The Return of the Prodigal (13 page)

She blinked furiously, obviously surprised by his question. “But I have told you. He was English. He was a teacher.”

“Yes, I remember that,” Rian said, having given the subject of her father considerable thought as the oxen plodded along the road back to France. “And his name was Beatty. Was he always a teacher, Lisette? Was he a friend of the
Comte
’s, as well as your mother? Perhaps they even were in business together? Perhaps years ago, before you were born?”

Lisette tipped her head to one side, as if trying to digest his questions, figure out where they were taking him, down what strange road. “No. He was a teacher. Always. He was a good man.”

“A good man. Named Beatty. Joseph Beatty? John Beatty? Henry Beatty?”

Lisette slapped at his arm, and not playfully. “Stop that! What are you doing? What are you asking?”

“Never mind, Lisette. I’m tired, and you’re clearly exhausted. We’ll talk again in the morning, all right?”

“No, I don’t think so. My
papa,
his name was Robert Beatty. I hope that makes you happy, because those are the last words I will say to you, Rian Becket. You have become a horrible man.”

Rian stood up as best he could beneath the low roof, placing the tin plate on the bench. “I’m sorry, Lisette. I really am. For everything.”

And then he left the caravan, his feet barely touching the ground before he heard the door slam shut behind him and the bolt slide home.

L
ISETTE HAD CRIED
herself to sleep. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d done so, but she had. Perhaps because, no matter how she’d tried, no dreams of her
maman
would come to her. Perhaps because Rian Becket did not attempt to come to her. She would have turned him away with sharp words, but he could have tried to come to her, couldn’t he?

Perhaps because, when she did close her eyes, only nightmares came to her.

Rian was going to kill her
papa,
and she could not think of a single way to stop him. She could not escape, run away, for she had no idea where they were, or how to get back to the manor house. They would stop at no inns, where she could cut the coins from the hem of her gown and find herself a protector, the way Jasper protected his Lieutenant. She could do nothing but continue to pretend Rian trusted her, and wait for some opportunity to present itself.

Could she kill Rian Becket in order to save her
papa?
She certainly had enough weapons at her disposal. But could she do it?

No. No, she’d couldn’t. Because Rian Becket was only a good man making a terrible mistake. It was someone else, very possibly this man he called his
papa,
who truly deserved death. Rian, like herself, was little more than a pawn in this two decades’ old deadly game that seemed to delight her father, worry the man, Thibaud, and cause the mysterious Loringa to smile secret smiles that were more frightening than the worst of nightmares.

She’d thought herself so smart. Deliberately leaving the medicines behind because that had been rather like leaving Loringa behind. Helping Rian elude Thibaud and his two companions, so that she could be on her own, decide on her own, make judgments on her own.

Leaving herself totally unprotected.

Stupid! Stupid!

But she had wanted to make her own judgments, after believing for so many years that she was an orphan, after more than a year believing herself the beloved daughter of a rich and powerful man—the dream of any orphan. After hearing the horrifying tale of her mother’s murder on some far-off island at the hands of her
papa
’s privateering partner, the cruel Geoffrey Baskin. After nearly four months of nursing a soldier so dangerously wounded, so ill, so vulnerable, to belatedly realize she was only prolonging the inevitable, saving him so that her
papa
could eventually kill him, and everyone Rian held dear.

She had begun to question her own
papa,
her own past. How could she have done that, been so ungrateful?
Why?
Because of Loringa? Because of that woman’s strange words, stranger smiles? Because of Thibaud, who had all but cursed Lisette’s mother while saying he would not die twice for the same mistake?

If that is what he says.
Hadn’t Thibaud said something very close to that when she’d told him what she knew of her mother’s death?

Oh, God. God, God, God, please help me.

But God must be busy with other clamoring souls who needed His attention. She would have to help herself. As Sister Marie Auguste had warned her so many times, prayers were a wonderful thing, but it was also true that God helps them who help themselves.

So another day had dawned, a day bound to be crowded with more lies, more fears, and more horrible miles traveled inside the caravan. And, with God busy elsewhere, Lisette knew it was up to her to make it through this day, and the next, and the next.

She was buttoning the last button on her gown when Rian knocked hard on the door to the caravan, causing her to jump inside her skin…which caused her to begin her day angry with him rather than fearful of him.

Because God helps her who helps herself.

“You have the manners of one of those ugly oxen, Rian Becket,” she told him as she opened the door, motioning for him to stand back so that she could climb down the three narrow steps that were more of a ladder than steps. “And if you are going to open that foul mouth of yours and demand that we be on our way within the minute, I will tell you that you will be on your way on your own. I am going back to the stream, to wash. And then I will eat the breakfast a decent man would provide for me.”

Rian drew himself up smartly, saluting her in a way that made her palm itch to slap his beard-stubbled face. He was so handsome, even when bedraggled. A beautiful, beautiful man.

“Oh! You make me
so
angry!” she exclaimed in all truth, and she pushed past him, heading into the trees, to the stream she had visited the previous evening.

He didn’t follow her, which she appreciated at first, as she took care of her personal needs, but when she had been at the stream for some minutes, washing first her hands and face, then allowing her bare feet to dangle into the water, she began to wonder what on earth was keeping the man.

She had assumed he would follow. Attempt to tease her out of her mood, kiss her, apologize to her for being such a beast. After all, he was a man, and even a man who did not trust a woman still could lust after that woman. He might even think that he could make her believe herself in love with him, if only so that she’d tell him all her secrets, tell him about the
Comte
Beltane.

Yes. He would follow her.

But he hadn’t.

He wouldn’t leave without her, would he?

“I think too much—and never about the right things!” Lisette exclaimed, getting to her feet. Leaving her hose and shoes on the bank, she turned to run back through the trees, praying she wouldn’t come into the clearing just in time to see the back of that stupid cannon disappearing down the road.

And ran straight into the unyielding wall of muscle and bone that was Jasper Coggins.

She gasped a time or two, trying to recapture her breath. “Jasper, I didn’t see you!”

“Jasper ain’t ever heard anybody say that a’ fore,” the big man said, grinning down at her. “The Lieutenant said to tell you to take all the time you…um…all the time you need, miss. He’ll be bringing you something to break your fast in a minute or so.”

“Yes, well, thank you, Jasper. Why didn’t the Lieutenant just wait and tell me himself?”

“Still stoppin’ the bleedin’, miss,” Jasper said, grinning. “Told him Jasper would shave him, but he wanted to do it hisself. But he’ll be along presently, miss. Don’t you worry.”

“I won’t,” Lisette said, her first lie of the morning, surely not to be her last of the day. “How badly did he cut himself?”

“Seen worse,” Jasper said, already lumbering back the way he had come, leaving Lisette to notice for the first time that it had rained sometime during the night, and she was presently standing barefoot in a small, muddy puddle of water.

She headed back to the stream, to wash her feet, to slip on her stockings and shoes before going to check on Rian, which gave him time to join her on the grassy bank, sitting down beside her, not looking at her.

“Pretty,” he said, dragging his good arm through the air as if to indicate the far bank still covered in late-blooming wildflowers.

Lisette sneaked a sidelong look at his face, and all her resolve melted like April snow in a warm afternoon sun. “Oh, Rian, look what you’ve done!”

She touched a hand to his cheek and he pulled away from her. “Don’t, Lisette, or it will just begin to bleed again. It seems a man needs two good hands to trim a decent sideburn. One to wield the razor, the other to tug on his skin, hold it taut. But, Lord knows, it’s not the worst wound I’ve suffered. It will heal.”

“You should grow a beard and be done with the thing,” Lisette told him sincerely. “Or your so wealthy
papa
should engage a valet for you. I wish I could shave you myself, but Denys always took care of your more…personal needs.”

Rian turned to look at her. “Strange fellow, Denys. He never spoke. Not once, in all the months he helped nurse me.”

Because poor Denys has no tongue,
Lisette thought, but did not say. No tongue with which to speak, no skills with which to write out his wants, his needs. Lisette had once mentioned to Loringa that she would like to teach Denys his letters, and the older woman had told her that could end badly, with Denys with no hands as well as no tongue, for Denys was just as he was made to be.

How he’d been made to be?
Born
to be? Or
made
to be? Lisette hadn’t dared to ask. Was that when she had first begun to question, to worry? When she’d first encountered Denys at the manor house? She’d had no experience with what was normal or not normal in the household of a man like her
papa,
the Comte. France had an often brutal history, especially during the Terror, and Denys was a man in his fifties, alive during a more unhappy time.

She’d prayed on it, prayed that Denys had been born without a tongue, or had come to be in her generous
papa
’s employ after someone had cut out his—she’d even been unable to complete that thought. Not then, not now, today.

She wanted her
papa
to be a good man. She
needed
him to be a good man. Her prince, come to rescue her from her solitary life at the convent. Come to save her, tell her about her beautiful, sainted—no, martyred!—
maman,
who never would have left her alone if she could help it.

Lisette had wanted the fairy tale, and she had gotten it. The home like a castle, the beautiful clothing, the limited but still exciting world of French Society during the Hundred Days of Bonaparte’s latest reign.

She had been a child in a woman’s body this past year, hungry for family, hungry for someone to love her. A child in her mind, her heart. Willing to look beyond so many things, for the things she now had.

And then, slowly, it had all begun to fall apart, most especially when she’d arrived at the manor house to hear her
papa
and Loringa speaking about their
guest,
this Lieutenant Becket.

“Lisette? Is something wrong?”

She shook herself back into the moment, to realize she’d been staring at Rian, while not really seeing him. “No, of course not. I have just been thinking of what I said, that you should grow a beard, Rian Becket. If you refuse a valet, it is a better answer than slicing yourself to ribbons each morning, yes?”

“A beard. Seriously?” Rian smiled, rubbing his bare chin. “My brother Court wears a beard. Mostly, he says, to annoy our sister Callie. A beard wouldn’t annoy you?”

“No, I don’t think so. You perhaps wouldn’t be so pretty, though.”

“A fine recommendation for growing a beard, I’d say. I’ve spent too many years hearing that word—pretty.”

“Yes, I imagine all those ancient Greeks that pretty people are compared to must have cringed at the same description as they were being immortalized in marble. You suffer so, Rian Becket.”

His cheeks actually went rather pink. “You’re a woman, Lisette. You wouldn’t understand. I ride better than most of them, fence and shoot better than any of them—and I’m still the
pretty one
to my brothers. The
little boy
who pretends to be a man. Such things can be disheartening when you hope to be taken seriously. The first time Wellington saw me? I could almost hear him thinking—what? I’m to trust this pretty boy with important messages? But this will probably help,” he concluded, holding up his abbreviated left arm, “although I would have preferred someone had rearranged my nose, if I’d been given a choice.”

“Oh, Rian,” Lisette said, resting her head against his shoulder for a moment. “You make such fun of yourself. I think I should weep buckets every day, if I were to lose my arm.”

“I sometimes consider it,” he told her, moving away from her, to pick up a flat stone and send it skipping out across the nearly still water, avoiding her eyes. “I’m sorry, Lisette. About badgering you the way I did last night.”

“You were very mean, yes,” she told him, her heart beginning to beat painfully fast in her breast. “I’ve told you now that my
papa
’s name was Robert Beatty. I don’t know why you should have needed to know, or why I so mulishly didn’t tell you when first you asked. But he was my
papa,
and he was not a friend of the
Comte
’s. That would make him a bad man in your eyes, and he was not a bad man. Nor was my
maman
a bad woman, simply because she and the
Comte
had been friends in their childhood.”

“I know. It was stupid of me. Inexcusable. I was actually hoping—No, never mind. Your parents have nothing to do with my pursuit of the
Comte.
”

“Pursuit?” She would remain calm, carefully ask her questions, the way she had done since he had finally come out of the shadows of his injuries and she had been able to speak clearly with him. “If the
Comte
is not running from you, how do you pursue him?”

“A good question. But, in a way, we’ve been pursuing him for a long time, my family and myself. If I’m right. If he is who I think he may be.”

“And if my
papa,
Robert Beatty, was not who you thought he was, yes? You cannot pursue a dead man.”

Rian lay back against the grass, looking up into the blue sky. “Yes, Lisette, exactly. The man who nearly destroyed my family many years ago, a world away from here. For the longest time, we thought him dead. But about three years ago something happened that brought us out of hiding, if you call it that, and many would, and eventually led us to London, and a man named Nathaniel Beatty.”

Lisette was so very glad he was not looking at her. She took a quiet breath and said, “Beatty? The same name as mine? But that is impossible, Rian. My
papa
has been dead for more than five years. He could not have gone to London.” And then, thinking quickly for perhaps the first time since last evening, she said, “Do you suppose—oh! Rian, do you suppose the
Comte stole
my
papa
’s name? What a terrible thing, to take such a good and honorable name and make it criminal.”

Rian sat up all at once. “Took his name? You mean, he
borrowed
your last name and took it with him to London? Christ, Lisette, that never occurred to me. But it is possible, isn’t it?” He looked at her, grinned. “Oh, Lisette, I’m so sorry.”