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Her eyes opened wide. Angelique fought off the unreasonable stab of jealousy. “What an odd gift to get from a woman,” she said evenly. “I wonder what you did to deserve it.”

His laugh was low and knowing. “Do you? Don’t you also wonder what you did to merit such a gift?”

She stiffened. “Let me test the blade to see if it is good enough for my purposes⁠—”

He dragged her back when she started to slither away from him. “Calm yourself,” he said in the same lazy tone. “No need to see if it’s sharp enough. You’ve no need of it.”

She said nothing but her muscles didn’t relax. It didn’t matter to her where he got the knife, or from whom. It was just a knife, hardly a romantic or sentimental gift to anyone.

“A man who once worked for my father moved his family west. His family was kidnapped by some native Indians and held captive during the last war. The man managed to ransom his wife and daughters, but not his son. He wrote asking for any help possible in retrieving the boy before it was too late.”

“Too late for what?” she asked sharply.

“The Wyandot had lost many of their young warriors to the wars and their women and children to raids. They sometimes made captives part of their tribe, especially children. Once the boy was grown, he could be married to a Wyandot girl, with Wyandot children. Sometimes captives forget their old lives and don’t want to return to their parents. My father wanted to help, and I wanted to see the western frontier. We managed to find the boy—a monumental task in itself—and bought him back.”

“Bought him?” she said sharply. “Like a slave?”

“Not like a slave,” Nate said firmly. “The Wyandot kept him captive, but they had taken care of him. He’d been given as a servant to a woman whose child had died of illness, to help tend her crops, not unlike what he would have done on his own father’s farm. My father negotiated a ransom price with the Wyandot elders and we brought him home to Boston, where he was reunited with his parents. His mother, who had somehow kept the knife from her captivity, gave it to me in gratitude.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You do not approve of slavery.”

“No,” said Nate flatly. “It’s a vile and immoral practice.”

“Your man Mr. Chesterfield said your father plucked him from a revolution in his country. He was a slave there.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Prince told you that? Well, you knew he was, by the brand. We were blown off course and had to stop for provisions at Saint-Domingue. My father knew the French had sent troops and there had been fierce fighting all over the country, so he had stayed away for several years. But he didn’t realize it had become a slaughterhouse.”

She gazed up at him, endearingly solemn. “Mr. Chesterfield said your father nailed him into a barrel.”

Nate grinned. “I’d forgotten that! Prince popped out of that barrel as skinny as a stick and as loud as a ship’s bell. For an uneducated child, he knew an impressive amount of English, and all of it profane.” His smile faded. “My father weighed anchor at once and we didn’t go back to Saint-Domingue for years. I’ve never seen him drive the crew so hard as he did to get away from there, as if he felt the brimstone breath of the devil on his back.”

“You said you were a sailor, last night,” she said, a line forming between her brows. “You must have been a child when that occurred.”

“My father was a sailor and he took me to sea with him as soon as my mother allowed it. I was a cabin boy when we snatched Prince.”

“Snatched,” she echoed. “You did not buy him, as you did the other child.”

His mouth hardened. “They weren’t holding Prince for ransom, nor were they selling him like a cow. They were burning people like him alive.”

Angelique jerked in horror.

“Saint-Domingue was a French sugar colony, with more enslaved Africans than white Europeans. The people in bondage rose up and won their freedom, but Bonaparte wanted to reinstitute slavery across the French colonies. Once a man has got a taste of freedom, though, he doesn’t like to give it up. The fighting was brutal across the island, but one French commander was especially barbarous. He made a point of it.”

Angelique inhaled deeply, thinking of other Frenchmen who made a point, not with fire but with the steel blade of a guillotine. “By burning them alive.”

“Prince’s mother was one of them,” he said quietly. “She all but threw her child at my father, screaming for help. Only by luck did she choose a man who cared enough to do something.”

“And she herself was killed.” Killed, saving her child at great sacrifice. Like her own mother.

“Most likely. It was hard enough to smuggle out one small boy. We couldn’t stay to know what became of her. Just taking Prince could have got all of us shot.” Nate watched her curiously. Something about this story had touched her deeply, he could tell, but she gave no clue what. Slowly Nate went on. “We took Prince home with us. By the time we reached Boston Harbor, he was fluent in English as well as French and Creole, and had started drawing star charts on old pieces of sail and calculating our course. My father said he’d never seen such voracious intelligence in a child so young, and he deserved an education.”

“Your parents raised him,” she murmured. “He treats you as a brother.”

Nate shrugged. “He is, for all practical purposes.”

Her face softened, saddened. “How fortunate for him.”

“Fortunate for us, too, I would say. Prince’s passion is chemistry. He mixes gunpowder and various other things that have been invaluable to my family. Some solution of his keeps moss from growing on the decks.”