Lisbon by Valerie Sherwood Read Free Book Online

what they were doing when we found them. Besides," she challenged, "why should we make trouble for them?"
    Wend stood up and considered the shorter Charlotte from her superior height.
    "That's so," she agreed. "Why should we make trouble?" Then she grinned. "Perhaps you liked what you saw?" she suggested slyly. "And you don't want to see Tom Westing's handsome face get bruised?"
    Hot color raced to Charlotte's cheeks. "That's ridicu lous, Wend,” she snapped. “I hope to heaven I never see Tom Westing again—indeed, I think I should die of embarrassment if I did!”
    “Oh, you’ll see him again. Wend laughed. But perhaps not with his pants off!”
    And as it happened, she did.
    The very next day.

3

    The day was hot and beautiful, with fluffy white clouds floating in an endless blue. Charlotte had come alone to what she called her “secret place.” Although it was not really far from the house, up near Fox Elve, it could be entered only through a cleft in the rocks and its entrance was fully concealed by the branches of an ancient gnarled oak tree. Charlotte had found it quite by accident during her first miserable year at Aldershot Grange and had formed the habit of going there whenever she wanted to be alone—or when life at the big gray house became too insupportable. She had never even brought Wend here.
    Today she had no companion. Cook had called Wend a lazy wench and threatened to take a broom to her rump if she disappeared again when there was work to be done. Without Wend for company, the “secret place” had seemed the perfect spot to while away a lazy summer s afternoon. Charlotte had brought along a leather-bound volume (it was in reality a racy novel called The Cuckold's Revenge),  and to mark her place she had carelessly slipped in a well-thumbed tract by Daniel Defoe that had been written six years ago in 1724. The tract was provocatively entitled “Conjugal Lewdness: A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed, and Married Whoredom,” and it dealt at length with a subject Charlotte found enormously fascinating: trepanning, which was the crime of  kidnapping heiresses and marrying them against their will (possibly with the encouragement of guns held at their breasts) in order to gain control of their fortunes. Charlotte had read the tract with big eyes and imagined herself snatched from her bed by a trepanner, bundled into a coach, and whisked away to be married in Scotland at gunpoint. She had imagined herself on such a wedding night—not cowering timorously in her bed, but leaping up dramatically and holding the trepanner at bay with his own pistol, which she had thought to snatch up before she made a dash for the door and freedom.
    But of course, Charlotte realized regretfully that she was unlikely to be sought out by a trepanner, since she was not an heiress and had no hope of becoming one. The best she could look forward to was that her uncle would trot out some prosaic suitor and tell her that she must be content with him. Her violet eyes gleamed rebelliously. She would chose her own suitor, that she would! She would not let herself be forced to marry against her will, as were so may aristocratic young girls. She would . . .
    What she would do was lost as she caught her skirt in a berry vine and with a little exclamation stopped to wrest it free. It was but a little way farther to a rocky opening behind the old oak, from whence came a faint splashing of water—indeed it was curiosity about that faint musical sound that had first led Charlotte to discover this little sheltered spot, surrounded by rock walls on all sides, where a spring-fed waterfall tinkled down to a little circular trout pool below—a pool that shimmered away through a crevice in the rocks, to appear a few yards farther through the rock as one of the many small streams that laced this broken landscape.
    Used to the place, she had scarcely looked around her,