The Return of the Prodigal (12 page)

She settled against him once more, longing to believe him. “I would miss you, too, Rian Becket. Some day I might wish to go to Hell again.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “I never know what you’re going to say next, to shock me. Are you hungry?”

“Starving, yes,” she told him, relaxing a little, close to deciding that she had overreacted, that he was not suspicious of her at all, but only concerned for her. Or, perhaps, that was what she wanted to believe. “But, mostly, I would like some coffee and fresh cream.”

“When we stop for luncheon we’ll make some on the fire. But for now I’m afraid all we have is bread and cheese.” He pushed away from her and reached beneath the seat, pulling out a small basket covered in a red-checked handkerchief. “I saved this for you.”

“Thank you,” she said, pulling out a thick slice of fresh bread and biting into it as she looked around the interior of the caravan. She had decided to think of it as a caravan. “Where will we sleep? Jasper will fill this entire space.”

“You can sleep in here, on blankets we’ll pile on the floor. Jasper and I will sleep beneath the stars. We’re soldiers, we know how to do that.”

“You…you won’t be sleeping with me?”

“Another form of Hell, Lisette, this one for both of us,” he said, flicking at the tip of her nose with his forefinger. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I want to join Jasper up on the seat. I’m wondering if these oxen can move faster than snails, but I doubt it.”

She watched him as, bent nearly in half, he made his way forward, past the swords and rifles and bayonets and horrible, cruel instruments of war, still wondering if he believed her to be friend or foe.

And realized that it didn’t matter. One way or another, she was his prisoner.

“H
OW FAR DO YOU THINK
we’ve come, Jasper?” Rian asked as he helped the man release the pair of oxen from the traces, and then watched as the large man pounded a stake as thick around as a man’s wrist and containing a large iron ring into the ground. He pulled the strong ropes tied to the oxen’s bridles through the ring and knotted them, thus securing the oxen for the night.

“We left Torhout an hour after dawn, and kept to the road except to cook a midday meal and to allow your woman to take herself into the forest a time or two.” Jasper looked up at the darkening sky. “A good twelve hours on the road, Jasper thinks, not having found a timepiece on the battlefields. Gog and Magog are slow, but they are steady. Fifteen miles? All of them to the south, just the way you wanted. Two more days, one more night?”

Rian nodded, having come to much the same conclusion himself. “We watch her every moment, Jasper. Especially as we get closer to Valenciennes.”

“Jasper doesn’t understand, Lieutenant. She’s your woman, right?”

“Is there a man anywhere who can say with conviction that a woman is his, Jasper?”

The big man grinned, winked. “Jasper ever gets himself one, he’ll tell you, Lieutenant. Does the one you’ve got know how to cook?”

“I don’t think so, not if this afternoon’s experience is to be considered as evidence. You don’t really want to give her another chance to burn another rabbit, do you?”

“No, Jasper supposes not. Only two of the things left a’ fore we have to stop in some village and load in some supplies. You still got those coins?”

“I’ve got enough,” Rian assured him as he watched Lisette climb down from the back of the caravan, looking slightly green around the gills. He would agree that the wagon was badly sprung—in fact, not sprung at all—and the long afternoon’s ride over badly pitted roads hadn’t been a pleasant one. “And I have a feeling Miss Lisette will not be joining us for rabbit cooked over your charcoal brazier.”

Jasper looked over his shoulder, and then laughed out loud. “Need to put her up on the bench tomorrow, Lieutenant, out in the air, or else she’s going to go green as a frog by the time we get to this Valenciennes of yours. And she’s still got to think up a story about how Jasper saved your life, remember?”

“You’re doing more than enough now, Jasper, just taking me back to the manor house. Things could become…unpleasant once we get there.”

“So you say, Lieutenant. Jasper hasn’t had a good fight in some time now. But no way to use the cannon? Pity, that.”

“We’ll still take it with us to Becket Hall. I promised that, and I mean it. But Gog and Magog will probably have to stay behind, as well as the caravan. I’m sorry.”

“No need, sir. Time Jasper was out of the munitions business, Jasper’s thinking. Need a good war to turn more than a few pennies, and it don’t look like we’ll be havin’ one of them again anytime soon.”

“You come to Becket Hall, Jasper, and I just might be able to guarantee you a war,” Rian said just before Lisette joined them. “Sweetheart, how do you feel?”

“I am not speaking to you, Rian Becket,” she said, holding a hand to her stomach. “I am much too busy planning ways to kill you for this horrible caravan.”

“And you’ve yet to set foot on whatever boat I can hire to take us across the Channel. In October, Lisette. There could a storm.”

“Yes,” she said miserably. “I have heard this about the Channel in October.”

“Really? And where did you hear this?”

She looked up at him, her eyes going wide, as if he’d caught her saying something she should not have said. But then her hand left her stomach, to clamp hard across her mouth, and she was lifting her skirts with her free hand and bolting into the trees.

“Jasper’s thinkin’ we each get our own rabbit, Lieutenant.”

“And I’d say Jasper has that one right,” Rian said, looking into the trees, wondering if the gentlemanly thing to do would be to go to Lisette, hold her head, or to stay away, give her some privacy.

He opted for the latter, and turned back to the caravan, ready to help Jasper prepare their dinner.

Lisette didn’t rejoin them for a good hour, by which time the rabbits had been skinned, gutted and were turning on a cleverly designed spit above the charcoal brazier. She looked less green, although her gown was damp in several spots and her hair hung wet and dripping down her back.

“What happened? Was there a passing storm that somehow missed the encampment?”

“You are so very amusing,” Lisette bit out, plunking herself down on a rolled blanket, the one that would become Rian’s bed in another hour. “I found a stream and I bathed. Without soap, without towels. It was horrible, and I nearly froze. But I do feel better.”

Rian was instantly concerned. “Do you know how to swim, Lisette? How deep was this stream? Why in bloody hell didn’t you come back for soap and toweling and tell me what you planned to do?”

If she was cold, her glare at him was solid ice. “Now I must tell you everything? Oh, isn’t that interesting. Would that be the same way you told me that we were going to travel back to France in a torture chamber drawn by great ugly beasts who smell worse than the only chamber pot in a plague house? My most sincere apologies, Lieutenant Becket.”

She stood up, pushed her wet hair back behind her ears, and spit—yes,
spit
—into the charcoal fire. Then she turned on her heels and headed back to the caravan, her hips swaying in what could only be thought of as a provocative, come-hither way by a man who wished for an early death.

“Jasper thinks you should probably wed that one, Lieutenant,” Jasper said, grinning like a very large village idiot. “That way she mayhap won’t be killin’ you.”

“She could be, and most probably is, my enemy, Jasper,” Rian said, reaching forward to turn the spit, as the rabbits had begun to char on one side.

“There is that, Jasper supposes. You’re in a fine mess, sir, if you don’t mind Jasper pointin’ that out to you. Do you know yet what you’re going to do, once we get to this Frenchie’s domicile?”

“No, not really, Jasper,” Rian said, fingering the hilt of the pistol he had jammed into the waistband of his pilfered trousers. “Walking up to the front door and banging on the knocker, however, is a method I’ve already ruled out. Mostly, I want to see this man. Judge his strengths, his weaknesses.”

“Reconnoiter,” Jasper said, nodding. “Troop strength, that sort of thing?”

“I don’t know,” Rian said, suppressing a sigh. “I sometimes think I’m out of my mind, and I’m making up this entire thing. A man, granted, a mercenary man, took me in, wounded, planning for me to heal so that he could return me to my family—for a profit. That’s one possibility. Ransom is another. France is a poor country ravaged by decades of war, as Lisette pointed out to me. Or, a third option, he could have hoped I could introduce him, yet another French émigré, to London society. London has been overrun with the species for several years now.”

“All good reasons, Jasper thinks. Except that your family has an enemy.”

“Of long standing, yes. A very dangerous enemy, Jasper, make no mistake about that. I keep going back to those last moments, before I went unconscious, only to wake God only knows how much later, in a bed at the manor house. Those men, Jasper, they definitely hadn’t been planning to kill me. Looking back on the moment, I wish I hadn’t put up such a fight, or I might still have my left hand. No, they
came
for me, as if sent to find me, subdue me, carry me off. I know, I know, it seems far-fetched. But why else would I be alive? Why else would I have been transported, as I now know, a good forty miles, all the way into France, if someone didn’t have a use for me? Me, in particular, Jasper, not just some English officer who looked to be from a fairly wealthy family.”

“Because of the uniform,” Jasper said, once again nodding his massive head. “Some of you looked a fair treat on the field, Jasper will say that. That fellow—his lordship Uxbridge? Could have been king of the world, for so good he looked, paradin’ up on that fine horse of his. Us boys cheered him every time we saw him, he was that pretty. Gives a man a reason to fight, seeing a fine man like that ridin’ ahead of you, straight into the thick of it without a thought to hisself, when he could have just as easy stayed home by the fire, counting his gold.”

Rian smiled, remembering his own first sight of Lord Uxbridge. “A pretty man, I agree, Jasper. Last time I saw him, he was mounted beside the Iron Duke himself, and looking pretty smug, because we’d damn near turned the tide by that hour. Shame I didn’t linger to admire the man more, or none of what happened might have happened.” Then he shook his head. “No, that’s not true. Someone wanted me, Jasper, and they were going to get me, one way or another. I just wish I knew how they knew.”

“Heard his lordship lost his leg, right at the end of the day. Grapeshot blew it all but clean off. Sad, that. Rabbits are ready,” Jasper said, taking the spit from the fire. “You think Miss Lisette will have changed her mind?”

Rian was slow in absorbing what Jasper had said about Uxbridge. Damn. What was worse? A hand, or a leg? “If you’ll help me cut mine up, Jasper, I’ll take my plate in to her and see.”

Rian watched as Jasper wielded a very sharp knife and a badly bent fork, dismembering the rabbit in a way that both inspired awe and was a reminder that he was glad Jasper thought kindly of him. He then took up his metal plate and carried it to the back door of the caravan. “Lisette? May I come in?”

“If you are through being so stupid, I suppose so,” she said from behind the door. “And laughing at me. I know you are laughing at me, because I look the drowned cat.”

“Drowned rat,” Rian corrected as he heard her push back the bolt Jasper had placed inside the door to protect himself and his inventory as he slept. Then he stepped into the dimness, as Lisette had pulled the scraps of curtain across both small windows, probably to lie in the dark in her misery as Gog and Magog had lumbered through every rut and hole in the roadway they had traveled.

“I think that smells very good,” she said, eying the plate. “And my stomach is very empty. Exceedingly empty.”

“I wish I could make this easier on you, Lisette,” Rian said, sitting down beside her on the bench and holding out the plate, so that she took up a piece of meat with her fingers and began chewing on it. “Jasper assures me of one more night and two rather full days on the road and we’ll be at our destination.”

“At the manor house,” Lisette said around a mouthful of meat. “When you have killed the
Comte,
will you then steal his fine carriage? It would seem a good idea, if he will not be needing it anymore.”

“I’m not going to kill the
Comte,
Lisette,” he told her, pushing a piece of the meat into his own mouth. “That’s not my plan.”

“But you will kill him, if you think he deserves killing.”

“All right. Yes, I will, if there’s no other way. If he is who I have no choice but to think he is, the man doesn’t deserve to live an hour longer than he already has.”

“Why? What did he do?”

“Lisette let it go, please.”

“Let it
go?
You drag me out of France just to drag me back to France, just for me to let it
go?
No! And you look at me with suspicion, Rian Becket. Do not lie. I can see it in your eyes. You think this friend of my poor dead
maman
’s is a terrible man, and that I only do what he says because—because I am a terrible person? A…a whore?”

“A whore?” Rian looked at her in real shock. “For God’s sake, Lisette, you’re not a whore.”

“I came to your bed. I like what you do to me. I like what we do together. This does not make me a…an emblem of purity.”

“An emblem of—If I understood French, would that sound better in your own language? Make more sense?”

“My own language is English. I am English. All the French tell me that. And you know what I mean, Rian Becket. I worked for the
Comte.
I lived under his roof, at the grace of his charity. I could be in great sympathy with him, and only doing his bidding in whatever horrible thing it is you think the
Comte
is doing.”

“So? Are you, Lisette? Are you in his employ in that way?”

“No! I worked as one of his housemaids, and that is all. How dare you ask such a thing!”

Rian threw back his head, laughing. God, she was magnificent. “I asked, Lisette, because you asked me to ask.” But then he sobered. “Tell me about your father, Lisette. Please?”