by Heather Snow
Derick leapt to his feet, dropping coins on the table—some for the owner, more for the boy. “With my thanks,” he said over his shoulder as he rushed to get his horse.
He briefly thought about getting Emma as well. But no, she was safely tucked away at Aveline Castle with his mother’s journals. He wouldn’t risk her any more than he would that young groom. After he’d interrogated this stranger would be soon enough to let Emma in on whatever he discovered.
Half an hour later, Derick tied his mount off about a quarter mile from the cave. He’d go the rest of the way on foot. He checked his pistol and tucked it away, just in case he needed it, then headed deeper into the woods.
He smelled the smoke first, a light wisp on the breeze, like that from a cook fire. It was soon followed by the aroma of roasting meat. He slowed his step, moved more quietly. As he got closer to the small clearing where the keyhole cave was situated, it was evident from the tamped-down undergrowth that at least one person had been passing here fairly regularly. He could now see tendrils of smoke rising from a small unattended fire just outside the mouth of the cave. A rough spit had been erected over the fire with what looked to be a large rabbit skewered on it.
Derick crouched low, hidden by a large oak, and waited for the stranger to show himself. Could this be the man he was truly after? If so, it raised more questions than it answered, but that was nothing new. Things so often were more complicated than they seemed, particularly when it came to treason. His instincts told him he was close to uncovering the truth now, and the thrill of the hunt pumped through his veins as he waited for his quarry to show himself.
He didn’t have to wait long. Less than a minute passed before a man emerged from the mouth of the cave. A tallish man, though not overly so, a lean build, dark hair—just as the owner of the Swan and Stag had described. A wave of gray smoke from the cook fire obscured Derick’s view of his face, however, and by the time it cleared, the man had come around and now stood with his back to Derick. He crouched down to check his supper.
Derick took the opportunity to catch the stranger unaware. He pulled his pistol, hoping he wouldn’t need it but intending to be prepared for any eventuality.
“Stop what you are doing and place your hands where I can see them.”
The man tensed—Derick felt it as much as saw it—but did as he was ordered. When the man’s hands came into view, Derick noticed the man was older than he’d expected, knuckles more pronounced, skin more lined. But still strong enough to kill Farnsworth, he’d wager.
“Now, stand slowly and turn around.”
The stranger obeyed and Derick got his first look at the man’s face.
His heart kicked so violently, he nearly dropped his gun. It listed sideways in his grip, almost forgotten. His first thought was that there was no way he could have been prepared for this. His second was that he was staring.
Staring into eyes so familiar that he might as well be looking into a mirror.
“Hello, my son.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Derick’s grip on his pistol tightened, and he righted the weapon, aiming straight at the Frenchman’s heart. “It was you?”
Hardly the first thing he’d ever imagined saying upon finally meeting the man who’d sired him, but there it was. Of course, he’d never expected to meet the man under these circumstances.
Damnation. Could any person alive have ever been born of more duplicitous parents than he had been? Should he prick his finger right now, he wouldn’t be surprised if the blood that welled from the wound was as black as the ebony hair he and his sire had in common.
He couldn’t seem to stop staring at Charles Moreau. While he’d never met him, Derick knew his name well. During that last ugly confrontation he’d had with his mother, she’d gloated over how she’d insisted upon Charles as Derick’s middle name to honor her lover and how Scarsdale had never suspected, as Charles was as common an English name as it was French.
“It was me, what?” Moreau asked carefully. His English was very cultured, very natural—but why shouldn’t it be? The man had lived here as his mother’s secret lover for more than a decade before Scarsdale had discovered them. Moreau still held his hands in the air and his eyes had not left the pistol Derick held on him. A perplexed frown formed between his eyebrows.
As the shock of seeing Moreau dimmed, Derick’s thinking cleared. Moreau clearly played some part in this. However, if the Frenchman had been his mother’s accomplice, why hadn’t he just left England when she killed herself? It made little sense for him to still be around…He had no reputation in England to protect.
Something was off. He’d best guard his words carefully and let Moreau do the talking so he could get to the truth.
Derick affected a casual shrug with the shoulder not attached to the hand that held his pistol. “Squatting on my land. I’d heard reports and came to investigate.”
“I see.” Yet one black brow winged high in clear disbelief. Derick wondered if he looked so arrogant when he made the same gesture, as he knew he did often. “And reports of a vagrant necessitate a pistol?”
Derick narrowed his eyes. “Yes. Now what in the hell are you doing in England, much less here?”
Moreau’s eyes narrowed in much the same way, then flicked to the pistol once more. He squared his shoulders. “Why? Are you planning on carrying out your English father’s threat?”
“What?” Derick frowned, and then understanding dawned. His mother had told him that when Scarsdale had uncovered the truth, he’d had Moreau severely beaten. Before he was sent back to France, Moreau had been warned that he’d be killed if he ever set foot on English soil again. Derick slowly lowered the pistol. “Of course not.”
The Frenchman gave one hard nod of his head, then slowly lowered his hands. “Merci.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“You haven’t answered mine, either. Why the pistol? Who did you really think might be out here?” he asked, suspicion clear in his voice.
“I told you why I’m here.”
Moreau snorted. “Fine. Keep your secrets. God knows you come by them honestly.” Moreau turned his back on Derick, crouching to turn the rabbit on the spit, so he didn’t see Derick flinch at that hard truth. “I thought maybe you were hunting the man that killed your mother, as I am.”
Killed my— He couldn’t have heard Moreau correctly. Derick came around the fire so he could see the Frenchman’s face. “She killed herself.”
Moreau stood and raised his eyes to Derick’s. The stark grief in them made Derick wish to look away. Grief and a naked love that was hard to look upon, even all of these years later. Derick couldn’t breathe. If he’d felt as if he were looking in a mirror before, it was magnified now…only he saw how he would look in the future. Every time he thought of Emma.
“Vivienne would never do such a thing.”
Surely Moreau hadn’t come all the way from France upon learning of his mother’s death because he couldn’t believe she’d committed suicide. If he had, that was terribly sad, and Derick didn’t wish to be the one to have to convince him of the truth. But he would have to be. “Perhaps, not under normal circumstances,” Derick said gently, awkwardly. “But there are things you don’t know.”
Moreau threw a hand out in an effusive gesture of agitation, or perhaps denial. “There are things you don’t know, either.”
Yes, there were. About his mother, about Moreau, about why Moreau was here today. And he wanted to know them all. “Then why don’t you tell me?” he asked, not sure which answer he sought the most.
Moreau’s shoulders relaxed and he nodded. “Oui. I will tell you why I am here. Then you can help me avenge my Vivienne.” He removed the skewered rabbit from the fire. “Come, sit with me.”
Derick followed Moreau to the mouth of the cave, where a crude campsite was set just inside. He refused the man’s offer of roasted meat, but did sit on a log that had been pulled in to serve as a seat.
&nb
sp; “Your mother, she wrote to me these many years we were kept apart. During wartime, the letters did not come so regularly, but they always came. I begged her, year after year, to come as well, to run away and join me in France. But Vivienne, she never would.”
“Why not?” Derick always had had the impression that she would have gone to France in a heartbeat if she were able.
“At first, it was because Scarsdale threatened to stop her family’s allowance if she tried to leave.”
Derick nodded. That made sense.
“But then,” Moreau went on, “even after her parents died and her sisters married, she still would not come.”
Derick could sense Moreau’s sadness, his confusion. Then the man lifted a shoulder and a bittersweet smile turned his lips.
“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that your mother was spoiled. She’d never lived in anything less than a fine castle, and that was the one thing I couldn’t offer her. I’d given up everything to follow her to England when she was forced to marry Scarsdale, you see. We were so young. Stupid. But even if I hadn’t left everything behind to be with Vivienne, my family’s money and holdings were lost in the Terror. The only wealth I have now is what I have earned, and that was never enough for her. She had no wish to live in a small cottage, nor to do for herself.”
Moreau rose from his seat, and began to pace. “It was hard for me to understand. I didn’t care where I lived, as long as I could be with Vivienne. I would have come and lived in this cave”—he swung his arm in an agitated swipe—“risking my life if I were caught by Scarsdale, just to be with your mother.” Moreau let out a long, pained sigh. “And I was very angry that she didn’t feel the same.”
Derick shook his head. This poor man, so besotted by a selfish woman who didn’t deserve such devotion. Not like Emma, who was so very worthy of love.
“Life is too short not to be with the one you love,” Moreau said. Derick’s body went very still. Would he risk his life in a country he was warned never to enter again, just to be near Emma? Hell, yes. So why wouldn’t he stay in England to be with her?
Moreau started talking again. “But Vivienne begged me to hold on. Scarsdale was so much older than she. I’m sure you know, her family had negotiated an extremely generous widow’s portion for her. She promised that when Scarsdale died, we would use it to purchase a small château near the sea where we could live out the rest of our lives together. I loved her so much, I couldn’t have denied her. So we waited. And waited. Twenty-three years, we waited.”
What hell that must have been. He couldn’t imagine one year without Emma. Hell, not one week.
“And finally, I received her letter that Scarsdale was dead. Ah, that letter.” The Frenchman’s eyes closed slowly, as if in remembered bliss. “So full of joy and excitement and promise. Vivienne bade me to come to England and join her here, be with her until the estate was settled and her portion under her own control, and then we would leave England together, just as we had arrived together so many years ago.”
What a fool he was being. He wasn’t going to be like his parents. He wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of his and Emma’s love. If she wouldn’t come to America, then he would have to stay here. He could do nothing else.
“But then, only two days after I received that letter, another came, telling me to stay where I am. Vivienne said that she was in trouble and that I was to expect her imminently.”
Derick’s attention jerked fully back to Moreau. “She was planning to come to you?” That explained her hastily packed valuables. So what happened between her dashing off a letter to Moreau and her jumping off a cliff? Had Farnsworth caught up to her? Had she realized there was no escape from justice?
“Yes, but she never arrived. So after several days’ wait, I came here…only to find her dead. I will never believe that when we were so close to finally being together Vivienne would take her life. Non.”
Moreau’s story was worrying, on many levels. Derick chose to focus only on the part that pertained to his mission. His instincts told him to believe Moreau’s tale, so he decided to be honest with the man in return. He stood to face him.
“Mother was in trouble, which is why she killed herself, rather than be arrested.” Derick briefly outlined his own version of events—noticing how Moreau flinched when Derick mentioned her long-running affair with George Wallingford—and ending with her taking her own life to avoid being captured as a traitor.
Moreau’s ruddy complexion reddened with rising emotion during the telling. “How could you believe such a thing of your mother?”
“Well, in addition to mountains of circumstantial evidence, my mother was a liar and a deceiver, who felt nothing for anyone but herself,” he said. Although in light of what he’d just learned, “And perhaps you,” he allowed.
“That is not true! She loved you. You were her son!”
“She hated me!” Derick shot back, old hurts and fresh anger boiling up.
“No, Derick. You must remember how your mother doted on you.”
Flashes of memory, of her perfumed arms cuddling him close, her lilting voice singing lullabies in French, of kisses and hugs, assaulted him, twisting him with an old longing. He’d loved Maman so much, and had known, with a little boy’s certainty, that she loved him, too. Which is why her sudden coldness had wounded him so grievously. “She loved me until you were gone. Then she hated me.”
Moreau’s eyes filled with sadness. “She never hated you. When Scarsdale sent me away, your mother clung to you—not only as her child but as the only part of me she had left. When Scarsdale became aware of what you meant to her, in that way, he took you from her, too. He told her you were his heir—the only one he was going to get, at any rate—and that you would be raised by an Englishman, not some French whore. That’s when he sent her here.”
Derick stared at Moreau, stunned.
“I know, from Vivienne’s letters, that she did not treat you well when you came to visit her. You must understand, Derick…You were a source of both joy and misery to her, a reminder of everything she couldn’t have. Me. You. Love. She believed Scarsdale only sent you to torture her. She never meant to hurt you…She just wasn’t capable of anything else at the time.”
Derick closed his eyes, shutting out Moreau’s entreating, sympathetic gaze. Could it be that Vivienne Aveline was not as heartless as she’d seemed?
“And you’re wrong about her. When you left for France, Vivienne did her best to keep track of you. She poured out her worry for you in her letters to me. In time, she came to suspect what role you played in the war. We both did. She would never have betrayed England, never have done anything to put you in danger.”
If not her, then who?
“Vivienne’s letter said she’d seen something she shouldn’t have. Now you say there is a traitor here. Maybe she saw something that got her killed.”
Derick’s eyes flew open. “Wait—she said she saw something she shouldn’t have?”
“Yes.”
“Did she say what?”
“Non. The letter was very short, rushed, her handwriting hurried and scribbled, agitated.”
Damnation. This could change everything. “Do you have it?”
“Non. I left it safe in France, with all of her other letters to me. But I tell you, it said only that I should stay in France, that she’d seen something she shouldn’t have, that she didn’t feel safe here any longer, and that she was coming to me immediately.”
Derick scrambled to reevaluate everything he’d thought he knew. But first he needed everything Moreau knew. “So when you got here, you learned that Mother was dead. Then what did you do?”
“I could not believe it, so I decided I must stay until I learned what truly befell my Vivienne, and avenged her. I didn’t have much money, not enough to stay at an inn for long, so I decided to conserve my coin for food and find a place in the woods to stay. I found this place and then started investigating.”
“You were
the man asking questions in town about her,” Derick realized.
“Yes, as discreetly as I could. But I learned nothing that I didn’t already know…except that the Wallingford man had been Vivienne’s lover for many years before his accident.” A look of jealous distaste crossed Moreau’s features, followed by resignation. “She never shared that with me. Alas, I cannot fault her. It’s not as if I’ve been a monk all this time. And your mother was a woman of strong passions. But I know her heart belonged to me, as mine does to her.”
Derick had no wish to think about his mother and her passions. “Then what did you do?”
“I tried to retrace Vivienne’s steps, to discover what she may have seen. I learned from one of your maids that the day news arrived of Scarsdale’s death, Vivienne went to Wallingford Manor, presumably to share the wonderful news with her…friend. It is unknown whether she ever made it that far because when she came back, she was very upset, but wouldn’t tell the maid anything. Two days later, Vivienne was dead.”
What the hell had happened between the castle and the manor?
“When you arrived, I thought about reaching out to you for help, but I could not bring myself to do it. Yet I cannot bring myself to leave, either, not knowing what happened to your mother.” The Frenchman let out a growl of frustration. “So I find myself watching Wallingford Manor more often than not, since that was the last place she was known to have gone. I can think of nothing else to do.”
“You’ve been watching Wallingford Manor?”
“As much as I am able without rousing suspicion.”
“Were you there last night?”
Moreau nodded.
“Was it you who snuck into the house?”
But Moreau gave a quick shake of his head. “Non. It was another man.”
“You saw him?”
“Oui. He caught my attention because of how he crept through the shadows, sticking very close to the house, as if he didn’t wish to be seen. It seemed very suspicious. When he reached the house, he stopped, very sudden like, and then dashed in through an open set of French doors.”
