Lisbon by Valerie Sherwood Page A

bow, and Charlotte thought: He is a gentleman for all his worn clothes. That bow had a practiced ease.
    “I hope you enjoyed it,” she said stiffly, well aware that Cook and Wend were both watching them, bright-eyed. And then, to escape their surveillance, “Would you like to see our garden?” she wondered.
    “Very much.”
    Together they strolled out into the low-walled weedy patch, but neither of them was aware of their surroundings. In the soft air a bee buzzed around his head, but he seemed not to notice. She was giving him a luminous look. Charlotte’s heart would have beat faster if she could have known what Tom was thinking on his way over here; he had been wondering about the strange tug on his heart strings this thin little waif had inspired, and had been chiding himself roundly for taking such an interest in one so young.
    Now in the weed-choked garden he was hanging on her words.
    “We had beautiful flowers back in the Scillies,” she told him wistfully. “I can t quite get used to this north country, the hard winters, all the snow—I guess I'll always love summer too much. ’’
    “I was brought up in the Bahamas,’’ he said surprisingly. “So I know what you mean. ”
    “Oh? I thought Wend said you were from Carlisle.”
    “Only since I was seventeen. My father . . . died and my mother remarried, a shipbuilder. He and I don’t get along. ”
    She cast a sudden stricken look at his worn clothing, hardly that of a shipbuilder’s stepson. So that was why he had wandered down this way—trouble at home.
    “Is that why you’re here instead of in Carlisle?” she asked steadily.
    He gave her a quick wary look. Actually he had come here in pursuit of a girl—Maisey, whom he had met in Carlisle one market day. But the glow of that little affair was already ebbing, and anyway, he was not of a mind to tell her about that, this too-thin, big-eyed child who had such a strange appeal for him.
    “What do you do?” she asked.
    He looked out across the garden wall before he answered, and his gaze seemed to skim past the lake’s shining surface to the blue sea somewhere beyond their vision.
    “By trade I am a navigator,” he said. No need to tell her of the slippery decks of the fast furtive ships where he had learned that trade.
    “Did you go to sea early?” she asked eagerly.
    “When I was ten,” he admitted. “I was a cabin boy.”
    “That must have been a very difficult post to get for one so young,” she said admiringly. “I mean, so many lads in seafaring towns must seek it.”
    “Not really difficult,” he said, still looking out to far vistas. “My father was the ship’s captain. ” No need to tell  her that he was “Devil Ben’’ Westing’s son or that his father’s ship, the Shark, was the terror of the seas.
    “What trade was he in?” asked the girl from the Scillies, who knew something of the sea.
    “Trade?” He turned to look at her then. “Why, mostly the Far East, Africa, India.” That much at least was true. The Shark had ranged with other freebooters mostly from Madagascar.
    “The spice trade!” Her violet eyes sparkled. “How exciting!”
    His calm gaze managed to give her no hint of how exciting it had been. He still bore the scars of some of that excitement. “Yes, it was exciting,” he admitted, and there was irony in his tone.
    She missed that irony. “I have always wanted to see the Spice Islands,” she told him.
    Not the way I saw them, he thought grimly. With dead men hanging from the yardarm, half the sails rent and mutiny below! “They are very beautiful.”
    “It must have been wonderful, growing up beside your father.” She sighed with envy. “Mine died when I was very small.”
    It had not been wonderful. It had been pure hell. Tom could admire his father’s strength and courage, but there had been precious little else to admire. His father’s world was not the world of the buccaneers, with gallantry