Becket's Last Stand. Кейси Майклс

his wife toward the door, Cassandra following behind, so happy for her sister, who’d found her Jack, and who would soon, after so much heartache, have her own child to hold.

      COURTLAND WALKED DOWN the hallway toward the music room still holding a sheaf of papers filled with drawings of the first and second lines of passive defenses he and Ainsley had commissioned a few weeks earlier, all of them now in place.

      Thankfully, Ainsley had at last been able to convince the women in Becket Village to leave. Except for the stubborn Becket women and some of the household staff, who refused to leave Eleanor, who could not be moved without imperiling her unborn child. They’d taken their children inland with them, out of the way of battle and safe from the defenses that now made the area dangerous even to its inhabitants. They had all gone together, but would break off for predetermined destinations in small villages scattered throughout Romney Marsh, so that no one would raise an eyebrow at an influx of over one hundred new inhabitants descending on the same place.

      Becket Hall, Becket Village, were now little more than armed camps…and one musical evening meant to entertain Eleanor.

      Mentally, not really needing to consult his lists, Courtland reviewed their defenses.

      Deadfalls fitted out with wooden spikes and seamlessly hidden beneath the landscape were now located in the tall reeds to the East, behind the treacherous, shifting sands along the shoreline that were their own deterrent.

      Protective trenches had been dug around the Western and Northern sides of Becket Village, in places more than twelve feet deep—good for burying Beales’s dead hirelings once the assault was over, Spence had joked. Again, these defenses were camouflaged with grasses and shrubs, ready to snare the unwary, and too wide for most men to jump across them if they were discovered.

      The shingle and sand beach and the first dozen or more feet of shallow sea in front of the village and Becket Hall itself had been studded with sharp sticks of wood tied together to make large structures that, to Courtland, looked like enormous children’s playing jacks, preventing small boats from landing easily and then slowing any force trying to make its way across the beach. Only those who lived at Becket Hall knew the paths through these obstacles that wouldn’t end with a foot impaled on hidden nine-inch metal spikes Jasper and Waylon had fashioned in the smithy.