Home for the Holidays (17 page)

The anger had sneaked up on her, not really unexpected, just all at once it was there and a lot of it, and now bitterly contained just below the surface. Having been used and deceived so easily marked her clearly as a naive fool. And Vincent had done it so easily. That was the quelling blow. She’d almost begged him to dupe her. Every tactic he’d used on her had worked, not because he was so adept at fooling people, but because she had wanted to believe that he cared about her.

Good God, he must have hated touching her, hated making love to her, despising her family as he did. And how he must have laughed at how easily she had succumbed to his seduction and his lies. Everything between them had been a lie, everything she had believed about him, a lie …

“Do you want to stay here with Thomas while I return to London?”

The question came from her father, who had just entered the room. At least she heard him right off this time. She recalled a number of times in the last week when he’d had to wave his hand in front of her face and repeat himself to try and get her attention.

“When are you leaving?” she asked.

“In the morning.”

He was going to find them a new home. She vaguely remembered that being discussed last evening during dinner. If he went alone, he’d stay at the London office. If she went with him, he’d need to get them rooms at a hotel. She saw no reason to incur the extra expense. She hadn’t asked him about his finances. It wasn’t her place to ask. In the few conversations that she’d managed to hear when she wasn’t so deep in self-pity, she gathered that he’d found new markets in the Caribbean and was no longer worried on that front.

“I’ll stay here,” she replied.

“You’re feeling better?”

There was a great deal of concern in his expression. There was also some hesitancy in his tone that wasn’t like him. Her state of nearly deaf distraction since his return must have begun to seriously worry him. But she saw no reason to hedge about the subject now.

“Better, no. Fully cognizant again, yes.”

He smiled gently. “A little absentmindedness never—”

She cut in, “I might as well not have been here, Father, for all the awareness I’ve had lately. Do you know, I don’t even know what detained you from returning home when you were supposed to. Each time it has occurred to me to ask you, we haven’t been in the same room, and then I as quickly forgot about it again. But I’m sure Thomas and everyone else knows by now. I’m sure you’ve mentioned it to me as well …”

“Three times, actually.” He chuckled, then surprised her by saying, “Damn me, never thought I’d reach the point where I could laugh about any part of that ill-fated trip.”

“Ill-fated?”

“From the moment we entered the warmer waters of the West Indies. The island we came to first wasn’t a major one, though we were so happy to see land of any sort, we stopped there anyway. But as soon as we docked, we were met by the local magistrate and a full troop of guards, and charged with attacking one of the local plantation owners. The man was there to support the charge, and quite a gruesome account he gave of it, that his plantation house burned to the ground, including his barns, that our ship just sat offshore and continued to rain fire down upon his property for no apparent reason.”

“Someone actually did that to him?”

“As it turns out, no. But at the time, Peter Heston was an old and well-respected member of the community whom not a single person on that island would even think of doubting, while I and my crew had never been there before and could have been pirates for all they knew. We were found guilty before there was a trial. The actual trial was a mockery where Heston repeated his ghastly tale. No other witnesses were necessary for us to be sentenced to prison.”

“Prison!” she gasped, incredulous. “You were actually put in prison?”

“Yes,” he replied. “And with absolutely no hope of getting out of it, when we knew that the entire island thought us guilty.”

He shuddered unconsciously. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how horrible that experience must have been for him and his crew. He’d never been in jail before, never suffered any real physical hardship that she was aware of. Nor should he ever have experienced anything like that, when he was a good, honest man who would never do anything that might get him arrested, much less sent to prison.

Which was what she couldn’t help but point out. “But you didn’t do anything!”

“No, and our ship’s guns were quite cold to prove it,” he agreed.

She frowned, getting a bit confused now. “Then why were you even arrested, much less put to trial?”

“Because our proof of innocence required immediate clarification, which didn’t occur.”

“For someone to examine the guns?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t they?”

He chuckled again. She was surprised herself now that he could, especially after he replied, “Probably because we were about to be lynched on the spot. This was midmorning, you see. And quite a few people had noticed the town guard heading for the docks and followed them. There was a huge crowd by the time we docked, and everyone there was able to hear Heston’s accusations. Understandably, the magistrate wanted to break that up quickly, and could only do so by getting us off the dock and into his jail.”

“When it would only have taken a moment or two for verification?”

“It was a very tense situation, Rissa. There were other plantation owners in that crowd who were no doubt thinking it could have been
their
houses that we might have destroyed. And when an issue becomes personal like that, emotions can be quite heated. We really were in danger of that mob of angry islanders taking the law into their own hands. Frankly, we were rather glad to be put behind bars until the matter could be straightened out. Knowing
ourselves innocent, we didn’t really doubt at the time that it would be straightened out, so we were more concerned with the angry crowd than with the charges being filed against us.”

“Yes, I suppose the immediate threat would have been of more concern,” she agreed. “But you said the man’s house hadn’t really burned down. Why weren’t you released after that was discovered.”

“No, I said no one else had done it to him,” he corrected her.

She blinked. “He burned down his own house?”

George nodded. “But that didn’t come to light soon enough to keep us out of prison. And at the time, the magistrate had two completely conflicting accounts on the matter, so whom do you think he would be inclined to believe?”

“Heston, of course.”

“Exactly. The man’s plantation really had burned to the ground. Our ship’s guns hadn’t been fired. These were facts that we were assured were both going to be investigated right after we were all secured in the jail. But too much time had passed, on getting us secured and getting the crowd to finally disperse. And since it wasn’t immediately proven that the guns weren’t heated the least bit from use, it couldn’t be proven at all. Yet there was a burned down plantation, proof for the other side,
and the word of one of their own well-known and respected citizens.”

Larissa shook her head. “How did the truth finally get discovered?”

“When Peter Heston’s wife finally returned to the island. She had been there that day when Heston went completely mad. She had known his mind wasn’t quite right for a long time, but she had never warned anyone, since his increasingly strange behavior had seemed harmless. But early that morning she came upon him starting the fires. He was raving that there were pirates hiding on the property and the only way to flush them out was to give them no place to hide by burning everything to the ground.”

“There weren’t any, though?”

“No, it was all in his mind. She tried to stop him, of course. But he didn’t recognize her. He thought her one of the pirates and tried to kill her as well.”

“How horrible for her.”

“Yes, though she did manage to escape, and by the quickest means possible. Unfortunately that was by boat. They lived on the coast, had their own small dock where Heston kept a fishing vessel. She used that, leaving the island completely rather than going to town to get help.”

“I think I would have rather been out in the water where he couldn’t reach me than still on the island where he might catch up to me, if I were her.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right. Never looked at it from her perspective, merely from my own, which included her long delay in returning. I would have preferred she come straight to town to report what had happened, thus leaving my crew and me out of the incident completely, but she was so frightened by having her own husband not recognize her, call her a pirate and try to kill her, that she wanted only to get as far from him as possible.”

“Where did she go?”

“She had a daughter by her first marriage, who lived on a nearby island. Unfortunately the daughter wasn’t home, was on a shopping trip to the mainland.”

“Unfortunately?”

“It was the daughter who convinced her that she had to return to get help for Heston, who was obviously quite crazy now, before someone did get hurt by him. Heston’s wife had been thinking only of her own safety, which included never returning to her own home. Which was why so much time passed before she did return and the truth was learned.”

“Why was there no one else around to witness the fire and how it started? Had they no servants at all?”

“That was one of my own questions, answered by one of the jailers. It was common knowledge that Heston had had bad crops for three out of the last four years. Other plantation owners in the area had suffered from the same bad
weather, but it wasn’t all a weather problem, not for all three of the bad years. Most of it was likely part of his decline; he simply wasn’t attending to his crops properly. But the Hestons were barely making a living by then, because of so many failed crops. The plantation workers were seasonal, so none were around this time of the year. But the house servants had been let go a few years ago. And they lived on the far east end of the island, with no other neighbors close by.”

“It is amazing indeed that you can laugh about any of that misadventure.”

He grinned at her. “It really wasn’t that much of a hardship, their prison. What I find amusing myself is there was no one else in it. The place had been closed up for years. They had to open it and clean it up just for our benefit. There was even a debate to just keep us in the jail instead, though it was finally decided the accommodations there just weren’t big enough to contain an entire ship’s crew.”

“The island was that small?”

“Compare it to one of our country villages and you can imagine the size, and how everyone would know everyone else, which tends to keep down crime. The only reason they even had a prison on the island was it had many years ago been converted from an old fort, which was no longer in use. But we were well fed for our brief sojourn, and not
mistreated. The worst part of it all was our boredom—they had yet to decide how to put us to work—and our outrage and sense of hopelessness. In fact, we spent all our time there plotting escape, which we probably would have succeeded at eventually had we been forced to stay there much longer.”

“What happened to Peter Heston?”

“Considering he went berserk in town when he saw his wife there, and tried once again to kill her, proving to everyone just how crazy he is now, he’s been moved to another island that has a religious order which runs a house to care for the aged and mentally imbalanced. He’ll live out his days under the supervision of the nuns there.”

“And the townspeople who convicted you out of hand, based on one man’s word?”

“Oh, they were duly repentant, so much so that we have been given exclusive shipping rights to all their crops for the next five years.”

Larissa raised a brow at her father’s new grin. “You find that adequate recompense?”

“Hardly.” He chuckled. “Particularly after it came to light that the island was dying due to being so far off the normal shipping lines that they couldn’t get ships to come their way.”

She huffed indignantly. “So you will be a benefit to them if you agree to contract their crops.”

“Certainly, but it satisfied my own goals,” he replied. “I will in fact probably have to buy another ship or two to accommodate an entire island—now that I know my old markets are available again.”

She could have wished that the conversation had not turned indirectly to the Everetts. But the fact was inescapable that had Albert Everett not forced her father to seek new markets in the West Indies because he stole his old ones, he wouldn’t have spent time in prison, would never have had to leave England, so they wouldn’t have lost their house—and she wouldn’t have met Vincent.

“I am glad you can find something amusing about all this,” she said bitterly. “I can’t. I thought you were dead. I thought nothing else could have kept you away from home for so long. I imagined shipwrecks, horrible storms, yes, even pirates. Never would I have imagined you detained in a prison, because I know you would never do anything that might break any laws.”

He put his arms around her, advising, “Let it go, Rissa. It’s all over now. I’m home, safe, in good health, and have even benefited from the mishaps of the journey. Don’t be angry on my account.”

“I’m not, I’m furious that the Everetts have done us such an injustice and yet won’t pay for it.”

“We know how pointless revenge is.”

“I know.” She sighed.

“And you don’t mean
the
Everetts, you mean Vincent Everett in particular. His brother apparently met justice at his own hand.”