The Wayward One

by Danelle Harmon

  “For the record,” Ruaidri said, “I never raped yer sister.”

  “Spare me the details, I don’t want to know.” Blackheath was circling him again, taking his measure, trying to find a way to end this.

  “I married her.”

  “The marriage will be annulled.”

  “The marriage has been consummated for the past six weeks.”

  “I do not recognize your marriage.”

  “Yer brother does,” Ruaidri said, moving in a circle around Blackheath, the branch still gripped in his hand. “In fact, he gave his permission for it. Told me if I didn’t marry her he’d kill me.”

  Something flickered in Blackheath’s nightshade-black stare, and out of the corner of his eye, Ruaidri saw the two seamen exchange glances.

  “Andrew has no authority to be making such decisions. I am her guardian.”

  “She’s past the age where she needs your consent.”

  Ruaidri felt the blood oozing out of the wound in his side and knew that time would soon be running out for him. His body, so recently compromised and so recently healed, was not infallible and he could see in Blackheath’s thin smile that the duke knew it too, was now prolonging this dance of death in order to let Ruaidri’s own body do him in. The matter decided him. Gripping the splintered branch in his hand, he lunged, Blackheath’s shoulder the target for his makeshift spear, and as the duke pivoted neatly out of the way Ruaidri found himself tackled once more from behind, this time by the seaman with the lethal fists.

  “Where’s the lady?” he shouted, both arms locked around Ruaidri’s throat and hauling him backward. “Damn you, tell us now or this ends right here!”

  Home in bed, Ruaidri wanted to say, but the words would not come because the man had his arms locked around his throat, squeezing off his air. The stick fell from his hand as he clawed at the thug’s wrist, finally hurling himself forward and the man with him until they both tumbled hard to the street, there to begin pounding each other until mud filled Ruaidri’s mouth and the split in his side opened like a seam coming unthreaded and his knuckles came apart against his attacker’s teeth. Someone grabbed the back of his shirt and hair and yanked him hard off his opponent and then Blackheath’s white, gentlemanly knuckles collided with his jaw, sending shock waves through his brain and turning his knees to water. The duke hit him again and again and again until the blood was running in rivulets from his mouth and his world was a sea of stars. He went limp, grabbed up the broken stick as he fell and smashed it hard against Blackheath’s ankle, hard enough to knock the leg out from under him. The duke went down, twisting and kicking out hard, his muddy boot grazing Ruaidri’s skull; for a brief moment they both lay there, stunned—and then Blackheath lunged to his feet, hauled Ruaidri to his, yanked his head back by his queue and drew a knife.

  “Lucien!”

  A woman’s voice, penetrating the soup that had replaced his brain, the cold blade against his throat—

  “Lucien you stop it right now, do you hear me?! STOP IT!”

  Ruaidri had a brief moment to wonder how and why Nerissa was out here in the darkness and then the duke, with a vicious curse, shoved him away, hard. Ruaidri went down, landing face-first in the mud, gamely pushing himself up and out of it once more to sway there on hands and knees, the first light of dawn showing all the little pebbles in the mud, a puddle edged with boot prints, someone’s feet, all revolving in a slow, sickening circle a few inches from his blurry eyes.

  “Stand back, Nerissa. This is none of your affair.”

  “It is too my affair! That is my husband you’re killing and you will stop it this instant, do you hear me? Stop it!”

  “Nobody…nobody…hurts my little sister!” Blackheath roared, his face twisted with rage, and as Ruaidri struggled to keep from falling on his face in the mud, the duke drew back his booted foot and prepared to deliver the fatal blow.

  His wife’s scream… Blackheath’s boot stopping before it could connect with his head…and Nerissa, oh God, his sweet Sunshine sagging in a surprised Brendan Merrick’s arms as he charged onto the scene with Andrew and the feisty little Mira, now shouting the house down around the mighty Duke of Blackheath.

  “You blasted, bleedin’, pond-sucking idiot, look what in hell ye’ve gone and done, you festering pile of bull manure!”

  The duke stood there, blinking, the insane rage fading from his eyes as he beheld the shocking sight of his little sister lying unconscious in a stranger’s arms while a tiny sprite of a Yankee woman gave him the dressing-down of his life.

  “Well?” she raged, stamping her foot. “Are ye going to just stand there like an imbecile? Go help yer brother-in-law to his feet before he drowns in a puddle, you no-good sack of sh—”

  “Mira, enough,” said Brendan, still holding a limp Nerissa. “He’s the Duke of—”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass who he is, he’s more concerned with killing his brother-in-law than finding out what the tarnal hell’s wrong with his own sister! You men, you’re all thicker than a Maine fog, every damned one of ye! Fighting over the poor girl when she’s in such a condition!”

  Ruaidri struggled to his feet, staggered a few steps, reeled and fell once more. He tried to find and collect his thoughts, but they were nothing but a flock of sparrows flitting around the birdhouse that was his stunned brain, some going in, most alighting elsewhere, all of them elusive and unable to be caught.

  “Condition?” he managed, but nobody heard him.

  Brendan had handed Nerissa to Lord Andrew and was reaching a hand down to help him up. “An bhfuil tú ceart go leor, mo chol ceathrair?”

  “I’m fine,” He grasped his cousin’s hand, grateful for the support as he found his feet. “Just…catching…my breath.”

  “What condition?” the duke demanded, his jaw hardening.

  “You’re as dumb as an ox in a blindfold if ye can’t figure it out!” Mira went to Nerissa as she began pushing against Andrew’s chest and her brother gently set her down.

  “What condition?” Ruaidri echoed.

  Mira turned on him. “The condition that you put her in!”

  “What?!” thundered Blackheath, his face darkening with rage once more.

  “What?” echoed Ruaidri, still trying to stuff the sparrows into their little birdhouse and now finding there were even more of them.

  “She’s going to have a baby, you numbskulls!”

  Stunned, shocked silence. Blackheath’s mouth opened in horror, and Andrew lunged forward to grab his arm before he could finish killing his equally stunned brother-in-law.

  Nerissa, as shocked as the rest of them, leaned heavily against Andrew. “B-baby?”

  Mira shook her head, planted her forehead in her palm, and walked a little distance away.

  And Lucien exploded.

  “That’s it, you’re done for, O’ Devir, you are bloody well done for, this is the final insult!”

  He shook off his brother and lunged for Ruaidri. Nerissa, recovering both her wits and her composure, turned on him.

  “If you so much as touch him I’ll walk away from here and you will never see me again, Lucien! Ever!”

  The duke froze.

  She put a hand on her brother’s chest and shoved him backward, away from her husband. “How dare you,” Her eyes were hard and bright with furious unshed tears. She sloshed through the mud to the man she loved, making it clear where her loyalties lay. “How dare you do this to us.”

  Ruaidri concentrated on curling and uncurling his toes, trying to stay conscious as his head swam with confusion and the blood oozed from his side and the words condition and baby repeated themselves over and over again in his brain. The lass was giving her brother a drubbing that even he hadn’t been able to deliver.

  “Baby?” he asked, but she did not hear him.

  She turned on the duke. “Ever since I was a child you’ve treated me like a doll, protected and sheltered me, manipulated the events of my life to suit your own wishes, told me
what I could have, what I could do, where I could go, whom I should marry. You wrecked my life with what you did to Perry, you robbed me of my chance for happiness with a man I loved, you ruined him and you nearly ruined me and I will not, I repeat, I will not, let you do the same to Ruaidri, do you understand me?”

  The duke brushed a bit of mud off his elbow. “He’s a dirty, grasping, Irish maggot, my dear. You can do better.”

  The lieutenant rubbed at his jaw. “Sure knows how to fight,” he lamented.

  “Enough,” Lucien said coldly. “You, Nerissa, are coming back to England with me. You, too,” he added, with a hard look at Lord Andrew “This marriage will be annulled.”

  Andrew stood unmoving. “How did you even find us?”

  “Quite by chance, I can assure you. Our frigate recaptured a cutter taken off the coast of Nova Scotia by two American privateers only hours before. We were told that they and the brig Tigershark were on their way here. We landed a boat in darkness on some godforsaken beach a mile or two distant and an inquiry at the docks made it easy to determine your whereabouts.” He turned back to his sister. “My patience, Nerissa, is nearing its end. Come with me, please.”

  “No.”

  “Nerissa, I will not ask again.”

  “Did you not hear a single word I just said?” she cried angrily. “I just told you to get out of my life, to leave me alone, to let me make my own choices, to respect them! I chose to marry Ruaidri, he didn’t force me, I married him because I love him!”

  “What?”

  “I said I love him, damn you!”

  Lucien just stood there blinking, his face a dreadful mask of shock, anger, and immeasurable pain.

  “And furthermore,” Nerissa said, her voice shaking with rage, “Don’t think for one moment you can talk me out of this, make me see reason, manipulate events to bend them to your will or convince me to go back to England. I don’t want to go back to England. I can’t go back to England—”

  “Yes, I know all about what you did, my dear, back on that ship. I can assure you, I can…fix things, so that your name is cleared—”

  “I don’t care if my name is cleared, I’m not going back. My home is here with my husband and my…” she put a hand on her still-flat belly, and the tears began to flow down her cheeks, “my baby.”

  “Christ,” Lucien swore. He had turned white and looked as though he was going to be sick. He walked a little distance away and retrieved his pistol, his back turned to them all as he gazed at the glow in the eastern sky over the Merrimack. His hands, the knuckles raw and bleeding, were clasped in a death grip behind his back.

  “If you will not annul this sham of a marriage, Nerissa, then I will find a way to make you a widow.” He turned and looked at his sister. “Unless that’s the fate you want for this man you think you love, let go of him and come with us. We’re leaving this wretched hellhole and going home.”

  Brendan stepped forward. “Your Grace.” His voice was affable, but there was something in his kind amber eyes that was firm and unyielding, steel beneath a polite smile and easy-going manner. “’Tis my home you’re talking about, and a lovely home it is, too. Faith, I do hope you were only speaking in the heat of the moment.”

  “Captain Merrick. Another turncoat, I see. Last I saw of you was back in ’74 when you were in the Royal Navy and were about to take Charles over the seas to Boston. I’ve read about your exploits in our newspapers.” His eyes hardened. “What is this place, a damned den of rebels?”

  “We’re Americans!” Mira shot back, “and proud of it!”

  Brendan smiled tightly. “I will forgive the insult, Your Grace, as enough blood has been shed here today and there’s no need for more. Now please, come with me. This den of rebels, as you call it, is waking up around us and will not show you, an Englishman and an aristocrat at that, the mercy my cousin has. In fact, I daresay you’re not safe here at all. Come with me, all of you. You can stay with us until we figure this out.”

  “I am not staying with you or anyone else, I am taking my family and we are all going back to England.”

  “How?”

  “The frigate that brought me here is cruising just offshore. Her captain is waiting for us.”

  Brendan shrugged. “I daresay his wait will be a long one, as there’s no way he can get into that river with the piers sunken across its entrance, and no way that any ship here will allow him to. Oh, no, Your Grace. I’m afraid you’re my guest until we get this sorted out, at which time either Ruaidri or I will bring you down to New York and deliver you into the hands of your countrymen, since that’s the nearest city that they happen to still have a stronghold in. Until then, since you refuse my offer of hospitality in our home, you can make your quarters on my ship. I’m sure you’ll find her quite comfortable.”

  Blackheath just stared at him. He was outnumbered, beaten, and he knew it. He glared at Ruaidri, his eyes murderous. “You’ll die for this. I promise.” And then, to Andrew, “You’re coming with me.”

  “No, he’s not.” Ruaidri had managed to net his flitting thoughts and stuff them back into his pounding head enough to finally trust his own voice. “My mission as an officer in the Continental Navy was to bring that explosive back from England and hand it over to John Adams. I’m sure Lord Andrew will be free to make his own choices durin’ both Adam’s interview and whatever follows it.”

  “I will not permit you to hand my brother over to some rebel knave.”

  “Ye don’t have a say in the matter.”

  Sensing the tension rising between the two once more, Brendan seized the duke’s elbow. “Come, the town’s waking up and you’re not safe here,” he said, his tone growing increasingly urgent. “Let me take you all out to Kestrel.”

  “I am not finished here, Merrick.”

  “Yes,” Ruaidri said flatly, pulling Nerissa close. “You are.”

  Blackheath’s eyes were beginning to glitter with cunning intelligence and deadly promise. He looked at Ruaidri and didn’t say a word.

  He didn’t have to.

  “I told you before,” Ruaidri said. “You’re no longer commanding the world around you from the House of Lords or that miserable pile of rock that’s your ancestral home. You’re standing on an American street, surrounded by Yankee sea captains, myself included, whose decision ’twill be as to whether ye ever make it back England.”

  Lucien stared coldly at him. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

  “You did have the chance and you didn’t. Just as I had the chance, and didn’t. And ye know why I didn’t, Blackheath? Ye know why I held back during our fight? ’Twas because of yer sister and the fact I love her. Don’t think for a moment I couldn’t have ended yer life had I wanted to, but I wouldn’t give her that grief. She’s suffered enough.”

  “Big words from a beaten man,” Lucien said coldly.

  “Not so beaten. American jails are as capable of holding English dukes as they are British tars, soldiers and sea officers. Your gettin’ out of this hellhole will depend on my charity, along with my cousin’s. And the good people of this town, who don’t have a whole lot of use for lofty English ideas and an aristocracy who think they rule the world. Those days are over. Done with.” He offered his arm to Nerissa. “Good day, yer Grace. Perhaps when next we meet, yer way of announcin’ yerself will be a bit more…gentlemanly.”

  “You should have killed him when you had the chance,” Cooper murmured beneath his breath.

  “I tried.”

  Lucien watched them go. Beside him, Andrew stood sullenly, obviously torn between any misguided friendship he had with the Parasite and joining his brother. A little distance away, Merrick’s gaze had moved to the waterfront, past the many masts silhouetted against the brightening eastern horizon to the river’s mouth. It didn’t take a genius to know what he was thinking—of the frigate waiting out there beyond it, a frigate that, O’ Devir had made clear, was now about as accessible to him as a walk on the moon and was no
w fair game for any particularly enterprising Yankee sea captain—and Merrick, Lucien knew, was particularly enterprising.

  He, Lucien de Montforte, was stranded here in this godforsaken hellhole.

  And as the Parasite had reminded him, powerless.

  He longed to smash something to vent his frustration, to forego the constraints of his breeding and heritage and finish this with either pistol or sword, and then he realized there was one sure way to finish it and it had nothing to do with sullying his hands with more physical violence.

  “Nerissa,” he called after the retreating pair.

  She turned and looked at him, her eyes wounded, the tears still wet upon her face.

  “It is bad enough that you would marry a man so far beneath you,” he said. “It is bad enough that you would marry a man that your family does not accept, a man for whom you have thrown away your birthright, heritage and country, a man who will never be able to keep you in the comfort and luxury in which you’ve been raised and to which you’ve been accustomed.” He waited for his words to sink in, and then he dropped the killing blow. “But for you to knowingly walk off with an accused killer, a man who murdered his very best friend….”

  Bang. He saw the fatal shot hit home as the blood drained from the Parasite’s face.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nerissa said uncertainly, and tried to continue on.

  “Don’t you? Do you mean this vermin you’ve wed hasn’t told you?” Lucien’s smile was coldly triumphant. “Josiah Brown. A duel, 1776. You shot him, didn’t you, O’ Devir? Your very best friend in the world, and all over a woman you both purported to love.” The blows he’d dealt the Irishman during the fight were nothing compared to the damage his words now caused, and Lucien felt a dark and savage satisfaction as he watched stunned denial and fear, yes fear, steal the color from that rascal’s hated face. “Dolores Foley was the wench’s name, wasn’t it? And she’s dead now, too.”