The Return of the Prodigal (21 page)

“I am
Voodoo!
”

“You are
pathetic!
You’re no more than he lets you be, and nothing on your own. I don’t believe in your evil, and you do
not
frighten me. You may have once, I admit that, but not anymore, not ever again.” Lisette headed for the door, turned, smiled her sweetest smile. “Coming? Your
master
is probably expecting you.”

It would have made for a marvelous exit, one that would keep her spirits high, because she needed to feel confident, but the door was locked, and she had to stand back and wait for Loringa to extract the key from her pocket and let her out into the hallway, where Leon waited to escort them back to the drawing room.

“Heard yellin’,” he said, looking at Loringa. “Cap’n says you’re to watch her, not yell at her. Dinner’s waitin’.”

Loringa muttered something beneath her breath and turned on her heels, heading toward the servant stairs.

“She’ll be along shortly,” Lisette said loudly, feeling better than she had all day, even if her bottom lip did crack open when she smiled. She had inadvertently found a soft spot in the strong presence that was Loringa, and she would exploit that soft spot for all it was worth. “Loyal dogs always come racing to heel when their masters beckon.”

Leon looked at her curiously, and then merely shrugged and indicated she should precede him toward the winding marble stairs that led down to the foyer. “Cap’n says you’re to be brought straight to the dining room.”

“And we can’t disappoint the Cap’n, can we?” Lisette said sweetly. She picked up her skirts and headed for the stairs, the scissors in her pocket lending her courage.

When she arrived in the dining room at the very back of the first floor of the manor house, it was to see her father rising from his chair, as if showing her how much the gentleman he could be in his own home.

“Good evening, Lisette. Aren’t you looking particularly pretty this evening? Even some
color
in your cheeks. Well, one of them. You’d be wise to exercise more caution, so that you don’t fall again,” he said, his voice like smooth silk. “Please, be seated at the foot of my table, as you are my hostess.”

“We have guests?” she asked him as Leon, serving double duty, pulled out her chair for her. Please, God, don’t have Leon come marching Rian and Jasper in here at gunpoint in the next few moments.

“Not yet, no, as you’re probably sad to hear. But I am expecting one shortly. Leon? The guards are in place?”

“Yes, Cap’n,” the man said, leaning his arm on the curved top of one of the high back chairs spaced along the length of the ornate, marble-topped table, clearly not a soldier used to coming to attention as he gave his report. “One at each corner of the main house, two at the gatehouse. A little thin we are, Cap’n, what with Thibaud and the other two gone, and everyone else either already in Paris, packin’ up like you said to do, or in Calais, gettin’ the ships ready to sail.”

“Thibaud is on a fruitless mission, I’m afraid, now that I know for certain that our quarry is one of Geoff’s crew. A pup then, a man now, a dead man tonight. Thibaud will be searching the way to the coast, when our quarry is doubtless still very much in the area. I believe we will simply have to carry on our best without them until Thibaud realizes his mistake. Are you up to capturing a one-armed man just lately out of sickbed, Leon? I do, you’ll recall, greatly stress the need to take him alive. If Geoff and anyone else is out there somewhere they must be located and eliminated, or we’ll never be able to turn our backs on anyone in London with any degree of confidence we won’t find a knife there a moment later.”

Lisette unfolded her serviette and laid it in her lap, terrified for Rian, but unwilling to show her fear. “You want him alive? So that you can torture him, as you did the others?”

Edmund Beales smiled almost kindly. “Such an unpleasant word, torture. Convince? Yes, much more palatable, don’t you think? We will
convince
our dear Mr. Becket that it will be more pleasant for him to share what he knows rather than to resist us. He would be devastated, I’m sure, to see you harmed, if the right words from him could prevent it. Well, hardly harmed. Perhaps even delighted. I believe Leon has quite the way with the ladies, don’t you, Leon? That doxy in Cannes was only an unfortunate casualty of your sometimes overzealous ardor, I’m sure. Then, Lisette, we’ll let your Mr. Becket die, swiftly. I can be kind, you know.”

Leon grinned at her, spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth.

Lisette quickly looked down at the bowl of soup placed before her and was very nearly sick to her stomach, even though she hadn’t eaten all day. “Everything Loringa told me was true. Except that it happened to other people, not to my
maman
or to me, and you are the monster who perpetrated that horror. And now you calmly speak of rape and killing, and expect me to sit here and pretend I can look at you and actually eat my dinner?”

“You’ll be looking at me, dear Lisette, for another year, until you reach your majority. If you don’t eat, I will order you fed. If you don’t behave, Leon or someone else will teach you the folly of disobeying me. I leave the choices to you. Leon, you’re still here?”

“Goin’, Cap’n,” the man said, pulling on his nonexistent forelock and hustling himself out of the dining room.

“You know,” Edmund Beales said, holding his soup spoon suspended over the bowl, “it didn’t have to be this way. I could have taken you to New Orleans, to London—anywhere. You’re beautiful, in a pale, almost ethereal way, just like your mother. A fat dowry would have brought me a powerful alliance with one of the better titles in England. But you went and ruined yourself, didn’t you, just like a bitch in heat raising its backside to any mongrel that comes along. You’re a great disappointment to me, Lisette, a great disappointment. Ah, well, I’m sure I can find some more intelligent young woman to take your place once we’ve shown your likeness to your mother’s portrait to the bankers in New Orleans.”

Lisette felt her cheeks go hot, and bent her head to her soup. Better to eat, keep up her strength, better not to try to cross swords with this man, not verbally. Best to bide her time, hoping Rian and Jasper could think of a way to come get her, take her away from this twisted creature and his madness.

I
T WAS NEARING FULL DARK
when Rian and Jasper at last started out, leaving the caravan where it was, and Thibaud bound and gagged behind them. But not inside the caravan. That was a mistake they wouldn’t make twice, even if Rian still found it difficult to believe Lisette would risk injury to herself by using one of those sharp blades to cut herself free.

He and Jasper were armed much as they had been earlier, carrying every bit of munitions a man could possibly carry and still be able to stand up. A two-man army, complete with artillery.

He checked the thick rope Jasper had affixed to the saddle, looked across to the one tied to Jasper’s saddle. They were strong, they’d hold. The horses they rode had been built more for endurance than speed, and they’d hold as well.

Tonight’s adventure would make for grand telling on snowy nights for many years to come. If they lived to tell it. If he lived to write it.

And he would write it, all of it that he felt able to share with a sure to be entertained world. He had the story. All he needed was a title. A pity
Don Juan
was already taken.

“Jasper?”

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“We’re insane, Jasper.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This isn’t going to work.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you want to turn back?”

“No, sir!”

“Do you think she knows we’re coming, Jasper?” Rian asked, sobering. “Do you think she wants us to come for her?”

“Well, sir, she most probably does. But we tied her up, sir. Never know how a lady takes to that sort of thing.”

“So she’ll hug me, then she’ll hit me?”

“Could be, sir,” Jasper said, shooting Rian a smile.

They rode in silence for a space, Rian going over in his head everything Thibaud had told them.

Beales was a creature of habit. When at the manor house he dined each night at precisely seven o’clock, and remained at table until nine. Then he sat in the main drawing room until eleven, at which time he went upstairs, to bed. There had, of course, been no mention of evening prayers.

Lisette, Thibaud had told them, was bound to be either with her father in the drawing room located at the front of the house, to the left of the entryway, or locked in her room at the rear of the second floor. After eleven, most certainly after midnight, Lisette would be in her bedchamber.

Please God.

Guards would consist of six men at the most, four of them in their fifties and loyal to Beales, two of them younger, more recent hires, and probably as loyal as shrimp. Beales would keep his most trusted men closest to him, meaning that the two less loyal men would man the gatehouse.

This was how Thibaud had always arranged guards, and he’d been in charge of the process for a long time.

“We’ll leave the horses a half mile from the gates, Jasper, and proceed on foot,” he told the man, not for the first time. “Approach silently, knives only, and dispose of the men at the gatehouse.”

“Leaving four others, Lieutenant,” Jasper said. “Jasper remembers.”

“Yes, of course you do. We hide the bodies, go back for our weapons, the horses, and return, unlock the gates with the keys I pray God we find on one of the bodies, and proceed from there.”

“Never thought Jasper would say this, Lieutenant, facing a battle. But he’s lookin’ forward to this one, he really is.”

“We take him alive, Jasper, remember?”

“If Jasper’s still alive himself to remember, yes, sir, we certainly will.”

R
IAN HAD STRIPPED
to his waist, as his white shirt might be seen in the moonlight, and was unarmed now except for the knife in his boot. He advanced through the brush along the side of the road, behind Jasper, who blocked him as effectively as a small building, Rian thought, smiling.

He really shouldn’t be smiling. God damn! He was in the middle of a nightmare. They all three of them were, he, Jasper and the captive Lisette.

But he couldn’t help himself. He was close, so close to being the one who finally brought peace to Ainsley, to all of the Beckets. To all of those who had died so many years ago, whose rest must be disturbed by the fact that those deaths had not been avenged.

Yes, it was romantical of him to think this way, to think of himself as the one person blessed with both the opportunity and the ability to put to rest such a long-lived nightmare. Romantical, and dangerous, as who was he except a young, barely tested, one-armed man?

But he had Jasper, bless all the saints for putting the man-mountain in his way, and Jasper had taken up the gauntlet without hesitation, making Rian’s mission his own. A seasoned soldier, a man with a heart probably larger than most men’s heads, and with an arsenal that not even Edmund Beales could know was being aimed straight at him.

Jasper stopped, and Rian nearly barreled into him. “A problem?”

“No, sir,” Jasper said, dropping to his haunches. “We’re here, that’s all. See?”

Rian moved out from behind his friend, keeping bent in half, his hand already moving toward the top of his boot.

Just ahead, no more than twenty feet away, was the wall surrounding the manor house, and the wide iron gates, the gatehouse built into the wall on the left the same side of the roadway where he and Jasper now hid in the darkness.

Two men were standing guard just inside the closed gates.

Damn. Inside the gates.

Rian stepped back into the bushes, sat down, looked at Jasper.

“Problem, Lieutenant?”

“You could say that, Jasper. We need them outside the gates. We need the gates open.”

Jasper shrugged. “Could just boost you up and over the wall, sir. Done it a’ fore. Come at ’em that ways?”

Rian shook his head. “We’d have to come over the wall some distance away, to stay silent, and run the chance of coming within eyesight of the guards patrolling the outside of the house itself. Thibaud said they’d stay close to the house, too lazy to actually patrol, but we can’t chance that. I don’t trust the man.”

“A bad man, that,” Jasper said, nodding his agreement. “Jasper’s still wonderin’ why he’s breathin’. Sir.”

“I know. But if this all goes wrong, and Beales ends up dead, I need someone alive, someone to take back to Ainsley.”

“So you can learn the names of the others, whoever else is left.”

“Yes, Jasper. If we get them all—when we get them all—then we’ll at last be free to relax, live…live free. No one else would ever remember a supposed crime nearly twenty years old. Ainsley could finally leave his self-imposed prison, rejoin the world.”

Jasper nodded, but the frown on his face told Rian that the man didn’t quite understand the ins and outs of Letters of Marque and outright piracy, and the fine line that divided the two. Being tricked into attacking an English merchantman had been Beales’s coup de grâce, keeping Ainsley from the respectability he so longed for, but that now might finally be within his reach.

If Rian succeeded. If Rian didn’t take his own ambition too far, if Lisette wasn’t already dead. For no success would mean anything, if Lisette was dead.

“Jasper has an idea, sir,” the big man said after a moment.

“All right, let’s hear it. I’m about ready to try anything.”

“Well, sir, they’re watchin’ for you, but nobody’s expectin’ Jasper. So iffen you was to work your way ’ round and come up on the gate from this side? Stickin’ to the trees, outta sight? Then you’d be right there when Jasper needs you, yes?”

“Needs me? Needs me for what? Jasper, wait—”

But the big man had already gotten to his feet and staggered out into the middle of the roadway. He wore nothing but his dusty boots, a pair of uniform trousers with seams stretched to the limits, and the thick leather belt crisscrossed over his chest, holding the short, curved sword tight to his back.

He looked, Rian thought, smiling in spite of himself, like every little boy’s bogeyman nightmare come to life.

And then Jasper broke into song, making up in volume what he lacked in expertise, and began staggering in the direction of the gates.

Realizing what the man was up to, and that he wasn’t, so far, playing his own part, Rian angled off into the underbrush, cutting to one side and then around again, heading for the gates.

Jasper took his time, weaving from one edge of the roadway to the other, his gait unsteady, his words increasingly slurred, as if he’d drunk all the ale in a five-mile radius and now couldn’t find his way home to wherever he belonged.

Rian was at the wall now, not ten feet from the two men who were standing close together just inside the gate, their rifles butt-down on the ground, fairly mesmerized by Jasper’s bizarre approach.

Jasper’s song was partly in English, partly in French, probably something he had learned in taverns he’d visited during the months since Waterloo, and it trailed off suddenly, as if he’d forgotten the words to the third verse.

“Hullo!” he said, standing with his legs spread wide, five feet from the iron gates. He raised both huge arms and waved at the men on the other side of the gates. “Come ta see the lady Lisette. Got a message from her man, I do.”

The two guards put their heads together, whispering in rapid French. One gestured toward the gravel drive leading to the manor house not forty feet away, while the other pointed to Jasper, who was swaying where he stood, grinning like the village idiot.

“Come on now, lemme in,” he said. “Gave Jasper these pretty things, he did, just ta come tell his lady where he’s stayin’, and to fetch her to him
toot sweet.
Look!” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the trio of gold coins Rian had given him, walking closer to the gates, the coins in his palm, and then managed to drop them. “Oh, that’s not good.”

The gold coins fairly gleamed in the moonlight, and the guards conferred again.

Rian couldn’t speak French, but he was fairly certain he knew what the men were discussing.

If they went to the manor house, alerted the other guards, what would happen to those three lovely pieces of gold? But if they were to first avail themselves of the coins, easily overpowering the stupid drunken fool who could barely remain upright, who was to know?

Of course, if they were to think to themselves, what on earth did this man think he could do—take the woman out from under their noses, without a fight? Then the jig was truly up, and Jasper better be able to run faster than he heretofore had proven possible.

But greed was a powerful tool, and Jasper had used it well. While one of the guards lifted his rifle to his shoulder, the other one propped his against the wall of the gatehouse and extracted a large key from his pocket, opening the lock and pulling back one side of the gate.

“There you go!” Jasper crowded, grinning again. “One of ya fine fellas want to be helpin’ Jasper with these coins, eh? Feelin’ a little sick, and bendin’ is a bit past him just for the moment….”

The guard who had opened the gate shoved the key back into his pocket and went to his knees in the dirt, picking up the coins.

Well, one of them. His head landed on the other two.

The still-armed guard whirled about to run back inside the gates, but was met by Rian’s knife, which plunged deep into the side of his neck, cutting off any chance of a scream. He pulled out the knife, careful to avoid the spray of blood.

Clawing at his neck, the man was all but dead before he crumpled to his knees, fell face-forward in the dirt.

“Jesus, Jasper,” Rian said, looking at the shortened figure of the first guard. “Don’t ever become angry with me, all right?”

“No, sir,” Jasper said, already disposing of Rian’s handiwork in the bushes. “Sharpened it fine, didn’t Jasper?”

Rian was already digging in the abbreviated corpse for the key, holding it up to Jasper before that man, after tossing the head into the bushes, grabbed the corpse by the waistband of the trousers and pulled it out of the roadway.

“Now we have to hurry, Jasper,” Rian said, giving one last look to the gates before deciding to close the open one, so that it would still appear to be locked. “You ready?”

“Feelin’ good, sir,” Jasper told him, and they were off, running as fast as they could, straight down the moonlit roadway, heading for the horses.

And the small French field cannon those horses had dragged behind them from their campsite.

T
HE MANTEL CLOCK
at last struck out the hour of midnight and Lisette got to her feet, sure that her father would now allow her to retire to her bedchamber, as had been their routine when in residence at the manor house ever since she’d come to live with him.

“No, no, sit down, my dear,” he told her, not lifting his gaze from the pages of his book. “Not that I don’t trust my own flesh and blood, but unless you wish to be tied to your bed—a distasteful prospect, don’t you agree?—you will have to remain here, in my sight, until such time as your Mr. Becket is brought to me.”

“Loringa can accompany me,” Lisette said, amazed to realize that, of these two hated creatures, she’d prefer the company of the Voodoo priestess to that of her own father.

“Loringa is sulking, I’m afraid. You were very cruel to her, my dear. If, over the next few days, you were to suffer sharp pains in your stomach, or notice that lovely hair of yours is falling out? Well, don’t say I have not warned you.”

Lisette sat down once more. “That’s ridiculous. She has no real power.”

At last her father put down his book, folding it over, his finger keeping his place. “And what do you know of Voodoo, my dear?”

“I know from listening to Loringa’s rambles that it’s ridiculous, no religion at all,” Lisette said, lifting her chin. “Part belief, part ritual and superstitious nonsense.”

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small green leaf, placing it between his teeth and gums. “Ah. You have just described
all
religion, my dear. Do not feel superior to Loringa and her ways. They have served me well. Faithfully.”

“By feeding you those stupid leaves? She controls you with them, doesn’t she?”

Her father threw back his head and laughed aloud. “Would you like that, Lisette? Perhaps your
papa
is a good man, a kind man, but only led astray by the evil Loringa. Perhaps your
papa
can still be saved, hmm? Shall we go down on our knees together, you and I, and pray?”

She looked at him stonily. “I wish to go to my rooms. I’m so tired. I don’t want to argue, I don’t want to think. I just want to sleep.”

“And not wait to see your paramour? The man you betrayed your father for, the man who would take you away from me, return to destroy me? Oh, please, don’t deny me the pleasure of watching your face when he’s dragged in front of me.”

“He won’t come. He hasn’t come because he is already long gone, on his way to England, to his family. I mean nothing to him.”

“You underrate yourself, surely. A wise man would have run, I agree. Live to fight another day, and all of that rot. But he’s a young man, and he probably believes his little servant girl loves him. He probably believes he has right on his side, and that right always wins. Geoff would have taught his followers just that sort of romantic claptrap.”

But Lisette wasn’t listening. She’d heard something. She didn’t think her father had, he was so enthralled with the sound of his own voice, but she stood up, pretending a stiffness in her limbs that wasn’t really all sham. She stretched, and then began walking slowly about the room, edging closer to the front windows.

There! She heard it again. What was that sound? She’d heard it before, she was sure of it, at some other time, in some other place.

And then it came to her, all at once. It was the slight squeak of one of the wheels of the French field cannon they’d been dragging along behind the caravan for the past several days.

Rian had come to rescue her! And in a most heroic, romantical way.

Lisette looked behind her, to where her father had just gotten to his feet, the book falling to the floor. He turned, met her eyes, his expression in part confused, in part frighteningly alert, and Lisette smiled, said in French,
“Maintenant, vous créature vile, nous verrons ce que le côté de la droite peut accomplir!”

Now, you vile creature, we’ll see what the side of right can accomplish!

Then, because she thought it probably a prudent thing to do, she aimed her body toward the far front corner of the room and threw herself face forward, onto the floor, and covered her head with her hands and arms.

A moment later, the world exploded.

T
HE PAIR OF GUARDS
at the front door had been taken out by the blast, the resultant displacement of building stones that left a gaping hole where the heavy front doors and the surrounding arch of stones had been, and Rian dispatched the guard who came running from the left side of the manor house with the shot from his pistol, without even breaking stride.

He tossed the spent pistol to the ground, thinking he’d have to thank Jacko for those long hours of firearms training, once they were safely back at Becket Hall. The man had been right. It was possible to move and at the same time hit a moving target. All you needed was skill…and a little luck.

And, so far, Rian believed his luck to be in. Now if only it could hold.

Pulling the sword from its sheath, he then ran up the stairs he had so stealthily crept down only a few short days ago, deftly avoiding debris and the beginnings of several small fires, and crashed into the swirling smoke. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, which were still intact, although looking a bit crooked, and loudly called Lisette’s name, then turned to his left, toward the drawing room.