Page 44 of When the Rogue Returns
She stared at him. “Not to mention that I thought you were running from the authorities, just as we were. My family had convinced me that you were as culpable as they, so I couldn’t return to the scene of the crime without risking being caught and made to admit what I believed was your part in the theft.”
“Or yours or your family’s,” he said acidly.
She tensed. “Yes. Once it was done, I wasn’t keen on being hanged for it. Like you, I did what I had to in order to save myself. But apparentlymydoing so is some kind of crime.” She sat up as if to leave the bed, and he rose to catch her by the arm.
“Lieveke,”he said in a low voice, “I’m not accusing you.”
“Aren’t you?” Her lovely brown eyes darkened with sorrow. “You think I should have tried harder, should have looked for you, should have roamed the Continent searching for the man I thought had betrayed and abandoned me—”
“No,” he cut in, reminded yet again that she’d been made to believe a lie. He still had difficulty remembering that her family had been as callous with her as with him.
Drawing her resistant body into his arms, he pulled her back down on the bed. When she lay rigid beside him, he stifled an oath. He was handling this very clumsily. But he had never expected that she’d thoughthimthe villain of the piece all this time.
Propping his head on his hand, he stared down at her jutting chin and mutinous expression. “I see why you couldn’t look for me. Why you felt compelled to go off on your own.” He laid his hand on her belly. “But to run off to Scotland? It never occurred to me to search beyond the Continent, because I would never have thought you’d travel so far from your home.”
She met his gaze imploringly. “I had to get away from them, don’t you see? They wanted me to create more fakes so they could pass them off as real, to make money. I couldn’t... I wouldn’t...”
“Ah,” he said, beginning to understand. “They wanted to turn you into a criminal, too.” She’d really meant it when she’d said she’d been trying to escape her family. “So where are they now?”
“Still in Paris, I hope.” She relaxed slightly against him. “I haven’t seen them since I took my chance to get away from them.”
He caught his breath. He could write to Vidocq in Paris and have the man find them there, then keep an eye on them until Victor could get there. “I suppose they’re using false names.”
She nodded. “They did so from the moment they booked passage on the ship in Amsterdam. And they took other measures to change their appearance—Gerhart grew a beard and Jacoba and I cut our hair.”
Which explained why neither he nor anyone else had been able to track them after they left their lodgings.
“Gerhart had some friend who’d been a spy for the French in the war and knew how to create false papers,” she added. “That’s how I learned that such things could be obtained for a price.”
“So the name you used to come here isn’t the one you used to leave Amsterdam and enter France.”
“Of course not. I didn’t want Gerhart and Jacoba to find me, remember? It took a bit of doing, but I was able to discover someone in Paris to create false papers for me, as Gerhart’s friend had done for them.”
Nothing showed how much she distrusted her family more than the fact that she’d gone to such lengths to evade them. Then again, perhaps she’d simply been worried that her family would be caught eventually, so she’d changed her name to make sureshewasn’t.
But in that case, she wouldn’t have chosen his mother’s name. So far, her version of events was much more plausible than any of the conjectures he’d made. Which meant that the villains of this piece were definitely Gerhart and Jacoba.
He forced a nonchalant expression to his face. “So what names did they take?” he said casually.
Apparently that didn’t work, for her gaze shot to his. “Why?” When he didn’t answer right away, the color drained from her face. “Victor, what do you intend to do?”
He played dumb. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, yes, you do. Now that you’re certain my family and I were behind the thefts—”
“Not you,” he broke in.
“I made the parure,” she corrected him. “The authorities will consider me culpable. Why,youpractically do, even knowing what happened.”
“That’s not true.”
“Hear me out.” Her breath grew ragged. “It’s clear that you want vengeance—”
“Justice,” he shot back. When she flinched, he cupped her cheek. “Don’t you want that, too, after what they did? Don’t you want to see them punished?”
“I would, if there was any way to do it without punishing me as well. And there is none.” She shifted to face him. “If you capture them and haul them back to Amsterdam to stand trial, they will blame me for the theft. It will be their word against mine. And as you said, they didn’t have the skills to make the parure. I did—a point they are sure to make. I could very well hang, and they could get off scot-free.”
His breath stopped in his throat. He hadn’t thought of that possibility. Of course, until this night, he’d assumed she deserved the same punishment they did. But since she didn’t...
