sure to be shunned by all but her closest friends. She’d heard the dire warnings often enough from her own mother. How much Michel and his mother must have suffered, how hard their life together must have been!
“But my father did intend to wed her,” Michel continued, his voice growing distant. “Maman was sure of that, for she loved him—loves him—with all her heart. But he was killed before she could tell him she was carrying his child, and then, of course, it was too late.”
“Was your father a soldier or a sailor?” she asked softly. Longing to see his face, she tried to twist about on the stool, but instead he gently held her head steady, beginning again to comb her hair. “You must have been born during King George’s war.”
“My father was a sailor, oui, a privateersman, a captain, the most successful of his time in the Caribbean.” Michel’s pride was unmistakable. “His name was Christian Saint-Juste Deveaux, and his home was more elegant and far more grand than many of the châteaux of France. Or it was, at least, before he was slaughtered by an Englishman and his house burned to the ground.”
Slaughtered by an Englishman: no wonder he’d been so unhappy over what she’d told Dr. Hamilton. But how could she have guessed? The coincidence was eerie. Both their fathers privateers, both captains prospering, though they’d fought on opposite sides of the same war.
But maybe it wasn’t a coincidence at all. “My father was a privateer captain, too,” she said slowly, her uneasiness growing. “Though I expect you know that already, don’t you?”
Michel didn’t seem to hear her, or perhaps he simply chose not to answer. “Your oldest brother, Jonathan, or Jon, as you call him. He’s twenty-six years old, isn’t he?”
She hesitated, wondering why he should speak of her brother now. “Jon was twenty-six in April.”
“My own age exactly. Did you know that, ma chérie? I, too, was born in April in 1745. But while your brother was blessed with both parents, I, alas, was not. Yours were wed on board your father’s sloop, weren’t they? Or rather your mother’s, since by rights the Revenge still belonged to her, didn’t it? That would be in September of 1744, in the waters off Bequia, with your grandfather there, too, to give his blessing.”
“That is true,” she said faintly, her uneasiness growing as he told her details of her family that no outsider should know. “But of what interest can any of this be to you?”
It was the reproach in her voice that finally stopped Michel. He hadn’t meant to tell her any of this, not here, not yet, but once he’d begun he had found it impossible to end the torrent of names and dates and circumstances he’d heard repeated to him since his birth.
But maybe it was better this way. If Jerusa knew the truth as his mother had told him, then maybe she’d stop believing he was a better man than he was. She would scorn him as he deserved, and leave him free to honor his mother’s wishes and his father’s memory.
He wouldn’t allow himself to consider the other alternative, that once she heard the truth, she might understand, and forgive. Morbleu, he’d never deserve that, not from her.
“Why, Michel?” she asked again, her voice unsteady. “What purpose do you have in telling me these things I already know?”
“Simply to prove the whims of fate, ma chère,” he said deliberately. “You’ve only to count the months to see that your brother, too, was conceived long before your parents wed.”
“But that cannot be.” Jerusa’s hands twisted in her lap as she remembered again all her mother’s careful warnings. Her mother could never have let herself be—well, be ruined like that, even by a man like Gabriel Sparhawk. But as Michel said, Jerusa had only to count the months and learn the awful truth that neither of her parents had bothered to hide.
“Two boys, Rusa, two fates,” continued Michel softly as he combed the last snarl from her hair. “Consider it well. One of us destined to be the eldest son of a wealthy, respected gentleman, while the other was left a beggar and a bastard. Two boys, ma mie, two fates.”
Because she would never know, he dared to raise one lock of her hair briefly to his lips. “And two fathers, ma chérie,” he said in a hoarse whisper that betrayed the emotion twisting through him. “Our fathers.”
He knew the exact moment when she guessed the truth, for he felt her shudder as the burden of it settled onto her soul. With a little gasp she bowed her head, and gently he spread her dark hair over her shoulders like a cape before he went to the bed for his hat and coat.
He took his leave in silence, closing the door with as little sound as he’d opened it two hours before.
Silence that was alive with the mocking laughter of the ghosts of the past.
Chapter Eleven
Her father had killed Michel’s father.
No, slaughtered was the word he’d used. Her father had slaughtered his. Her father.
She stared unseeing from the window, struggling to imagine Father this way. Of course she’d known he’d once been a privateer, the luckiest captain to sail out of Newport, and from childhood she’d heard the jests among her father’s friends about how ruthless he’d been in a trade that was little better than legalized, profitable piracy. She remembered how, as boys, her brothers would brag to their friends about how many French and Spanish rogues Father had sent to watery graves, and how he’d laugh when he caught them playing with wooden swords and pretend pistols as they burned another imaginary French frigate.
But before now, none of that had mattered. To her, Father was gentleness itself, the endlessly tall, endlessly patient man with the bright green eyes who would always make room for her to climb onto his lap after supper and listen solemnly as she played out little games with her dolls on the table after the cloth was drawn. With her, Father never scolded if an impulsive hug left strawberry jam on the front of his white linen shirt, or refused if she begged to go down to the shipyard with him. With her, he always smiled and laughed or offered his handkerchief and his open arms when she wept, and not once had she ever doubted that he loved her as much as any father could a daughter.
And yet it didn’t occur to her that Michel might have invented it all, or somehow mistaken her father for another man. In her heart she knew he’d spoken the truth. It wasn’t just that Michel had been so unquestionably right about everything else to do with her family; it was the raw emotion she’d heard in his voice when he’d told her, or rather, when he hadn’t told her. Another man would have delighted in horrifying her with the details of how Gabriel Sparhawk had killed Christian Deveaux, but not Michel. The pain he must feel had sealed all that tightly within him, and that, to her, was infinitely more terrifying than any mere bloodthirsty storytelling could ever be.
Two fates, two fathers. Fate had cast her on the winning side, while Michel had lost everything. And now, somehow he meant to even the balance.
Without any sense of how long she’d been sitting, she rose unsteadily to her feet. The shadows of the trees were long across the street below, and the smell of frying onions from the kitchen windows below told her that preparations for supper had already begun. Michel hadn’t said when he’d return, but odds were he’d be back before sundown, maybe sooner.
