Becket's Last Stand

Poor Eleanor. Cassandra decided she’d suffered enough. “Let me comb your hair. It’s all tangled in the back, from lying against those pillows.”

“Oh, I suppose so,” Eleanor said, sitting up. “Jack must think I’ve got birds nesting in my hair at times. But aren’t I keeping you from something?”

“Not a bit of it,” Cassandra said, grabbing the brush from the dressing table and climbing back up on the bed, kneeling behind her sister. “I can’t think of anything more enjoyable than spending time here with you.”

“Which explains why you’re pulling my hair out of my head—ouch!”

“Sorry,” Cassandra mumbled, trying not to giggle. But she’d talked so long with Eleanor that she’d lost track of time, and Jack would be coming into the bedchamber at any moment, while Mariah kept Odette occupied checking on young William Henry’s supposed putrid throat. “Oh, see how pretty you look now? Let me get you that bed jacket over there, and put it around your shoulders. I think I feel a chill.”

“Cassandra,” Eleanor said sternly as her sister dashed away, running back with the lace-edged bed jacket, “what are you doing? And don’t tell me you invited everyone in here to my prison to entertain me, because I’m in no mood to be cheered by a gaggle of people who can come and go as they please while I’m stuck here like some—Jack? I thought you were all meeting over at The Last Voyage to decide who next goes out on maneuvers with the Respite.”

“Yes, I imagine you do think that, since that’s what I told you,” her husband said, smiling at Cassandra.

He’d changed his clothes since she’d last seen him, and his dark blond hair was still damp from his bath. Jack always had a rather lean yet rugged look about him, riding out on the Marsh daily, his skin darkly tanned, making the laugh lines around his mouth and eyes stand out in relief when he smiled. He looked dangerous, while Eleanor looked the Compleat Lady. And they loved each other very much. “Thank you, she looks beautiful. Not that you aren’t always beautiful, darling, so don’t go pulling a face at me. Now, are you ready to go downstairs?”

“Down— Downstairs?” Eleanor shook her head, looking incredulous. “What did you all do, lock Odette in the cellars? She won’t let me leave this bed.”

“What Odette doesn’t know won’t hurt us, or at least not until she finds out,” Jack said as Cassandra pulled back the covers and helped Eleanor on with her slippers, not that her sister’s feet would ever touch the floor, and then arranged her long nightgown so it covered the scars on her ankle. “At Morgan’s suggestion, we’re having a musical evening, and as you’ve been such a brave little soldier for all this time, we thought we’d include you.”

He slipped his arms beneath her and she wound her hands around his neck as he lifted her from the bed, high against his chest. “Well, look at me, Cassandra, holding my entire family in my arms. Gives a man pause, I’ll tell you.”

“Just don’t be so nervous that you trip with your family as you go down the stairs.”

“My darling wife, always so trusting.”

“I was only teasing, Jack, poking fun at my new weight that you couldn’t have been expecting. But, to speak of being trusting, and I don’t wish to appear ungrateful, not when you’ve all gone to so much trouble—but will Spence be singing?”

“Not if there’s a merciful God,” Jack said, carrying his wife toward the door, Cassandra following behind, so happy for her sister, who’d found her Jack, and who would soon, after so much heartache, have her own child to hold.

COURTLAND WALKED DOWN the hallway toward the music room still holding a sheaf of papers filled with drawings of the first and second lines of passive defenses he and Ainsley had commissioned a few weeks earlier, all of them now in place.

Thankfully, Ainsley had at last been able to convince the women in Becket Village to leave. Except for the stubborn Becket women and some of the household staff, who refused to leave Eleanor, who could not be moved without imperiling her unborn child. They’d taken their children inland with them, out of the way of battle and safe from the defenses that now made the area dangerous even to its inhabitants. They had all gone together, but would break off for predetermined destinations in small villages scattered throughout Romney Marsh, so that no one would raise an eyebrow at an influx of over one hundred new inhabitants descending on the same place.

Becket Hall, Becket Village, were now little more than armed camps…and one musical evening meant to entertain Eleanor.

Mentally, not really needing to consult his lists, Courtland reviewed their defenses.

Deadfalls fitted out with wooden spikes and seamlessly hidden beneath the landscape were now located in the tall reeds to the East, behind the treacherous, shifting sands along the shoreline that were their own deterrent.

Protective trenches had been dug around the Western and Northern sides of Becket Village, in places more than twelve feet deep—good for burying Beales’s dead hirelings once the assault was over, Spence had joked. Again, these defenses were camouflaged with grasses and shrubs, ready to snare the unwary, and too wide for most men to jump across them if they were discovered.

The shingle and sand beach and the first dozen or more feet of shallow sea in front of the village and Becket Hall itself had been studded with sharp sticks of wood tied together to make large structures that, to Courtland, looked like enormous children’s playing jacks, preventing small boats from landing easily and then slowing any force trying to make its way across the beach. Only those who lived at Becket Hall knew the paths through these obstacles that wouldn’t end with a foot impaled on hidden nine-inch metal spikes Jasper and Waylon had fashioned in the smithy.