Becket's Last Stand

Ainsley Becket laughed, rubbing at her curls. “I can think of many ways to describe you, pet, but bland would never be one of them. You’ve got your mother’s features and curls, but my mother’s more honeyed coloring. And she was also a beautiful woman. I look at you, Cassandra, and see the women I love. I thank God every day for you.”

Cassandra blinked furiously, fighting back tears once more as she leaned her cheek against Ainsley’s shoulder and he put his arm around her. “You never told me that, before, Papa. About your mother. Was it sad, leaving her to go to sea?”

Ainsley was quiet for some moments, and Cassandra believed he was thinking about what he would say to her next, how he would say it.

“Cassandra, I’m not proud of my past, and offer no excuses for what I’ve done, for there are none. But I know you’re old enough to hear this story now,” he said at last. “My family made its living smuggling from the shores near Deal, until my father was caught and hanged at Dover Castle and my older brother and I escaped on the first ship leaving port, a ship heading for Haiti, although we had no idea where we were going. Haiti? We’d never even heard the word. We could have been sailing to the moon, but we had no choice. It was either the ship or the hangman, or at the very least, transportation. I was thirteen, my brother four years older. We didn’t even have time to say goodbye to my mother, and by the time I was in a position to write to her—once I’d learned to write— it was to discover that she’d died mere weeks after we’d sailed.”

Cassandra sat up straight, amazed at one part of the story. “You have a brother? You never told me that, Papa.”

“Will and I sailed with some fairly unlovely men for several years, learning our craft, until he was killed during an assault on a Spanish ship. The captain gave me my share and Will’s, and I combined that with everything we’d saved over the years, bought my own small sloop, a true wreck of a ship,” he said, smiling at some private memory.

“How old were you then, Papa?”

“All of twenty. And rather full of myself, I suppose. I managed to hire a crew, and had some small successes as a pirate. Very small successes. A year later Jacko and I met over exchanged fists in a wharf-side pub, he explained Letters of Marque to me, and we became licensed privateers. I was, hopefully, on my way to respectability and, eventually, a return home, to England. From the very beginning, my objective was to return home.”

“Until Edmund Beales betrayed you, tricked you into attacking Eleanor’s ship and becoming a pirate again,” Cassandra said, sighing. “There isn’t a conversation that doesn’t lead back to Edmund Beales, is there? Not for so many years.” She looked up at the portrait once more, tears spilling onto her cheeks. “He took so much from you, Papa, from all of us. I hate him!”

Ainsley took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped at her cheeks. “Don’t hate him, Cassandra. Be aware of him, be alert to danger, prepare yourself as we are all doing, but don’t waste your time hating the man.”

“Lisette says he’s a monster.”

“As his daughter, that’s quite a damning indictment of the man. But, yes, Edmund Beales is a monster. One of his own making. But he’s also brilliant, as I learned to my great sorrow when he engineered his betrayal of us so many years ago. We can’t underestimate him. Which brings me to something I’ve been considering for some weeks now. Until this is over, until Edmund strikes at us and is defeated, I want to send you, all of the women, to Chance’s Coventry estate.”

Cassandra shook her head, sending her curls falling into her face. “No! No, Papa, don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Lisette should go, probably, as she should never have to see her father again. But I can’t leave you, and I know Morgan would never agree, or Mariah or Fanny. Oh, and Elly! Papa, she can’t leave. Not with the baby coming in another month.”

“I agree. Odette and Eleanor will have to remain here.”

“But, Papa, if Elly stays, why should the rest of us go? Elly will want us here with her, I’m sure. And how could any of us be so far away, not knowing what’s happening here at Becket Hall? No. I won’t go. I won’t, Papa.”

“I lost your mother…”

“I’m not my mother, Papa. I’m me, Cassandra. And we know he’s going to strike at us this time. We’re prepared, we’re ready.”

“Are we?” Ainsley asked, as if posing the question to himself. “Edmund excels at treachery, and we’re preparing for a frontal assault. A battle, a war. I’ve agreed to all that we’re doing, but I’m not certain any of it means anything.”

“Then we can stay?” Cassandra asked, pushing her question as her father looked up at the portrait of her mother. “If you really don’t believe he’s going to attack us, there’s no reason for us to go, is there?”

“Oh, he’s going to attack, Cassandra,” Ainsley told her, looking at her, his usually bright eyes unaccustomedly dull. “Soon. I only wish I knew how.”

“It doesn’t matter how,” Cassandra said bracingly, leaning against his shoulder once more, praying her father had now given up the idea of sending her away from Becket Hall, away from Courtland. “You’ll defeat him. There can be no possible other ending.”

CHAPTER FOUR

COURTLAND WALKED ALONG the shore with his head down, the brim of his hat shielding him from the wind, his unquiet thoughts occupying all of his attention.

She’d kissed him.

Christ Almighty, she’d kissed him!

He hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t suspected she’d ever do anything like that.

And the hair? She’d looked so grown-up. Not prim, definitely, but not the child he was used to seeing, doing his best to dismiss as a perennial pest, God bless her, believing herself in love, when she was too young to know love. Wasn’t she?

Eighteen. Cassandra was eighteen.

He was, he thought but couldn’t know for certain, thirty-one.

Ridiculous! Unacceptable!

God. She’d kissed him.

Worse, he had almost kissed her back, almost put his arms around her, drawn her closer against his body.

Taught her how to kiss.

Which, he knew, would be disastrous, if her inexperienced, almost clumsy attempt had been enough to send him reeling like some raw youth.

He stopped, bent to pick up a few stones, held them in one hand as he began tossing them, one by one, into the sea. He threw hard, launching the stones as if they were his thoughts, his damning, betraying thoughts.

And then he hesitated, his arm drawn back, as something Cassandra had said to him danced lightly in his brain. We thought. That’s what she’d said, wasn’t it? The idea to put up her hair hadn’t been hers alone. We.

“Damn it!” he said, throwing the stone past the third line of waves making their way toward the beach. His shoulder hurt, he’d thrown so hard, and he dropped the rest of the stones, began walking parallel to the water once more.

This is what happened when all the Becket women gathered in one place. Trouble. Mischief. Deviltry.

And he knew who the ringleader had to be. Morgan. The woman was a mother now, a countess. You’d think she would have curbed her deviltry at least a little bit, become more sober, circumspect. Then again, look at whom she’d married. Ethan was almost as bad as she was. If their twins grew up to be half as troublesome as the two of them, it would be only simple justice.

Courtland turned to his left, making his way across the beach and into the main street of Becket Village, home to the crews of the Black Ghost and the Silver Ghost, those who had survived the massacre, and paused, as he always did, to look at the mermaid masthead carved so many years ago by Pike, the ship’s carpenter, and set deep into the sand, looking out at the sea they’d all forsaken.

Pike had been dead these past five or more years, a victim of the Red Men Gang, and the reason Court¬ land had first donned the black mask and cloak of the Black Ghost and ridden out to protect the local smugglers, little knowing that the Red Men Gang had been headed by Edmund Beales.

Life was so odd, and it seemed to travel in circles, as Ainsley was prone to say, each one drawn smaller than the last, until the past and present collided.

Courtland mounted the wooden flagway, heading for The Last Voyage, the one place Cassandra could not follow, and the pint or two of ale he felt necessary at the moment, hesitating only when he heard hoofbeats coming toward him through the misty dusk.

“Chance,” he said, waiting until his brother dismounted from his large stallion, Jacamel, and stepped up on the flagway. “You’re alone?”

“Rian and Ethan are somewhere behind me,” Chance said, lifting his hat and pushing back his nearly shoulder-length blond hair that had escaped the ribbon he used to secure it at his nape. “Our brother handles the new mare well, but Ethan insists the two still have to get to know each other better, especially since Rian’s learning how to direct Miranda only with his knees.”

“Leaving his hand free to hold a sword or pistol,” Courtland said, nodding his head. “If anyone can do it, Rian can. Although I question his choice of name for the mare. Miranda?”

“Lisette chose it. If she’d told him to call the damned horse Mud Fence, he would have done it. She holds quite a bit of power over our youngest brother,” Chance said as they entered the tavern. “I don’t know that I like that.”

“Because she’s Beales’s daughter? She proved her loyalty, Chance. Hell, she tried to kill the man.”

“Granted. But she also helped keep Rian in France for months after he could have returned to us, with us believing him dead all that time. She only had her epiphany about her father when he killed that servant who tried to help her, or so she says. We have no proof the man is dead.”

Courtland lifted the two mugs Ivan poured for them and carried them to a table in the corner. “I believe her,” he said before taking a long drink from the mug. “And so do you. What else bothers you about Lisette?”