Julia Justiss – Regency High Society Vol 4: The Sparhawk Bride / The Rogue's Seduction / Sparhawk's Angel / The Proper Wife (страница 43)

And for the first time she knew with chilling certainty that he was right.

“You’re going to kill my father,” she whispered, her hands tightening around her arms. “You’ll kill him because he came for me.”

“I have no choice, ma mie. No choice at all.” When he lifted his face, his eyes were haunted and empty. “But I love you, Jerusa.”

She was trembling and she could not stop. He could talk all he wished of choices: had she chosen to love him as much as she did? “How can you say you love me when you’ve sworn to do such a thing to my family?”

He shook his head, his blond hair glinting in the firelight. He was trying so hard to smile for her sake, but all that showed on his face was the misery in his soul.

“I love you, Jerusa,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “Je t’aime tant! Did you know I’ve never said that to anyone else? I’ve never loved anyone but you, Jerusa. Never. Perhaps that’s why I can’t explain this now. I don’t know the words. Sacristi, how can I say it so you’ll understand?”

He plunged his hand deep inside the sea chest and pulled out the a small, flat package wrapped in chamois, and as he unwrapped it, Jerusa’s heart plummeted. The black-haired beauty with the laughing eyes.

Was this, then, why he’d insisted on returning to the Swan this afternoon, to save this woman’s portrait from the looters? Was she Jerusa’s rival, one more reason why he would not want her in Martinique?

“Here, ma chère, look.” Michel thrust the little portrait out for her to see, his hand shaking. “Look at her, my blessing and my curse!”

“She—she is very beautiful,” said Jerusa haltingly. What else could she say?

He studied the portrait himself, cradling the brass frame in the palm of his hand. “She was beautiful once. I can remember her that way if I try very hard, and look at this. Perhaps that is why she would never sell this, no matter that there was no food on the table and my belly was empty. For Maman, pride was enough.”

“She’s your mother?” asked Jerusa, struggling to make sense of all he said.

He nodded, absently tracing his finger around and around the oval brass frame. “Antoinette Géricault. She was only seventeen when my father loved her, ma mie, only seventeen when he died and when I was born.”

When he was a child, the two portraits had always hung near his mother’s bed, low on the wall so Maman could see them as soon as she woke in the morning. The beautiful lady with the charming smile, the handsome gentleman turned in profile as if to admire her. It wasn’t until he was older that he’d learned the beautiful lady and the handsome gentleman were his parents, and heard the story of how Maman had saved the portraits, one in each pocket, as she’d run down the stairs the night of the fire that had destroyed everything else.

The fire that had been set by Gabriel Sparhawk and his men….

“Then she was the most beautiful girl in St-Pierre, and men would beg for her smiles. Christian Deveaux fell in love with her the moment he saw her, as she walked one morning from the market with a basket of white lilies.” Michel smiled, remembering how his mother would bend her arm as she told the story, showing him how the basket had rested against her hip, just so. “But that was long ago, before the sorrows claimed her beauty and her smile.”

The sorrows, and the Sparhawks.

That was how it had begun for him: every misfortune, every injustice was blamed on the Englishman Gabriel Sparhawk. He had murdered Christian Deveaux. He had destroyed poor Christian’s name and honor. He had robbed them of the fortune and position that should by rights be theirs. And worst of all for Michel, he had drained every bit of love from his poor Maman ‘s heart, and left it filled with the poison of hate.

No wonder he had no memory of Maman ‘s smile beyond the one that was painted on the ivory oval.

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.”

Chapter Nineteen

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.”