The Return of the Prodigal

“But you know that you still need me, Rian Becket,” she said with determination in her voice, tilting up her chin. “I will button your coat if it is cold, cut your meat when you are hungry, guide you when your French fails you. Do not argue, for you know I am right.”

“I’m not that helpless, Lisette. I can button my own coat. And I do speak and understand some French.”

“Yes. Filthy words. They are not enough.”

Rian smiled, remembering the days he would sit with some of the Becket crew who spoke French, and the words he had learned. Like merde. Gautier had invoked that word often as he attempted to untangle fishing nets snarled in the frequent storms off the coast of Romney Marsh. “Perhaps you’re right, Lisette. I only know how to insult the French.”

“Your English victory insulted us enough,” Lisette said, sliding from the bed to retrieve her night rail, slip it over her head. “But I am happy now, Rian. I will take you to your family, see you safely there. It is agreed.”

“It is agreed. I’ve already asked you to come with me, remember? Before you began arguing with me. You could stay with us for as long as you like. Indefinitely,” Rian said, coming to a decision even as the words left his mouth. The Beckets were careful who they invited to live at Becket Hall. The outside world had been given very limited access to their stronghold for almost twenty years.

But Lisette? No one had anything to fear from her.

And he would miss her, if she were gone.

“Stay with you?” Lisette pulled a face again. So comical in such a pretty face. Almost delicious. “As your servant?”

“Only if you wanted to, Lisette. Nobody at Becket Hall forces anyone to do anything they don’t wish to do.”

“Then this Becket Hall of yours must be tumbling down around its own shoulders. Do you all laugh and sing and play the grasshopper, Rian? There are no industrious ants?”

It was a simple question, but Rian ignored it, as he had learned to do concerning any question about Becket Hall or the people who lived there. “Once we’re there, you can decide if you want to stay.”

“And if I wanted to leave?’ she asked, her head cocked to one side.

“Then I would miss you,” he told her, realizing it was true.

“Thank you, that is very nice.” She lowered her gaze, as if unsure of how to respond to his statement. “The Comte will be in residence before the week is out. I told you this, yes? We should go now. Tonight.”

“Tonight?” Rian laughed. “I don’t think so, Lisette. Tonight I want you here, beside me. We’ll leave tomorrow.”

“No!” She rushed back to the bed, climbed in beside him. “They watch in the daytime.”

“What? Who watches?” Suddenly Lisette didn’t seem to be an asset to him, not if she believed such nonsense. She spoke like a child living in a fantasy world, or one who saw bogeymen where there were none.

“I tried to leave, months ago, just before you came here, you and the other soldiers. They stopped me, said I was ungrateful. They took all my wages that I had hoarded, and no longer pay me. I so want to be far away from here.”

Rian rubbed at his suddenly aching head. Prolonged thinking was still beyond him, damn it. Feeling, touching, desiring, indulging his senses—those worked for him, quite nicely. But to think, really think? That wasn’t so easy. “Far away from here, you said. That brings us to another question, Lisette. Where, exactly, is here? I should know, but I don’t.”

“Valenciennes, of course. We are closer to Valenciennes than anywhere else. I told you that, yes?”

“Probably,” Rian answered, cursing himself for not paying more attention when Lisette spoke to him. But it was so much easier to drift, to think of nothing of any consequence. Although he felt more alert tonight. Perhaps making love to Lisette helped to concentrate his mind? He could think of worse ways to nudge his brain. “I’ll need a map, Lisette. To see how far we are from the coast.”

“There is no need,” she told him quickly. “I have been planning this for some time now. Since the day the Comte stroked my hair and asked if my hair was this same color…everywhere. He is a filthy man, Rian, and I must be gone before he returns. And if he knew that you…that you had gotten to me before him, your life would be forfeit, no matter his plans for you. You see that, don’t you? For all of this, we must go. I have sneaked into the Comte’s study, I have seen a map. I have a route already decided.”

“He asked you such a crude question? Bastard. No wonder you’re frightened,” Rian said, his right hand balling into a fist. He would like to linger, to thank his benefactor, and then knock him down. How long had Lisette lived with this fear? “Are we within walking distance to the coast?”

She shook her head. “Not if anyone were to come looking for us, no. We would needs must move faster than that. But I have a plan for how to get the money we will need for the journey.”

“Of course you do. You have a head full of plans, don’t you, Lisette?”

“Do not laugh at me. You could no more fight off the Comte than could I. Oh! Je suis très stupide! Don’t frown! I’m sorry, Rian. I didn’t mean that. I really didn’t.”

“So you don’t see me in the role of protector? How shocking. Never mind, Lisette. I know my worth as a protector now. I know how useless I am. Tell me about your plan.”

“I am so sorry to have said that, Rian.”

“Lisette, enough. The plan.”

“If you’ve forgiven me? Very well. I will steal from the Comte, of course. I volunteered to houseclean his private chambers this past spring, and that lent me the excuse to rip and tear everywhere, to find every last bit of dirt. I am very good at finding dirt. I found a leather purse at the back of his wardrobe.”

“And you took it? That was dangerous, Lisette.”

She looked at him as if he’d just told her he could fly. “Of course I didn’t take it, Rian. I left it just where it was. After I’d counted the coins inside it. Gold coins, Rian Becket. English coins. Worth even more than their weight in gold now that the French treasury is in shambles. The purse is still there, and still full. I checked on it tonight, to be sure, before I came to you. That is why I was so late.”

“You’ve thought this out well, Lisette,” he said carefully. “There’s only one thing I don’t understand. Why would you wish to slow your escape by taking me along with you?”

“I said I was sorry, Rian Becket. I didn’t mean that you are helpless.”

“Yes, thank you yet again, but that doesn’t answer my question.”

“You said…you said you would miss me. I would miss you, too.”

Rian smiled, relaxed. This was what living with secrets did to a person. It made him leery even of people whose only thought was to help, to be a friend.

But then he thought of something else. Something Lisette had said to him that afternoon, something he’d forgotten until now, and her mention of ransom. “You think the Comte took me in because he might have some use for me?”

“I said that?”

“You did. More than once. Don’t dissemble, Lisette, I need to hear the truth. You said this employer of yours does nothing unless there is a reason. I don’t have my head completely up my— I do remember some things, even when my mind insists on wandering down its own paths.”

“Your mind dances in mists, Rian, but that is only because you nearly died. And you are better each day. This past fortnight, you have been very much improved. Very well. There are rumors—rumors only—that the Comte finds different inventive ways to keep himself wealthy. As a traitor to France, I am convinced, tossing his hat into whichever camp he sees most likely to benefit him. I can only think he means to ransom you, now that you aren’t going to die. It is not all that uncommon. Others have done this.”

Her explanation seemed reasonable, to a point. The Comte couldn’t know for certain, simply because he’d worn the uniform of an officer—granted, one especially tailored for him in London—that his family had enough money to pay the Comte a ransom sufficient to not only cover the expense of Rian’s recuperation, but also provide him with a handsome profit. Besides, now that England had won the war, the Comte could find himself dangling at the end of a rope for attempting such a trick.

Then again, he might have thought Rian’s family could be his entrée into London society if he were to escort him home to England. Was that too far-fetched a notion? The Comte wouldn’t be the only Frenchman eager to make a splash in English society. Especially one who would appear to like to be allied with the victors? Yes, this prospect made more sense.

There had to be a reason that the man had taken him in, kept him here for four long months. A hope of some reward. Certainly, from Lisette’s description of the man, he was not a saint. The man could be nothing more than an opportunist.

But old habits die hard, and the one of looking at every unknown person with suspicion harder than most, especially for a Becket.

“If you say so, Lisette, then I imagine I have to believe what you believe. One way or another, the Comte sees me as a paying guest. We leave tomorrow evening, all right?”

She nodded furiously. “You will stay here, in your bed all of the day, and I will tell everyone not to disturb you, that I am in charge, caring for your new fever. You will rest, take your medicine without arguing with me, and I will bring you food, more than enough for your needs, so that we can pack it, take it with us.”

“No more medicine, Lisette.”

“But you must, Rian! You know you’re not yet entirely well. What would I do with you, on the road, if you really were to fall into another fever?”

“Leaving me behind would be one answer,” he said, smiling at her fierce expression. “Very well, another thing for us to discuss at some other time. We should probably delay our departure until after dark.”

Once again, she nodded, and then smiled, as if delighted that he shared her opinion. “We’ll walk to the outskirts of Valenciennes, where we should be able to hire a coach. Not a good one, I’m afraid, as that might raise suspicion, but one that will serve our needs. From there, we’ll stop whenever you feel the need to rest, until we arrive at the coast. A pity your fine English uniform was ruined. Does a ship passage cost a terrible amount of money? There are twenty-two gold coins in the Comte’s purse, but I don’t know what English coins are worth.”

“More than twenty? We should be able to hire our own small boat, Lisette, with that much money. One that can take us across the Channel to Dover in a few hours. Will you feel safe from the Comte then?”

“Oh, yes, I will. And then I will be English. And then you will take me to your family and they will shower me with kisses for bringing their prodigal home safe to them. I will be the heroine, Rian,” she said, snuggling against him. “I like that.”

It was so easy to smile when Lisette was being silly. So easy to forget anything else when she slid her hand onto his belly, then trailed her fingers lower, teasing him, arousing him, taking him out of this world and into one where he was still whole.…

CHAPTER THREE

“LORINGA, YOU FRIGHTENED ME!”

“Nothing frightens you, devil’s child. If you fail when you leave us, it will be that lack of respect for fear’s warnings that will be your destruction. But you are wise to fear me while you are here.”

Lisette watched as her father’s constant companion, the self-proclaimed Voodoo priestess, plodded across the carpet and sat down heavily, glared at her in the candlelight.

“Don’t be silly. I don’t fear you,” Lisette protested as she continued to pack a small portmanteau, hastily shoving in the few bits of simple clothing she had carefully chosen for her journey. “I should have said that you startled me. That is all, Loringa. Because I don’t believe in you.”

“You say you eat only from the common pot,” Loringa reminded her, smiling, the gap between her front teeth seemingly growing wider by the day. “You believe.”

“I believe you are capable of drawing up potions, poisons. I believe that it’s you who keeps my own papa chewing on those strange leaves, so that he rarely eats, he rarely sleeps. I believe you are evil pretending to do good. But none of that makes you a priestess.”

“I am Dahomey. Your maman, she was born in New Orleans, she understood the power of the Voodoo. She entrusted your life to me, remember? Voodoo is powerful. And I am the most powerful of the powerful. I saved that boy, didn’t I? Nobody but me. He was as good as dead when he was brought here.”

Lisette didn’t have an answer for any of that, so she continued her packing, sweeping her brushes and a hand mirror from the dresser and tossing both on the bed.

“Not those, servant girl,” Loringa scolded. “A teacher’s daughter, an orphan working as a lowly servant, does not have pretty silver brushes.”

“I’ll simply tell him I stole them.”

“And that will explain away the initials carved on their backs?”

L.M.B. Lisette Marguerite Beatty. Lisette replaced the brushes and mirror without further comment. She supposed she should have thought about that herself. Truth be told, the woman really did unnerve her. Still, the brushes and mirror had been her papa’s first gift to her. She longed to take them with her, have something of him to look at, to remember why she was doing what she would do.

After Loringa left, she’d pack them. The old woman worried too much.

“Don’t you have something else to do, Loringa? Sticking pins in one of those strange dolls, saying your rosary while you burn feathers and stroke that ugly fat snake of yours? If the nuns knew what goes on here, they’d be telling me to run back to them before lightning strikes from the sky, cleaving this house—and your head—in two.”

The old woman sat back in the chair and laughed, the sound rich and full, belying her years. “You mock me because you do not understand. I have the power. Your papa, he knows this, and is grateful. Who do you think keeps him safe all these years?”

“So you say,” Lisette grumbled, closing the portmanteau and fastening the two leather straps. One day she would succeed in convincing her papa to send Loringa away, and theirs would be a normal life, the sort she had dreamed of as she grew up alone and lonely in the convent, believing herself to be without family. “So you seem to have convinced him. It makes my stomach sick.”

“Sick with the jealousy you feel. Because he needs me, and he does not need you, devil’s child. You merely amuse him, even now. But you wish to make him love you,” Loringa said, pushing herself up, her colorful skirts covering feet she could no longer house comfortably in anything other than a pair of man’s slippers she had cut holes in so that her misshapen bones could protrude in places. Her coarse, graying black hair was in a thick braid wrapped tightly about her head, her round cheeks had begun to lose their fight with the years and her hands were large, like a man’s, and gnarled, like old tree branches.

If Loringa was so powerful as she kept saying, why didn’t she fix herself—her hands, her feet? In her body, she was an old woman.

But the eyes? Loringa’s black bean eyes were alive. Too alive. And they saw too much, just as the ears heard too much.

Loringa was, to Lisette, a malevolent spirit. At the same time, it was Loringa who told her stories of other days, years ago, and of her father’s bravery, of his daring adventures in the islands. Of his sorrow.

“I do more than amuse him. He needs me, Loringa. He came for me as soon as he could. And he has allowed me this most important mission.”

The priestess shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose so. He loved the mother of the child. He is curious about you. A man grows older, and he begins to think about death, and who he might leave behind to remember him. A man is never dead, while someone remembers him. I will go before him, to make ready for him, so it will be left to you to keep his memory.”

Lisette softened, aware that Loringa truly cared for her father. “Tell me again, Loringa, please. Tell me about my mother…and the rest.”

“To give you courage as you go into battle? To remind you why you’re doing what you will do?”

“I know why,” Lisette said, pulling a cloak from the wardrobe and slinging it over her shoulders. “I know I’m a motherless child, and I know why. I know why I grew up alone, with the nuns, never knowing my parents. I know what was taken from me. But I want to hear you tell the story again.”

“So that when the time comes, if it comes, you will shed no tears for the man who makes you cry out his name in pleasure in the night.”

Lisette turned her back on the woman. “Now you go too far. Listening at keyholes? Is that your magick?”

“Why do we fight, devil’s child? My own devil’s own spawn, the ungrateful child whose life I saved for her? Is it because this is so important? Yes, that is why. He isn’t truly convinced, your papa, he doesn’t believe me when I say I can feel her, that she can feel me, that this fool Becket is truly the one who will lead where we wish to go. Even if her evil master has already escaped our justice through death, we will at least be able to deal with her, and with the others that we find with her. That, after all this time, vengeance may be within reach.”

“Forgive me, Loringa. We’re both fighting the same battle.”

“We know the name. Becket. Luck was in with us in London, even as it was out, and we learned the name. Before he died in his gaol cell, before his throat was cut and stopped him, the fool, Eccles, he did nothing but bleat the name of the man who had captured him, questioned him and then delivered him to this place called the War Office, and certain death. The names Eccles heard others call him. Becket, Becket. A soldier, surely. An officer of the English Crown.”

Lisette nodded, knowing the story. “But only that—Becket. Not even a full name. It seems so little for…for all of this.”

“It was enough for your papa, enough for a beginning. We would have moved then, hunted this man Becket down, followed him to his lair, struck then. But there was much else to occupy your papa, much work to do on this side of the Channel to keep the rest of the Red Men Gang funneling gold to the cause of France. Ah, these French. War, and more war. A king, an emperor, a king again, the little emperor come and gone a second time. Now a king yet again, fat and stupid, waiting to be plucked, keeping your papa busy as a fox in the henhouse even as he plans his return to England. Whispers and intrigue—your papa’s life’s blood.”

“It takes a very wise man to be able to know which side of the coin falls upward, time and time again, and how best to lay his bets,” Lisette said, quoting her father almost word for word. “But he didn’t forget the name, and found it on the rolls of those soldiers being sent to Belgium. Becket. Not such an unusual name. Rian Becket could be as innocent as the morning dew, and all of this for nothing.”

“As were the others who carried the name and were questioned without result. They had been innocent. And I would agree that this one is as well,” Loringa said, “were it not that I feel her. I have felt her for some time, searching me out, but so much more now that the boy is here. From the moment the name was first brought to my ears, I could feel her in my heart, fighting to crawl into my head. Your papa wanted only revenge on those who meddled in his affairs, his plans for what he calls his triumphant return to England, and he found his old enemies. God is good. This young Becket will lead us where we want to go. And then, finally, it will be over. What we’d believed to be over so long ago. I pray Baskin still lives, so that your papa can take his life from him, and the lives of his sons, his daughters, all of his seed. This is his right. As it is my right to destroy my twin.”

Lisette felt that familiar pang of discomfort at the idea that her father had arranged for five soldiers with the last name of Becket to be captured, separated from all the other English so conveniently gathered in Belgium to face down Bonaparte, had ordered the five brought to him to answer questions. The other four had died of their wounds, Loringa had told her, but when the fifth man, Rian Becket, had been delivered to the manor house, Lisette had been visiting and had intervened, begging her father to let her find out what he wanted to know.

What she did not want to know was how the other four soldiers had died. This was a part of her papa she did not understand, and she only forgave him because of his great pain, his longing for justice. Still, she prayed for those four soldiers every night, on her knees. She could not undo what had been done, but she could ease her papa’s long years of torment. She could find Geoffrey Baskin for him. After that—no, she wouldn’t think of what would happen after that.

“If you feel her now, this twin of yours, why didn’t you feel her all these years? You thought she was dead, didn’t you? Is she stronger than you are, Loringa? Was she able to make you believe she was dead?”

“Odette is not stronger than I! I am the strong one, she is the weak one. Her evil keeps her weak, and goodness makes me strong. We are marassa, and I am the good twin.”

“The other side of the same coin, yes, I remember you telling me that. Bad for every good, happy for every sad. Two sides to everything. But if you are the good twin, Loringa, I shudder to meet this Odette.”

“And that is why I am here, devil’s child. You will need protection from my dangerous sister.” She reached into one of the many pockets of her apron and extracted a thin silver chain.

Lisette leaned forward, frowning, hoping her shock didn’t show on her face. “What…what on earth is that? It…it looks like a fang. A huge, ugly brown fang.”

“The tooth of the alligator,” Loringa explained, moving her hand, setting the tooth on the end of the chain to swinging lazily in the air. “Fed by all of my most powerful ingredients saved from the islands, soaked in feuilles trois paroles in the mavoungou bottle, used to make the broth, you understand, the migan. This is my gift to you, this gad, this protection from the bad loa. But you will still need your wits about you at all times. Odette worships the bad loa.”

“And you expect me to wear that monstrosity around my neck? How could I hide it from Rian Becket?”

“Keep it with you. Find a way,” Loringa ordered, pushing the necklace on Lisette.

She grabbed the thing gingerly by its chain, quickly laid it on the bed. To touch the tooth itself, she felt sure, would be to have it burn her palm. Be calm, stay calm, she warned herself. Don’t let Loringa see. “Only if you tell me again about my mother. Tell me, while I finish packing up my things for my daring escape from my lascivious employer.”

Loringa sighed, returned to her chair.

“The story does not change with the telling. It was good, for many years between your papa and Geoffrey Baskin. They were partners, friends. The Letters of Marque, the adventures, a share in the booty allowed us by the Crown. Not pirates, not buccaneers, child. Privateers. All of the adventure, your father would say, winking at me, but all within the law. They would both return to England one day, rich men, as others had done before them.”

“And then Papa sailed to New Orleans,” Lisette said, at last slipping the gad into the pocket of her cloak.

“A blessed day, a cursed day. He met your maman, your sweet maman, and brought her back to the islands with him as his wife. And Geoffrey Baskin saw her, broke the Lord’s Commandment, coveted her.”