“Yes, send as many as we can spare with the Mercier family to England. Have them return the ship to France post haste. All others should come here immediately to the inn around the corner, the one with the tavern next door, and we will have a plan.”

Simon raised his eyebrows. “Which is?”

“I don’t know as of yet. I’ll watch the house to try and determine at least how many patrol the place.” She heard her voice speaking, but even as she said the words, she felt an odd sense of detachment, as if the energy had drained from her, sucked in by a heavy despair.

As soon as Simon left her in the shadows, her darkest thoughts rushed at her in a desperate invasion of all hope. She sank to the ground. The loss of the entire DuPont family clenched at her heart and forced breath from her lungs. Wrapping her arms around her own body, she gulped and swallowed cries into silence. Her chest shuddered with the effort and shook with each new wave of desperate sorrow. She had failed them. They could have left through another gate, waited until the dark of night, anything but face Bibot.

She imagined the eyes of a child, large and hopeful, and she cradled the small toy horse.

Unbidden, thoughts of her parents, shackled by the Spanish, haunted her. She tried to blink them away. Their memory always came forward in moments of despair or failure. Her mother’s eyes, desperately drinking in Scarlet’s face, her head turned toward her only daughter for as long as the captors allowed. If Scarlet had come home earlier, she could have warned them. She should have run to them as her brother had done.

She should have saved them all: her parents, her brother, the DuPont family, the children. Despair squeezed her chest tighter. She succumbed for one minute more, gave sorrow its full reign, and then she commanded herself to calm. For Andrew. She would not fail him too.

She measured her breathing, unclenched her fists, and tasked her brain to focus. Her shudders slowed and her sobbing ceased. Never would she feel carefree, but at least some sense of reason had returned. Wiping tears from her eyes, she made her way through the darkness back to a hiding place that allowed her to watch the prison residence.

In the twenty minutes she waited, only one guard walked past. She knew more must wait inside, but perhaps Bernard underestimated the league’s ability to find Andrew. With any luck, they could whisk him away in the dark of night. As she considered the possibility, the beginnings of a plan formed. And with that new hope as fuel, she ran off through the streets. If she moved quickly, she just might get their costumes in time.