“Let’s sit down,” Drake said, softly, as if facing a fractious horse.
Beau glared at him. “Let’s not. Let’s hear your explanation.”
Drake considered him for a moment, then, finally, sighed. “Theo has been working for the home office,” he said, and his gaze faltered. “But right now, we don’t know where he is.”
It was nothing short of a miracle that Beau didn’t knock him down again.
Which was when Pip moved, an erratic step forward. “I do,” she said.
Beau and Drake both whipped around on her to find her ashen, her hand to her chest as if holding in her heart. Beau knew exactly how she felt.
“What do you mean?” Drake asked her very quietly.
“Yes,” Beau said, knowing how deadly he sounded. “What do you mean?”
Pip had never looked so flummoxed. “The boy Robbie, who was released from the cellar,” she said. “He had help. A man. I saw him….”
Beau honestly felt capable of murder. “Yousawhim. You saw Theo.”
“Well…” she looked back and forth to the men, suddenly frantic. “It looked like him. But I thought, how could it be? We all knew he had been lost in France. We allknew.”
“What do you mean he was in the cellar?” Drake asked, suddenly very alert. “With the smugglers?!”
Pip shrugged. “It looked like him. I mean, I only saw a shadow, but his…his movements. They made me think of Theo. He told young Robbie his name was….” Her face crumpled into distress, and she turned to Beau. “Oh, sweet God. He told him he was called Barnaby. That was the name of Theo’s dog, wasn’t it? The mutt he rescued from the lake when we were ten. I didn’t think.”
Beau swore his heart was going to explode. Rage poured through him, taking his breath. Outrage. Betrayal. After all this time…all thistime…they were telling him Theo was alive? Had been alive since that horrific day when that bedamned dragoon showed up at his door?
“That’s not possible,” he whispered, rubbing hard at his own chest, as if he could pull things into order. “It. Is. Not. Possible.”
Alongside him, Pip shifted. He was terrified she would touch him, try to comfort or support him. If she did, he very much feared she would let loose the cataclysm that roiled inside of him and she would go sprawling, too.
She didn’t. In a disconnected way, Beau was glad. The pressure was building inexorably inside of him, and he didn’t want to take it out on her.
“Drake? What do you have to say?”
And Drake, who was igniting this explosion, didn’t look particularly agitated. He sighed and motioned to the facing settees. “Sit down.”
But Beau shook his head. “No. Explain this.”
When he didn’t sit, neither did the others, leaving them in an uncomfortable tableau.
“I told them they should tell you,” Drake said, unnaturally stiff, as if at attention. “They promised Theo they would. But they were afraid that if you knew, you would give the game away. And his position was far too delicate.”
There was a moment of fraught silence, and then Pip straightened.
“We just made the same decision about Robbie and his mother,” she said to him. “For the same reason.”
Which was when, oddly, the explosion came. “Not for ayear!” he yelled. “Not after watching his family hold a fuckingfuneral! There’s a plaque in the goddamnchurch!And now you tell me he’s been alive all this time?!”
Drake never flinched. “That is what I’m telling you.”
He was so close to simply howling. “And now you don’t know where he is again, is that right?”
Drake didn’t answer.
“Fuck you,” Beau snarled, walking away. “Fuck all of you.”
“His position was—”
