The Reckless One (McClairen’s Isle #2)

Chapter 1

D IEPPE , F RANCE A PRIL 1760

A fine drizzle seeped from the low, gunmetal-colored sky above the prison yard. The head jailer, Armand, bounced his cudgel in his palm, his already bad mood exacerbated by having to stand outside in this weather. Well, he promised himself, he wouldn’t stand in it any longer than necessary.

“Hold his cursed head down in the water till he passes out if you must,” he barked at the two beefy warders straining to force the half-naked man to his knees before a water trough.

They were having little success. The man fought like the devil. He’d always fought like the devil. Ever since he’d been sent here from the prison at Le Havre, after his short-lived escape.

Armand pulled his timepiece from his pocket and angled the face into the rush light. Five o’clock and it was already dark. Cold too, he thought, noting the vapor lifting from the prisoner’s bare skin. Damn cold.

“Curse your misbegotten birth, hurry!” he shouted.

Madame would be arriving soon, heralded by a note received less than an hour before telling him to have ready an assortment of “exotic specimens.” Spontaneous visits were unlike Madame Noir. Usually she gave Armand ample warning of her intentions—and her needs—so that he could make certain that her arrival did not coincide with that of his superiors. They would not look kindly on Armand and Madame’s little arrangement.

But the perverse itch that tormented Madame this day apparently needed immediate scratching. Aristocrats, Armand thought and spat at the slick black cobbles. Who could account for their whims? If she didn’t pay so well for her sport, he would have refused to see her. But she did pay.

A sudden burst of activity at the trough drew his attention. The prisoner had heeled back and rammed his elbow into the older guard’s gut. The younger guard retaliated with a vicious blow across the prisoner’s temple. A gash appeared above his brow, oozing blood. He dropped to his knees.

“Non , Pierre, you imbecile!” Armand sprinted forth, swinging his cudgel. “No marks! Drown him if you must but no marks, do you hear?”

“Oui , no marks,” Pierre grumbled.

“And you, English bite,” Armand said, grasping a handful of the prisoner’s hair and dragging his head up. “You had best behave.”

The Englishman turned his head. Long, dark hair streamed over his forehead and a rough beard covered the lower half of his face making his features barely discernible. Only his eyes gleamed from the shadowed countenance.

“Or else what?” the prisoner sneered. “You’ll kill me?” An evil smile flickered and disappeared in the dark face. “I am afraid, friend Armand, that your threats have quite lost their power to intimidate.”

Startled, Armand straightened. The prisoner’s gaze followed him, defiant, if edged with bleakness.

“And why is that?” Armand asked.

“You can’t threaten a dead man with death,” he rasped back in French gutter patois —the dialect of the prison. “I saw the clean clothes. Did my father send them for my execution? How sentimental of him.

“No matter. You’ll not have them clean off my body, Armand,” the Englishman vowed. “You’ll not make one penny more off my corpse than I can—”

Pierre’s fist plowed into his belly, cutting off his words.

Armand grinned. So that is why the Englishman fought so hard. He thought he was on his way to being hanged. He thought they were bathing him so that after he’d been executed they could strip clean clothes from his body rather than ones stinking of jail. They’d fetch a better price that way. Not a bad notion.

It was amusing and Armand, who rarely had the pleasure of denting this particular prisoner’s self-containment, relished the experience. He motioned Pierre to revive the Englishman.

With a grunt, Pierre heaved him over the rim of the trough and dunked his head in the cold water. The Englishman lurched upright, sputtering and coughing—and fighting. Water streamed down his heaving chest, leaving muddy trails on its filthy surface. Muscles and tendons corded and swelled in his lean body. Even in the cold air the sweat beaded on the faces of the two guards straining to subdue him.

Armand watched with concern. The prisoner had come here as a youth, but the years had turned him into a man, a man who, in spite of the deprivations of prison life, still had somehow developed a formidable physique.

This is what came of mollycoddling “political prisoners” and allowing them meat and blankets and a room on the upper levels of the prison rather than in the fetid subterranean chambers where most were held. But Armand’s master insisted that political prisoners be kept alive in anticipation of possible ransoms.

Armand thought it a waste—and possibly dangerous. Should the Englishman ever put bulk on that tall, broad frame … Mon Dieu , even three warders would have a hard time holding him. As it was, soon one of the guards would lose his temper and start using his fists on the prisoner’s face. Madame disliked marked faces. Armand waded into the fray, his amusement vanishing.

“Merde!” he shouted. “You guard your virtue like a nun!”

“My virtue?” the Englishman panted, his struggles abating.

“Oui . She probably won’t even choose you now,” Armand said contemptuously.

“She?”

“Madame Noir.”

The man stopped fighting, yet none of the tension left him. He narrowed his eyes on Armand. “She picked me? Specifically?”

“Non . She says foreigners. And you, mon homme , are one of the only foreigners left. Do not think to make her pass you by again. If you spit at her this time, I swear I will render you useless to any woman ever again.”

“He is not useful to women now,” Pierre added his voice. “Best take whatever Madame offers, brut . It might be your only chance to ever have a woman. Though rumor claims Madame is the one who does the ‘having.’” He broke into coarse laughter.

The Englishman ignored the provocation. Armand considered him. “Should Madame pick you, do not think to escape,” he warned. “No man has ever escaped after one of her nights of pleasure.”

A glimpse of teeth flashed in the prisoner’s dark face. “Me?” He shook his head. “Non . I simply wish to take advantage of the situation, as Pierre suggests.”

Armand snorted in disbelief. “You didn’t feel that way some months ago when she would have taken you.”

The smile disappeared. “‘Some months ago’ I still held out the hope that my father would ransom me as he did my brother. I still believed—” He broke off abruptly. After a second’s silence he shrugged, a smile flashed once more in his dark face.

“I still believed in something,” said Raine Merrick.

“She is unnatural!” hissed the English youth chained beside Raine. “I heard what she is. Depraved! She’ll not have me!”

The boy flung himself against the manacles holding his arms spread wide against the rough stone wall next to where Raine was likewise chained. He was seventeen, or so he said. The same age Raine had been when he had been brought to France.

“She’ll not use me that way!” The lad’s defiance broke in a sob.

Raine ignored him, watching the cell door with cold anticipation as he rubbed his jaw against his shoulder. The pleasure of having his face clean-shaven once again was as heady a sensation as any he’d known in the past five years. Of course they hadn’t let him shave himself. They would never have trusted him with a razor. Instead, they’d tied him to a chair for the procedure.

Pierre had taken particular delight in waving the dulled blade above Raine’s loins but as Raine refused to react the porcine guard soon grew tired of the sport and contented himself with describing to Raine in graphic detail what “Madame’s boys” endured at the hands of the veiled lady.

Raine didn’t bother to tell Pierre he already knew all about Madame. She was a legend among the prisoners. It is why, months ago, he’d spat at her feet when she’d arrived to look over her “prospects.” He still bore the scars from the beating that little act of rebellion had incurred.

But at that time he’d still been certain that the years he’d already spent in this prison were somehow a mistake and that the two short weeks of freedom he’d had after his escape would soon be returned to him for the rest of his life. Almost a year passed before he’d realized his father would not be sending a ransom and that the prison he’d been sent to was a far harder place to escape than the one from which he’d come.

A desire for revenge had taken hold of Raine. He’d survived in this hellish place driven by a seething need to make his father pay. But this prison had a way of stripping a man of all but his most basic drives. Eventually his pride had withered and died as he focused all his dwindling reserves on the increasingly herculean task of staying alive.

Even the rumor that his father had ransomed Ash could not rouse his sense of injustice. By then he’d seen far worse injustices. No, Raine no longer wanted vengeance; he simply wanted to survive. And that meant escaping or dying in the attempt.

He’d die soon anyway. Few lived as long as he already had, killed by disease or illness, another inmate, or simply the slow inner corrosion that eventually found its physical expression in death.

He had one chance to escape and it depended on Madame Noir’s choosing him over the other “candidates” Armand had dredged up. He looked around at the other men. Two were long-time residents: a hatchet-faced middle-aged colonist from the Americas and a slender Prussian dying of consumption. The English youth chained to the wall next to him was new, delicate, and sullen-looking.

Suddenly the door to the cell grated open. Raine peered through the gloom at the dark figure hovering in the outer corridor. His attention sharpened.

Madame Noir.