Lisbon by Valerie Sherwood

have here a pair of exalted eyebrows!"
    Despite her vexation, Charlotte laughed—and Tom laughed with her. He had a laughing face, she decided, sunny.
    “Actually," he admitted on a sober note, “it was the tract that interested me most."
    “Oh, Mr. Defoe's tract on trepanning?"
    He nodded. “I was curious about it."
    “So now you are planning to kidnap a young heiress and marry her at gunpoint?" Charlotte guessed merrily.
    He gave her an odd look. “I might," he said carelessly.
    She caught her breath and color flamed in her young  cheeks. But I am heiress to nothing ! she reminded herself quickly. And then the fleeting thought came: Of course, Tom doesn’t know that. . . .
    The slanted look she gave him through her lashes was suddenly arch. “They hang men for trepanning, Tom.”
    “Ah, but it might be worth it,” he sighed, and looked out suddenly into the distance. He had seen a man hanged for trepanning once. A big blustering fellow who had swaggered all the way to the gallows. And from a coach he had seen a girl’s white face peering out to watch, and people had nudged each other and said she was “the one. ” Tom thought he had seen a glisten of tears on her cheeks before her head had been suddenly jerked back to disappear from view as the prisoner was strung up and left to jerk and dance in the air while the crowd stared and muttered. Tom had wondered then if it had been a real kidnapping, or had this pair actually been lovers? Anyway, the law was clear. Trepanning was indeed a hanging offense.
    He turned back to gaze upon this lovely delicate young girl at his side—and found she was not looking at him but instead was intently studying the rocks. Her color was high. Although his tone had been bantering when he said “it might be worth it,” there had been something in the way he said it that had made her heart beat faster.
    Charlotte was growing up.
    By the time they had come within sight of Aldershot Grange they were the best of friends. And on Charlotte’s part at least, a little more than that—she had decided she adored him. His roguish smile lingered with her long after he had gone.
    When Charlotte came into the kitchen to tell Cook she had lost her soup bucket and rolls into the gorge, she found Wend standing in the open doorway watching her.
    “Well,” said Wend, leaning on her broom and considering Charlotte with new respect, “I see you went out and got him!”
    “I did nothing of the kind!” protested Charlotte. “I nearly fell over into the gorge and he saved me.”
    “Clever of you,” said Wend admiringly.
    Charlotte flushed. “I wasn’t trying to be clever,” she  told Wend stiffly. “I was trying to turn around because I thought I couldn’t get by him where the path was so narrow, and I—”
    “Just fell naturally into his arms.” Wend chuckled. “I must remember to do that someday.”
    “Don’t be silly, I’ll probably never see him again.”
    Wend snorted her derision.
    The next day Charlotte was adjusting the worn window hangings in her bedroom when she saw Tom striding down the slope to Aldershot Grange. As he walked, he was leafing idly through a book, which she guessed was the novel she had dropped in such haste. He cut a handsome figure, she thought with a pang, watching him swing along in the distance in his worn russet coat with his battered hat set at a cocky angle upon his shining fair head. When he came closer he looked up, and Charlotte instinctively stepped back, breathless lest he should see her watching him approach. When she dared to look again, he had disappeared—probably into the kitchen, she guessed from the angle at which he had approached the house.
    She ran downstairs, suddenly alarmed lest flirtatious Wend should already have him seated at the kitchen table drinking a tankard of cider. But it was Charlotte he had come to see.
    “Mistress Charlotte, I’m returning your book,” he said with a courtly