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Updated: June 26, 2025
"The Roderick who brought home the Luck?" Ricky laughed. "But he brought home a fortune, too, didn't he, Rupert?" Her brother relit his pipe. "Yes, but a great many lords came home from the Crusades with their pockets filled. Sir Roderick de la Stone thought the Luck worth his entire estate even after he was made Baron Ralestone." Ricky shivered delicately.
By the steps down which he had come stood a slight figure in a faded flannel shirt and mud-streaked overalls. His bare brown feet gripped the stones as if to get purchase for instant flight. "Hello," Val said questioningly. The new-comer eyed young Ralestone warily and then his gaze shifted to the bushes beyond. "I'm Val Ralestone." Val held out his hand.
"So Val looks like the ghost," Charity said a moment later. "Now I will have to go to town and see that portrait. Just where is it?" Rupert shook his head. "I don't know. But it's listed in the catalogue as 'Portrait of Roderick Ralestone, Aged Eighteen." "Just Val's age, then." Ricky spooned some watermelon pickles onto her plate. "But he was older than that when he left here." "Let's see.
"Against the direct orders of the black despots in the land, young Ralestone got de Roche and his daughter away on his ship. Her maid chose to remain among her people. Ralestone hints that she was a sort of priestess of Voodoo and that it had been her dark powers which had protected the lives of those she loved. "Ralestone took the refugees to Curaçao, but de Roche did not survive.
"Val, hadn't you better go back to bed?" suggested his sister. "Not now," he grinned at her. "I haven't lost my mind yet, nor am I raving. Ladies and gentlemen," Val prepared to echo Creighton's speech of an hour before, "permit me to introduce Roderick St. Jean de Roche Ralestone, the missing heir!"
His wife was dead, worn out while yet in her youth by the horrors of her girlhood. But Roderick brought with him a ten-year-old boy who had the right to both the name of Ralestone and that of de Roche. "Roderick himself was greatly changed. Years of free-trading, both in the Gulf and in the South Seas, had made him wholly sailor. A cutlass cut disfigured his face and altered the line of his mouth.
"Coming!" he shouted back. "Well, make it snappy!" she shrilled. "The toast has been burnt twice and " But what further catastrophe had occurred her brother could not hear. "Yo'all wants to git to de back do', Mistuh Ralestone, suh? Dere's a sho't-cut 'cross dis-a-way." Sam turned into a side path and Val followed.
"And may I ask who you are and what you are doing here? This place is not open to trespassers, you know." "We did think we would explore," answered Ricky meekly. "You see, this all belongs to my brother." She swept her hand about in a wide circle. "And just who is he?" "Rupert Ralestone of Pirate's Haven."
The thin, efficient, brown-faced person who was Roderick St. Jean de Roche Ralestone, to grant him his full name, stretched lazily and transferred a fistful of Ricky's peas to his mouth, a mouth which was no longer sullen. At Val's question he raised his shoulders in one of his French shrugs and considered. "Yellow, with lilies behind mah ears," he grinned at Ricky.
I advise you, Ralestone, that if Fen makes you the proposition I think he's going to, to grab it. It'll mean hard work for you and plenty of it, but there is a future to it." "I don't know how to thank you," the boy began when Holmes frowned at him half-seriously. "None of that. I was really doing Fen a favor, but you needn't tell him that.
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