in holders when Rowan, staring moodily out their bedchamber window into the courtyard below, announced that late though it was, he must get started.

“What?” Charlotte was startled. “Surely you are not going to start out at night?” In her world travelers left at dawn. Or sometime during the day. Never by moonlight.

“The sooner gone, the sooner back,” he quipped. And almost with the words he was gone; she could hear his footsteps echoing down the hallway and disappearing down the stairs.

She stood at the window of the Iron Crest and watched him go out into the courtyard. A dim circle of light from the windows showed him climbing aboard a horse that seemed already to have been brought. As she watched, he started off down the street, and just before he disappeared from her vision another rider came out of the darker shadows and joined him.

Charlotte craned from the window, trying to see. The two horses, moving along briskly, passed a lamp shining before a tavern, and for a moment the riders came into view.

There was something familiar about that other figure. Charlotte caught her breath. Although the rider was dressed as a man, it was a woman. A lithe woman with an almost gamin quality in the way she rode her horse.

Annette.

Charlotte closed her eyes. Whatever was between Rowan and the Frenchwoman did indeed go back a long way— and reached into the present and perhaps the future.
And had they
—
together, Annette and Rowan—killed a man last night?

When she opened her eyes again, the world seemed to have darkened.

In the days that followed Rowan s departure, Charlotte did much soul searching—and arrived at nothing. Rowan was a mysterious man—and perhaps a deadly one. But he had saved her life twice, he had for her an overpowering physical attraction, and in her heart she was sure he loved her. But if he had done the things she suspected him of, could she stay with him?

The Milroyds helped. They were always there urging her to go with them on some new sightseeing junket. Glad to get away from her own nagging thoughts, Charlotte accompanied them willingly. The Milroyds never tired. Through what seemed to Charlotte at least a hundred resplendent churches in the elegant Manueline architecture, their eager feet hurried.

Nor did weather deter them. Undaunted by mists, they set out on the moss-covered road to Sintra. Twice they lost their way in the deepening fog and once the ladies alighted from the large hired carriage which Preston Milroyd had masterfully insisted on driving without a guide, only to shriek as lizards darted suddenly beneath their feet. They found their bearings again at a favored royal residence along the way, seeing the rococo palace of Queluz loom suddenly out of the white silence. And at last, as they drank in the scent of magnolias—a scent somewhat overpowered by the dank smell of moss and wet bark—a 
sudden change in the winds tore the mists apart and showed them the sweating stone tiles and winding streets of Sintra, and rising on the heights above them the crumbling ruins of the seventh-century stone castle the Moors had thought impregnable—until it fell in 1147.

With the others, Charlotte had climbed the sentry path with its sweeping view all the way to the sea pounding the coast. At the top, out of breath, they had struggled through brambles and trailing vines and disturbed the birds nesting in its empty battlements. Even the exuberant Milroyds had been silenced by the vast loneliness of this high place and shivered at the sound of the wind moaning through its empty cisterns.

To Charlotte, looking down across the plain, her feet upon a stone where some long-ago Moorish girl might have stood on tiptoe to kiss her lover, this crumbling ruin was more than a mere reminder that conquerors came and went. It was a reminder that the past did not come again.

Her brooding gaze found the blue glitter of the sea, far away. Somewhere that sea lapped other shores, somewhere it lapped the English coast, where she had left a lover who would not come again.

Her eyes grew moist and her heart ached for Tom.

“Charlotte, you're wool-gathering!" cried Alice Milroyd nearby. “Preston says if we hurry we might have time to see that abandoned monastery they told us about—the one with cells lined with cork to keep the dampness out.

The Milroyds could always be counted on to bring one back to the mundane present—and at that moment Charlotte was very grateful. She spent too much time these days brooding about Tom, and she knew it. Perhaps it was her defense against her fears about Rowan, she told herself.

She was only half-listening when, on the way down from the Castelo dos Mouros, Alice Milroyd told her gaily that Sintra was where King João had been caught long ago kissing one of the queen s ladies-in-waiting and had airily sworn the kiss was
por hem
, which meant “without consequence"—and the words had crept into the language.

“I wish some of Preston s kisses would be ‘without consequence,' " she had leaned forward to whisper laughingly 
to Charlotte. “It seems to me that every time Preston deigns to join me in our big four-poster back home I have another child! Ah, but soon you will have children of your own and you will know what I am talking about,” she added conspiratorially.

Charlotte joined in her mirth, but her own laughter was halfhearted. She had of late been wondering about the “consequences” of her own late-night activity. She had been feeling queasy at breakfast these last few days, and she wondered if that meant something.

But the Milroyds were soon to leave, and they took Charlotte along with them on their “last journey,” as they called it, riding along the rocky coast west of the city, leaving the fairy-tale structure of the mighty Tower of Belem behind them, lapped by the waters of the Tagus, and striking out for Estoril and the Boca do Inferno, the Mouth of Hell, stopping overnight along the way.

Charlotte had not been feeling well the morning she waked in the little green-shuttered inn on the road to Estoril, and the jouncing ride in the carriage, rough except when they moved along the white beach sand, had made her feel no better. And when, amid the ohs and ahs of the impressionable Milroyds, she had looked dizzily down into that awesome chasm they called the Mouth of Hell, down into a churning whirlpool where the sea’s inrushing water turned into a whirling creamy torrent as it was sucked down, she felt a sudden blackness steal over her and crumpled to the ground.