Rogue's Destiny

  Rogue’s Destiny

  by Blair Bancroft

  Published by Kone Enterprises

  at Smashwords

  Copyright 2013 by Grace Ann Kone

  For other books by Blair Bancroft,

  please see http://www.blairbancroft.com

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

  Author’s Note

  In Rogue’s Destiny, I have shared a genuine ancestor with the heroine, Victoire du Bois. At age twelve, the man who called himself Peter Demo was a drummerboy for General, the Marquis de Montcalm. After the general’s death and defeat on the Plains of Abraham—the decisive battle in which Britain won Canada from the French—he lived with the Abenakis for many years. He became a courier de bois, eventually settling into a cabin on the Isle La Motte (Vermont) in Lake Champlain and experiencing a most amazing life before passing on at age 112, the year of the one hundredth anniversary of the battle. He is generally believed to be Montcalm’s natural son. Peter Demo kept a journal through all the days of his life, and my mother (also an author) and I like to think that’s where we got the writing gene. I also like to think he would have approved of Victoire.

  Blair Bancroft

  Chapter One

  Lower Canada, Spring 1818

  Rare spring sunshine sparked off the tops of rapids swollen by snow melt, propelling the heavily laden birchbark canoe with the grace and speed of a dolphin. Victoire du Bois, hands gripping a paddle while her feet nestled in a pile of fur pelts, warbled a cry of pure joy. Que magnifique! She had escaped the stone walls of the convent into the splendor of the vast wilderness. Into the bubbling happiness of reunion with her father—traveling with him, as she had for the past nine springs, to sell the furs he had trapped during the long, cold Canadian winter.

  Each year, the good sisters at the convent shook their heads but let her go when her father came for her. Victoire traded her drab wool gown for leather leggings, fringed leather shirt, and fur-lined coat and tried not to smirk at the scandalized faces as she walked across the convent courtyard with the bronzed, rough-hewn courier de bois at her side.

  And now, once again, she was free. Free to enjoy the forest, the streams, the verdant beauty of this new land. To run through the thick brown leaves that carpeted the trails. Free to be with her father and absorb the wonders of his life, so totally different from the calm, chaste, and unbelievably dull world inside the convent of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

  “Ah-h!” Victoire breathed in the scent of spruce, fir, and birch growing out of a low groundcover of pungent wintergreen, even as she dipped her paddle in perfect rhythm with her father’s. Spring was glorious. Freedom was glorious. She chortled, transforming her father’s customary stoic woodsman’s expression into an indulgent smile.

  “Portage ahead,” he called over the sound of the rushing current. “We’ll go ashore in—” “Turn now!” he shouted as the current suddenly surged, hurtling them downriver at a startling pace.

  Victoire struggled, her paddle useless against a wall of water with a mind of its own. Ahead, she saw only a solid white mass of churning water, broken by rocks jutting above the foam-flecked waves. Ah, mon Dieu! Never before had the river been like this.

  No time to be fainthearted. They would manage, they always did.

  She gripped the paddle tighter, her face settling into a grimace of effort as she fought to help her father defy the roiling water. The canoe began to turn, but the raging river fought back. As the canoe broadsided the current, it shuddered and settled into an erratic spin. Victoire’s paddle clipped a rock and shattered, the pieces spinning away, twenty yards downstream in seconds.

  She caught the look on her father’s face and knew this was the nightmare they had managed to avoid through the twenty-two years she had been the daughter of a courier de bois. They were about to be swept through treacherous, unnavigable whitewater and over a waterfall. Not a large one—she’d seen it many times—perhaps ten feet. But the boulders at the bottom were large. If they didn’t drown, they would be crushed on the granite like wheat on a millstone.

  “Into the furs! Cover up,” her father ordered.

  “Tu, aussi!” “You too,” Victoire shouted as she dug into the pile of pelts, rolling herself into a cocoon of fur. Papa! Why was he not sheltering beside her? She lifted the corner of a pelt to call to him just as the water’s roar grew louder. The canoe tossed, tipped, nearly flipped over, spun around again. It bounced off a large boulder, zigged, and rushed on. A scream pierced the roar of the falls. The wind? Or had she betrayed her father’s teachings and the scream was her own?

  Never! Members of the Famille du Bois and the Famille Darrincote did not scream, no matter what.

  “Papa, come!”

  Grim-faced, he kept paddling, as if he had not heard her cry. With the roar of the rapids, the thunder of the waterfall so loud, perhaps he had not.

  “Papa, I love you!” Their eyes met. Never taking her gaze from his, Victoire called out, loud and clear, “Yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .”

  The thunder of the falls enveloped them. Ice cold spray stung their faces, soaked through their clothes.

  “Je t’ aime!” Her father’s shout of love resounded over the unrelenting pounding of the deluge. “Ta promesse. L’angleterre!”

  The bow tilted down, crashed over the edge of the waterfall. The deluge swallowed them whole. They were spinning, spinning inside a great wall of water. Down, down, smothered in a blanket of pelts. Water everywhere, ice cold. No way up. No way out. Ah, Mary, Mother of God, pray for me!

  And then the unrelenting caprice of nature vanished, leaving nothing but a black void.

  West Wycombe, England, 1818

  Flickering shadows danced across the cave’s white chalk walls as a six-sided lantern suspended from the ceiling swayed slightly, perhaps stirred by unseen forces conjured by the incantations of the red-robed “priest.” Jack Harding leaned against the open archway that led to the innermost room of the rabbit warren carved out of chalk and flint beneath a hill north of West Wycombe. Behind him, candles stuck into the wall at the six points of a carved pentagram added to the unearthly shadows flitting across this far-from-holy place.

  On previous visits to the caves, he had found cynical amusement in the irony of devil worship in a cave three hundred feet beneath the Church of St. Lawrence. But somehow tonight the amusement had palled. What was he doing among these sons of the idle rich, so bored with their lives they must tempt the devil to add titillation to their nights?

  You, too, are a son of the idle rich.

  Hell and damnation! The blasted caves were invading his senses, conjuring thoughts he’d put behind him long since.

  As a bastard should.

  Truth was, he was here because Avery wanted him here. When his younger brother and fellow cavalry officers returned from years of fighting Bonaparte, they found London decidedly flat. That they would revive the Hellfire Club of their grandfathers’ day was almost inevitable—the club of sharp-witted, sharp-tongued, and highly irreverent gentlemen, founded by Sir Francis Dashwood and enjoyed by men who took pleasure in challenging the accepted rules of society, including that famous American, Benjamin Franklin.

  Not wishing to mimic their elders too closely, Avery and his friends called themselves The Devil’s Disciples, and Jack supposed inviting a bastard half-brother to join them was all part of their determination to flaunt as many of society’s rules as possible. Jack’s lips quirked down. And what better place for a rogue? In spite of years of respectability—semi-respectability—working for Tobias Brockman, the wealthiest self-made man in Britain, he was still a rebel at heart. The masked man who had led a useless revolution against the inevitability of progress.

  The so-called progress of men like Tobias Brockman, who had sent his young protégé Terence O’Rourke to save the notorious Captain Hood from hanging. By offering him a job.

  And somehow O’Rourke, now Jack’s best friend, had used his Irish charm to convince an unrepentant rogue that fighting Tobias Brockman’s battles was actually a blow against the stranglehold of the upper classes on people’s lives. And a far better fate than being hanged for insurrection. So here he was at four and thirty, a man feared and respected from the Highlands to Cornwall, from Belfast to the Dingle. He had a townhouse in London and had recently purchased a modest country cottage. He had enjoyed far more than his share of women. Loved only twice—one as a sister rather than lover—and watched both women go to other men. Julia to happiness of near fairy-tale proportions, Beth to violence, tragedy, and an uncertain future. The only clear fact—Beth Brockman’s future was not his, for she was the love of his best friend’s life and, God willing, they would find their way past all the obstacles—

  Enough! The caves of West Wycombe were no place to indul
ge in maudlin sentiment. This was a place conceived with the intent to scandalize the ton, while providing its members good company, good food, superior drink, outrageous ceremonies, and a generous dollop of women from London’s finest courtesans to Covent Garden bawds (whom the club members cheerfully referred to as “nuns”). Add a strong flavor of the netherworld, and the activities in the caves satisfied the most rebellious spirits among them. And who had been more of a rebel than Jack Harding? But tonight. . .

  Instead of enticing him to participate, blasphemous chants, boisterous drinking songs, bursts of laughter, moans, cries of ecstasy had all blurred into a nightmare cacophony of sound echoing eerily through the chalk chambers. Enough to make him want to stopper his ears and run for the cave’s entrance.

  Hell and the devil confound it! He must have imbibed too freely of the Devil’s Punch. Suddenly, he was an outsider, a voyeur . . . seeing everything through the eyes of a cynic instead of a pleasure-seeker.

  Slowly, Jack pushed himself off the rough chalk wall and peered into the caves’ innermost room, nearly a half mile from the entrance. Seven Disciples, garbed in flowing monks’ robes of pristine white, knelt in a ring before a “priest” wearing blood-red vestments. The priest—his brother Avery Dunstan, Lord Cheyney—was chanting a diabolical parody of the Latin mass, while holding aloft a golden chalice. The members, eyes closed, clasped hands while the heir to an earldom invited demons to join them in their revels.

  Jack doubted any of the men, most particularly Avery, truly believed they were about to consort with demons, but each and every one relished the thought of defying the established order, of doing something that would damn them in the eyes of society. The world outside chained them with rules and regulations. Their fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, sisters, and wives had so many expectations of a gentleman’s conduct that a man could choke on them—his individuality destroyed, his inner self ground into dust. A man must be free, must he not? A man must be a man, even if it meant embracing the other side of the coin, the dark underbelly of life.

  Even if it was only once or twice a month at a club carved into the white chalk hills of Buckinghamshire.

  His face devoid of emotion, Jack turned away from the unholy ceremony, stepping carefully over the stones laid across a small underground stream, which some inventive eighteenth century gentleman had named the River Styx. It wasn’t deep, but the ignominy of falling in . . .

  Safely on the other side, Jack paused to examine the erotic carvings cut into the chalk walls. Why tonight, when he’d seen them a hundred times before? The first time he’d viewed the oversized phallus jutting from the wall, lovingly carved in fine detail, he’d stood there and grinned. Then laughed out loud as he’d noted the matching female parts, just as detailed, carved into the opposite side of the tunnel, the two destined to be separated forever.

  Fortunately, that wasn’t a problem the members had to endure.

  As he continued down the tunnel, the cacophony that had beaten on his senses only minutes earlier settled, quite inexplicably, into normal sounds of revelry, some echoing from behind, where the alleged devil-worshipers were likely on their third goblet of “blood.” Some from ahead, where other members were indulging in more earthly pleasures, and some from the banquet room where a few members still lingered, preferring overindulgence in food to overindulgence in flesh or the risk of conjuring demons. Jack cast an idle glance into the banqueting room and skidded to a halt. Nothing should surprise him any more, but this was something new.

  An extremely fine example of femininity lay atop the long wooden table, every inch of her soft peach flesh, her long chestnut hair, and the dark hair hiding her core fully displayed for the delectation of the gentlemen surrounding her. Harry Blacklock, one of Avery’s cavalry officers, was busy dribbling champagne from the woman’s pink toes to the top of her head, while two other former officers licked it off with obvious relish. Good God. Temptation loomed. Just when he thought the Devil’s Disciples had reached the zenith—or was it the nadir?—of decadence, one of the members thought up something new.

  His cock stirred. And then, seemingly with a sigh, subsided.

  He was getting old. Or some such nonsense. Unease assaulted him from every direction. Absurd. He’d joined the group gladly, helped Avery devise many of the club’s rituals, helped create the unholy names for the food they ate. (He was particularly fond of “Breast of Venus,” a name that made chicken infinitely more delectable.) Yet tonight there was no satisfaction. Here he was, in the wee hours of the morning, wandering the eerie tunnels, looking for . . . what?

  All things pall after a certain length of time. Even the old Hellfire Club motto, Fait ce que voudras (Do as you will), could lose its attraction. Devil it! Must be something he ate. What he needed was a bit of privacy, a warm bosom ,and equally warm heart. He’d never been much for group orgies. Perhaps the Maze Room?

  As he approached the chamber which had been cut with inner walls subdividing the cave into something resembling a miniature maze, Jack could hear giggles, groans, heavy breathing, and the slap, slap, slap of flesh against flesh. Ah yes, sex—surely the proper remedy for the grim gargoyles that seemed to be perched on his shoulders tonight.

  He stepped into the chalk-walled maze, his eyes flicking over the various rutting couples as he moved forward, looking for a woman who was free to satisfy his need. A sudden pocket of cold air struck him. Likely one of the cave system’s ghosts. After all, it seemed only logical that some of the original Hellfire Club’s revelers had refused to leave the place where they had so thoroughly indulged themselves.

  And what a thought for a hard-headed realist like himself. If it weren’t for Avery, he would have turned his back on these professed devil-worshippers long since.

  No, he would not. He might be one of the few members who worked for a living, but he understood their restlessness, their urge for excitement, their desire to be free. Their determination not to abide by society’s rules. Wasn’t that why he worked for Tobias Brockman? Because Brockman made his own rules, like sending an Irish rogue named Terence O’Rourke to get rid of a English rogue named Captain Hood, only to agree to O’Rourke’s assessment that they’d do better to hire him than see him hang.

  A sound broke through his wandering thoughts. Was that a sob he heard beneath the erotic noises surrounding him? Not possible. The women who came to the caves were more than willing; indeed, they felt privileged to be chosen by the club’s members. But things could go wrong in a club that boasted its members were free to do as they will. Not surprising a few might step over the boundary of chacun à son goût—to each his own—and plunge into depravity. An admission that troubled him. Avery and his officers had formed The Devil’s Disciples with the intent of surrounding themselves with men of similar mind and shocking the ton in the process. No one was ever supposed to be hurt.

  Then again, his mood tonight was too melancholy. Likely, he’d imagined the heart-rending sobs.

  Jack passed a couple indulging in an act of sodomy that could have gotten them hanged above in the broad green fields of England. But below ground, in the old Hellfire caverns, even pederasts were free to fait ce que veux voudras.

  The sobs grew louder. Great gulps of tears, punctuated by a low heart-rending wail.

  Hell and the Devil! Not at all what he needed. Stupid female. If she found the club’s activities not to her liking, nor the generous pay that went with them, all she had to do was get up and walk out. She wasn’t that far from the entrance.

  Jack found her in the last nook of the maze, curled up in a corner, her back against the rough chalk wall. He bent down, attempting to penetrate the shadows. Devil it! She was young and fresh off the farm. A round country girl with enticingly ample flesh, a fall of straight blond hair and huge blue eyes. Tears glinted on cheeks whose healthy peach had never seen a rouge pot. Definitely not the club’s usual feminine fare.