Becket's Last Stand

CHAPTER ONE

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

Courtland Becket said something unlovely under his breath as the hammer came down hard on the side of his thumb rather than the small brad he was tapping into place.

“Cassandra, how many times have I asked you not to sneak into my workshop without knocking?”

“Dozens, I suppose,” she said, hopping up onto the workbench, her slipper-clad feet crossed at the ankle and swinging back and forth tantalizingly close to Courtland’s face as he sat on his work stool. “You know I don’t listen when you bluster.”

“I do not bluster,” he said, tapping the brad home and then inspecting the finished project that had occupied him for most of the morning. “There. Done. What do you think?”

Cassandra leaned forward and took the thing from him, held it up in front of her. “Very fine workmanship, Mr. Becket, as always. You do exemplary work. What is it?”

He took the thing back, prepared to show her. “It’s for Rian, to help him on with his boots. Look—these two hooks go into the loops at the top of either side of his boot. The hooks are connected to this handle. Rian positions his foot in the boot as best he can, and then attaches the hooks, then pulls. He’ll still probably have to stamp his feet entirely into the boots, but this should help him a lot.”

“Amazing. Let me try it. To see if it really works, I mean,” Cassandra said, hopping down from the workbench.

“You aren’t wearing boots,” Courtland pointed out, as he’d been doing his best to keep his gaze averted from her slim, shapely ankles as she had deliberately goaded him by dangling them in his face.

“Yes, but there’s a boot over here. Rian’s? Of course it is, so you could test your brilliance.” She slipped out of her right shoe and grabbed the boot. “So, pretending I only have the one arm and hand, I simply step into the boot as far as I can, and then—oh, pooh, it went on by itself. I didn’t realize Rian had such large feet. And the top comes up past my knees. How on earth do you men walk in these things?”

Courtland sat back on the stool, smiling as Cassandra comically clomped around his workshop in the boot, her skirts pulled up, her tawny curls bobbing as she stepped, limped, stepped again.

She knew what she was doing, of course. She was bedeviling him again. On purpose. With full deliberation and malice aforethought.

And he was watching her, entranced, again. Unable to help himself. Wondering how long it would be before he had to leave Becket Hall forever, or else break her heart.

“Enough, Cassandra. Why did you come down here?”

She boosted herself back up onto the workbench and lifted her right leg toward him, wordlessly telling him to remove the boot for her. Which would expose her bare leg all the way to her knee.

He’d rather chew the last of the metal brads in the pocket of his leather apron.

“Papa wants to see you in his study,” she told him, lowering her leg, at which time Rian’s boot simply slid off her foot and onto the floor. “Hand me up my slipper, if you please, you big spoilsport.”

Courtland bent down, retrieved her slipper, and raised himself up in time to see her bare foot extended, her leg uncovered to her knee as she held up her hem once more. “Cassandra, for the love of God…”

She smiled down at him as he took hold of her bare ankle and pushed the slipper onto her foot. “There, that wasn’t so painful, was it? Honestly, Court, anyone would think you’ve never seen a female ankle before.”

“And if I say I have, that would mean you’d then quiz me about whose ankle it was that I’ve seen, so I’m not going to say it,” Courtland said, getting to his feet as he untied his apron and laid it on the workbench. “Who else will be there?”

“Where?” she asked him, grinning like the minx she was. Her mission in life, for today, forever, seemed to be to do her best to drive him mad, send him screaming into the Channel to drown himself, just to be away from her. The temptation of her.

“Never mind, I was a fool to ask. I’ll find out soon enough.”

Cassandra hopped down from the workbench again, chasing after him as his long strides took him out of the basement workshop and toward the stairs leading up to the first floor of Becket Hall. “Spencer, and Rian, and Jack. Jacko, of course. Oh, and Chance.”

Courtland turned around, causing Cassandra to bump into him. She looked up at him, smiling, and he could smell the sweet jasmine in her hair. “Chance? When did he get back?”

“I didn’t mention that? Honestly, Courtland, if you didn’t spend half your time moldering down here in the cellars, you’d know more. Chance and Julia and the children arrived at least an hour ago. He may have news on Edmund Beales.”

“I do not molder.”

“I suppose moldering is in the eye of the beholder, then,” Cassandra said, dancing past him and up the steps, leaving Courtland to follow after her. He always seemed to be following after her, even while trying to tell himself that she’d become too old for him to consider her his personal responsibility…and old enough to know that her grown-up self caused him problems he refused to face.

As a child, she had tagged behind him everywhere, and he’d been flattered, delighted. She’d taken her first real steps to him. She’d run to him when she fell, scraped her knee. As her papa, now known to the small world of Romney Marsh as Ainsley Becket, hid in his study, turned away from the world in his grief, it had been Courtland who had sat Cassandra on his knee, taught her sums and her letters, read her stories, held her hand when the storms raged in off the Channel.

He’d tied her sashes when they came undone, taught her how to fly a kite, sat her on her first pony, held her above the waves when, as all Beckets had to do, she learned to swim.

He’d instructed her to stay away from the shifting sands that ran along the shore to the east of Becket Hall. He’d shielded her from the teasing of her older siblings, explained to her that her papa did indeed love her, very much, even if sometimes he was too sad to look at the child who, day by day, more closely resembled her dead mother.

And that had all been fine.

When Cassandra was two. When she was five, ten. But at fourteen? Yes, that’s when it had all begun to change, slowly at first, without him really noticing what was happening.

She still followed after him everywhere he went. But now it was to tease him, to goad him, to dare him. Look at me, Courtland. Look, I’m growing up. What will you do with me now?

She was his sister, damn it!

No. Not his sister. Never his sister.

He knew who he was. He knew who she was. She was the daughter of the house, Ainsley’s child. He was the mongrel, the boy who had slept and eaten with the dogs, the boy who had been an object of pity, brought home because what else was to be done with him?

He owed Geoffrey Baskin—Ainsley Becket—his life. His loyalty.

Ainsley Becket owed him nothing, least of all Isabella’s daughter.

Courtland shook his head, disgusted with that part of himself that refused to accept what had to be, and bounded up the stone steps to the main floor of the large house, turned and headed for Ainsley’s study. He needed to concentrate on Edmund Beales, the monster so long thought dead, but the same man Rian had gone head-to-head with only a little more than a month ago, in France.

Beales had come out of that encounter wounded, but not defeated, not dead. And now he knew that Ainsley, his old partner Geoffrey Baskin, also still lived.

A reckoning was coming, and coming soon, and the tension inside Becket Hall was fast becoming unbearable.

All of the Beckets had gathered in Romney Marsh a month ago, to talk, to plan, to prepare for that final reckoning, discuss the many ways Edmund Beales might come at them. When, and where. Would he chose sudden violence, or stealth?

It had been a large gathering, all eight Beckets and their wives and husbands, a menagerie of children.

Morgan, now the Countess of Aylesford, and her husband Ethan, their young twins, Geoffrey and Isabella.

Chance and his wife Julia, bringing with them their three children.

Fanny—good God help them all, now the Countess of Brede—and Valentine, the most long- suffering and piteously besotted fellow in creation.

They’d joined Eleanor and her husband, Jack Eastwood, who resided at Becket Hall along with Spencer and his wife Mariah, and their two children.

And Rian. Rian and his new bride, Lisette. Edmund Beales’s daughter.

God. Lisette’s introduction to the family had caused some tense moments, and still did, unfortunately, especially with Jacko, Ainsley’s second-in-command during the years in the islands.

But they were all together again, all of Ainsley’s eight “acquired” children who had survived the attack on the island; his seven hostages to fortune, and the child of his beloved Isabella.

Almost eighteen years after that last day, that terrible, unforgettable day, they had rebuilt, grown, possibly even healed.

The ships, the Black Ghost and the Silver Ghost had been dismantled once they’d reached what would be called Becket Hall, the boards used to construct Becket Village, housing the survivors of the attack on land, the betrayal at sea.

Life, often painful, had moved on…only to have Edmund Beales resurface, bringing danger to all of them.

Courtland had never asked Ainsley about the warning Beales had written in the blood of his victims: You lose. No mercy, no quarter. Until it’s mine. He didn’t think it was his place, especially when Ainsley had been so cruelly hurt, outwardly strong for his crew, for the survivors, but dead inside for too many long years.

No one had asked when they’d all first come together again last month. But perhaps it was time. Time to know what it was that Edmund Beales had wanted and could not find, the reason behind the tortured bodies, the eventual massacre.

Until it’s mine.

They had all thought Beales wanted Isabella, but it would seem that the man had coveted more than his friend’s wife. What? What had the man wanted? What might he still want?

Courtland stood outside the closed door to the study, certain it would be he who would finally be the one to ask that question.

CASSANDRA ENTERED THE drawing room to see Julia sitting with Mariah, the two with their heads together, speaking quietly.

“Secrets?” she asked, sitting down beside Julia. “Don’t tell me one of you is breeding again. I’m too young to be an aunt so many times over.”

Mariah colored beneath her flame-red hair, and dipped her head. “You weren’t supposed to guess. We all have enough on our plates with Elly at the moment, with…with everything else that’s going on. The men need to feel free to concentrate on finding Beales, putting an end to this long nightmare.”

Cassandra hid her surprise at having guessed correctly, for she’d just been, she thought, speaking nonsense. “Elly’s fine, Mariah, isn’t she? And the baby won’t be arriving for another month or more. I don’t know how she stands it, being confined to her bed this way.”

“Elly can’t stand it,” Mariah said, smiling. “But Odette is, by and large, a powerful force, more powerful than any one of us. And she seems to have gotten Elly and the baby this far, so it’s impossible not to listen to her.”

“I’ll agree with that,” Julia said, smoothing down her skirts. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but she had presence, Cassandra had always thought. Presence, and a keen, sharp-eyed intelligence. Chance adored her. “I still hang this ridiculous gad around my neck when we travel, much as I know it’s all superstitious nonsense. An alligator’s tooth, if that’s truly what it is? Nonsense, I keep telling myself. But I wouldn’t be without it.”

“She gave one to Lisette, you know,” Cassandra told them quietly. “To protect her from her papa’s evil, the evil of Odette’s twin, this horrible Loringa Rian saw in France. I think she should have given her a second one, to protect her from Jacko.”

“He’s still being so nasty?” Julia asked, frowning. “Chance and I noticed it when we were here last month, but we’d hoped Ainsley convinced Jacko to come to his senses. After all, Lisette isn’t responsible for her father’s…actions.”

“Jacko’s not the only one,” Cassandra said, grabbing the dish of sugared treats from the table between the couches and placing it in her lap. She’d lost what Odette called her baby fat last year, but it wasn’t because she had given up her love of sweet things. “Lisette won’t walk over to Becket Village without Rian or Jasper going with her. Jasper is so huge, nobody will even look at him, even though he’s really the kindest creature in nature, according to Lisette. I think…I think Rian and Lisette are going to have to leave Becket Hall when this is all over. Lisette, just by being here, opens old wounds for some people, even though none of it, what happened, what might happen next, is her fault. After all, she saved Rian’s life. That should mean something to our own people, shouldn’t it?”

Mariah and Julia exchanged glances Cassandra couldn’t interpret. “What does Ainsley say?” Mari¬ ah asked.

Cassandra shrugged, popped another piece of the chewy candy into her mouth. “He doesn’t say anything. You know Papa. He just sort of looks at people, and they know he doesn’t approve. So no one will do anything terrible. But Lisette feels the dislike, she has to, poor thing. And you’ll be leaving, too, won’t you, Mariah? Once this is over?”

Mariah smiled. “Lining us all up like ducks, Callie? Why?”

Cassandra didn’t realize she was being so obvious. “No reason. I know Elly would never leave Becket Hall, not of her own volition, and Jack seems happy with that. But Papa?” She shook her head. “He had another letter from Mrs. Warren last week, you know.”

Once again Mariah and Julia exchanged glances, this time smiling at each other. “Marianna Warren? Really?” Mariah commented. “They only met the one time, and that was years ago. So they keep up a correspondence? I didn’t know.”

Cassandra rolled her eyes. “Oh, of course you do. Spence writes to her ship captain—Abraham, is it? And that’s where you and Spence will be going, I already know that, I guess. This place known as Hampton Roads. Papa has several maps of the area. They’ve been arriving from America for years. And…and he’s purchased land there, a huge parcel along the water. For his ships, you know? He doesn’t think I know that part, but I do.”

She waited for her sisters-in-law to react, which didn’t take long.

“Ainsley’s thinking of leaving Becket Hall? Leaving Romney Marsh?” Julia shook her head, looking astonished. “He won’t even travel to London. He goes nowhere.”

“Fearing arrest for piracy so long ago in the islands, no thanks to Edmund Beales,” Mariah said, and then sighed. “Ah, but once Beales is gone? Any real chance of trouble from that quarter would be gone with it, and Ainsley would be free to go anywhere without fear of exposing all of us to the same charge. But he’d go to America? Not London? I never imagined, and I doubt Spence has, either. My goodness. Delightful to think we’d be living close by, but still shocking.”

“How do you feel about that, Callie?” Julia asked her. “Chance and I would never leave England. I know, because we’ve discussed it. We want our children to grow up here. Are you asking to come live with us rather than relocating to America? Because you’re most definitely welcome, unless you want to live with Fanny and Valentine, or stay here with Elly and Jack and—oh.” She sat back on the couch, grinned at Mariah. “It’s Court, isn’t it? You’re lining up all your ducks, but you don’t know where Court fits in that line, do you? And you think we know?”

Cassandra put down the candy dish and twined her fingers together in her lap. “I don’t think he’ll stay here, that’s all. Becket Hall doesn’t need so many masters, or it won’t once we’re free to travel anywhere. Jack and Elly love this house, love Romney Marsh, and Papa would want someone to live here in any case. Fanny’s settled, Chance and Morgan are settled. Rian and Lisette will go somewhere else, they really have no choice, do they? You and Spence are already planning your own move to Hampton Roads.”

“Which, counting to eight on my fingers, leaves Court, and you,” Mariah said, nodding her head. “Oh where or where will you go? I imagine Ainsley assumes you’ll go where he goes. But will Court be equally happy to go there, as well? Especially when offered the opportunity to at last rid himself of his shadow?”

“I’m not his shadow!” Cassandra said, knowing that wasn’t true.

“Ah, Callie,” Julia said, leaning over to kiss Cassandra’s cheek. “You’ve been nowhere but here. You know so little of life, of men. And you’re young, too young to be thinking of marriage to anyone.”

Cassandra looked above the fireplace, at the portrait of her mother. “Mama wasn’t any older than me when she married Papa. He was at least a dozen years her senior. I know, because Court told me.”

“And now we’ll tell you something you already know,” Julia added quietly. “Court sees you as his sister. Perhaps, some day, he’ll change his mind, see what the rest of us see. But not now. There’s too much going on now, with Beales out there somewhere. This isn’t…this isn’t a happy time. Truly the wrong time.”

“But it has to be now, Julia, don’t you see?” Cassandra explained tightly. “Edmund Beales will be gone soon, out of our lives, and everyone will scatter to the four winds, I just know it. We won’t all be held here anymore, in this limbo Odette calls our lives all these years. If Papa leaves—if Court and I end up on opposite sides of the ocean before he admits to himself that he can’t live without me? What will I do? Whatever will I do?”

Morgan’s voice came at them from the doorway. “Oh, alas. Alas and alack! What will I do? Whatever will I do? Poor Court, poor me!” She crossed the room in her usual graceful, long-legged strides, a raven-haired beauty of lush proportions, and then plopped herself down next to Julia. “Callie, I never thought you were such a dolt. You want him, then you go get him, that’s what you do.”

“That’s what you’d do, Morgan. Oh, wait, that’s what you did, isn’t it? Poor Ethan is still trying to figure out what happened,” Julia said, laughing.

“I crossed an ocean to get to Spence,” Mariah said. “Of course, I mostly wanted to box his ears for him, but that’s neither here nor there, is it?”

“The whys don’t matter,” Morgan said, rubbing her hands together, clearly eager to enter into a conspiracy. “It’s the how we’re concerned with, if Callie really wants to bring Court to heel.”

“Yes, how? I’ve tried almost everything, and he still refuses to think of me as anything but a baby,” Cassandra asked, leaning forward on the couch.

“True, true. And you’re all grown-up now, aren’t you? We just need Court to finally accept that delightful change. This might take some serious thinking, although I am already entertaining one possible idea, and it will take our minds off this tense waiting, waiting for Beales to show himself,” Morgan said, reaching for the depleted sugar treats in the candy dish. “Ladies? Can we please entertain suggestions from the floor? You start, Julia. I’ll leave my idea for last.”

“And, knowing you, Morgan, that’s probably a good thing,” Julia said, looking at Mariah and winking. “It will at least delay, if not spare our blushes.”

Cassandra looked to the other women, one by one. “You think I could do that?” she asked, her heart pounding.

“Do what?” Morgan asked innocently, popping a sugar treat into her mouth.

“Seduce him, of course. That is what you’re suggesting, isn’t it?” Cassandra asked, and then waited while Mariah slapped Morgan’s back, to help dislodge the candy stuck in her throat.

“Ah,” Julia said, sighing theatrically. “Our little girl is all grown-up now, isn’t she? This should help divert our minds from worries over Edmund Beales.”

CHAPTER TWO

“YOUR PARDON, SIR? Sir Horatio Lewis and Mr. Francis Roberts to see you, sir.”

Edmund Beales did not look up from the papers on his desk, aware that the men were standing just inside the door, but perversely refusing to acknowledge that fact. “Thank you, Walters. Please keep them waiting. A half hour should be sufficient to depress their any remaining pretensions.”

“Uh…um…sir? That is, they’re…here.”

Beales smiled, swiveling on his chair to look at the two men who, although they were not standing there, hats in hand like supplicants, were in fact only minus the hats. Their joint demeanor was that of inferiors come begging…most probably for their miserable, pathetic small lives.

“How utterly tactless of me. Gentlemen, do come in.” Beales did not rise from behind his desk. Nor did he offer his hand other than to wave rather languidly in the direction of the two deliberately placed uncomfortable chairs facing the massive desk that had once graced one of Bonaparte’s many residences. Not that the man had much need of such a glorious piece of furniture now, freezing his skinny shanks on the rocks of Saint Helena.