Leslie Lafoy (30 page)

“He must have been quite the charmer.”

“Or wealthy enough to make the risk worth it.”

Chuckling, Barrett observed, “An optimist with a cynical edge. You’re unique, Belle.”

“You’ve just now noticed?” she asked, grinning up at him.

“Actually, I knew that the instant you walked into my office.”

She rolled her eyes. “And you were utterly fascinated.”

“Yes, I was,” he admitted, suddenly realizing just how early he’d begun to tumble head over heels. “I still am.”

Belle gazed up at him, her soul aching at the gentleness of his smile, her heart straining to hear the faint whisper of words unspoken. She could feel them hanging in the damp air between them, could see them shimmering in his eyes. They were important words, she sensed; words she needed, words that she instinctively knew would change the whole of her world. That she yearned so desperately for them frightened her. That he withheld them hurt in a way that was unfathomable.

Quietly clearing the lump from her throat, she drew a steadying breath and managed a smile as she pulled her hand from his and said, “Well, we’re almost done with the trail. The next part is ‘Setting sun on Castle’s Rise.’”

He nodded, breaking the spell, and visibly squared his shoulders as he looked around them. “Why,” he asked as she moved past the line of beloved brides, “would Lafitte go to all this trouble?”

“To protect the treasure from those he didn’t want to have it?”

“He could have placed it in a bank vault in some city in America and it would have been perfectly safe. All he would have had to do in his will was name the bank and provide either a key or a password.”

“That’s assuming,” she replied, “that pirates trust bankers.”

“You have a point. Grave robbers are generally a cut above.” She was puzzling his comment when he called out, “To your right, Belle. The crenellated headstone.”

It took her a moment to see it, shadowed as it was by a granite mausoleum. She moved over the dampened grass to stand before it. The stone was old, the relief of the inscription worn by the years and the elements. “‘John Malcolm Castle,’” she said as Barrett moved to her side. “‘Who threatens to rise from the dead and wreck those who put him in his grave.’”

“Probably bankers.”

She looked up at him, puzzled by his persistent return to the subject. “Your father’s a banker, isn’t he?”

“A financier, actually,” he clarified, his hands stuffed into his pockets and his gaze skimming over the face of the mausoleum. “It’s a fine distinction between the two, but one to which he holds quite religiously.”

“And what’s the difference?”

He looked back over his shoulder, answering, “My father’s something of a master puppeteer. He plays people and their money, moving them here and there, putting them together for resounding applause and considerable profit.” Turning his attention back to the grave marker, he added, “Bankers sit behind their desks and benefit from peoples’ aspirations and desperations. They’re not much better than common leeches.”

It was a most decidedly odd topic of conversation—especially considering where they were and what they were doing. But he seemed to have a deliberate purpose for it and so she accepted it and asked, “If you have such a low view of bankers, where do you keep your money? In a tin buried in the rear yard?”

“My father’s firm. In a large metal lockbox in a large steel vault. His clerks move money in and out of it as need be and at the end of every month I’m sent an accounting statement.” He gave her a quirked smile. “Along with a note from my father suggesting investments.”

“Do you ever follow his advice?”

“He does know how to make money.”

“Apparently his son does, too,” she laughingly quipped.

“I prefer to do it in a considerably less public fashion than he does. But yes, Belle, I’m a wealthy man.”

She started, appalled. “I wasn’t trying to—”

“I know,” he calmly interrupted, his smile confident and satisfied. “And if I hadn’t wanted you to know that about me, I wouldn’t have told you.”

Put another way, he’d manipulated both the conversation and her so that he could convey the information. Part of her was irritated that he’d felt the need to be less than bluntly honest about it all. A greater part, however, was curious. “And why,” she ventured, “do you think I need to know that?”

“It’s a bit complicated. Let’s finish our search for the treasure and I’ll have a go at explaining on our way back to the town house.” He didn’t give her a chance to accept or decline. “This is the point where we’re to squint and imagine the sun setting on Mr. Castle’s headstone.”

He’d broached the subject of his wealth and then pointedly dropped it? Belle knew that she could ponder the logic and purpose of it all for the next month and still not arrive at an acceptable rationale on her own. Barrett would explain when Barrett wanted to and not one second before then. Whether that explanation made any sense remained to be seen. She sighed and deliberately set the matter aside. “I’ve lost my sense of direction,” she admitted. “Which way is west?”

“Over our shoulders. We’re facing the way we’re supposed to be. Are you squinting?”

“There’s no need to,” she countered dryly. “I can see the mausoleum quite clearly.”

Apparently undaunted by her lack of enthusiasm, he said, “With the sun setting, the top of the headstone would throw shadows over the face of it. Some of the letters of the inscription would be in sunlight, some in shadow.”

“But which of them would change as the sun moved down?” she asked, her frustration intensifying. “And they’d be different from day to day as the seasons come and go. If Lafitte was trying to spell something, we’d have to know on what day and what time he intended for us to be standing here.”

Barrett stepped to the back side of the headstone and she counted as he deliberately stepped off the distance between it and the padlocked door of the mausoleum. Fifteen paces. Exactly.

“This has to be it,” he announced, taking a half-step back and removing a small, dark bundle from the inside pocket of his coat.

Her brows knitted, Belle closed the distance between them. He’d knelt and unrolled the bundle on the ground by the time she reached his side. “What are you doing?” she asked as he extracted a short, slender rod from the case with one hand and took the lock in the other.

“Just what it looks like I’m doing,” he replied, grinning and inserting the pick in the keyhole. “I’m a man of many and varied talents.”

Fascinated, she leaned close, barely daring to breathe as she watched him deftly work the pick and listened to the sound of the tumblers clicking. Only when he chuckled did she dare expel her held breath and ask, “Would you be willing to teach me how to do it?”

“If you want to learn,” he replied, yanking the lock free from the hasp. He pulled the pick in the same smooth motion in which he snagged the case up from the ground and gained his feet.

“I am so very impressed.”

His eyes sparkled as he grinned down at her and tucked the bundle back into his coat. “As I intended for you to be.”

Oh, if he weren’t so damn interesting and boyishly charming, he’d be insufferable. Removing the lock from the door, she laughed softly. “I’ll be even more impressed if you pull a lamp out of your pocket.”

He produced his cheroot tin, opened it and shook a fair number of lucifer sticks into the palm of his other hand. “Not a lamp in the strictest sense of it,” he said, his smile widening. “But hopefully close enough to earn me some small measure of your regard.”

“Some very small,” she allowed teasingly while pulling open the door and dropping the lock on the ground.

The hinges groaned in protest. A match flared and cast a flickering light over the narrow corridor inside as Barrett stepped past her. She followed on his heels, her gaze sweeping over the inscribed granite blocks that lined the sides from top to bottom. There seemed to be two allotted for each of the occupants; one over the other. The uppermost one was by far the largest and bore the name of the deceased along with their dates of birth and death. The lower, smaller one bore an expression of the survivors’ grief.

They were halfway to the back wall when Barrett lit a second match off the first. In the brightness of the new flame, Isabella gasped in recognition.

“It’s the pattern of the lines, Barrett!” she exclaimed, pointing to a twisted tangle of patinaed rods that protruded from one of the memorial blocks just above her head. She stepped back to see the name on the block above it.

“‘The sweet knots of life by death undone,’” he read aloud as her heart skittered. “‘The course of love and betrayal run. Regret and sorrow my masters be. Sleep pirate princess and dream of me.’”

“Louise Benoit was my grandmother’s younger sister,” she explained, feeling slightly queasy. “The family legend has it that she ran off with a sea captain when her father refused to let them marry. No one ever heard from her again.”

Lighting another match, he asked, “How old was she at the time?”

“In her early twenties, I think,” she supplied, trying to remember not only all that she’d ever heard of her great-aunt, but the nuances of the telling. “It was a year or so after the Battle of New Orleans and just months before my grandparents married.”

“According to the dates here, she didn’t live long after that.”

“Pirate princess,” Belle whispered. “She didn’t run off with a sea captain. She ran off with Lafitte. With her sister’s lover.”

“Which would go a long way toward explaining why Lafitte left the treasure to your grandmother. It’s nice to know that pirates can feel guilty.” He handed her the cheroot holder and a newly lit match, saying, “If you’d be so kind as to hold all this for a minute.”

She took them absently, her mind whirling through childhood memories, her eyes seeing them for the first time in understanding. The way her grandmother’s lips had thinned every time someone sang the praises of Jean Lafitte … The way her eyes had misted the few times she’d ever spoken of the sister lost to forbidden love … The hard edge of her mother’s tone when she’d warned her to abandon her curiosity about Great-aunt Louise’s fate … There was no reason to search for the missing, her mother had declared. Louise had left by choice and had been given up by choice. There was no undoing the decisions that had been made so long ago.

The sound was raw and cold and Isabella started from the past. Two realizations struck in the same instant—that the web of metal rods was more than merely symbolic of Lafitte’s sentiment. And that the heat of the flame had reached the tip of her fingers. Tearing her attention from Barrett’s effort, she lit another match just before she was forced to drop the other.

Stone grated against stone again and she held her breath, looking back to watch Barrett, his hands wrapped tightly around the ornate handle, coax the inscribed slab of granite from the wall. The world around her was beginning to narrow and gray and spin ever so slightly when it suddenly slid free. Her gasp of surprise steadied her and she stepped forward to peer into the opening as Barrett set the slab of stone at their feet.

It was a shallow recess; a stone box of sorts. And inside lay a single piece of folded parchment. With a trembling hand, she retrieved it, hoping and praying that it wasn’t another map, another string of clues to be followed. Barrett straightened and wordlessly took the matches and cheroot box from her.

Swallowing down her heart, she unfolded the paper and skimmed the first lines. Vaguely aware that her jaw had dropped, she looked down at the bottom of the page. It was real. The seal was there. The signature. The signatures of officials and witnesses, too.

“What is it, Belle?”

“A land grant,” she answered, looking back up to the first lines of the document. “From James Madison, President of the United States of America, to Mr. Jean Lafitte. Five hundred thousand acres of Western land in appreciation for his service to the United States during the New Orleans campaign of the Second American War for Independence.”

Dragging a breath into her lungs and locking her knees, she looked up to meet his gaze. “A half million acres, Barrett.”

His smile seemed brittle and forced as he said, “Welcome, Belle, to the world of the wealthy.”

Yes, she was wealthy. Wealthier than she had ever imagined it possible to be. So why did she feel as though the world had just crashed in utter ruin around her?

Chapter Sixteen

The document tucked inside her jacket, Belle walked along at Barrett’s side, her hands stuffed deep in her pockets and her mind not so much reeling as simply staggering. It was one thing, she knew, to hold title to large amounts of land and quite another to have actual possession. Making the land somehow pay was yet another monumental thing altogether.

Then there was the matter of getting back to America to begin the work of claiming the inheritance. She didn’t have the money for passage. She didn’t have money to live on while the lawyers filled out papers and argued among themselves. Barrett would doubtlessly loan her what she needed to travel and to survive in the interim, but the very idea of asking him for it made her stomach squirm and her chest tighten. The notion of accepting a freely made offer didn’t sit one whit better.

And every aspect of her quandary was based on assumption, she realized, her heart skittering. The document could be a forgery. Or it might have been rescinded in the years since it had been issued. Lafitte hadn’t been known as a sterling citizen; what the government had awarded for exemplary behavior, it might well have taken back for bad. Lafitte could well have sold, gambled, or traded it all away, too, and then forgotten that he’d done so. Such memory lapses were wont to happen as the mind aged and the soul tried to mend fences before passing to the world beyond. Lafitte certainly wouldn’t be the first man to bequeath something that wasn’t his to give. Or he might not have been able to get rid of it no matter how hard he’d tried. She’d read the journals of Lewis and Clark. She knew that there were vast stretches of utter wasteland in the West.

Then again, she admitted on a sigh, the document might be perfectly legal and still in force. When she walked in the door to claim it, the government lawyers might sag in relief and hand it over to her for nothing more than her signature. The land might be a gold mine of resources, sitting there pristine and waiting for her to unlock its potential. She could sell it. She could lease it. She could work it. She could build herself a fine house and rattle around inside its walls for the rest of her want-for-nothing life.