Lisbon (74 page)

Cassandra's green eyes widened. When the earthquake struck, she had for a terrible moment thought,
I have lured Drew to Lisbon and now I have brought him death
! But now he was telling her that she had
saved
him, that she had brought him luck!

Despite the horror of their situation, despite all that she must do, a reckless feeling of joy welled up in Cassandra. She was free to love him, free to love him at last! But even with the thought, reality crowded back and she was plucking at Drew's arm.

"I can't just run away, Drew. I've only just found my mother. I can't leave her here to die—and there's Wend as well.''

“Perhaps we can strike up toward that castle on the hill.” Drew cast a narrow glance upward. “I cannot see much through all this murky dust, but the streets do look a bit clearer up there. Come, we will circle around and work our way up. Perhaps we will be able to see a way to reach the Royal Cockerel from there. ’

Midway up the hill they encountered Wend, struggling toward them, dirty and bruised and wailing Cassandra's name as she hobbled quickly toward them.

“Oh, Wend, where is my mother?'' cried Cassandra. “Why isn't she with you?”

“I don't think she came home last night,” said Wend, who now that she had found friends was recovering her aplomb. “Leastways her bed wasn't slept in.”

“I remember that her coach was already gone when I left last night,” Cassandra recalled. “Oh, Wend, I mustn't have found her only to lose her again!”

“Well find her,” said Wend sturdily but she looked frightened.

“Let's keep going toward the castle,” Drew's voice prodded them as a wave of acrid smoke billowed over them, making them choke. “We could be cut off where we stand.”

Obediently they moved off, stopping now and then to help people struggle out of the ruins of houses they had lived in all their lives. It suddenly came to them, the reason why so few cries for help were coming out of the inferno below. It was All Hallows' Day, and almost everyone had gone to church.

And died there.

Even as they moved up the hill, Charlotte and Tom were hurrying down it, fighting their way through the 
rubble of walls and houses toward the church. But a wall of flame pushed them back and they were forced to retreat up the hill crowned by the Castelo de São Jorge, knowing it was no use. Through dancing orange flames and waves of sooty smoke they could see that the church was but a mound of rubble in which nothing could live.

Beside Tom, Charlotte was weeping softly for a man who, until the very day he died, had loved her.

But Tom, who had not known Don Carlos, for all his gravity and sympathy, was walking with a jauntier gait as he led Charlotte around and over small mountains of rubble that had once been houses and wells and garden walls. By a stroke of fate his lady would be his again! He would never know that Don Carlos, from the inferno of the city below, had planned it that way.

It was as they stopped to rest in their struggle upward toward the great frowning castle and looked back in awe upon the doomed city that they saw Cassandra and Drew and Wend climbing up toward them—and Charlotte's tears turned to tears of joy that her daughter had been spared.

She called out to Cassandra, beckoning her forward, but her voice was lost in a new thunder of sound from the seaward side as the second of the three huge “tidal waves'' that were to inundate Lisbon that day raced in to further devastate the stricken city, where, among the thousands of houses destroyed, more than fifty palaces and more than thirty magnificent churches had already come crashing down. But even though they had not heard her calling, Cassandra had seen her, and presently she and Drew and Wend toiled up and joined them.

“Tom.” Charlotte waved her arm airily. “Allow me to present to you your daughter, Cassandra!”

Tom, who had just straightened up from lifting a heavy beam to free a dog trapped in what was left of a house with broken shutters, was so startled that he missed a step on the cobbles and nearly fell on the dog, who ran yapping away.

“My
daughter
?” he said almost in disbelief. But his gaze had only to flick over Cassandra's coloring, so exactly like his own. “Charlotte,” he murmured, “you are a wonder.” And then he was embracing Cassandra and meeting Drew. 

“You will come with us to Brazil, of course, Cassandra. ” Tom was very much the father figure now.

“Oh, yes, do!” cried Charlotte.

Drew Marsden shifted his feet restlessly. Cassandra could guess what he was thinking:
Leave Blade’s End? Never!

And as for herself, the lands of perpetual sunshine were not for her. She loved the wild high crags and silvered skies of the north of England, she loved to see the sudden bursting of spring and to drink from her cupped hands the cold clear water that cascaded down from snow-capped peaks. Back in England her cream-colored mare, Meg, waited, eager to take her on wild rides among the lofty fells beside Drew’s dappled stallion, the Bishop. Back at Aldershot Grange a long-haired cat with knowing green eyes was even now licking her paws and waiting for the day Cassandra would return so that she could leap into her lap and have her creamy fur stroked. Indeed Clover must have had her kittens by now—she would be eager to introduce them. And there would be long nights by the winter fire while the wind tore at the chimneys. . . .

“Drew and I want to be married in England,” she told them.

Tom put a proprietary arm around Charlotte. “I will marry this lady anywhere she will have me,” he said. “But I had hoped to have my daughter in attendance.”

“No—I can’t go to Brazil,” said Cassandra. “Drew and I have spent too much time away from home already. We must go back and resume our lives.”

Charlotte’s face clouded with disappointment. “Perhaps,” she said uncertainly, “we should not go to Brazil just yet, Tom. I have not yet seen Phoebe.”

“She and Clive were busy escaping the bailiffs when last I heard,” Cassandra warned her mother ruefully. “Phoebe will be hard to find!”

“I must go back,” said Tom quietly.

“Well, then perhaps ...” Charlotte gave Tom a look of yearning. She wanted so much to accompany him, to go where he was going, wherever that was—forever. And the sunny lands of the south were
her
lands, where she was meant to be. The daughter of the sunny Scillies would be 
at home amid the brilliantly colored flowers and rustling palms of faraway Brazil. She pictured herself there in the long-galleried house Tom had described, walking through its cool high-ceilinged rooms, hearing its fountain tinkle— indeed she could almost feel the hot sunlit tiles of the great courtyard beneath her feet at this moment. She cast a last look back at the fiery hell of the great doomed city, smoldering like a great funeral pyre. Carlos would be there forever now, his pain at last departed; she could leave him with a clear conscience, knowing she had done what she could. And—for a moment a look of slight distaste crossed her beautiful face—Don Carlos’ greedy nephews would be delighted to believe that she too had perished in the holocaust of Lisbon. It would be a clean break. Carlotta del Valle would disappear forever and Charlotte Keynes would be reborn. As Charlotte Westing, at long last wife to the man who had won her heart so many years ago. “Perhaps we should not insist, Tom,” she said softly. “After all we will be visiting Castle Stroud—”

“World s End,” Tom corrected her, smiling.

“And they can come to Brazil to visit us—perhaps next year?”

“Oh, yes.” Cassandra’s voice was warm. “I’d like that so much!”

Tom was looking discomfited. Having discovered he had a daughter, he wanted to bring her home with him at once, show her the wealth and grandeur he now possessed, display her beauty and her charm to all the leading families of Rio de Janeiro.

“I had hoped to cover you with jewels.” He laughed ruefully. “And show the world my daughter.”

“You can send Cassandra presents,” said Charlotte quickly. “And cover
me
with jewels!” She was laughing because no gems in all this world would ever mean so much to her as Tom’s emerald eyes looking down upon her with so much love and trust.

“That I will do,” sighed Tom.

Cassandra cast a look back at the smoldering city, and wondered what had happened to Leeds Birmingham. She felt a little chill pervade her. He had seemed so indestruc
tible, she had felt he would go his laughing way forever. Could he too be lying, like so many others, crushed beneath the fallen stones of Lisbon’s palaces with the flames licking at his bones?

Her somber gaze combed the billowing clouds of smoke. And as if in answer to her silent call, a figure was coming out of that smoke, a figure with soot-blackened face and clothes, with one cuff charred and all of him well-begrimed.

“Leeds!” she cried.

He came sauntering toward them with all of his old aplomb. “I came up here to see if you made it,” he told Cassandra, nodding toward the little ruined church above them. “I remembered telling you to go there if anything happened. I had no idea you would have your own entourage.” He glanced around him.

Cassandra was quick to introduce him.

“How fares the city?” asked Tom, knowing Leeds had just come from there.

“As you can see.” Leeds shrugged and gestured toward the billowing smoke that rose threateningly even higher. “The king has turned everything over to Pombal and he’ll be mopping up what’s there before he sets loose the firing squads.” As if to emphasize his words, there was a sporadic volley of gunfire from the great conflagration below.

“Then the royal family is safe?”

“All save Prince Damião,” said Leeds blandly. “They cannot seem to find him. The rest of them were on the road to the Tower of Belem when the earthquake struck, and so were unharmed. If any of you are thinking of going down into the city to help out, abandon the idea. They will not let you through. Pombal has already stationed men to search out looters and shoot them. On a nervous day like today they are as like to shoot you as not.”

“We were not thinking of going down, ” said Tom, frowning down at the holocaust.

“Pombal has also closed the ports,” added Leeds.

“I have my own ship in Oporto," Tom volunteered. “I had left her there to have her keel scraped, but if she has not been too damaged by these great waves that have visited this coast, you may all voyage with me—to England or Brazil or anywhere along the way."

“Thank you. I may join you in Oporto. " Having satisfied himself that Cassandra was all right, Leeds stretched and took a step back the way he had come.

“Oh, you aren't going back into
that
?" cried Cassandra unhappily.

He looked surprised. “But of course I'm going back. Who knows what may be found there on a day like today?"

“You'll be shot as a looter," Tom warned.

“Not I.” Leeds grinned genially at him.

Tom recognized freebooter's blood when he saw it. He did not insist.

“But one last word." Leeds paused and smiled appraisingly at Cassandra. There was something very warm in that smile. “If you should find yourself tiring of this great fellow"—he nodded toward Drew—“you have only to let me know where you are, anywhere in the world. I will find you and take you away with me!" He was laughing as he strode back down the hill.

Cassandra's gaze followed him wistfully. He was the kind of man who would always go back into the fire—in search of what he might find there. And like as not he would come out of it with a whole hide. She wished him well.

They dined together at the little inn called the Castelo and looked out the window at a murky red sunset that turned the sky to blood except where the dark smoke swirled over Lisbon.

Cassandra smiled at Drew. Despite all that had befallen, tomorrow's sunset would be laced with gold. Perhaps she and Drew would not wait until they reached England to marry. Perhaps they would do as Charlotte and Tom proposed to do—let the captain of Tom's ship say the words over them that would bind them together law
fully, though with no bonds stronger than the love they already bore each other.

Tonight she would sleep in Drew’s arms, tonight and all the nights to come. Ten thousand future sunsets would shower their golden radiance upon them and they would ride the wild crags forever!

The Gorringe Bank had done its deadly work. Africa and Europe had collided beneath the sea, crunching up parts of the outer shell of two gigantic continental plates.

And Lisbon, glorious Lisbon in its Golden Age, would never be the same.

But for those wayfarers beset by so many storms, for Drew and Cassandra, the pair of lovers who had found each other anew, and for Tom and Charlotte, the lovers who had found each other again, this time of peril and holocaust marked a new beginning, and love that would last, in the words of that Lowland Scottish song:
Till all the seas run dry.

In the same room where they had embraced last night, Tom took Charlotte into his arms again.