Lisbon by Valerie Sherwood Page B

toward women and loyalty to country—privateers, really, whose only enemy was Spain. Tom had learned his trade in an evil world, a world of piracy, where any likely ship was prey if you were strong enough to take it. He had hated that world, and when he was seventeen he had left it, jumped ship and never gone back. Where his father was now, he did not know—and did not care. That Devil Ben would end his life at the end of a hangman’s rope, he had little doubt. And Tom had no intention of joining him there.
    As he looked down into those trusting violet eyes, the truth trembled on his lips. He yearned to tell Charlotte all about it—of the blackguard his father had been even though he had come of good family once, of how his father  had never really married his mother. How, when he was away on one of the long voyages from which he might never return, she had met a shipbuilder and married him and gone to live in Carlisle.
    Tom had found out where she was and gone to Carlisle. There he had met a cold reception. He had shipped out, but was now back again—and the reception was just as cold. His mother had three children by the shipbuilder now and she wanted to forget the past—and Tom was part of that past.
    “It is true I am by trade a navigator, but in truth I prefer the land,” he said. And meant it. Although he had grown up on the rough seas, it was really the land that beckoned him, land and forests and mines. He hoped someday to become a planter, somewhere far from Carlisle. Suddenly he wanted to tell this slip of a girl about that, to share all his dreams with her.
    He cursed himself for a fool. She was a child, a wee wisp of a maid, a bud, not yet a flower.
    But still he could not bring himself to leave.
    They sat on the garden wall with the tall weeds blowing about them and the shining expanse of the lake behind them, and he told her stories—very much expunged—of the sea and the strange tropical lands to the south. Of jungle orchids and of the mahogany that men called rosewood because when it was fresh-cut it smelled like roses, of flying fish and coral beaches and spice-scented nights beneath the Southern Cross.
    He talked to her soberly, as if she were a grown woman.
    Charlotte was enthralled.
    When Tom left that day, he took her heart with him.
    He stopped by once more, two days later, and found her sitting on the garden wall looking dreamily out toward the lake. She turned and looked up rapturously at his approach, for all that he was both dusty and tired.
    "I'll be sailing day after tomorrow,” he said brusquely. “On the Mary Constant. I’ve signed on for a long voyage.” And she was not to know that after that long talk with her in the overgrown garden, he had sat all night on the heights above Aldershot Grange, looking down at the dark  pattern of its chimneys against the moon-silvered lake, and fought a great battle with himself. If he stayed, he would do what he had never in his life done—sully a child. For he saw the shining trust in those violet eyes and knew in his heart that she would be easy prey. He was shamed by the thoughts he had had of her—thoughts of bringing her to his bed—and with a wrench he had put them away from him.
    And then he remembered her lovely smile, like the sun breaking through the mists above the crags of Helvellyn, and his resolve was shaken.
    No, he told himself, he would not do it. He would leave Charlotte as he had found her. Untouched. She deserved to grow up sweet and pure and dreaming.
    And the only way she was going to do that was for Tom Westing to put a distance between himself and her. To go away. To sea, preferably, where he could not easily get back in case he weakened. To sea, and on a long voyage. For this elfin half-grown girl with her violet eyes and her wonderful smile had taken such a hold on him as would not easily be broken.
    The morning after his vigil on the heights above Aldershot Grange he had