long. Her and her Indian woman. They’re stuck here with us and she’s, well, sir, she’s the sort what takes charge, if you take my meaning. Other women are camped here with us, children, too, who hid out until the Americans left. We’ve been living off the dead, which is where I found the flask and blankets, but not much food. We’ve only three rifles betwixt us, and not much ammunition anyway. It’s a mess we’re in, Lieutenant, an unholy mess.”
Blinking, Spencer tried to make out the woman’s features, but now there seemed to be two of her, neither one of her standing still long enough for him to get a good look, damn her. “English?”
“You’re not a prisoner, if that’s the answer you’re hoping for,” the woman said, her accent pure, educated. “We’ll give him another day, Clovis, and then we have to be on the move north. Onatah says we’ll have snow within a fortnight, and we can’t just stay here and freeze as well as starve, not for one failed lieutenant. As it is, it will take us at least that fortnight to get to civilization. We’ll make a litter, and we’ll simply have to take turns dragging him.”
Then she was gone, and Spencer squeezed his eyes closed as the sun hit him full in the face. “You’re right, Clovis. Not an angel,” he said weakly, and then passed out once more.
CHAPTER ONE
Becket Hall
June 1814
“CAN YOU SMELL IT, Spencer? There’s a considerable storm churning somewhere out there. I imagine Courtland will have noticed, and won’t bring the Respite back from Hastings until it passes. That’s unfortunate. I was hoping to hear any war news he and Jack may have picked up while visiting my banker.” Ainsley Becket turned away from the open window overlooking the increasingly angry Channel to look at his son. “How’s the shoulder? Does it still pain you when a storm’s on its way?”
Spencer shook his head and returned to his glass of canary. Well, Ainsley had slipped that question in neatly, hadn’t he? “No, sir. If it did, I wouldn’t tell you. Because then you’d tell Odette and she’d be after me again with her damn feathers and potions. I’m fine, Papa. Truly.”
“And bored,” Ainsley said, seating himself behind his desk. “You won’t be leaving us again, will you, now that you’re recovered? Or should I refrain from mentioning that Jacko has compared you to a lion incessantly pacing in its cage? All that seems missing is the growl, but I doubt that will be the case for long.”
Spencer avoided Ainsley’s intense eyes, pretended to ignore the inquisitive tilt of the man’s head. He knew he was being weighed, judged. Even goaded. Quite the devious fellow, Ainsley Becket, for how smoothly he poked at a person. That was the trick with his papa—don’t trust the smile, don’t pay attention to the mild tone. Watch the eyes.
“No, I’m not leaving, Papa. I’ve had enough of Canada for one thing and now that Bonaparte has abdicated there’s nowhere else to go, no one else left to fight. I’ll just sit here and rust like everyone else, I suppose.”
“And the headaches?”
“Sweet Christ!” Spencer leaped to his feet and began to pace. So much for trying to keep himself in check. He remembered Jacko’s comparison and quickly stopped pacing, ordered his temper back under control. “I told you, I’m fine. Fully recovered, I promise.”
Ainsley kept pushing. “So you remember now? How you got to Montreal, how you were loaded on a boat and then onto the ship that brought you back to us? You remember more than being in the battle and then being at sea? You remember more than either Clovis or Anguish has told you?”
Spencer stabbed his fingers into his hair and squeezed at the top of his skull with his fingertips until he felt pain. “No, damn it, I haven’t. Odette says the good loas kindly took away my memory of those weeks, so that I don’t recall the pain. Loa protecting me or not, I got a whacking great bang on the head, that’s all. And I’m damned tired of being treated like an invalid.”
“And you’re bored,” Ainsley repeated, palming a brass paperweight as he continued to look at Spencer, the man who had once been a defiant orphaned boy of hot Spanish blood, wandering the streets of Port-au-Prince, barefoot and close to starving, yet ready to spit in the eye of anyone who looked at him crookedly. Ainsley had been forced to stuff him in a sack to keep the boy from biting him as he took him to the island and handed him over to Odette and Isabella’s tender mercies, the seventh of the orphans Ainsley had felt it necessary to take on to ease his increasingly uneasy conscience over the life he’d chosen. He’d named the boy Spencer, in memory of the sailor they’d lost overboard on their most recent run.
Within months of his joining them, they’d fled the island, Spencer still mostly wild, a wildness that had never really left him. What a long way they’d come. How little he still knew about his adopted son. The timing had been wrong. He’d brought Spencer into his world only months before he had wished himself out of it, and Spencer had been left mostly to his own devices for the past sixteen years.
“Spencer? You can say it. I do understand.”
“Then, yes, damn it, I’m bored! How do you bear it, living here, day after day after day, year after year after year? At least when the Black Ghost rode out, there was something to break the monotony. I’d almost welcome the Red Men Gang back to threaten us, just for the excuse to ride out, bang a few heads together.”
“There will be no more smuggling from these shores, Spencer, and therefore no need for the Black Ghost to ride out to protect our people. With Napoléon contained, the government is able to use its ships to set up a blockade all along the coast. Smuggling has become much too dangerous an enterprise. And I won’t commit the Respite again. It’s too risky for us.”
Spencer knew they were getting into dangerous territory now, and spoke carefully. “Not everyone in this part of the Marsh is willing to give up the life.”
“I’m aware of that. But we took more than a few chances these past few years, and I don’t believe in pushing our luck, so those who persist in making runs will have to do so without the protection of the Black Ghost.”
Spencer kept his gaze steady on his father. “A few of the younger men are restless, confined here the way they are. They want their turn outrunning the Waterguard. They want their own adventure.”
Ainsley steepled his long-fingered hands beneath his chin as he looked at his son. “You had yourself an adventure, Spencer. Killed your share of men, watched friends die. Do you really long for another such adventure?”
“You coming, Spence?”
Spencer turned his head to see that his brother Rian had poked his head inside the room. “Oh, right. I forgot the time,” he said gratefully, getting to his feet, careful to look Ainsley full in the eyes as he added, “If you’ll excuse me? A few of us are meeting at The Last Voyage. Would you care to join us?”
Ainsley smiled, shook his head in the negative, just as Spencer had known he would—or he wouldn’t have invited him. Not this evening. “No, thank you, I think not. And watch for the storm. You wouldn’t want to get stranded in the village for the night.”
“Because to walk home along the beach in the rain might serve to melt me.”
“Probably not, but neither of us really needs to have Odette ringing a peal over our heads about her poor injured bird, now do we?”
Spencer
