“Aye, you’re right, my lord! Aye, you are right!” Damien agreed. They laughed together. Amanda did not look back. When Frederick set her up atop a horse, he was smiling, and she smiled in return.
The men returned to Valley Forge within a few hours. Amanda sat at the table in the hut and stared at the three of them, Eric, Damien, and Jacques, as they stood before her, something like errant schoolboys.
Eric cleared his voice to speak, but then Jacques stepped forward. “I killed your father, Amanda.”
“He meant to kill me, Jacques,” she said quietly. “He—he meant it. He always despised me.”
Then Jacques went silent. Eric cleared his throat again. “Amanda, Nigel wasn’t your father.”
“What?” Astonished, she leapt to her feet.
“But—”
Damien slipped an arm about her, coming down upon his haunches by her side as he led her to sit again. “Didn’t you ever wonder that a man could be so cold to his own flesh and blood? I had heard the rumors, of course, but—I remember your mother, Amanda. Just vaguely. She was always so kind and so sweet, and so—”
“Giving,” Jacques interrupted him. He looked at Amanda, but he seemed to see beyond her, to another time and another place. “She was beautiful and gentle and sweet, and her voice was like a nightingales, and she cared for everyone about her, be they slave or freedman, worker or gentry. She—she bought my indentured time when I arrived from Nova Scotia.”
He paused, hesitating a long moment. His dark eyes fluttered over Amanda. “I fell in love with her,” he said, his voice cracking. “And she fell in love with me. We meant to slip away to Louisiana, but he caught us. He left me for dead. I was taken in by Lord Cameron’s grandfather, and over the years my body healed, but it wasn’t until Danielle arrived that I remembered all that my life had been.”
Amanda discovered that she couldn’t breathe. She tried to form words. “What—what do you mean?”
“Amanda,” Eric said, speaking quietly at last. “Jacques is your father.”
There was silence. Dead silence, then Jacques started to speak, his French mingling with his English in his eagerness. “I could not tell you, I did not even tell Lord Cameron, I was so afraid that you would be horrified to know that you were not the daughter of a great lord but the child of a common laborer, a man who worked the land. But I saw,mon Dieu! I saw what he did to you, and I had vowed that I would kill them.Mais, ma petite, not even then did I mean to tell you, but your husband insisted—I am so sorry. I have loved you greatly from afar, and my life has been made rich just to see you, just to be privileged to touch my grandchildren, to live in the shadow cast by the bounty of the hall.…”
Amanda felt numb. So very numb! He was watching her with such anguish, and Eric was staring at her, and Damien…
She leapt to her feet, throwing her arms around Jacques. With a glad cry, she showered his cheeks with kisses. “My father!Mon père!Oh, thank God, thank God! Eric, how could you have known, how could have guessed and not told me!”
“Well, I—”
“You are not so horrified then?” Jacques asked her, his hands trembling as he held her.
“Horrified? Horrified! Oh, no, I am so thrilled and so very proud! My father was not some monster who lived to take revenge upon me because my mother could not bear his touch! He is tall and handsome and brave and wonderful, and he loves me. He loves me! Oh, Eric, isn’t that what matters the most?”
Eric, relieved and greatly pleased, leaned back against the mantel, grinning. “Oh, of course, Amanda.” It was both wonderful and poignant to watch the tears hovering in her eyes, to see the wonder upon her face. And Jacques. The Acadian who had always been there for her, loving her, never thinking to speak the truth, when the truth might have caused her pain. “Love—and the man,” Eric agreed. “We’re fighting for a new world here. For rights, where it is the measure of a man that matters, and nothing more. And I would say, Monsieur Bisset—as a man who has known you since he wore knee breeches—that there is no man of finer measure, or greater measure. No man whom I would rather call father-in-law.”
Eric reached out for Jacques’s hand. Jacques looked from his daughter’s red head to the hand outstretched to him. Their hands met. Then Eric cleared his throat and smiled at Damien, who was staring on delightedly. “Maybe we should give them a few minutes.”
“Maybe we should.”
Neither Jacques nor Amanda noticed as they left. Amanda was crying, tears of joy. “Danielle! Danielle is my aunt! Oh, how delightful. I cannot wait to see her again.”
Eric left her alone until very late, and then returned to the hut. The main room was empty, and so Eric hurried on into the bedroom.
Amanda was there, and for a moment he thought that she slept, she was so very still. He walked over to the narrow bed and discovered that her beautiful emerald eyes were open, that they had a dreamlike quality to them. Her lips were slightly parted in a beautiful rose smile and her hair was splayed about her in ripples of sable and fire, sweeping over the bare and naked beauty of her ivory shoulders. He knelt down by her. As her eyes focused on him, her smile broadened.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” she returned.
“So…”
“Oh, Eric!” She wrapped her arms around him and held him close. “Thank you! Thank you for so much! You’ve not only given me love, but you’ve given me our beautiful children, and our home, and now you’ve even given me a father!”
He chuckled softly. “Well, I can’t really take credit for all of that—”
“And you’ve given me a country, Eric. Today I knew it. I knew it so thoroughly! I knew that I would die for you, and then I discovered that I would die for this cause too. I understand everything that meant so much to you, what it was worth fighting for, worth dying for.… It’s meant to be, Eric! Not a land for titled hogs such as Nigel Sterling, but for men like my real father. Quiet, dignified, determined to wrest the very best from the land. To give to it. Oh, Eric! I cannot tell you how happy I am! You cannot imagine what it was like to wonder how a parent could hate you so fervently! And he’s wonderful, isn’t he? Jacques is wonderful!”
