Paper Woman: A Mystery of the American Revolution (29 page)

The younger
woman smiled at Mathias and brushed his elbow.
 
"It's so hot."
 
Mathias
scooted closer to Sophie, who could tell the woman's lower leg was rubbing
his.
 
"Don't you agree it's
hot?"
 
Mathias eyed Sophie and
seemed embarrassed.

Sophie grinned
at the women.
 
"Forgive him.
 
He's a deaf mute."
 
Beneath the table, Mathias prodded her shoe
with his moccasin.
 
She enlarged her smile.
 
"But there's a Frenchman in the
Stocking and Slipper looking for someone to talk to."

The women
gaped, having realized only when Sophie spoke that she was a woman.
 
Then they rose, bobbed curtsies, and
hastened out the door and across the street.
 
Sophie muffled a laugh.
 
"
Vive
le Montcalm
.
 
Don't you dare tell
him I did that."

"I'm a
deaf-mute.
 
My lips are sealed."

"Good.
 
Are you always so rude to doxies?"

He shook his
head.
 
"They usually treat me like
I'm a piece of furniture.
 
I cannot
imagine what happened in this instance."

"Oh, well,
of the two of us, clearly you were the more handsome man.
 
A compliment to both of us, wouldn't you
agree?"

"Backhanded
flattery if ever I heard it."

Chapter Twenty-Two

KER-POWW
!
 
"HALF PAST six, and all's well!"

All was,
indeed, well inside the Queen Charlotte.
 
The number of patrons in the tavern had tripled.
 
David had earned the Congress ten percent on
its investment.
 
And while Mathias
visited the smithy next door, his cousins communicated with Lower Creek warriors
in the back of the tavern, despite their different dialects.

Sophie grimaced
at the fat proprietor strutting his smoking timekeeper back inside.
 
Powder wasn't cheap.
 
He used the equivalent of an entire box of
cartridges each day calling out hours and half-hours.
 
All had best be well.

The excellent
English tea, of which she'd been deprived in Georgia due to trade restrictions,
was plentiful inside the tavern.
 
By
six-thirty, however, it made its presence known to her bladder.
 
She whispered to David, "I'm going to
find the vault."

"Not a bad
idea.
 
Let me know where it is."

She handed over
her saddlebags, squeezed from her seat, and glanced across the street at the
Stocking and Slipper.
 
Using up every
minute of his two hours, the Frenchman was.
 
But after all, there had been
two
women.

The innkeeper's
wife aimed her down the back stair, and she exited the tavern to a circle of a
dozen Negroes dancing in the dusk of evening while another fiddled.
 
She skirted them, a pot of corn mush kept
warm above a fire, and a beehive oven.
 
Off to the side, Lila sat with two elderly women and rocked her baby to
the rhythm of the music.
 
The new mother
gave Sophie a mystical smile.

A trail wound
through a small citrus grove, and the trees cleared to reveal a barn, watering
trough, and vault.
 
Through the planks
of the barn Sophie smelled the horses belonging to the innkeeper.
 
A massive Floridian mosquito lazed around
her ear and she swiped at it.
 
She
rapped on the door of the vault to make sure it wasn't occupied before
entering.

Above the
serenade of fiddle music, footsteps rustled in the coarse grass outside —
likely a tavern patron with several tankards of ale talking in his
bladder.
 
Uninterrupted time in a seat
of easement was another simple comfort she'd relinquished in favor of the
quest.
 
She reached for the corncobs.

No one was
waiting when she emerged, but the hair on the back of her neck stood up.
 
She hurried by the trough, and when she
passed the barn, he stepped out with a familiar greeting: a huge, raised knife,
and a sneer wrapping his mouth and black eyes.
 
She stiffened in horror.
 
"
Adios,
hija del Lobo
," El Serpiente whispered and sprang for her.

A pistol fired,
and she shrieked.
 
The assassin howled
with pain, the knife knocked from his hand.
 
"¡
Santa Maria
!"
 
He turned toward the grove enraged and shaken, wagging his hand.

At the edge of
the grove, Dunstan Fairfax stood at attention, a smoking pistol in his hand,
gaze fixed on the assassin.
 
Neither his
face nor his voice displayed any feeling.
 
"The devil.
 
I
missed."
 
He holstered the pistol.

Loathing carved
deeper into El Serpiente's face, and he shook his fist at Fairfax.
 
"The same way you missed Manuel's knee
in Alton?"

More horror
churned Sophie's stomach.
 
All her
suspicions about Fairfax were true.
 
She
backed away from both men.

Fairfax
encroached on the assassin.
 
"
Señor
Vasquez, or Velasquez, or Alvarez, or whatever your latest alias is, Major
Edward Hunt insists on an audience with you.
 
Be sensible and come along with me peacefully."

The assassin
spat on the ground, drew his sword, and stepped to the right, the trough
looming behind him.
 
"I would
rather mate with a demon,
El Teniente del Diablo
."

"The
devil's lieutenant" drew his hanger.
 
"As you wish."
 
Sophie
crept toward the grove, having no desire to watch a master murderer and a
military machine dismember each other.
 
Fairfax's words iced her spine.
 
"I shan't be but a moment, Mrs. Barton, so don't go far."

She ran.
 
Metal clashed behind her.
 
The assassin cried out, and she halted to
look back.
 
Fairfax had maneuvered El
Serpiente into tripping over the trough.
 
While she gaped, the lieutenant dragged the other man up off the ground
and knocked him out with a solid fist to the jaw.
 
Then he swung around and spotted her.

Terror loaned
her legs extra speed.
 
Halfway up the
path through the grove, the thud of Fairfax's boots closed behind her.
 
The fiddle music grew louder, as did hoarse
breaths of pursuit.
 
A few feet from the
exit of the grove, he snagged her arm and hauled her around.

"Lila!"
 
Sophie loosened her arm and swung at
Fairfax's jaw.
 
He blocked the swing and
pinned her arm.
 
"Lila!"

He clapped a
hand over her mouth, pinned both arms, and dragged her back down the path.
 
When they emerged at the barn, the assassin
still unconscious, Fairfax released her mouth.
 
"An audience between you and Major Hunt would be a waste of his
time.
 
He wouldn't have the slightest
idea how to extract information from you."

"I demand
that you release me this moment!
 
Lila!"

Angelic
radiance suffused his face.
 
"Not
until I've expedited the process of extracting information."

He dragged her
toward the barn, and dread smothered her.
 
She was going to be flayed alive.
 
"Help!
 
Fire!
 
Fire!"

Fairfax kicked
open the barn door.
 
"Scream if you
like.
 
No one shall hear you."

"You shall
be answerable to Major Hunt for every bone you break, every bruise you give me,
every scratch!"

He hauled her
inside and pinned her against the far wall, his left arm trapping her right,
his right hand clutching her left, as if they'd paired off in a bizarre
waltz.
 
A horse whickered in the stall
nearest them and shied away.
 
Fairfax's
voice softened in the shadows.
 
"Breaking, bruising, and scratching?
 
No, I cannot be bothered with any of that."

In the next
instant, her awareness of him jolted to comprehend that one hundred sixty-five
pounds of sweating, hard-muscled male pressed her to the side of the barn, her
inner thighs heated on his groin.
 
The
horror in her stomach curdled.
 
She
wasn't going to be flayed alive.
 
Oh, no.

His chest
expanded and contracted against hers while his breathing returned to
normal.
 
He smiled.
 
"As I was explaining outside, I believe
we've gone about this all the wrong way."

He didn't sound
penitent.
 
"Take your hands off me,
Lieutenant Fairfax."

The warmth of
his breath slid along the right side of her neck.
 
"Dunstan," he whispered.
 
"Dunstan."

"Damn
you!"

He laughed, his
breath a caress on her neck.
 
"You
think me a monster, don't you?"

"Torture
and violation are two sides of the same shilling."

His lips
hovered above her right ear.
 
"I've
never forced anyone."

Surely he
understood the multiple forms of rape.
 
And he hadn't denied torture.
 
She squirmed for escape but succeeded only in riding higher on his
groin.
 
Revulsion roiled in her chest,
particularly when she realized that any woman unfamiliar with Fairfax's twisted
mind might be aroused by his physical prowess and appeal.
 
Any woman.

"You —
you're supposed to be in South Carolina with the Seventeenth Light.
 
You ignored movement orders.
 
You'll be court-martialed for coming to East
Florida."

"Court-martialed?
 
Certainly not.
 
I've been authorized to neutralize the St. James espionage
menace."

Aghast, Sophie
stared at Fairfax.
 
Not only had he
covered up his acts of torture and murder well, but he'd schemed his own
transfer out of Georgia far enough in advance to whisper seduction in the ear
of his future commander and receive his blessing on the pursuit of spies.
 
For the duration of the mission, Major Hunt
had been saddled with a junior officer who was manipulative, brilliant, and
brutal.
 
Empathy for Edward panged her.

"So here I
am."
 
Fairfax grinned.
 
"And here
we
are."
 
He drew his lips along the line of her jaw
in a touch so light she barely felt it.

Her skin
crawled, a flush of flesh extending from her right ear down into her right
toes.
 
Her voice emerged hoarse.
 
"I haven't any information that could
be of use to you."

"The
flowerpot," he whispered, nibbling her earlobe.

She stared at
the open door of the barn over his shoulder.
 
Fairfax was crazy.
 
"Flowerpot?"

"You
remember.
 
The daisies.
 
A message buried in the soil, I wager."

It came back to
her then.
 
Sunday night over a week
before, when she was still under house arrest, she'd received that mysterious
flowerpot full of daisies and the second cipher hidden within.
 
She tried to make her tone as dubious as
possible, but for some reason, it continued hoarse.
 
"Why do you believe there was a message buried in the
soil?"

"Mmm.
 
I haven't understood until now why he's so
obsessed that he could chase you across three hundred miles into this worthless
hell."
 
He nuzzled her neck, the
heat of his lips encouraging her skin to crawl even more and her head to spin.
 
"You're such a spirited liar.
 
Of course there was a message in the flowerpot
— one so important that you violated house arrest."
 
He trailed his lips into the hollow of her
throat.
 
"You're also lying if you
say you aren't enjoying this —"

"And
you're doubly damned, Lieutenant."
 
She attempted to thrust him away from her and again only succeeded in
enhancing the contact of their bodies.
 
A shudder soared through her.
 
His restraint was so calculated, so
well practiced
.

"How
intriguing.
 
Do you realize no woman has
ever pretended to fight me before?"

"I'm
not
pretending!"

"If you
truly want me to desist, stop lying to me.
 
Tell me about the message.
 
Did
it not specify the alternate meeting place for Don Alejandro and the
rebels?"

His lips
migrated up to her chin, and she thrust her head back, as far away from him as
possible, her neck muscles straining.
 
Oh, gods, she didn't want Fairfax to kiss her mouth.
 
She'd as soon tongue a slug.
 
"I don't know what you're talking
about."
 
She held her jaw shut.