Free Lisbon by Valerie Sherwood Page B

ordered it cut lower, while the seamstress had tightened her lips and muttered darkly that something would “pop out”), the long full skirt of the white voile overdress swung out fashionably, split down the center and both sides decorated with heavy white point lace trailing four inches wide down the length of the skirt, over a bell-shaped white linen petticoat embroidered in white silk and encrusted with lace. Charlotte gasped to see the wide top panniers of the whalebone structure that gave the wide skirt such elegance. Not since she had lived in the Scillies had she seen anything like that. And besides that there was a tiny white lace cap edged with white ribands that fell through her long blonde hair down below her shoulders. And a pair of soft white slippers that actually fit (a lucky guess of Bodine’s) and white gloves and a white-painted fan.
    The effect, for all the tempting low cut, at which Livesay blinked and Ivy moaned rapturously and Cook muttered, was strikingly virginal and entirely enticing.
    Charlotte was so excited she almost wept. She tried the entire costume on and ran downstairs to twirl around the cavernous kitchen to the delight of Wend and the other servants. She broke into a dance her mother had taught her when she was a small child. The steps might be out-of-date now, but her young body was so graceful, her feet in their soft new shoes tripped so lightly across the stone floor, that the servants—even disapproving Cook, who objected to so much of Charlotte’s bosom showing—cheered her on, clapping their hands until finally, flushed and laughing, she collapsed onto one of the long benches at the rude trestle table.
    “I think I’ve never been so happy!” she gasped.
    Wend, who had been off visiting her mother along the Greta, had come bouncing in while Charlotte was dancing, and stood watching while Charlotte collapsed laughing at the kitchen table.
    “Oh, Wend, isn’t it a beautiful dress?” she cried, smoothing out the skirt that rippled like cream. “My uncle’s friend  sent it to me. Oh, Wend, I think I’ve never been so happy!”
    “Oh, I think you could be quite a lot happier,” was Wend's lazy comment.
    Charlotte shot a look at her. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean,” Wend said with enormous nonchalance, “that on the way here I ran across Will the Peddler. He was just down from Carlisle, where he’d been buying his goods along the waterfront. He told me a ship had just been sighted coming in, and someone with a glass said it was the  Mary Constant. She was still far out but she’d be  docking on the next tide. ”
    The Mary Constant —Tom’s ship! The look on Charlotte’s young face dazzled even Wend.
    Tom Westing was back!

5
Early Summer 1732
    That day in early June dawned bright, and Charlotte, who had been far too excited to sleep the night before, was up with the dawn and demanding of a sleepy-eyed Wend how long she thought it would take a man to reach Aldershot Grange from Carlisle.
    “That depends on whether he’s afoot or riding.’’ Wend yawned.
    “Well, I doubt he’ll be riding,” said Charlotte reluctantly. “After all, he’s a navigator and he doesn’t own a horse.”
    “So don’t look for him before tomorrow at the earliest.”
    But of course he could hire a horse, or manage a ride in a cart . . . Charlotte spent all the afternoon half-dressed, watching from her casement, ready to slip into her wondrous new gown the moment she saw Tom’s familiar form in the distance.
    The sun set without him.
    The next day she was certain he’d be here, so she dressed herself in the white gown and went out and sat on the garden wall, arranging her skirts to make a pretty picture for him from a distance. After a while the sun grew too hot for wall perching—after all, she wanted to look cool and fresh when he arrived—so she waited beneath the shady branches of a nearby tree.
    Hunger finally drove her