Lisbon (58 page)

He had signed it in very large letters: Robert Dunlawton, Gentleman.

“He might just as well have said,
I
n any event, Cassandra will be free of you,’
” mused Rowan Keynes when he read the letter. “For once she became a widow—should I follow Dunlawton to Scotland and make her a widow—I would have small control of her. ” He grimaced. His vision had been clouded by Cassandra’s myriad of young suitors— that the graying Scot should be one of them had entirely escaped him.

He decided not to pursue the fleeing pair to Scotland. It seemed he had lost two daughters this day—both to men he would not himself have chosen for them. That, it seemed, was the way of the world. . . .

But Cassandra and her unlikely suitor did not reach Gretna unscathed. They had almost reached Kendal when a wooden bridge over a small tributary stream made into a roaring torrent by the spring runoff collapsed beneath them, dumping them and their mounts into the icy waters. Cassandra’s wound was now healed enough that it caused her no trouble, but her unwieldy skirts did, and she would have drowned but that Robbie flailed through the flood to snatch at her skirts just as they would have dragged her under, and so pulled her to safety.

They were both chilled to the bone as they shook out their wet clothes and found their mounts, which were shaking themselves off, having found downstream a bank up which to clamber. Cassandra bore no scars of the 
misadventure, but Robbie developed a hacking cough that deepened as they reached the Scottish border.

Cassandra, looking ever southward, for she feared pursuit by her father, was impatient to be wed and thus removed from his domination.

And so, like her mother before her, she spoke the vows of a loveless marriage before a blacksmith’s anvil at Gretna Green.

On the pretext that she needed to shop for clothes, Cassandra persuaded Robbie to spend three nights in Carlisle—actually, she hoped the rest would lend him strength, and it did seem to help.

It was night when at last they reached Aldershot Grange and sounded the great iron knocker.

It was Livesay, clad in a long nightshirt with a dishlike candleholder in his hand, who answered the door, peering out at them. At the sight of Cassandra, her hair covered by a large silk scarf against the damp, the color of her eyes made indeterminate by the wavering light, he fell back, pale.

“Mistress Charlotte!”
he gasped.

“I know, I do look like her, Livesay,” the vision greeted him ruefully. “But I’m Cassandra.”

“Oh, Mistress Cassandra.” Livesay sounded shaken but relieved.

“Robbie, this is Livesay, who has been our butler forever. Livesay, you see before you my new husband and the new owner of Aldershot Grange—Robert Dunlawton. ”

“No,
you
are the owner,” Robbie corrected her in a hoarse voice. “Remember, I have this day made the deed over to you.”

Livesay looked stunned. He collected his wits. “Wend 
is with us again, Mistress Cassandra—but spending the night in Cat Bells at the moment.”

“Is she?” Cassandra was overjoyed. “Oh, how is she, Livesay?”

“She’s well.” He hesitated. “But much has happened to Wend since you’ve gone. She married and left us, you know. ”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“And then
he
left her after the child was born dead. She worked somewhere else for a while, but last month she came back to us.”

“Then it’s lucky we are. I think we’ll need a fire made, Livesay, for I don’t like the sound of my husband’s cough. ” Nor did the doctor, when he was called at the end of the week. He proffered various potions and told Cassandra to apply poultices to Robbie’s chest, but nothing did any good. She and Wend both fussed over him, but any fool could see that his condition was worsening. And as time went by, his cheeks were no longer merely pink but quite flushed, although on the whole his skin seemed papery and pale. He lost weight all through that summer and autumn, and it was a mere shadow of his former self who celebrated, with all the heartiness he could muster, the Twelve Days of Christmas at Aldershot Grange.

“He will not make another Christmas,” the doctor told Cassandra solemnly.

“Oh, no, don’t say it,” said Cassandra brokenly. And she thought.
Another death on conscience. For Robbie wore himself out trying to save me from the torrent and was exhausted and shivering when he pulled me out upon the bank. If he dies, it will be my fault.
She did not tell the doctor that. Instead she went wearily off to plump Robbie’s pillows and try to make him eat some of the broth Cook had sent up to him.

Spring came with a shower of blue heather matching the blue of the sky between the clouds, for it was a wet, rainy spring that brought out the blossoms and finished off the ill.

One day Robbie called her to his bedside. “It’s sorry I am to leave you, lass,” he told her softly. “But leave you I 
must—and soon. Send Livesay to me. I'll make my own arrangements and spare you that, at least.”

He died the next Sunday and was buried with the rain pattering down like tears upon his coffin and upon the old worn rocks of this ancient land. He had arranged for his own funeral service, and at the end was sung a Scottish Lowland song that he had instructed Livesay to say was ‘just for her, to tell her what she means to me.

Cassandra listened as a sweet singer from Buttermere sang out:

And I will love thee still
,
my dear
,
Till all the seas gang dry.

She listened and her tears mingled with the rain that ran down her face.

In all her life she would never find another man like Robbie, who had asked nothing of her, nothing. . . .

She grieved for him, deep in her heart, for she had loved him like a father. And wore for him the widow's weeds she d been denied wearing for those she might have wed.

‘‘Will you go back to London now?” Wend asked her wistfully when the funeral was over.

She was surprised at Cassandra's shiver, at her harsh, “"I'll never go back,
never!"
 Indeed her memories of what had happened there were all too green.

Men had died of loving her. She would allow no man to love her—ever again. But only to Wend did she confide all this.

For a long time Cassandra tried to lose herself in work. In recent years Rowan had let the house and outbuildings run down, and Robbie had left her a little money. For months she concerned herself with repairs to masonry and stonework and a new roof. But that could not last forever. Still, Aldershot Grange was a working estate; Robbie had planned to raise sheep here. Very well, she would raise sheep. The green-eyed blonde beauty became a familiar figure at livestock markets and fairs. She hired a shepherd. But it didn't fill her life.

The big cream-colored Persian cat helped.. She found the cat limping on one of her long restless walks. It had run a thorn into its paw and was very thin, with burrs matted into its shabby tangled coat. She coaxed the cat home, got Wend to hold her while she extricated the thorn, very carefully removed the burrs and combed and fed the cat—now named Clover—to purring beauty. Sometimes, Wend thought whimsically, looking at the pair of them as Cassandra sat in the window seat looking out at the setting sun with the last rays touching her own pale blonde hair while she stroked the big cream cat on her lap, they looked as if they were blood relations—pale blonde woman and pale blonde cat.

The horse helped too. A cream-colored mare she had named Meg, who took her on long wild rides through the low valleys and into the lofty fells up past Fox Elve, and gallops along the lake down toward Buttermere and Cat Bells.

Sometimes she rode up past Castle Stroud, which was a beehive of activity, for the place had been sold and the new owner’s agent had a crew of plasterers and carpenters and stonemasons busy restoring it to its former beauty.

And sometimes those gallops led her past neighboring Blade’s End, an ancient holding named for a formidable warrior who was reputed—like Richard the Lion Hearted —to have hacked men and horses in half with a single stroke on the field of battle, and which was now dominated by a beautifully proportioned dwelling which had been built in the Old Queen’s time in the last century. Blade’s End was occupied now, after being long vacant.

On one of those rides she met the nephew who had, after much litigation, inherited the estate. Charlotte had twice seen him at livestock markets—once he had bid against her and won—so she knew who he was when he came striding out of the big stone house and hailed her as she was riding by. Then as now, she had admired the easy grace of his tall athletic figure—then as now deplored the careless condition of his clothing, both the light gray velvet jacket and the darker gray cloth trousers, rent here 
and there and casually mended. Plainly there was no woman in his life!

She drew rein, smiling down at him as he approached. “I’ve seen you ride by,” he said. “And wished my horse had not gone lame, so I could gallop after you! My name’s Drew Marsden. And you’ll be the beauty of Aldershot Grange, Cassandra Dunlawton. Will you not join me in a stirrup cup? ’Twill give you strength for your journey, I promise, wherever you’re bound!”

Cassandra liked him at once. She liked his keen though not handsome countenance. She liked his friendly manner.

“ ’Twould be most welcome,” she said. She tied her mare to the hitching post and accompanied her genial neighbor in through the two-story stone porch with its colorful Dutch stained glass, making patterns of colored light across the floor. There was more stained glass, medieval and mellow, in the tall windows that lighted the somber great hall into which he brought her. The arms of his mother’s family adorned the splendid fireplace before which a pair of white wolfhounds rose at her entrance.

“Cromwell! Ireton! Stay,” he commanded in a deep voice, and the dogs obediently settled back. He turned to Cassandra. “I have named the dogs Cromwell and Ireton after the two great bedchambers upstairs,” he confided with a grin, “which my grandmother named for our two mighty Civil War generals who are supposed to have sheltered here.”

That was typical of the laughing irreverence of his nature, Cassandra was to learn.

“I could lend you a horse,” she offered as she sank down upon the tasseled red velvet pillow that covered a long carved bench, and watched him pour the wine, standing before the fireplace.

“Could you indeed?” His gray eyes lit up as he handed her a goblet of ruby port. “I’d be obliged indeed, for the Bishop—that’s what I’ve named my horse because whenever he’s mischievous, which is often, he always gives me such a pious, blameless look—must needs rest his leg another two weeks, by my judgment.”

“The Bishop?” Cassandra burst into laughter. “And to 
think I but named my mare Meg! D’you always use such inventive names?”

“Aye. Naming runs in the family. I’ve even named you—before I met you, of course. I called you the Wraith of the Derwent Water because you were never in when I called.”

Cassandra caught her breath. She had given strict orders to Livesay to turn away all gentlemen callers—but she hadn’t meant to include her neighbor just to the south in that order.

“The Wraith will be home next time,” she promised penitently.

“Good. Let us drink to that.” He lifted his glass and drained it. “You do light up this hall,” he murmured, studying her.

After they had chatted for a while, he took her through the house, showing her the renovations he was making, and smiled when she said impulsively, “Oh, don’t change either of these,” when he showed her the two tapestry-hung bedchambers, “Cromwell” and “Ireton,” with their dark oak Jacobean furniture.

“I don’t intend to,” he said softly, and she knew from the way his gaze caressed those rooms that he felt about them as she did.

They were kindred spirits. And soon Meg and the great dappled gray stallion Drew called the Bishop were galloping across the blue heather and treading their way together through the lofty fells.

Cassandra found it easy to relax with Drew, either at Aldershot Grange or in the paneled drawing room of Blade’s End with its portrait heads and gilded allegorical figures. She didn’t realize it, but she was falling in love.

How he felt about her was brought home to her the day Meg tripped over a stone and Cassandra went headlong into the bracken. Drew was olf his horse instantly and bending over her, white-faced.

“Are you hurt?” he demanded tensely.

“No,” Cassandra gasped. “I don’t think so.”

“Thank God,” he said, and cradled her in his arms, burying his face in her thick fair gleaming hair.

It was unexpected and touching and Cassandra forgot for the moment her vow never to let another man love her. She lay back and let Drew kiss her and fondle her, and found life unutterably sweet.

Until she remembered.

Then she scrambled up without ceremony and insisted they ride on. She saw that Drew was puzzled but she did not explain.

After that she tried to draw away from him, to interest herself in other things. She tried to stay away from the great E-shaped stone house to the south, with its steep roofs and dormers and tall chimneys. And especially she tried to stay away from the tall gray-eyed man who lived there.