“I will be the one who tells him,” Courtland said, making what was probably the longest speech of his young life. But then, he wasn’t a child, never had been probably, and never would be, not after this day. “He needs to see his daughter. The rest of you stay here, wait for someone to come for you.”
With the sleeping Cassandra in his arms, once more he made his way to the large white house, to the beach. Flies buzzed everywhere now, but still no birds sang.
He’d have to get Spencer and Rian and the other young boys before the sun grew too hot, form a burial party. So many bodies…
He looked to the horizon, and his heart lurched in his chest when he saw two ships, Geoffrey Baskin’s ships, limping toward the harbor, masts without their topmost bits, sail ripped and shredded, flapping loose in the stiff breeze.
Slowly, he made his way across the beach, around the bodies of the dead, Cassandra now awake and laughing in his arms, and walked down the last few yards of the hard-packed sand nearest the shore, into the gently lapping clear blue-green water until it reached his knees.
The small wavelets caressed his shins, and each one spoke to him in Isabella’s voice. Over and over and over again:
You are her protector. Never leave her, not ever. Promise me.
Courtland listened carefully to Isabella’s plea, to Cassandra’s happy gurgles, as he waited. Stoic. Refusing to feel.
He remained there, not moving, not reacting, as the boats were hastily lowered. As men jumped from the ships, frantically swimming toward the shore. As they waded through the shallow surf, and then began to run. As they shouted out the names of those they loved, their wives, their children, and no one answered.
He only began to shiver, to cry, as his Papa Geoff splashed toward him through the surf, slowly shaking his head, wordlessly begging Courtland not to tell him of the destruction Edmund Beales had wrought in their small paradise, the death he’d brought with him…
Romney Marsh 1815
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