Jamie poured a glass of brandy in the sputtering light of a half dozen candles, thought better, and poured it out. He hadn’t depended on drink in Rome; he wouldn’t depend on it now.
“Perhaps the estate will earn what I owe you in ten more years,” he growled.
“You’re a damned fool, Jamie. You’re paying your debts,” Mallet said in a voice laced with impatience. “It wouldn’t take much longer to earn out if you had taken an income like we proposed.”
“Don’t start again, Andrew.”
“You have a wife, Jamie,” Andrew began.
“Leave my wife to me,” Jamie sputtered. He would not have them interfering with Nora. They could spare him that much.
Andrew ignored Jamie’s outburst. “So when are you going back to her? Have you heard from her?”
“No.” Jamie spoke so softly Andrew leaned closer to listen. “Not once.”
“Then go, man. What else is there to put right?” Will asked.
“Nothing that can be fixed,” Jamie said.
“No such thing,” Will told him. “Can fix anything if we all put our minds to it.”
They have a right to know,he thought.
“Can you bring one hundred and thirty-two Africans back from the dead? Even Richard can’t do that.” Jamie blurted it before he could cower from it again.
Will and Andrew stared at him, eyes wide, for a long moment before all three men turned their faces to the far corner of the room where Richard silently sipped his wine.
“Quite right, Jamie. Even I can’t raise the dead.” He raised one brow and a glass in salute.
“Africans?” Andrew asked. “Jamie? What is this about?”
He had been right; Will and Andrew didn’t know. Richard must. Jamie assumed he had told them. They deserved to know. They deserved the whole truth about the kind of man they rescued.
“Jamie,” Will prodded, “what Africans?”
“Enslaved,” Jamie murmured. “They went down on the Avante, a slaver out of Jamaica. Dead, every one of them.”
“The African trade has been illegal since ’07. In America, too.” Will looked puzzled. “Jamaica’s one of ours.” He always believed in the good in people.
Andrew spared Jamie from responding. “Since when did making highly profitable activities illegal put a stop to them? We banned the trade but not slavery itself,” he said hotly. “As long as the plantations rely on slave labor, men will run the patrols to get at the profits, the blood money!” Andrew choked off his words. He looked at Jamie and then at Richard.
“Quite,” the duke affirmed, looking steadily atJamie. “Bloodsuckers who profit have blood on their hands as much as the plantation owners.”
Jamie felt sick.
“Jamie,” Will whispered, “what does the Avante have to do with you?”
Their expectant silence lashed him like a whip, but he still couldn’t answer.How do you tell men who love you, who moved the earth to find you, to rehabilitate you, that they helped a murderer?
“What else is there to do, Jamie?” Richard asked, at last. It wasn’t really a question.
“Nothing,” Jamie said. “There is nothing left to do. Nothing I can do. My inheritance, meager as it was, financed the Avante. Mine! I’m responsible for the dead at the bottom of the Atlantic, and there is nothing you can do, singly or together, to fix that.”
Andrew and Will stilled, drinks in hand, waiting for Jamie to continue.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “You must believe I didn’t know. The bastards lied to me.”
“What did they tell you?” Andrew asked.
