Regency High Society Vol 4. Julia Justiss

       St-Pierre, Martinique 1754

      “Look at them, Michel!” whispered Antoinette Géricault urgently. “Look at them and remember all they have stolen from you!”

      Her fingers clenched the boy’s shoulders tightly, her nails sharp through the worn linen of his shirt. But Michel did not flinch. He deserved whatever discipline Maman gave him. Hadn’t she proved to him times beyond counting that he was wicked and shiftless, scarcely worth the toil it cost her to feed him? If she didn’t love him so much, she wouldn’t bother to correct him or strive so hard to make him worthy of his heritage.

      And of her. He must be worthy of Maman’s love, for she was all he had.

      “Look at them, Michel!” Her breath was hot on his ear as she leaned farther over his shoulder and out the single window of the attic room they shared. “Mon Dieu, that they should come here to my very doorstep after so many years! Look at all they have, while you must go wanting!”

      The English family was leaving the sloop now, lingering on the gangway for their last farewell with the captain and crew. They were treated more as honored guests instead of passengers, and why shouldn’t they be? They were handsome and prosperous, well dressed and well fed, from the broad-shouldered father to the small, plump mother with a baby in her arms and four more children gathered around her.

      The oldest boy, the one who looked to be Michel’s age, tugged on the leash of a rambunctious black puppy, all floppy ears and buggy-whip tail. The boy bent to pat his back, and the puppy licked his face in a wet, sloppy kiss. The mother laughed, her head tipped back so her merriment rang out clear to Michel’s ears, and with her free arm reached out to fondly hug the boy’s shoulders.

      “Look at her, the shameless English whore!” whispered Antoinette furiously. “Look at how she can laugh at the suffering she has brought to us!”

      Michel looked at the other boy, forcing himself to share her outrage. He would never have a puppy. There was scarcely enough bread for Maman and him, let alone for a dog. He would never have a coat of blue superfine, or a three-cornered beaver hat with a silk cockade, or shoes with brass buckles, or a leather-covered spyglass to tuck nonchalantly beneath his arm. With shame he thought of his single pair of breeches, too short now to tie at the knee, his darned thread stockings, the worn shoes with the mismatched laces that he’d stolen from the feet of a drunken sailor.

      He would never have two brothers to jostle and jest with the way this boy was doing. His father would never crouch down to point out something high among the mast-filled skyline of the harbor, something just for the two of them to share. His mother would never embrace him like that, openly, for all the world to see.

      And his Maman never laughed….

      “I did not know there was a daughter, too,” his mother was muttering. “Evil little creature, born of their sins. May she perish from the same shame that her father brought to me!”

      Before this, Michel had not noticed the little girl, hidden from his sight by her mother’s skirts until she skipped forward to throw her arms around the puppy’s neck. Though she was scarcely larger than the dog, she showed no fear of it, shrieking with delight as the puppy tried to lick her face, too. The hood of her cloak slipped back and Michel could see her face, her round, rosy cheeks and her laughing eyes, her black hair charmingly tousled, the promise of her parents’ looks already confirmed in her beautiful little face.

      Unconsciously Michel inched forward, drawn by the spell of the small girl’s happiness even from this distance. Beside him his mother smiled with grim approval.

      “You will not forget now, will you, Michel?” she whispered, almost crooning. “You will never forget them until justice is done. For that man is Gabriel Sparhawk, and he is the one who murdered your father.”

       Chapter One