The Return of the Prodigal

“Don’t you have something else to do, Loringa? Sticking pins in one of those strange dolls, saying your rosary while you burn feathers and stroke that ugly fat snake of yours? If the nuns knew what goes on here, they’d be telling me to run back to them before lightning strikes from the sky, cleaving this house—and your head—in two.”

The old woman sat back in the chair and laughed, the sound rich and full, belying her years. “You mock me because you do not understand. I have the power. Your papa, he knows this, and is grateful. Who do you think keeps him safe all these years?”

“So you say,” Lisette grumbled, closing the portmanteau and fastening the two leather straps. One day she would succeed in convincing her papa to send Loringa away, and theirs would be a normal life, the sort she had dreamed of as she grew up alone and lonely in the convent, believing herself to be without family. “So you seem to have convinced him. It makes my stomach sick.”

“Sick with the jealousy you feel. Because he needs me, and he does not need you, devil’s child. You merely amuse him, even now. But you wish to make him love you,” Loringa said, pushing herself up, her colorful skirts covering feet she could no longer house comfortably in anything other than a pair of man’s slippers she had cut holes in so that her misshapen bones could protrude in places. Her coarse, graying black hair was in a thick braid wrapped tightly about her head, her round cheeks had begun to lose their fight with the years and her hands were large, like a man’s, and gnarled, like old tree branches.

If Loringa was so powerful as she kept saying, why didn’t she fix herself—her hands, her feet? In her body, she was an old woman.

But the eyes? Loringa’s black bean eyes were alive. Too alive. And they saw too much, just as the ears heard too much.

Loringa was, to Lisette, a malevolent spirit. At the same time, it was Loringa who told her stories of other days, years ago, and of her father’s bravery, of his daring adventures in the islands. Of his sorrow.

“I do more than amuse him. He needs me, Loringa. He came for me as soon as he could. And he has allowed me this most important mission.”

The priestess shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose so. He loved the mother of the child. He is curious about you. A man grows older, and he begins to think about death, and who he might leave behind to remember him. A man is never dead, while someone remembers him. I will go before him, to make ready for him, so it will be left to you to keep his memory.”

Lisette softened, aware that Loringa truly cared for her father. “Tell me again, Loringa, please. Tell me about my mother…and the rest.”

“To give you courage as you go into battle? To remind you why you’re doing what you will do?”

“I know why,” Lisette said, pulling a cloak from the wardrobe and slinging it over her shoulders. “I know I’m a motherless child, and I know why. I know why I grew up alone, with the nuns, never knowing my parents. I know what was taken from me. But I want to hear you tell the story again.”

“So that when the time comes, if it comes, you will shed no tears for the man who makes you cry out his name in pleasure in the night.”

Lisette turned her back on the woman. “Now you go too far. Listening at keyholes? Is that your magick?”

“Why do we fight, devil’s child? My own devil’s own spawn, the ungrateful child whose life I saved for her? Is it because this is so important? Yes, that is why. He isn’t truly convinced, your papa, he doesn’t believe me when I say I can feel her, that she can feel me, that this fool Becket is truly the one who will lead where we wish to go. Even if her evil master has already escaped our justice through death, we will at least be able to deal with her, and with the others that we find with her. That, after all this time, vengeance may be within reach.”

“Forgive me, Loringa. We’re both fighting the same battle.”

“We know the name. Becket. Luck was in with us in London, even as it was out, and we learned the name. Before he died in his gaol cell, before his throat was cut and stopped him, the fool, Eccles, he did nothing but bleat the name of the man who had captured him, questioned him and then delivered him to this place called the War Office, and certain death. The names Eccles heard others call him. Becket, Becket. A soldier, surely. An officer of the English Crown.”

Lisette nodded, knowing the story. “But only that—Becket. Not even a full name. It seems so little for…for all of this.”

“It was enough for your papa, enough for a beginning. We would have moved then, hunted this man Becket down, followed him to his lair, struck then. But there was much else to occupy your papa, much work to do on this side of the Channel to keep the rest of the Red Men Gang funneling gold to the cause of France. Ah, these French. War, and more war. A king, an emperor, a king again, the little emperor come and gone a second time. Now a king yet again, fat and stupid, waiting to be plucked, keeping your papa busy as a fox in the henhouse even as he plans his return to England. Whispers and intrigue—your papa’s life’s blood.”

“It takes a very wise man to be able to know which side of the coin falls upward, time and time again, and how best to lay his bets,” Lisette said, quoting her father almost word for word. “But he didn’t forget the name, and found it on the rolls of those soldiers being sent to Belgium. Becket. Not such an unusual name. Rian Becket could be as innocent as the morning dew, and all of this for nothing.”

“As were the others who carried the name and were questioned without result. They had been innocent. And I would agree that this one is as well,” Loringa said, “were it not that I feel her. I have felt her for some time, searching me out, but so much more now that the boy is here. From the moment the name was first brought to my ears, I could feel her in my heart, fighting to crawl into my head. Your papa wanted only revenge on those who meddled in his affairs, his plans for what he calls his triumphant return to England, and he found his old enemies. God is good. This young Becket will lead us where we want to go. And then, finally, it will be over. What we’d believed to be over so long ago. I pray Baskin still lives, so that your papa can take his life from him, and the lives of his sons, his daughters, all of his seed. This is his right. As it is my right to destroy my twin.”

Lisette felt that familiar pang of discomfort at the idea that her father had arranged for five soldiers with the last name of Becket to be captured, separated from all the other English so conveniently gathered in Belgium to face down Bonaparte, had ordered the five brought to him to answer questions. The other four had died of their wounds, Loringa had told her, but when the fifth man, Rian Becket, had been delivered to the manor house, Lisette had been visiting and had intervened, begging her father to let her find out what he wanted to know.

What she did not want to know was how the other four soldiers had died. This was a part of her papa she did not understand, and she only forgave him because of his great pain, his longing for justice. Still, she prayed for those four soldiers every night, on her knees. She could not undo what had been done, but she could ease her papa’s long years of torment. She could find Geoffrey Baskin for him. After that—no, she wouldn’t think of what would happen after that.

“If you feel her now, this twin of yours, why didn’t you feel her all these years? You thought she was dead, didn’t you? Is she stronger than you are, Loringa? Was she able to make you believe she was dead?”

“Odette is not stronger than I! I am the strong one, she is the weak one. Her evil keeps her weak, and goodness makes me strong. We are marassa, and I am the good twin.”

“The other side of the same coin, yes, I remember you telling me that. Bad for every good, happy for every sad. Two sides to everything. But if you are the good twin, Loringa, I shudder to meet this Odette.”

“And that is why I am here, devil’s child. You will need protection from my dangerous sister.” She reached into one of the many pockets of her apron and extracted a thin silver chain.

Lisette leaned forward, frowning, hoping her shock didn’t show on her face. “What…what on earth is that? It…it looks like a fang. A huge, ugly brown fang.”

“The tooth of the alligator,” Loringa explained, moving her hand, setting the tooth on the end of the chain to swinging lazily in the air. “Fed by all of my most powerful ingredients saved from the islands, soaked in feuilles trois paroles in the mavoungou bottle, used to make the broth, you understand, the migan. This is my gift to you, this gad, this protection from the bad loa. But you will still need your wits about you at all times. Odette worships the bad loa.”

“And you expect me to wear that monstrosity around my neck? How could I hide it from Rian Becket?”

“Keep it with you. Find a way,” Loringa ordered, pushing the necklace on Lisette.

She grabbed the thing gingerly by its chain, quickly laid it on the bed. To touch the tooth itself, she felt sure, would be to have it burn her palm. Be calm, stay calm, she warned herself. Don’t let Loringa see. “Only if you tell me again about my mother. Tell me, while I finish packing up my things for my daring escape from my lascivious employer.”

Loringa sighed, returned to her chair.

“The story does not change with the telling. It was good, for many years between your papa and Geoffrey Baskin. They were partners, friends. The Letters of Marque, the adventures, a share in the booty allowed us by the Crown. Not pirates, not buccaneers, child. Privateers. All of the adventure, your father would say, winking at me, but all within the law. They would both return to England one day, rich men, as others had done before them.”

“And then Papa sailed to New Orleans,” Lisette said, at last slipping the gad into the pocket of her cloak.

“A blessed day, a cursed day. He met your maman, your sweet maman, and brought her back to the islands with him as his wife. And Geoffrey Baskin saw her, broke the Lord’s Commandment, coveted her.”

“And, wanting her, he betrayed Papa.”

“Your papa wished to leave the islands, but Geoffrey was not ready to go, to end it. He was always greedy, and he had turned to the blood thirst. More, he always wanted more. He wanted your maman. Even as she nursed you at her breast, he wanted her. I saw it, I felt it, I tried to warn your papa, but he trusted his good friend, Geoffrey Baskin.”

Lisette nodded. What she and Loringa spoke of was a story, a tragedy, but it was also Lisette’s history. “Papa trusted him when he said he wanted only one last voyage, one last adventure together, one with more bounty in it than either of them would ever need. But he had already betrayed Papa, lied to him, and when Papa sailed into the middle of what was supposed to be a group of unarmed merchant ships, it was to find that he was outmanned, outnumbered. And worse, he’d been tricked into attacking English ships. He lost almost everything, but he survived.”

“Only to return to his island home to find your maman dead. Everyone dead. A slaughter that left no man, woman or child alive. Even the animals—nothing breathed on our island. And all the booty, all your papa would take to England to begin a new life, now in the bowels of his partner’s ships. I watched from the trees, keeping you silent in my arms, while Geoffrey Baskin raped your mother for refusing him, for spitting in his face, for cutting him with the knife she had hidden beneath her skirts. Twice he raped her, on the sand, in front of everyone, and then he turned her over to his men. In my dreams, I still hear Marguerite’s screams. I could do nothing, child, Odette’s evil paralyzing me. It was all I could do to pray, invoke the good loa to keep you shielded from her eyes, for your papa would need you in his sorrow.”

Lisette blinked back tears for the mother she’d never known. “I thank you for that, Loringa. I know we have our differences, but I thank you for that. I only wish Papa could have kept me with him.”

“To live like him, branded a pirate, forced to flee the hangman? The nuns kept you safe, and your papa hunted Geoffrey Baskin and his traitorous crew, seeking vengeance. But it was not to be. He learned that Baskin and both his ships, overburdened by the weight of so much treasure, had floundered in a storm, that God had meted out His own justice. How your father hated God for taking his revenge from him. I despaired of your papa then, that he would destroy himself, but there was still you, his Marguerite’s child, and he would rebuild, find another way to fortune.”

“Helping Bonaparte, taking sides against the England that would have sentenced him to hang if they’d found him,” Lisette said, glancing at the clock on the mantel, knowing it was time she went to Rian Becket, led him away on a moonlit path of lies. “The same England he wanted to return to two years ago and longs to return to now, to live in the open at last. He says I’m to have a Season, but that is probably impossible now, after what I’ve done. But I don’t care.”

“A discussion for another day. Your papa, he always has his reasons, and he has always planned to return to England, no longer a fugitive, with or without you, foolish girl. But now this Becket, this man Odette protects, this man who could know Geoffrey Baskin? I am right, I know I am, and your father will at last get his revenge.”

“As will I,” Lisette said fervently as Loringa once more pushed herself up from the chair and left the bedchamber without another word.

Lisette sat down on the edge of the bed, her eyes dry now, her resolve strengthened. Geoffrey Baskin and his crew of murderers had taken her mother from her, had nearly destroyed her father, had stolen so many years of her life. Nothing she did now, to help her papa find this man, would be too much for her. Nothing.

Especially now.

How much did she believe in Loringa and her Voodoo? That was a question she didn’t want to ask herself, didn’t want to answer. Just as she was now going to keep a secret from the woman, and from her papa, who wouldn’t allow her to leave here tonight if she told him what she now knew for certain.

Lisette sighed, got up from the bed, and opened the bottom drawer of the bureau, extracting the small velvet pouch she’d hidden there along with Rian Becket’s other few possessions she’d taken from him that first night he had been brought to the manor house. His belt buckle, his gold epaulets, the coins she’d found in his bloodied purse. She plucked at the strings until the pouch opened, and then dumped its contents on the bedspread.

She reached into the pocket of her cloak, at last giving in to her excitement, her fear; her hands trembling, her breathing ragged, painful.