Pirates (29 page)

A shadow of shame moved briefly in Stone’s shrewd eyes, then vanished. “I apologize for the necessity, Mistress Rourke. However, these are desperate times, and regrettably, harsh measures are sometimes required.” He paused and turned to glance behind him, up the darkened stairs, effectively stopping Phoebe’s heart, and then went on in a determined voice. “Men who would shelter an enemy of the King cannot be counted among His Majesty’s friends. John and Lucas Rourke shall be remanded to headquarters in Charles Town, there to be tried as traitors.”

“You have no proof!” Lucas spat, appalled and furious. He was still bond at the wrists, like his father. ’Perhaps they’re right, these rebels, when they accuse the King and his government of tyranny. Only a despot detains honest citizens without just cause!”

The guests, who had been stunned to silence until then, began to murmur among themselves. Phoebe held Phillippa. who was sobbing silently; she did not dare to look toward the stop of the stairs again for fear of revealing what she had guessed—that Duncan was there, just beyond the reach of the lamplight, listening, watching. Planning God only knew what.

“Silence!” shouted the major. “There is no tyranny here. It is Rourke who has broken the law, not me, nor my men.”

“
British
law,” some intrepid soul scoffed from within the knot of dumbfounded partygoers. “Not our own!”

There was a flurry of agreement, incendiary, traitorous. The Tories were heard, as well. What an electric party group, Phoebe reflected—Trojans and Greeks.

Again, John Rourke spoke, the voice of reason in a room thrumming with violence barely restrained. Margaret stood straight-spinned and square-shouldered at his side, her hand
resting lightly in the curve of his arm. They might have been going in to dinner, for all the alarm either of them showed, instead of facing possible tragedy.

“Shhh,” Phoebe said to Phillippa. The room was an emotional tinderbox, ready to erupt into chaos at any moment. John and Margaret Rourke understood that, Phoebe could see, though she had her doubts about Lucas, and Phillippa was on the point of giving way to hysteria.

With considerable ceremony, Stone left his dais on the stairs and crossed to face his lost and hostess. “I
am
sorry” he said.

“I know,” John replied hoarsely.

At that, the Rourke men were taken from the room.

“Mama,” Phillippa moaned, trembling, her face wet with tears.

Margaret’s command came quickly and brooked no argument. “Collect yourself, Phillippa,” she said. “Your father and brothers, you and Phoebe and I, we must all be strong and share what courage we can muster among ourselves.”

With that, she swept away, following John and Lucas and their armed guard toward the back of the house. Phillippa straightened her back and dashed at her cheeks with the back of one hand. “Duncan is right,” she whispered, and Phoebe released her, though she remained close by. “This is oppression!”

Another convert to the rebel cause, Phoebe thought, but she took no joy in the fact. Nothing in her high school and college careers had prepared her for the fact that real people had staked everything, their lives, their fortunes, and their personal freedom, such as it was, on one of the greatest gambles in the history of the western world. The players on both sides of this drama were not the flat, lifeless figures in paintings, the fancy handwriting in eighteenth-century diaries, actors in a miniseries, or the subjects of outdated biographies—they were real. They were innocent, idealistic children like Phillippa, skinny boys with bad complexions and a yearning for home, whether that was London or Boston, Brighton or Yorktown. They were good and honorable
men, like John Rourke and like Major Basil Stone. They were courageous, beautiful women, like Margaret, like the women who surely waited and worried and made the age-old sacrifices on both sides of the fray.

Phoebe stood, stricken, watching as Major Stone conferred briefly with several of his men. When the conversation had ended, he came to her, as she had expected him to do.

“When next you see your husband,” he began, not unkindly, not even disrespectfully, but with a sort of obdurate reason that turned Phoebe’s blood to splinters of ice, “I trust you will tell Mr. Rourke that the lives of his father and brother are now in his hands.”

“I imagine he knows that,” Phoebe said. She, like Phillippa, had drawn strength from Margaret’s brief parting speech.

“I imagine he does,” Stone agreed.

Phillippa had recovered her composure, though her eyes were still puffy and red-rimmed and the skirts of her gown were rumpled where she had grasped and crushed them in her first. “Perhaps,” she said to the major, “you should take Mother and Phoebe and me as hostages, too. Surely chivalry cannot matter to you, not if you would betray men who have long been your friends.”

Phoebe said nothing, made no attempt to stop her sister-in-law’s diatribe.

Major Stone glared at them both for a long moment, then moved through the scattered remnants of the crowd and disappeared.

Phoebe waited until she was certain no one was watching, then made her way slowly, casually, up the main staircase, Phillippa following. There was no sign of Duncan, but something of his essence lingered in the weighted summer air, and she knew he had been a witness to the arrest of his father and brother. She was thankful he had not attempted to intervene.

Not yet, at least.

Phoebe hurried along the upper hallway, holding her hem off the floor to keep from tripping over the rustling skirts of
her ball gown, with Phillippa still close behind. She opened the door to her room and burst in, expecting to find her husband there, pacing, perhaps, while he laid plans to implement a rescue.

The chamber was empty, though the curtains had been trust aside and the terrace doors gaped open, admitting mosquitoes, the rise and fall of human voices, and the night sounds from the stables and the dark, dense woods beyond the garden and the lawn.

Phillippa cast a glance at the rumpled bed, which was clearly visible by the light of a lamp lit earlier, when Phoebe and Duncan had finished with their lovemaking, but she asked no question.

“Is there another way out of this room?” Phoebe asked, keeping her voice down and hoping the state of the bedclothes didn’t tell too clear a tale. “Besides climbing the outside wall like Dracula, I mean?”

“Dracula?”

“I’ll explain another time,” Phoebe replied, exasperated with herself. She was going to have to stop mixing up her centuries if she wanted to live happily in this one. Not that she was likely to achieve that modest dream, given the war and the fact that she was married to one of America’s Most Wanted. “Sometimes these houses had—have—secret passages. How about this one?”

Phillippa went to the terrace and looked out before closing the doors carefully against the night and turnings to face Phoebe. She hesitated, and Phoebe realized, with a slight pang, that the girl was making a final, down-to-brass-tacks decision—to trust or not trust.

She waited in silence. If she had not proven her loyalty to the family by now, there was, in her opinion, no hope of ever doing so.

“Yes,” Phillippa said at long last. “Come here, and I’ll show you.” Behind one of the floral tapestries flanking the fireplace on either side was an almost seamless panel. With a push of her hand, Phillippa opened it, revealing the cramped passage inside. Rather a full-sized hallway, this was a rabbit warren, one of many entrances, Phoebe
later learned, to a maze covering most of the house. Anyone larger than a child of five or six would be forced to crawl through it on hands and knees.

Phillippa knelt and peered inside. “I suppose he’s long gone,” she mused.

“Duncan?” The name left Phoebe’s lips aboard a mocking tone. “He doesn’t have the sense to run away. He’ll get himself horsewhipped, and finally hanged, trying to save your father and Lucas from the evils of a British stockade.”

Rising, Phillippa closed the Alice-in-Wonderland door, and the tapestry fell into place, as it was intended to do, with no help from anyone. “Now that I’ve had time to think about it,” she said, using a damask towel from Phoebe’s washstand to wipe her hands, “I understand that Major Stone means Father and Lucas no real harm. He is using them as bait, that’s all.”

“To trap Duncan,” Phoebe agreed ruefully. Perhaps some of Phillippa’s fears had been erased, but Phoebe herself was still terrified. Trap or no trap, her husband would try to spring the prisoners. For him, the knowledge of their captivity would be unbearable, reason enough, in and of itself, to attempt their release. “Phillippa, if you have any idea where your brother would hide, you must tell me. It’s important that I speak with him.”

“Why?” Phillippa asked, walking resolutely over to the bed and making it up, as she had probably seen the servants do many times. “You won’t be able to change his mind, you know.”

Phoebe feared her sister-in-law was right. “No,” she said sorrowfully. “I don’t suppose I will.” She sat down on the edge of the bed she had shared so happily with Duncan such a short while before, and Phillippa took a seat beside her, frowning.

“I want to go away with you and Duncan,” Phillippa finally proclaimed. “I’ve decided to join my lot with the rebels and do what I can to help throw off this miserable king.”

Phoebe smiled sadly. “You have a great deal of confidence in your brother’s ability to escape,” she observed.
“What makes you so certain he won’t be caught, tried, and hanged?”

“He’s far too clever,” Phillippa said.

Phoebe was skeptical, but for the sake of her sanity she chose to believe that Duncan would prevail, as the colonies themselves would prevail, shaping themselves into the beginnings of a great if often troubled nation. “I’m not sure Duncan will agree to take you away from troy,” she warned quietly, after a long and thoughtful silence. “He might not be willing to subject you to that kind of danger, Phillippa. After all, you are his only sister.”

“And you are his only wife,” Phillippa pointed out, “but he’ll take you with him when he leaves.”

Phoebe could only sigh and wait.

And wait.

Duncan’s father and brother were being held, predictably, in a cramped, musty corner of the cellar, a tiny room with a dirt floor and drapery of cobwebs overhead. They were provided with a single tallow candle for light; it smoked and wavered and sputtered in the fetid gloom of their dungeon.

He watched them for a while, to make certain situation. Duncan could have told Stone, that pompous old maid of a soldier, that no amount of time or reflection would induce them to betray him. He was not a criminal in their eyes, but merely a misguided mischief-maker who would come to see reason, one the rebellion had been put donw and matters had been properly explained to him.

Duncan smiled for his own benefit, raised the loose metal grafting hidden amongst the dust and spider-spinnings of the ceiling, and let himself down through the narrow opening.

Lucas leaned forward, as if to rise, and simultaneously opened his mouth to speak. John, who sat beside his elder son on the cold floor, stayed both impulses by grasping Lucas’s arm.

Duncan dropped to his haunches, took up the candle, and held it in such a away that its dim light fell over his father’s worn, kindly features. He saw anger in the set of John
Rourke’s face, as well as exhaustion and an unsetting degree of sorrow. It was true, then, what Phillippa had written in her letter to Duncan so many weeks before: their sire was tired and ill. Perhaps even inclined to die.

“My men wait in the woods,” Duncan said, taking care to keep his voice low. There were guards outside; he had seen them moving sluggishly through the heavy night air, their coats discarded, their shirts wet with sweat, their palms slick, no doubt, on the stocks of their muskets. “There is room for you, aboard the
Francesca
.” Lucas spoke at last, in a spitting whisper. “You are mad, coming here!”

Duncan did not explain that he’d come to see their father; Lucas knew that had known it since their last encounter, in a distant cove. “The simplest things surprise you, Brother,” he said. “I have no time to cajole or convince. Will you leave with me, or allow yourselves to be hanged for depriving the good major of an opportunity to earn yet another medal?”

John took the tallow from Duncan’s hand and set it aside. “You must know,” he said, “that I cannot leave your mother or Phillippa. Or Troy itself, for that matter.”

Duncan felt a tightening in his throat. He too, loved the land, and hoped to live upon it again one day, as a free man, but there was no time to elaborate. “Mother and Phillippa are not in danger of being executed for treason,” he pointed out. “You are, and so is Lucas.”

“No,” John said firmly.

A vision of his father swinging from a length of rope on a scaffold flashed before Duncan’s eyes; he had seen other men die that way, for lesser crimes, and had come near to such an end himself, on several occasions. “God in heaven, Father, does your life mean nothing at all? And you.” He turned a blazing stare on Lucas. “You are a young man, with many fruitful years left to you. Will you never marry, never sire a child—never live unfettered, knowing that you won that liberty for yourself?”

A pained expression contorted Lucas’s face for a moment, but he brought himself swiftly under control. “Major
Stone will see his error and set us free,” he said, though the words lacked a certain conviction.

Duncan started to pretest, but his father cut him off by taking his wrist in a grasp still strong enough to be mildly painful. “Tell me, Duncan,” he said, “what would you do in my place? If this were your land—and it will be someday, in part, by the grace of God—if it meant abandoning your wife and your young daughter, abandoning all the workers who depend on you for every bite of food that goes into their mouths, every scrap of cloth that covers their backs,
what would you do
?”

Duncan was silent, defeated now, half-strangled by the frustration he felt, the rage, and the empathy.

“Speak,” John pressed sternly. “I will not allow you to leave my question unanswered. What would you do in my place?”