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go back home. I want to eat bananas.”
    The corners of the man’s mouth lifted. “I shall miss the
freshness of the coffee, but you do not want to go back to Saint-Domingue.” The
smile faded the way the sun will shine through a hole in a rain cloud and then
retreat behind a wash of gray. “It is not the same place.”
    “There is coffee here,” protested Etienne. He’d yet to see a
banana or a coconut or a sweet slice of sugarcane.
    The man picked up a cricket ball and tossed it. “So your
mother was married to another man?” There was the kind of carefulness to his
question that made Etienne want to pick his way around cautiously.
    “ Mon pere, Henri Petit. I am Etienne Petit.”
    The man didn’t correct him the way Grandpere would or even
Maman would.
    The ball went up and down a few times. The slap of the
leather against the man’s palm grew louder as the ball went higher and higher
with each toss. “Perhaps we shall see if a banana tree will grow in the
conservatory.”
    Etienne popped off his bed and snatched the ball when the
man tossed it in the air again. “Leave my ball alone.”
    The man’s mouth quirked up. “Do you play often?”
    Etienne shrugged. He hit the ball with the bat, he ran the
bases, he threw the ball, but there wasn’t anyone to play with, let alone a
team to challenge.
    The man sat down on Etienne’s bed, depressing the mattress
far deeper than Etienne ever managed. “I used to be quite good at cricket. Had
to be to hold my own with my brothers, but then I used to sneak off from our
tutor and practice hitting—not that you should ditch your lessons, but I could
teach you a few things.”
    “I don’t like cricket.” Etienne put the ball back with the
bat. He would never run away from his lessons. It would upset his mother too
much.
    “What do you like?” the man asked.
    Palm trees swaying in the wind, the cane fields burning late
in the night, and snow. Only one of those things could be found in England and
not at home. Etienne shrugged.
    “Tell me of your life in Saint-Domingue.”
    “Maman doesn’t like me to speak of it.”
    “Not even of the time before the revolution?”
    “Revolt,” corrected Etienne.
    The man’s mouth tightened, but he didn’t correct Etienne’s
description. Danvers would say a revolt turned into a revolution when it was
successful.
    Instead the man picked up a book and opened it. “Would you
like me to read to you?”
    “I can read for myself. I am not a baby.”
    The man closed the book softly and ran his palm across the
cover. “I know. I am sorry I have missed so much of your life. I don’t know
much about being a father, but I’d like to try.”
    Etienne had heard his mother gasp, and he’d seen the harsh
way this man looked at her.
    “You are not my father. My father loved my mother very much.
And you hate my grandpere, and you hate my mother, and you hate me.”
     

Chapter Five
    “I don’t hate you,” Beau said softly to his son. He let the
other charges stand. What he felt for his father, he wouldn’t describe as hate,
but definitely he hated Yvette for everything she’d done to him. “I don’t know
you.”
    “You hate my name.” Etienne thrust a belligerent lower lip
forward.
    “It is an unfortunate name for an Englishman when we are at
war with France.” Beau regretted his dismayed outburst especially since it had
occurred in front of Etienne.
    “I am French.”
    “You are only half-French, Etienne.” Beau sighed. The last
thing he wanted was to end this maddening day in an argument with his son. As a
young man, Beau had been a sought after companion in school. His easy ways
seemed foreign to him now, but he had to figure out a way to get through to
this child of his. He hated the strain of his own paternal bond, and he’d be
damned if he went to his grave robbed of a closer connection with his only son.
    Etienne stared back at him, his little face stoic in
distrust—yet so much a mirror to Beau’s own