The Return of the Prodigal

“I should murder you,” she told him, still whispering. “You want me in his bed? You’re that cruel?”

“This is no time for dramatics, Lisette,” he told her, holding back a smile. The woman was livid! She was livid, and he felt alive for the first time in months. “See if you can help boost me up to that first branch. I want to see this host of mine.”

“No! He is old, he is ugly. He is inconsiderate, coming home a day early. Bâtard. Rian, please. You promised we’d go. We must hire the coach and be gone before sunrise.”

Rian looked once more to the tree, once more to the windows.

His good mood soured. He was useless, less than useless. He couldn’t even climb a damn silly tree!

Lisette was crying softly now, and his decision was made for him.

No matter what he wondered about the man in the drawing room, Lisette was who she said she was. An innocent, frightened half out of her mind. And his savior. It was enough that he would remember the manor house, be able to guide his brothers back to it once he returned home.

He held out his hand to Lisette and, together, they began the long walk to the outskirts of Valenciennes.

CHAPTER FOUR

LISETTE COLLAPSED ONTO the thin, uncomfortable seat of the hired coach and cursed her papa. She’d been shaking inside for over three hours, and still felt none too steady.

What had he been thinking?

To add authenticity to her escape?

She could still feel the clench in her stomach as she’d heard her papa’s voice, realized he was no more than twenty feet away. And mocking her. The things he’d been saying! Hinting at filthy things, about how he would bed her, teach her how to pleasure a man the way he wanted to be pleasured. And then he’d laughed, both he and his friend Renard, that horrid, sharp-nosed man who made Lisette’s flesh crawl.

She believed she could understand why he had done what he’d done, said what he’d said. So that she would look truly appalled, and Rian would be given yet another reason to trust her. But did her papa have to say those things to the terrible Renard?

She disliked her papa’s friends, all of them. They laughed too loudly, they drank too much, and when her papa was not watching, they looked at her too hard. But she didn’t tell her papa that, because these were his crew, he’d told her, and they had been with him from the beginning, in the islands, and they were the only men he could truly trust in a world that each year found a new way to go utterly mad.

He had other friends, her papa. Important, powerful friends. Like the man, Charles Talleyrand, who had joined them for dinner one night while she had been in Paris with her papa. That man had dressed well, had spoken well, was a gentleman of privilege. But he had also looked at her too hard when Papa wasn’t watching.

Sister Marie Auguste had been right. Men were no more than a necessary evil.

“Here now, you’re shivering,” she said, turning to one of those necessary evils, frowning as she saw the perspiration on his brow, the white line around his tightly compressed lips. “I don’t understand this, Rian. You were well, yesterday.”

“I hadn’t walked for hours in a cold drizzle yesterday,” he said, pulling his cloak more fully around himself. “Two miles, Lisette? It was three miles if it was a step.”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t think you’d come with me, if you knew it was that far. But we’re safe now, on our way to the coast, with dawn only an hour behind us. They will have missed me by now, and you as well. How soon do you think they will come looking for us?”

“I don’t understand much French, Lisette, but I heard the Comte. I heard him say your name, and I listened to the tone in his voice. He’s not going to let you go so easily.”

“Or you,” Lisette reminded him, lest he tell her they should part ways, so that he could travel home safely, without being chased all the way by her papa. After all, he was a man, and therefore probably selfish at his core. “I told you. The Comte, he does nothing without a reason. I don’t know why he wants you, but he does.”

“So much for believing in Good Samaritans,” Rian said, smiling. But his teeth were chattering, and Lisette quickly slipped out of her own damp cloak, to lay it across his chest. “Damn. Maybe I do need one of those vile draughts of yours.”

Lisette reached down to open the portmanteau and made a great business out of searching it for the bottle of medicine she knew wasn’t there. She’d had enough of Loringa’s potions, confusing him, keeping him perhaps too muddled to find his way home. “It isn’t…I…I can’t find it, Rian!” She pulled underclothing from the portmanteau and dug deeper. “It’s—no, wait, here it— C’est une tragédie! I have brought the wrong bottle! It was dark, and I was fearful of lighting a candle. Oh, Rian, no!”

She held up the dark blue bottle with its cork seal.

He looked at it owlishly. “What is it?”

“Not the medicine for your fever,” Lisette said, sighing. “It is laudanum, to make you sleep. For the headache, for the pain from your wounds. It will do nothing for your fever. Rian, I am so sorry. You will die now.”

He looked at her, one eyebrow raised, and then laughed. “My loyal nurse cheers me no end. I won’t die, Lisette. I’m weeks past dying. But I will avail myself of some of that laudanum, once we’ve stopped for the night.”

“Because you’re in pain? Where? Tell me. Where is the pain?”

“In my ears. I keep hearing silly chattering in my ears.”

“You are not amusing, Rian Becket. Not at all.” Lisette replaced the bottle and threw the underclothes back in on top of it. But this was good. He would take the laudanum instead, as she had hoped, and he would sleep. She needed no more of the confusion she found when he held her in his arms at night, as he made love to her. “I liked you better when you were sleeping. My pretty poet, with the face of an angel. I will mix some with water for you when we reach Petit Rume.”

She felt his heated fingers against her nape as he took hold of her collar and pulled her back up straight on the seat.

“We’re not heading toward Petit Rume, Lisette,” he told her, and she looked at him in very real shock. “I begged a rude map from the fellow back at the stables, and he drew me the most direct route to the Channel.”

Lisette nodded furiously. “Yes, yes. And Petit Rume is a logical step in that journey.”

“Exactly. Think, Lisette. We’re fleeing the Comte, a man you believe will follow you, try to bring you back to the manor house. He would expect you to head for the Channel, and England. After all, you are English, and you say you have no one in France to care for you. It’s only, as you said, logical. So, instead of traveling west, as I assured the stable owner we would do, we are heading directly north.”

“North?” Lisette fought an urge to pull down the side window, stick out her head, look for the men who were following after them. “But what is north?”

“Belgium.”

“But…but—”

“We are no more than forty miles distant from Brussels, although there is no reason to travel that far before heading to the west once more. I’ve studied maps of Belgium, Lisette, so much so that I can very nearly see them in my mind. I’ve ridden the miles between Brussels and Nivelles to the south, and Tubize to the east, reconnoitering for Wellington. The land is easy to travel, and the people friendly to the English. We’ll make our way to Ostend, where I first landed, and take ship there.”

“But…but wouldn’t the Comte think you would do that?” Lisette asked him, racking her brains for a way out of this unexpected disaster. “He has to know you might take us to more familiar…territory?” She crossed her arms in front of her. “So my way is better, yes?”

“No way is better, Lisette,” he said, rubbing at his forehead as if his head ached. “Yours is one way, mine is another. I chose mine.”

Lisette wasn’t ready to give up. “But mine is probably faster.”

“Yes, and if I were to leave you when we next stop to rest the horses, and used some of the Comte’s lovely English gold to buy myself a mount, I could be in Ostend tomorrow night. Now let me rest, all right? Either I rest, or I’ll soon be casting up my accounts all over your shoe tops.”

“Your stomach is sick? Then perhaps I should give you some of the laudanum now?”

He shook his head, and then winced, clearly having caused himself pain. “I need my wits about me, Lisette. And, when next we stop, I need to search out a pistol, a sword. I feel naked, and I’m supposed to be defending you.”

“That’s very nice of you, Rian Becket,” Lisette grumbled, settling against the back of the seat, knowing she had lost the battle. “When we are finally safe with your family, and if you have not had occasion to throw up on my shoes, I will tell them all how brave you were.”

How brave you were…

Rian squeezed his eyes more firmly shut, his body swaying slightly with the movement of the coach, wishing away the words that kept repeating, repeating, inside his head as he floated in and out of a dream.

Brave? Had he been brave? He didn’t remember, couldn’t remember. God only knew how hard he’d been trying to recall what had happened that day, how he had come to be wounded, how he had been brought to the Comte’s manor house.

A residence approximately three miles outside of Valenciennes. He knew that now, too. And after seeing it drawn on the stable owner’s crude map, he knew that Valenciennes was more than forty miles away from the battlefield now spoken of as the battle of Waterloo.