“She didn’t have to,” Ainsley said, sitting down heavily, feeling all of his years. “We all know where your sister has gone.”
CHAPTER TWO
FANNY BECKET hid herself just at the entrance to a foul-smelling alley fronting on the bustling wharf where soldiers and horses milled about as dusk fell, waiting for the order to take ship. She nervously fingered the gad hanging around her neck from a gold chain, one of the especially prepared alligator teeth her old nurse and Voodoo priestess, Odette, insisted all the Beckets wear.
It was a silly thing, but Odette renewed the protective magic in each gad every spring, and how could Fanny leave such a potent weapon against the bad loa, the bad spirits, behind as she went off to war?
Dear God, she was going to war!
She’d ridden through the night and day to make Dover before anyone could catch her, drag her home, but she’d been standing in this alley for the past two hours, not knowing what to do next. Because Dover wasn’t Ostend, and she knew she had to get herself across the Channel to Ostend before she could travel inland, to Brussels.
To Rian.
Her mare, Molly, stood obediently behind her, nuzzling at Fanny’s neck, hoping for a treat, and she absently dug into the pocket of Rian’s cloak for the last broken bit of carrot she had brought with her, handing it up to the horse.
It was a mad scheme she was considering now as she peeked out at the milling soldiers, but desperate times called for desperate actions. After all, Rian had told her she was pretty, even as he laughed at her, pretended not to love her as anything more than his sister, even though they were not related by blood.
But they’d always been together, for as long as Fanny could remember. From that day when, at no more than three years old, she had knelt beside her mother in the pretty, whitewashed island church, and the priest was holding up the chalice, and her mother bowed her head, striking her breast three times, once for each time the bell was rung on the altar.
Just as the bell rang that third time, the cannon had exploded all around them, and Fanny had looked up, seen the blue sky, seen bits of the roof raining down on them before being pushed to the floor, her mother lying on top of her, protecting her.
That’s where the man later to christen himself Ainsley Becket had found her, still half-crushed beneath her mother’s lifeless body. There were others, other survivors of the Spanish pirate’s attack that had come from the sea without warning, Rian among them. Three of the women still lived in Becket Village, but other mothers and their children, and the four other orphans of that day, had survived only to die several months later, when Edmund Beales attacked their island.
Pirates. Brigands. Warm white sands and clear blue waters. Death. Death everywhere; once, and then again. Fanny barely remembered any of it. Just watching her mother beat at her breast as the bell rang, calling down the roof onto their heads…and Rian, only a few years her senior, but always there, always holding her hand, protecting her, swooping her up into his own thin arms that last day and carrying her deep into the trees, away from Edmund Beales’s treachery.
She’d do anything to protect him, as well.
Even see if he was right, that she was pretty. A pretty girl.
Fanny tested the knot holding the colored scarf around her head, hiding her badly butchered blond hair, and flipped the edges of her cloak back over her shoulders, the better to display the rumpled gown she’d donned over her breeches once reaching Dover.
“Don’t follow me, Molly,” she admonished the mare that hung her head as if she understood, and she probably did, for Molly was very intelligent, and Fanny had trained her well.
Then Fanny stepped out of the shadows, heading directly toward the slim young boy in the scarlet uniform of the 13th Regiment cavalry. She’d chosen him for his regiment, for his youth, for his size.
“You’re to be sailin’ off tonight, is it, you pretty thing?” she asked him, circling around both him and his horse, effectively cutting the youth from the herd of his fellow soldiers, all of them exhausted after sailing from Cove, their ship damaged enough that they’d had to put in at Dover for both repairs and provisions before following their two other ships to Ostend.
It had been unbelievable good luck, an omen, Odette would have said, that she’d found some of the 13th here, on this overcrowded dock. Rian’s own regiment; fine, brave Irishmen from County Cork, and beyond. It had seemed fitting to Rian that he fight with the Irish, even if the only thing still Irish about him was his blood, and his name. For the past seventeen years, since the age of nine, since that bell had rung a third time, he had been a Becket.
The young boy Fanny had singled out—he seemed such a child—dipped his head at Fanny’s question, swallowing down so hard that his Adam’s apple seemed ready to collide with his chin. “And that we are, Miss. Off to chase Boney back where he belongs, give him what for.”
Fanny measured him with her eyes. Yes, this was good. He topped her own not inconsiderable height by only a few inches. “Well, God bless you then, boyo,” she said, pushing even more of a lilt into her voice. “And would you be wanting somethin’ to take with you then? A last kiss from a grateful lass late of County Clare? Mayhap a bit more than a kiss?”
The young soldier looked about him, wetting his lips. “I’m not supposin’ you’d be offerin’ such a thing for free.”
Fanny smiled. “And what are you takin’ me for, boyo? One of them loose wimmen?” She reached up, stroked his smooth cheek that had only a hint of peach fuzz. What was he? Sixteen? “No brave man should be goin’ off to fight without first bein’ with a willin’ lass, now should he?”
“I been,” the soldier protested, his cheeks going red. “I been plenty.” He clasped his rifle with one hand and took her elbow with the other, even as she deftly grabbed on to his mount’s bridle, steering her toward the alleyway, which was right where she wanted to go. “But it’s quick we’ll be, a’fore the Sergeant-Major misses me, you hear?”
Fanny felt herself pushed rather roughly against the wet brick as the boy fumbled, one hand holding her still even as he propped his rifle against the wall and began unbuttoning his breeches.
That was helpful. He was giving her a head start, in a way, or so Fanny thought as she closed her eyes, whispered a quick “I’m so sorry” and brought the heel of the pistol she’d extracted from the pocket of her cloak down hard on the soldier’s temple.
Fanny might be young, and slim, but she was also tall, and fairly strong. Bending only slightly beneath the dead weight of the soldier, she dragged him deeper into the alleyway and lowered him gently to the ground.
She worked quickly, stripping the boy to his last little bit of clothing, for she was wearing Rian’s underclothes, and didn’t much care to exchange them for drawers that looked, even in this dim light, capable of standing up by themselves.
Five minutes later, leaving behind a small purse of coins, as well as a rough pair of trousers and a shirt for the boy to cover himself with when he awoke, and with her white braces in place across her now red-coated chest, the rifle slung over her shoulder, as well as the heavy pack containing the best of the soldier’s gear and her own, Fanny emerged from the alleyway once more, leading Molly and the black gelding by the reins of their bridles.
She stayed
