Miranda Jarrett - Regency High Society Vol 4 - The Sparhawk Bride / The Rogue's Seduction / Sparhawk's Angel / The Proper Wife

Quietly Jerusa came to stand behind him, drawn by the need to comfort him however she could. She rested her hands on his shoulders, her cheek against his, watching as he circled the frame and his mother’s face with his fingers.

“I should like to meet your mother when we’re in St-Pierre,” she said softly. “If she’s your mother, Michel, I know I shall like her.”

She felt how he tensed beneath her fingers. “She isn’t well,” he said, so carefully that she knew there was more that he wouldn’t tell her. “She seldom sees anyone, ma chère. She is unsettled in her thoughts, and company distresses her.”

Like the matching portraits on the wall, her madness had always been there. When he was young, he was terrified that some demon had come to claim his mother and make her wild as an animal in the forest, and that it was somehow his fault if she hurt him. She wouldn’t do it unless he deserved it, not his Maman. But he was so often disobedient, and when she was forced to beat him he wept, not from pain but because of the sorrow his wickedness brought to her.

If his father had lived, it would not have been like this. Maman would have laughed like other mothers, and there would have been food and clothes and a fine place to live, all if Gabriel Sparhawk had not murdered his father!

“I still should like to see her, Michel,” she said softly, “if only for a few minutes. It couldn’t hurt her to talk, would it? Most likely she’d enjoy it.”

“Don’t make the mistake of believing she’s like other mothers,” he said sharply. “She’s not some happy, round-cheeked lady like your own Mariah who will offer you tea and jam cakes and coo over your gown.”

“Michel, I didn’t mean—”

“Sacristi, Jerusa, she’s all I have!” He pulled free of her arms, his eyes tortured as he faced her. “When I was a child, she did everything she could for me. Can you understand that, Jerusa, you with your brothers and sisters and father and mother? She did everything for me. How could I not do the same for her?”

“But that’s the way of every mother and her child,” said Jerusa, reaching out her hand to calm him. “What son or daughter doesn’t strive to please?”

He shook his head and stepped back beyond her reach, the portrait still clutched in his hand. “Like every mother? Grâce à Dieu, non!”

He laughed, a harsh, bitter sound as he tossed the little portrait into the open chest. “Does every mother wish her son to be so much like his father that she will sell him to a drunken shipmaster when he’s but nine years old, set to learn the honorable trade of privateering? Does every mother rejoice when her son learns to kill, delighting in every lethal refinement or new skill he acquires in the name of death and justice, revenge and honor?”

“But in her way she loves you, Michel,” said Jerusa urgently. “She must! That is why I must speak with her. If she loves you, she’ll be as unwilling as I am to see you risk your life for the sake of an empty feud nearly thirty years old.”

“Oh, ma bien-aimée, my poor, innocent Jerusa,” he said softly, too softly for the pain that etched his face. “You still haven’t guessed, have you? It was my mother who made me swear to kill your father. And it was my mother’s idea, ma chère, to kidnap you.”

Gabriel thumped the empty tumbler down on the table and rose to his feet. Angry as he was, he seemed to fill the small captain’s cabin of the Tiger, the way, thought Josh glumly, his father did every space he’d ever entered.

“Do you mean to tell me that after a week in this place, all you have done is dawdled with some barmaid?” demanded Gabriel furiously. “Your sister’s life is in danger, and you’re chasing after some Creole baggage?”

“It’s not like that, Father,” said Josh, wishing his father wouldn’t immediately thrust whatever he did or said into the worst possible light. And it wasn’t as if Gabriel had had such great success himself on Barbados. He’d found no trace of Jerusa, and though he’d dined with the rear admiral from the fleet stationed there, no promises had been made and nothing accomplished. “I told you before. I might as well have been shouting at the moon for all the good the governor and his lot have done for me.”

“But damnation, Josh, didn’t you give them the letters of introduction?”

“I did, and they could scarce be bothered to break the seals.” He stood with his hands clasped behind his back so his father couldn’t see how he clenched and unclenched his fingers through the conversation. “None of the men you knew, or who knew you, are still here. The old governor was recalled to Paris five years ago, and the new one doesn’t know a Sparhawk from a sea gull.”

“More’s the pity for him,” grumbled Gabriel, but at least he’d sat back down into his chair.

Josh stepped forward to refill his father’s tumbler. All the stern windows across the cabin’s length were open to whatever breeze might rise from the water, but at midday the cabin was still stifling, and both men had shed their coats and waistcoats.

“When the officials turned their backs on me, I went to the rum shops and taverns. If any of Deveaux’s men were still alive, I figured they’d be there, not on their knees telling their beads in the churches.”

“True enough.” Gabriel took the tumbler, holding it critically up to the sunlight to see the pale gold color of the rum. At least he couldn’t question that; Josh had been careful to ship rum from the family’s firm in Newport, even though Martinique must have a score of distilleries of her own. “Though if there’s any justice in this life, the rogues that sailed with Deveaux have all gone to the devil with their master by now.”

“That’s what Ceci believed, too, until—”

“Ceci?” Gabriel frowned. “Who’s Ceci?”

“Mademoiselle Cecilie Marie-Rose Noire. Ceci. Her father owns the tavern where we met.”

“Ah, the barkeep’s daughter.” With a cynical sigh, Gabriel tapped his fingers on the edge of the table. “So, is she all the things a woman should be, Josh? Fair, charming, willing?”

Josh bit back his retort, but warmth still crept into his words. “She is both fair and charming, Father, but though she is the barkeep’s daughter, she’s not the slattern you seem determined to believe she is.”

“Then my sympathies to you, lad,” said Gabriel dryly. “If you’ve wasted your days with this girl instead of finding Jerusa, then at least you should have had her warming your bed during the night.”

And at last Josh’s temper spilled over. “Damn and blast, Father!” he exploded. “Is that all you can say about a woman? Will she warm my bed?”

But to Josh’s surprise, his father merely leaned back in his chair, rocking the tumbler gently in his hand.

“I haven’t thought that way about a woman since I met your mother,” he said slowly. “But you, lad. I’ve never heard otherwise from you. Not that at your age there’s anything wrong with seeing what the ladies have to offer, but this French girl—Ceci, was it?—must be a rare little bird to have clipped your wings so soon.”

Josh’s face went expressionless. Were his feelings that obvious, then, that even his father could read them? “She hasn’t ‘clipped’ my wings, Father,” he said stiffly. “I’ve known her but a week.”

Gabriel looked up at him from beneath his brows. “I didn’t say I was posting the banns yet, Josh.”

“A good thing, too.” Self-consciously Josh toyed with the cork from the bottle of rum. “That is, I like Ceci. I like her just fine. She’s clever and amusing and pretty and all that, but she was also the only person on this blessed island worth talking to.”