"Court?"
He shook himself free of what had to be traitorous thoughts, and smiled at her. "For the third time, Callie, no. I will not give you a pistol so that you can attempt to smuggle it inside your father's cell. Sulk, pout, refuse to speak to me completely, but don't ask me that question again, all right?"
"I wasn't going to ask you again," Cassandra told him, coming very close to a pout, but then smiling at him. "I was only going to ask you if you have any other questions for Papa."
"No, I don't think so. What's most important is that you assure him that we're all safe, that Jacko is still at Becket Hall and not under arrest, and that Odette is taking good care of Elly, who is also fine."
"Odette has taken to her bed, and Elly is driving Jack around the bend, demanding that she be allowed to speak to the authorities, prove that she is no more a captive than is the King of England."
"Considering that Farmer George spends most of his time in a straight waistcoat, mumbling to himself or having lively conversations with potted ferns, I don't think that's quite the comparison we want to use," Courtland told her, smiling at last. "But we have no choice but to lie to him, Callie. What good would it do to tell him the truth?"
"He must feel so helpless," Callie said, sighing. "I hate the thought of seeing him locked up in a cage."
He took her hand in his. "A sight he and I, everyone, wishes to spare you. It's not too late to change your mind, Callie. If Beales is somewhere close, watching, he'd recognize Rian, and perhaps Spencer, as well, but he wouldn't know me. I was too withdrawn from the crowd, too much in the background, to have gained his attention on the island."
"No. I'll do this. I won't promise that I won't cry, but I will do this. Where will we go…afterward?"
"There's a small inn we know, just a mile outside of Dymchurch. Rian was instructed to rent every available room. The innkeeper, Fairchild, has benefited from the Black Ghost's assistance a time or two over the years, and we've asked that he close the inn to other travelers for as long as we need it."
"Your plan, I suppose."
He nodded. "We'll take a circuitous route each time we go to the inn, although we'll surely be followed once you've made your first visit to the gaol. With any luck, we'll be able to not only see who is following us, but capture a few of them, ask them some questions. Damn, I still don't believe I'm letting you do this."
"You're not allowing me to do this, Court. I'm doing it because even the cruelest gaoler wouldn't deny a daughter's wish to see her papa."
He looked at her, her resemblance to Isabella so startling inside the dimness of the coach. "Just keep that hood covering your face. It's not beyond belief that Ainsley has more than one daughter, but if Beales knows you're also Isabella's daughter, that you weren't killed in the raid, there's going to be hell to pay."
"He believes he killed everyone, doesn't he?"
Courtland shook his head. "He has to know that Odette escaped the slaughter. The more I think about this, the more I know you shouldn't be seen, even if you keep your hood up on your way from the coach to the gaol. Morgan would have been best suited for this, but she's friends with the wives of some powerful men in Parliament, so she's needed in London as much as Ethan, or Fanny and Valentine."
"And Mariah is best suited to stay with Elly, and Lisette is— well, surely not Lisette. She can't be within miles of her horrible father. Why are you still frowning? It's my hair, isn't it? It's so much lighter than Mama's, but just as curled." She lifted her hands to her head, pushed her hair back straight from her face. "Here, look at me now. Do I still look so much like her?"
He looked at her, felt his heart turn over. She was so exquisite, like a porcelain doll, with her rounded chin and cheeks, the slight blush to her honeyed skin, the pouting fullness of her mouth. All she'd managed to do, pushing her curls out of the way, was to emphasize her youth, her innocent beauty. Isabella had been more slender, her cheekbones slightly sharper, her eyes darker. But there was no denying the resemblance.
"That might be worse," he said, attempting to remain rational, while he tried to tamp down another realization— that Cassandra was all grown-up. She was showing him a woman's face. The last of the child had left her eyes yesterday, as she watched her father being carried off to prison. "I should have stayed with my original plan and brought Sheila Whiting."
"Then
I'll
be Sheila Whiting," Cassandra said, grabbing his forearm. "Really, Court, why can't I be her? A servant from Becket Hall, come to fetch her master some meat pie and fresh linen?"
Again, Courtland shook his head. "There's a chance the officer in charge will then just take the bundle of clothing, eat the meat pie himself, and not let you see him at all. That's really why I decided that you could do this. They won't refuse a daughter. Sheila, bless her, couldn't have passed herself off as a daughter of the house if we had months in which to school her in how to behave. To say nothing of the fact that she's missing one of her top front teeth."
Cassandra giggled, laid her head against his shoulder. "Why, Courtland Becket, anyone would think you're a snob."
Unbelieving that he could find something amusing in this entire mess, Courtland found himself smiling again. "Yes, I suppose I am. After all, we're all so civilized now, aren't we? Real Englishmen."
"Soon to be Americans, some of us," Cassandra reminded him. "You are coming with us, aren't you? You can't plan to remain here, not once we break the law again, taking Papa from the gaol. Isn't that another reason you've told Jack he cannot be involved with anything you do? So that he and Elly can remain at Becket Hall?"
"Chance, Valentine and Ethan will be able to keep Jack away from any problems, or at least that's what we're hoping. But, no, I probably won't be able to remain in England."
She actually looked smug. "So you'll be sailing to America with Papa and me."
He looked at her for a long time, and then nodded. "Yes. I'm coming with you. I don't know why I ever thought I wouldn't."
She launched herself into his arms and he held on tightly, pressed a kiss against the side of her neck.
He wanted to say so much more. Warn her that nothing was really settled between them. She was still so young, had seen so little of the world, not that he was exactly a world traveler himself, having rarely left Romney Marsh, and then only to cross the Channel for a night or two at a time as the Black Ghost.
But she'd never danced with anyone but her brothers, never had been flirted with by some handsome young fool twice as clever as he; no one had ever stolen a kiss from her in a dark garden.
"Do you love me, Court?" she asked against his ear.
"I've always loved you, Callie," he answered, putting a bit of distance between them as the coach wheels began to roll over the cobbled streets of Dymchurch. "From the moment you were born."
She rolled her eyes at him, blew an errant lock of corkscrewed curl up and out of her face. "That's not what I asked, and you know it. Morgan said you'd say something stupid and vague like that if I asked you, and you've just proved her right. Are you
in
love with me?"
"Now's not the time to begin such a lengthy discussion," he told her as the coach turned a corner and came to a halt, none too soon to save his sanity. "Once your father is free, once we're in America…"
"I see," she said, all the sparkle leaving her eyes. "Shall we then make an appointment to have this
discussion?
After all, you're such a
practical
man."
"Callie— "
But she held up her hands, warning him to silence. "No. Not another word, Court. I shouldn't have pushed at you, I know that. I knew that before I asked the question. I shouldn't have said anything. But don't you ever wish to
not
be so solid, so dependable? So— so unselfish? To not think first of Papa, or of anyone else for that matter, but just of
you?
Of
me?
"
"I think we're here," Courtland said in what he hoped wasn't obvious relief, lowering the shade on the off-window and looking out onto the street.
The very crowded street.
"Who are all those people?" Cassandra asked, giving up her argument to lean in close beside him, and he quickly pushed her away from the window before anyone could see her face.
"I don't know. We're still a good block away from the gaol," he said, raising the shade once more. "Stay here. And
don't
look out the window again."
"Yes, yes of course. I'm sorry. I won't look out again. Just come back, all right?"
He touched his fingers to her cheek reassuringly. "I'll be back for you, I promise." Then he opened the door on the other side of the coach and jumped down onto the cobblestones, saw that theirs wasn't the only conveyance brought to a halt in the congested street. He walked to the front of the coach to look up at Jacob Whiting and Waylon who sat on the box holding a nasty-looking blunderbuss balanced across his knees.
"Can't go no closer, Court," Waylon said, spitting tobacco juice onto the ground not a foot from Court's boot. "Want us to give a blow on the tin, push the horses through 'em?"
"No, I'd rather not call attention to us, not with Callie inside the coach. Wait here. I'll go see if I can find out what's going on, although I already have some idea. They may have Ainsley on exhibit, like an animal from the Tower Zoo. We can't let Callie see that."
"True enough. Not much for seein' such a sad, sorry thing m'self, not the Cap'n," Waylon said, his long, hound-dog face looking even more sad and world-weary than usual. "A proud man, the Cap'n."
Courtland nodded his agreement and walked toward the rear of the crowd made up of mostly men, although there were a few women also there, holding on to the hands of young children brought to the gaol to learn an edifying lesson about what it means to break the King's laws.
He nudged, and excused himself, and kept on moving, on the lookout for Rian or any of the men from Becket Hall, who had damned well better be standing close to Ainsley if he was on show. Ignoring anyone who cursed him for pushing in front of them, he only stopped when he was finally near enough to see Ainsley standing on a wooden box on the raised flagway in front of the gaol, still dressed in the now rumpled clothing he'd worn the day before, both his wrists and ankles chained now, his posture straight, his chin high, his look as he gazed out over his fellow men one of mingled pity and disdain.
The man was magnificent, even in chains, ten— twenty— times the man of any other man in all of Dymchurch, in most of the known world. And this was how he was being treated!
"Jesus," Courtland breathed under his breath, his hands squeezing into fists when he realized that Ainsley's left cheek was bruised, and there was a small cut over his eye. Perhaps from a fall, his steps confined by the irons, or perhaps from a push that sent him flying against a stone wall of the gaol.
"They'll pay for this, whoever is behind this show," Rian said, stepping up beside Courtland, who turned to see that Rian was dressed in rather nondescript clothing, a rough woolen seaman's jacket hung over his shoulder, concealing the fact that half his left arm was missing, which could have identified him to Beales. "My money's on the blond one holding the whip— see him? Lieutenant, but with the look of a bully."
Courtland scanned the half dozen soldiers standing guard on either side of Ainsley and quickly saw the man Rian had pointed out to him. His uniform fit him badly, and he wore the self-satisfied smirk of a man who would find petty torture a fine entertainment. "I see him."
"Good. But don't worry about him. He's mine," Rian said tightly. "Damn, now what?"
Courtland looked toward Ainsley once more, in time to see a tall, painfully thin man dressed in funereal black from head to toe and holding a Bible stepping up onto another wooden box. He also noticed the man's white collar, gaping badly around a curiously long, stick-thin neck. "A man of the cloth? I think we're about to be treated to an edifying sermon on seeds that fall on shallow soil or some other such rot. Yes, look— Ainsley's smiling, enjoying the joke. He wouldn't be so amused if he knew Callie was here."
Rian's head whipped around to Courtland's. "What? I thought you were bringing Sheila Whiting. What in hell's name is Callie doing here?"
"It was my decision," Courtland said, his jaw tight. "My fault."
"Damn straight it's your fault. The only thing I can think of that would be worse would be to bring Fanny. Christ, or Morgan. Where is she?"
"Back there," Courtland said with a slight movement of his head, "safe in the coach, with Waylon and Jacob Whiting watching her, several others on horseback, as well. What's that fool saying?"
Both men looked toward the front of the gaol, and listened.
"Here he is, good citizens. You see before you Geoffrey Baskin. Spawn of the devil. Remember the name— Geoffrey Baskin,
murderer,
" the skinny black crow was shouting, waving the Bible in the air as he spoke. "You see before you the wages of sin! Black-guard!" he yelled, pointing the Bible at Ainsley. "
