Chapter Three
JACQUELINE MUCH PREFERRED EAVESDROPPING at doors—except at Haverston. The doors in that old mansion were much too thick, some even reinforced with metal, so it would be hard to hear through them unless there was shouting on the other side, which there wasn’t. She did check first, but only for a second. And since members of her family could traverse the halls at any moment, she couldn’t have stood there in plain sight with her ear to the study door anyway.
She hurried outside instead, leaving unnoticed through the back door of the house, and ran around to the study windows. She expected them to be open on that warm summer night and they were. She even peeked inside to confirm who was in there with her father—her uncles Warren and Boyd.
Anthony arrived just as she ducked below the window ledge. He wasn’t sailing with James, so what input he might have Jack couldn’t guess. Or he might just be there to provide moral support. No matter how angry Tony might be with James, he would still stand firmly with his brother against the Yanks, as her father and Tony called the Anderson side of her family. But there wasn’t going to be any sort of confrontation with Boyd and Warren tonight, verbal or otherwise, not when James had accepted their help on this mission.
Jacqueline was waiting so tensely to hear something from inside the room that she was startled when her brother Jeremy squatted down beside her, whispering, “I should have known I’d find you here first.”
She just put her finger to her lips as she scowled at him for finding her hiding spot. But he still asked, “What’d I miss?”
“Nothing yet,” she hissed, though she glanced quickly beyond her brother to make sure Percival Alden hadn’t tagged along with him. Percy was a long-standing friend of the family who could be depended on to do one thing—blunder. And in this case, that would be alerting her father to their eavesdropping outside the window.
“You heard from Drew?” Warren said inside the study.
“It’s not encouraging,” James answered. “Read it for yourself.”
Warren must have picked up Drew’s letter because he quickly pointed out, “Says here it’s not the pirate you and Drew suspected, that Pierre Lacross is still in prison on Anguilla.”
“Read the next part,” James prompted.
Boyd proved he was standing next to his brother and reading the letter at the same time when he said, “So the warden of that prison seemed a little nervous to Drew at the mention of Lacross? That’s actually understandable for a man living behind stone walls with hundreds of convicted criminals, don’t you think?”
“I do,” James agreed. “It’s the part about the warden refusing to allow your brother to see Lacross for himself. Drew is the only one of you who would recognize Pierre Lacross if he saw him because he was with me when I captured Lacross.”
“The warden could have denied Drew’s request for any number of reasons,” Warren put in. “Knowing Drew, he’s just annoyed that he couldn’t talk his way around that warden.”
Boyd added, “And that could mainly be because it’s a British prison and Drew’s American origins become obvious the moment he opens his mouth.”
Anthony chuckled. “Now that’s the more likely reason when Englishmen tend not to be cooperative with you Yanks even on a good day.”
“We’re not antagonizing them, Tony,” James warned his brother. “Keep your annoyance with me on me, not on them.”
“Then what am I even doing here?”
“I thought you might want to be included, in case you change your mind and decide to sail with me.”
“Not bloody likely, old boy. I’m staying close to home in case Judy changes her mind about that bounder Tremayne and returns home, needing a father’s shoulder to cry on. You can tell me all the gory details when you get back to England.”
“Then you might as well return to the party,” James suggested.
“Didn’t say I wasn’t interested,” Anthony grumbled.
Warren said, “Well, even if we still don’t know who we’re looking for, I’m game to leave now. I’ve been landlocked far too long. And we can investigate more once we get to the West Indies.”
James said, “If Drew and I didn’t both suspect Lacross is responsible for Jack’s abduction, I wouldn’t have given him this much time to try to confirm it. Drew checked Pierre’s old fortress island. It was deserted, but there were signs of recent occupation. And he wasted weeks trying to find out who had been there recently and where they went, which is why we didn’t hear from him before now.”
“But if Lacross is still in prison, what did Drew even hope to find there?” Boyd asked.
“Not all of that pirate’s men were captured the night we defeated him. But in any case, I should have been on my way back there long before now, considering that when I retired from the sea, I left more’n one enemy behind in the Caribbean. Drew wouldn’t know them if he met them. I need to talk to them myself to determine if any of them hatched this plot. Drew doesn’t know who to question to get answers that might be helpful, whereas I—”
“Get answers by any means,” Warren said, then added abashed, “That was a compliment, James, not a slur.”
Anthony chuckled. “You’re taking all the fun out of this, Yank.” But then he said to his brother, “No need to fry me, old boy. You might have upped your truce with them a notch for the duration of this mission, but I haven’t.”
James ignored that remark, saying, “I would have left sooner if my darling Jack hadn’t kept this from me. She found it on the ship that sailed off with her from Bridgeport. Her abductor, the ship’s captain, insisted on sending us a more polite version of the original ransom note.”
“A polite kidnapper?” Boyd said in surprise.
Warren snorted. “What kind of pirate writes a polite note?”
Anthony read it aloud: “ ‘Your life for hers. Sound familiar? You know the place. Do hurry, mon ami.’ ”
James explained, “Jack made a copy of this more goading note penned by her abductor’s boss before she forgot the exact words.”
“Yet she kept it a secret from you all this time?” Anthony asked. “Why?”
“She was afraid I would be walking into a trap if I returned to the Caribbean too soon, that they would be expecting me. The writer, who she knows is Catherine Meyer’s father, obviously thought I would know exactly who he was by those otherwise cryptic words.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, except he’s still in prison.”
Warren said, “Lacross again?”
“Now wait,” Boyd put in. “You can’t assume the man is French just because of that mon ami. I’m not all that familiar with the French language, but doesn’t that particular phrase mean ‘my friend’?”
“Sarcasm at its best,” James replied. “That note implies he wanted me to know exactly who was orchestrating my demise without providing proof that could be used in a court of law. And that, more’n anything else, sounds like Lacross. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Lacross has a daughter who’s a jewel thief and as clever as a fox, that shrew Catherine Meyer, who our fake distant relative Andrássy brought aboard The Maiden George.”
“Does she resemble Lacross?” Warren asked.
“Not closely enough for me to conclude that she’s his daughter,” James admitted. “But she could be doing Lacross’s dirty work. Either the warden in Anguilla lied to Drew, or Lacross is pulling strings from inside that prison. The point of this entire plan could have been to hand-deliver me to that prison and right into his cell.”
“Not possible,” Boyd disagreed. “I thought you nobles never got locked up for anything.”
“That’s usually the case,” James said. “But Captain Hawke would be.”
“Captain Hawke died in England. I could have sworn you made sure of it.”
“I did,” James said. “But news of Hawke’s demise might not have reached all the islands in the Caribbean, where warrants for Hawke’s capture could still be active. And I’ve been back there and someone who knew me as Captain Hawke might have spotted me. More to the point, Lacross saw me when I helped Drew rescue Gabby and Lacross was captured, so he knows I’m not dead. What I can’t figure out is how Lacross or whoever is behind this plot figured out that Hawke is James Malory. I went to great lengths to keep Hawke’s true identity a secret.”
Warren groaned. “Are we going to have to attack a British prison?”
“No—well, I hope not,” James replied. “I do need to have a talk with that warden, though. However, I can also think of two other men who might have said something similar to what’s in that original note. So many questions remain. Nothing is conclusive other than I’m sailing the morning after that damned masquerade ball I got browbeaten into attending.”
Boyd chuckled, guessing, “Georgie at her finest, eh?”
“On the contrary. I just bloody well hate balls. My George, however, can be enjoyably persuasive.”
“Oh, God, he didn’t just imply—?” Warren started to complain.
Anthony cut in with a snicker. “Course he did, Yank.”
Outside, Jeremy helped Jacqueline to her feet to escort her back inside the house, complaining, “I should have been in that room, but he’s refused to let me participate.”
“You think I didn’t try? He’s adamant that neither of us can go.”
Jeremy snorted. “I understand why you’re being excluded, but I lived in the islands and know the Caribbean like the back of my hand. I would be a real asset and he knows it.”
“Let’s try not to insult me, Brother,” Jack said drily. “You or I would make a perfect hostage that could stay his hand in a battle with his nemesis. So we need to bow out even if we don’t like it.”
“You do, but I still have time to change his mind. When is that ball that he referred to?”
Jacqueline rolled her eyes. Jeremy wasn’t going to win that argument with their father any more than she had. But still smarting over her own exclusion, she wasn’t about to stay there and try to convince him. She had to find Gabby and get her to tell her everything she knew about the pirate Pierre Lacross.