Thad bit back a choice word when his elbow connected with the table’s edge on his way to the floor, and he gave Arnaud a foot in the gut to push him away. “Blast it, Alain, that hurt.”
“That hurt?” He scrambled back to his feet, leaving Thad little choice but to jump back to his. “Try being whipped until your back is raw.”
Thad rolled his shoulders forward, his arms raised. “I told you not to go. Why could you not have listened?”
“You think I have not asked myself that a million times?” He took a swing that Thad ducked. Then he charged him and knocked Thad onto the chair.
He used the momentum to roll Arnaud over him and onto the floor with a thud. “It would all be so different.”
“I know!” Fury drenched the words, fury obviously aimed at himself. Not that that stopped him from hooking a foot under the chair and tipping it backward, Thad along with it. “I know. But someone had to go, and you refused.”
The impact was negligible, just enough to make him want to let loose a few strong words. Words that would be aimed more at the past than the jab of pain. “You are right. It should have been me who went.”
Arnaud spat out something in French and lobbed a pillow at Thad’s head. “Of all the idiotic things to say! Why? Why should it have been you? Because you could have evaded the pirates? Outsmarted them?”
“Because I had nothing to lose! No one was depending on me.” He grabbed the pillow and whipped it at Arnaud’s face before pushing up to his feet.
Arnaud sent the cushion flying toward the ottoman. “Are you daft? You have an entire nation depending on you. You are the one who knows every blasted man, woman, and child from Florida to Canada. You are the one Tallmadge trusts implicitly, who everyone trusts implicitly.”
“What then, Alain?” Thad spread his arms wide, making himself a target if that was what his friend needed. “What should I have done? Should I have kept my distance and left Peggy and your babe with no help?”
Arnaud spun away and kicked another stray pillow. “Don’t be a fool.”
“What then? What should I have done?”
“I don’t know! Perhaps exactly what you did!” Somehow he made it sound like an accusation, even pivoting around with a pointed finger. “Yes, you should have taken care of them. You should have raised Jacques as your own. Perhaps you even should have married her. But if so, then you should have loved her, Thad! She deserved to be loved.”
He might as well have hurled grapeshot at him. Thad took a step back, his arms falling limp at his sides. “How?” His voice came out like a rusty hinge. “How could I love her when she was still yours? When you were every other word that fell from her lips?”
Arnaud’s finger shook.
Edging closer, Thad reached out and gripped his friend’s shoulder. “We did what we felt was best. But her heart was yours, was always yours.”
There had never been room for him. He had known that the day he proposed. And she had apologized for it the day she died. As if it had been something she could help, as if he had not understood. As if he blamed her for it, and for not holding on long enough to give him the family she thought she owed him.
Arnaud drew in a shuddering breath. “Do I apologize for that?”
“No.” Thad swallowed. “Just do not begrudge me my chance now. Please.”
Arnaud knocked his arm away. “Again with the idiocy. Why do you think I am trying to keep you from making an utter mess with Miss Fairchild?”
“I am not making a mess of anything!” He shoved Arnaud two steps backward. “We were getting along quite well before you came in and exploded like an overcharged cannon.”
“Fire and brimstone, Thad, if it were anyone else you would be the first to point it out.” He indicated the door. “That girl is not ready for you.”
Growling, he shoved his hands into his hair and gripped it, but that did nothing to relieve the pressure building in his head. “Why is it that every man, woman, and child from Florida to Canada trusts me except for you?”
Arnaud had drawn closer again and reached out again to push him. “Why is it that you think you are the only one who can ever know what is right, ever do it right?”
“Because you cannot even figure out why you are angry! Is it over Gwyneth or Peggy? Because I married your wife or because I didn’t love her?” He returned the push, though Arnaud leaned into it and tried to reach his shoulders.
“Boys!”
There had been a day when that tone from his father would have stopped them both cold. And it had, on many occasions, brought an end to a scuffle much like this one. Not today.
Father huffed. “This way of solving your differences may have been understandable when you were ten, but now? How old are you?”
Arnaud rolled his eyes. Only, Thad was sure, because his back was to Father. “Younger, I believe, than you were when your brother last visited, though I recall seeing you with your arm locked around his head.”
Father’s lips twitched. “Entirely different. Archie and I were not fighting. ’Twas all in good fun.”
Arnaud changed his position, and they both staggered to the right. Thad smiled. “I daresay that for this to be termed fighting, we would have to be trying to hurt each other.”
They staggered back to the left.
“Hmm.” Father leaned into the wall. “You do have a point. But you scared Gwyneth away.”
“What?” Thad straightened and absently steadied his friend. Of course he had known Gwyneth left the room. But he had assumed…what? She was outside in the hall? Waiting to wrap her arms around him when he emerged? “Where did she go?”
“Up to her room, behind the locked door.” Father jerked his head upward in illustration. “Your mother followed her up to make excuses for you—”
“Excuses?”
Father leveled a glare on him. “You ought to have explained the situation well before now, Thaddeus, if you have fallen in love with her. In any case, I was sent in here to try to intervene. As if I were going to come between those flailing limbs.”
“See?” Arnaud pulled his waistcoat back into place and turned to face Father. “He is moving too fast and not taking the time for leisurely conversations that allow them to share all this necessary information.”
Father tilted his head to the side. “He may have a point, son.”
Thad lifted a hand in exasperation. “She may have only been here two months, but I have seen her each and every day. And I know this—I know I love her.” Seeing the shaking of Arnaud’s head, he moved that extended hand toward his sire. “Father, how long had you known Mother before you realized you had fallen in love?”
Father’s head moved to the other side. “He does have a point, Alain. I had scarcely even seen her in the two and a half months I had known her, but there was no question where my heart had inclined.”
Arnaud folded his arms across his chest. “And then you courted her another nine months before you proposed. Because you had to be sure you really understood each other before you made any commitments.”
“And that point is Alain’s.”
“How is that one his? I kissed her. I did not call the reverend to marry us here and now.”
Father opened his mouth, but Arnaud pivoted to Thad again, outrage in his eyes. “She is living here! Do you think it wise to go around kissing her if you do not intend to marry her quickly?”
Father’s sigh sounded as blustery as an October day. “I am certain Thad is aware of the delicate balance he must strike.”
Arnaud’s aristocratic nose went into the air, which gave Thad a sudden understanding of why the peasants in France had hauled all the aristocracy to the guillotine. “I am none too sure. Tell me, sir, what would have happened with you and your wife, do you think, had you not taken the time to properly court?”
“Ah.” Father’s eyes lit, and he lifted a finger into the air. “I have given it thought. I daresay that had we—”
“Alain.” Thad slapped his friend’s arm. “Asking him to expound on a hypothetical? What were you thinking?”
Arnaud snorted. “My mistake. I apologize.”
“Insufferable pups. Though I suppose I should be glad you can agree on something.” Father pushed off from the wall and took a few steps into the room. He measured Thad with his probing gaze and then turned it on Arnaud. “You cannot know how it has pained us to watch the two of you lately. Always you had been like brothers, even before we took you in, Alain.”
Arnaud’s nose moved back down, past its normal angle and into a humble one. “You know I am grateful for all you did for me. Sending me to school, funding my ventures—”
“I am not asking for thanks.” Father drew in a deep breath, his regard making Thad want to wriggle like a recalcitrant schoolboy. “I know how it must have hurt when you returned and discovered what had happened while you were gone. But we all thought you dead, every one of us.”
Arnaud shifted from foot to foot.
Father shook his head. “For two years Winter and I have watched, waiting to see if the fissure would be healed or grow into a chasm. Frankly, I am amazed you have gone this long without having it out about Peggy.”
Without moving his gaze from Father, Arnaud reached over to punch Thad in the arm. “We spoke of her often enough, but if ever I tried to draw him out on my feelings over him marrying her, he would ignore me.”
Rather than hit him back, Thad slid a step away. “Draw me out? Bait me, you mean. And I did not want to fight with you over her.”
“Maybe I needed you to. Has that never occurred to you? You, who can always tell what everyone else needs?”
“Did it help?” Thad took another step away, his mind screaming that it was time to leave. Time to escape this conversation before he lost his brother yet again—forever this time. “Do you feel better now for having accused me of seducing her, for insinuating I was wrong for marrying her, and then wrong for not loving her as you did?”
Arnaud didn’t budge. “You did not avoid the topic because you thought it best for me. You avoided it because you did not want to face what you did. Because deep down you felt you betrayed me by marrying her.”
He took another step toward the door. “I did not.”
“Face it, Thad. You could as easily have sent her and Jacques to your parents, to Amelia, to Philly. Any one of them would have taken them in. But it had to be you. It always has to be you who swoops in to save the day.”
He could only shake his head.
“And now you are doing the same thing with Miss Fairchild.”
Enough. “You, of all people, should understand that I love her. You, who still love Peggy to the depths of your soul.” He ate up the distance to the door and paused at the threshold to face Arnaud again. “The problem is that you don’t trust me. You haven’t trusted me since you came home.”
Not waiting for a response, he ducked his way out of the room and strode down the hall. He grabbed his hat as he charged out into the warm twilight.
His head hurt. His chest ached. And he hadn’t even the satisfaction of slamming the door behind him, as Father’s foot stopped it. Thad opened his legs to their full length to put space between him and the man who always saw far too much.
“I will run to keep up if I must, son, but it would be the kind thing to spare my aging joints and wait for me.”
“If you intend to lecture me, Professor, stay home.” But he held up at the gate.
Father approached with that infuriating, knowing smirk that had plagued the family for decades. “Where are we going?”
Thad shrugged and led the way to the street. “Are you going to take his side?”
Father chuckled. “Probably, to you. And then when I talk with him later, I will take yours.”
“Ever the devil’s advocate.”
“Ever the father who wants his children, even the one not born of his flesh, to have no rifts between them.”
“’Tisn’t a rift.” It couldn’t be. Rifts were permanent. “’Tis only a…strain.”
Father’s silence deafened him. And it stretched on and on until they turned the corner and headed, as Thad’s feet always did, toward the bay. At which point the elder man finally spoke, so softly that Thad could scarcely hear him over a wagon rattling by. “You may have chosen the sea above the classroom, but I taught you how to examine an argument. Have you done so here? Have you paused to entertain the notion that Alain may be right about your motives with Peggy?”
Thad shouldn’t have waited for his father to catch up. “I could not have sent her to Amelia. She had just had the twins and her hands were full. Philly had lost her babe, and Grandmama Caro had just moved to Maryland. You were having troubles at the college—”
“But family has always come first, and Peggy and Jack were family. You know any one of us would have helped.”
“Yes, but…” He could hear Arnaud’s accusation ringing in his ears, that it must always be him that saved the day. But it wasn’t that. “I had nothing to put aside. Nothing to juggle. I was the one Lane with no obligations, no family of his own…and I had already been helping so much. Jack…I was his father. The only one he had.”
Father sighed and followed him when he turned down a random, shadowed alley. “Your grandfather Hampton once gave your mother an ultimatum. Do you remember the story? She must marry by July or be tossed to the streets. I had been courting her for six months and had yet to break through her wall, and I had no idea she was in such dire straits. She stood there, the night when she had run out of time, and kept that terrible secret to herself. Because she thought if she told me, I would marry her in an instant.”
Thad glanced over at the familiar crease in his brow. “You would have.”
“Of course I would have, in half an instant. But your mother held her tongue because she did not want a marriage of obligation. Which is exactly what your marriage to Peggy was. And while I believe you would have found a steady resting place, the point remains that it is a difficult way to begin a life together. All you two ever had was a beginning.”
A beginning haunted by her husband’s ghost.
He blinked it away as he shook his head. “You know what plagues me, Father? The questions of what would have happened had the Lord granted her healing. If she were still alive when Alain came home, if he found her married to me…”
Father winced, though surely he had wondered it as well. There wasn’t a question in the universe Bennet Lane had not entertained at one point or another. “An ugly possibility.”
“Which leads me to a prayer of thanksgiving that God, in His wisdom, spared us that. But that, of course, begs another question.”
“Thad.” Father paused at the alley’s mouth and stayed his son with a hand on his arm. “You cannot think that way. To think He let her die to save you from that awkwardness, that it is therefore your fault she died because of the decision you made to marry her—that way is a twisted path that will lead you straight into the jowls of depression.”
He focused his gaze on a crumbling brick in the corner of the building behind his father. “Was it a mistake? Your honest opinion. Should I have married her?”
Father made no rash answer. He let his eyes wander upward as he pursed his lips. Then, after a long moment, he met Thad’s gaze again. “It was not a mistake. You provided Jack with a family, a sanctuary. You gave Peggy a feeling of purpose again. She told your mother it was the first time she had had a goal since she lost Alain. To be a good wife, to show Jack what family was meant to be.”
That was what he had always told himself. But somehow, with his best friend staring him down, it came off lacking. He let out the breath he had been holding and started forward again. “Maybe. But maybe I should have refused to touch her—”
“That is not how God designed marriage, son. And certainly not how He designed man. Which leads us to Alain’s concerns about you and Gwyneth.”
Thad groaned and, after a quick glance both directions, crossed to the other side of the street. “He overreacted. I kissed her, yes, but that is all. I will not apologize for it.”
“I will settle for you apologizing to her. Not for kissing her, but for kissing her before you explained what has made you the man you are and gave her the chance to reciprocate.”
He clenched his jaw and let that simmer as they closed the distance to the next intersection. “How upset was she?”
“She ran away from your mother. What does that tell you?”
That this might have to be a very long walk if he hoped to return and find her calm enough to want to speak with him. He lifted a hand to rub at the sore muscles in his neck. He was getting too old for wrestling matches with Arnaud. “What am I to do? I love her. I love her like I have never loved anyone, like I had begun to think myself incapable of loving.”
“Then you rest in the knowledge that a love so deep will not fade, and you give her the opportunity to mourn her father and recover from the trauma of seeing him killed.”
The scent of the bay teased Thad’s nose, and he caught a glimpse of dark water between the buildings. He knew what waited there—the Chesapeake merchant fleet, stranded in the harbor. And beyond it, over the horizon, the line of British vessels that held them there.
A vise went tight within him; a shiver slithered up his spine. “What if I haven’t that much time?”
Father again came to a halt, more abruptly than before. “Why would you say such a thing?”
Thad quickened his pace, his feet pulling like a lodestone toward his ship.
“Thaddeus!” A few pounding footfalls, and Father was at his side again. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” But whatever it was, it thrummed through him, setting every nerve ablaze. “It is the same feeling I get out at sea when a storm is coming.”
“Your mother insists you are no changeling, but I think you must be to have such a strange intuition. If I could bottle it, I would be the wealthiest man in the nation.”
Thad laughed and mentally thanked his father for a reason to do so. “I thought the stories of changelings were that the fairies stole the real children and replaced them with ones who were stupid and oafish.”
“There is no need to insult yourself, son. You are odd without question, but not stupid.”
He laughed again. Then he stopped as another alleyway loomed before them, stopped a mere second before a figure stepped out. Familiar, but not familiarly clothed. He sucked in a breath. “Mr. Bolton?”
Congressman Tallmadge, dressed like a farmer, emerged from the shadows with a frown. “The Misters Lane. You could not have received my note already.”
Father’s frown matched his friend’s. “We were out for a walk. What brings you to Baltimore, B—John?”
The congressman glanced between them and then nodded toward the Chesapeake. “Walk with me and I will explain as we go.” They flanked him as he continued on the path Thad had already set out. “Captain Lane, forgive me for taking liberties, but I sent my men to gather your crew. The moon is new and the night will be dark, thereby safe to slip past the British. Henry assures me he can pilot you safely through the blockade.”
Thad’s heart pounded nearly as fast as it had when he held Gwyneth in his arms. “You are sending me to sea? Tonight?”
“I have little choice.” His voice low, Tallmadge looked all around them. “We both know the British fleet is on its way from Europe, and as soon as they arrive, they will decide where in the region to attack. We need to know where they are, how many they are, and when they will be here. We cannot wait for someone else to discover this by chance, Captain. And if you wait any longer, the moon will not be new, and you will be forced to go the long way around to avoid detection.”
But if he intended to set sail tonight, it would have to be when tide and darkness were both with him. Which would mean that he would have to board his brig within the next few minutes.
He sighed. Tallmadge’s point was undeniable. And had it been any other day, Thad would have bounded most gratefully onto Masquerade. But today? Tonight? Now? He looked past the congressman to his father.
Father stared right back at him. “You said a month ago you wanted action.”
“Yes, but Gwyn is already upset with me.” Arnaud would understand, but would she? “If I leave without warning…”
“A bit of distance just now may be for the best. I will explain the situation.”
Tallmadge’s head swung from Thad to Father and back again. “Gwyn? The Gwyn you mentioned when you came to see me last month? Why would she be upset if you leave?”
Thad cleared his throat. He had a feeling that the head of the Culper Ring would not be entirely thrilled to learn that his Samuel Culper III was in love with the daughter of a British general. A murdered British general, whose brother-in-law was set upon the destruction of their country.
Father laughed. “Take one guess, old man.”
Tallmadge sighed. “In my day, one waited until the war was over before one turned one’s attention to matters of courting.”
Father, bless him, nudged his longtime friend with an elbow. “You may have. Some of us are quite capable of juggling both concerns at once.”
With a shake of his head, the congressman turned with Thad toward the docks. “Tell me you will go. If you do not, I cannot think who to send.”
His crew would be but a skeleton. Getting out of the harbor would be dangerous, finding the fleet risky, and getting home again an ordeal.
But his feet itched with excitement and purpose thudded through his veins. “They will head to Bermuda first, I am sure. I can await them there to get the count. Though Masquerade will need water and food—”
“I have men loading it even now, enough for the short trip. You will have to purchase more once there, though.”
“A good excuse for landing.”
And there she was, his first love, bustling with life again after two years asleep in the harbor. Dock workers carried crates and rolled barrels toward and onto her, and the Masquerade bobbed joyfully in response. He spotted his crew—the few still alive and not fighting off the Redcoats elsewhere—on the deck, in the lines, on the dock.
Henry jogged their way, his white teeth the only thing on his person that stood out in the quickly falling darkness. “There you are, Captain. I wanted to tell you I talked it over with Emmy, and she knows I be gone longer than usual this time. You gonna need me to lend a hand the whole way.”
He slapped a grateful hand to Henry’s back, nodded at Tallmadge, and caught Father’s gaze. “You will make sure she understands?”
“I will.” And he would see everything at home was cared for, Thad knew.
Except he could not promise to bring rest to Gwyneth’s spirit, could he? The insomnia might come back. The nightmares might strike again in what minutes of sleep she could find. When he managed to return, it might be to find her hollow and haunted once again, their progress lost.
You must always be the one to swoop in to the rescue.
The tension in his chest throbbed. Dear Lord… But what could he pray? “We had better hurry. Farewell, Mr. Bolton. Father—give everyone my love and request their prayers.”
Thad’s fingers curled into his palm. Dear Lord…I commit her to You.