Free Lisbon by Valerie Sherwood

toward Aldershot Grange.
    Livesay shook his head when he heard Charlotte’s excited scheme of taking Wend's place.
    “It won’t do,” he insisted doggedly. “The master—” “Uncle Russ needn’t know about it!”
    “But, Mistress Charlotte, it’s not right that you should fetch and carry like a—”
    “Wend needs our help, Livesay! She’ll be back in the spring—maybe sooner. And Uncle Russ won’t even know she’s been gone, because you’re going to keep on paying her wages and take them over and give them to her.” When still he hesitated, she gave him a defiant look. “You don’t think I’m strong enough to do Wend's work, but I am—you’ll see!”
    Livesay shook his head in perplexity and conferred with Cook—as he often did when things got too much for him.
    “Mistress Charlotte has a good heart,” sighed Cook. “She saw how things were with Wend at home.”
    “A good heart but not much sense,” retorted Livesay. “If the master finds out I went along with this scheme—”
    “No need for him to find out,” said Cook briskly. Not if we all swear not to tell. ”
    Livesay groaned, but in the end he agreed that Wend should have her wages, although he remained adamant about not letting Charlotte take Wend's place. Young though she was, he reminded Cook dourly, Mistress Charlotte was still the lady of the house.
    That winter and spring marked a time of growing up for Charlotte. Before, she had been a pretty child in a fey half-elfin way. Now she was on her way to becoming a blazing beauty. Even the servants who had known her so long they hardly looked at her anymore remarked it.
    And when Wend came back in early summer on a day of blue skies and fleecy clouds and birdsong, she stared at Charlotte and took a step backward in surprise.
    “Well, look at you!” she marveled.
    The two girls eyed each other with new delight, but Charlotte had grown up in other ways too. She no longer teased Wend into slipping away for hours from her job, realizing that Wend's livelihood depended on it. Alone now, even though Wend had returned, Charlotte wandered the glens or climbed the steep rocky paths—and sometimes, as she always had ever since she had found it, she took a book and went to her “secret place” by the waterfall to read and laze the summer days away.
    Only now she often found herself laying aside her book to dream.
    She dreamed of a tall young man with a laughing face and eyes as green as the sea beyond the Scillies. A man with a magnificent physique and the look of a wanderer to him. A man she knew in her heart she could count on through all the years.
    I'll miss you , she had told him, forlorn.
    And I'll miss you, Charlotte. The fervor with which he had said that, the vibrant note in his voice, the sudden intensity of his gaze—ah, she would never forget them!
    She fingered the gold locket he had given her—and she dreamed of wonderful tomorrows.
    Fall came with its crisp days and winter with its mists and snows and howling winds. When blizzards whipped across the Derwent Water and gusts of icy wind nearly toppled the chimneys of Aldershot Grange, when the servants all huddled together by the hearth in the kitchen, Charlotte took long walks in the snow, coming in redcheeked to stamp the snow off her boots.
    Charlotte spent the Twelve Days of Christmas with Wend again that year, but this time they left with more than a light lunch to be eaten at the circle of standing stones. They arrived laden with a whole stuffed goose and wheaten bread and damson preserves and all the apples they could carry from the deep bins in the Grange’s cellars— and Charlotte was pleased to find Wend's mother entirely recovered.
    Winter whistled by, a harsh winter that froze the lakes and blanketed the valleys in white. Then spring burst  forth and Charlotte could again stroll to her favorite haunts, now released from winter’s grip, and dream of Tom.
    It was on returning from