The Turncoat (20 page)

“I daresay he’s rather more occupied with General Burgoyne at the moment, Mr. Du Simitière. There is a war on,” she replied, but she was fascinated despite herself. The cabinet was lined with baize and stuffed with tomahawks, war clubs, pipes, bowls, baskets, and arrowheads. He was in possession of quite the largest stone hatchet she had ever seen. She thought she detected bits of bone and dried blood clinging to the blade. “Goodness. How did you acquire that?” she asked.

“I write letters to people and ask them to send me things.”

“I find it difficult to believe that this axe’s owner was much of a letter writer.”

“The hatchet was unearthed on the farm of the late Dr. John Kearsley on the Frankfort Road, about four miles outside our city,” replied Du Simitière. “I’m confident its owner had no further need of it,” he added brightly.

“You mean he was unearthed along with it.”

Du Simitière was elated by her conclusion. “Quite so! Are you a student of antiquarianism, Miss Dare? I believe that much could be learned from studying America’s native peoples with the discipline that Herr Winckelmann has applied to the ancients. Grave goods can tell us much about how a people lived. Do you not agree?”

Kate wasn’t certain she thought grave robbing was a legitimate form of scholarly inquiry. She agreed, however, that it might be informative, then demurred firmly when he tried to press upon her the loan of a copy of
Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums
.

Delighted to have an appreciative visitor and eager to find more wonders to please her, he begged her to follow him into the next room, where his most recent paintings and drawings were on display.

Du Simitière showed her quarto volumes of clippings detailing the progress of the revolt, from broadsides about the Stamp Act to engravings depicting Boston’s Tea Party. Sketches and miniatures of famous men on both sides of the conflict were bound together in his books, as they would never be in life. He was an impartial chronicler, preserving for posterity the Americans and British alike.

She stopped at the easel of a portrait, only half finished, of a handsome, dark, young lieutenant in the scarlet coat and blue facings of the 7th Foot. Something about the gold-flecked eyes and full lips of the subject gave her pause.

“Ah! That is a new commission. For Captain André. A portrait of his younger brother.”

“You know Captain André?” she asked, attempting to keep her tone light and conversational, as she wondered if she had stumbled into a trap of the captain’s making.

“Mr. Du Simitière knows everyone,” said Angela Ferrers, standing in the open door and dripping lightly on the compass rose painted floor. She wore homespun and coarse linen stays beneath a briny apron drenched with oyster liquor. “Your supper, Mr. Du Simitière,” she said with unusual cheer, setting a newspaper-wrapped parcel on a wobbling gateleg table.

“Delightful! I shall endeavor to build my own shell mound like our native peoples on the shores of the Delaware!” Du Simitière snatched the soaking package away from his precious drawings and unwrapped the parcel. He produced a knife from his pocket and began shucking and slurping oysters with quiet murmurs of appreciation.

“I had a message for you last night. Where have you been?” Kate asked, hating the petulance that crept into her voice.

Mrs. Ferrers ignored the tone of her question. “Shucking oysters on the dock.”

Her disguise was brilliant and practical at the same time. Kate couldn’t help but marvel at the woman. “Is that how you got into the city? With the fishing boats?”

“Howe cannot afford to turn away any catch now. We control the roads and the river. There are almost no supplies reaching the city, save what we let pass. I must say”—the Widow smiled at Mr. Du Simitière, carefully removed her sopping apron, and drew Kate into the next room—“America is proving to be a second education for me. Who knew that opening mollusks required such skill?”

“Anyone who has ever lifted a hand in the kitchen,” Kate said sourly.

Angela Ferrers laughed musically. “I wonder if you’ll be quite so eager to take up your role by the hearth when you return to Grey Farm, after such a glittering winter.”

“Howe means to attack Mercer,” Kate said.

“Yes, I know. I came to your room last night. I knew that the troop movements I observed in the city and André’s attempt on your life must mean an attack on Mercer. Your work allowed me to put it all together and get a warning to Washington last night. By this afternoon, Mercer will have been reinforced, and Colonel Donop will find the road to Red Bank hazardous. Enlisting Tremayne to aid you was resourceful. You did well to get away from André that night, but you didn’t tell me Peter Tremayne was back.”

The news that the Widow had been in her room when she was unconscious surprised Kate, and now the change in subject took her off guard. So she struck back. “You told me Peter Tremayne and Bayard Caide were cousins. André hinted that they are closer than that, but he did not say how.”

Angela Ferrers leaned back and made a critical inspection of Kate. She wasn’t fooled by the carefully applied cosmetics, because she had taught Kate to use them.

“Really? Did he happen to mention that while he was poisoning your drink? That was very careless of you, by the way, to take a drink you didn’t pour yourself. I taught you better.”

“No. He told me today, when he offered to fit me for a shroud if I didn’t come work for him. He means to track you through me.”

Even in sea-drenched rags, Angela Ferrers moved with a supremely confident swagger. She twirled in her tattered skirts and settled gracefully onto a threadbare stool. “How much do you know about the connection between Caide and Tremayne?” she asked.

“I know that their grandfathers were cousins, and that they were raised together. That Bay’s mother, Ann, fled her abusive husband. And that she and Bay were taken in by Peter’s father. And that Peter’s title was once held by Bay’s great-grandfather Edmund Caide. The Caides lost Sancreed when he was attainted for treason.”

“All of that is true. But it is not the whole story,” Angela said. “Edmund Caide’s descendants were embittered and twisted by the loss of Sancreed. None more than Ann’s brother, James. And James Caide lacked the principles that both ennobled and destroyed his grandsire. He spent most of his life trying to wrest the viscountcy back from the Tremaynes. When he feared he might never succeed, he abducted and raped Sancreed’s wife, Tremayne’s mother, to ensure that at least his child—and his own blood—would hold Sancreed again.”

“And Peter was that child?” Kate said. “Does he know?”

“I have no doubt,” said the Widow.

Kate could not imagine what it must have been like to grow up with such knowledge. “If the facts of Peter’s parentage were known, why was he allowed to inherit?”

“The late Viscount Sancreed was a man of principle. James Caide counted on as much. He knew the viscount would not be persuaded to divorce his blameless wife, Emma, or disown her innocent child. Indeed, that he would raise it as his own. He loved her, you see. To quiet rumors, the viscount even went so far as to acknowledge Peter specifically in front of the king. Peter’s legitimacy is now a lie accepted at the most exalted levels, which makes it fact.”

And a tragedy. “What became of Peter’s mother?”

“Emma Tremayne was, by all accounts, a loving mother while her son was a boy. But it was widely known that after enduring James’s touch, she couldn’t abide the touch of any man, including that of the husband she loved.”

Angela paused, studied Kate’s face a moment. “But none of that is your concern. You can’t involve yourself with Peter Tremayne. And you and I cannot meet in person again unless you have news that cannot be committed to a ciphered letter. John André is playing a deeper game than you are.”

“How so?” Kate asked.

“He is thinking beyond this theater and this conflict. Spymasters can become powers in their own right. Sometimes the power behind a throne. André has the talent and ambition for it, but he also has certain liabilities.”

“He admitted to me that he prefers lovers of his own sex,” Kate said, wondering just when she had become the sort of woman who discussed such things with candor. “He did not seem to regard the knowledge as a liability.”

“He is careful, and so long as he is discreet, Howe will turn a blind eye. But if Howe were to receive certain letters detailing André’s relationship with a young man he met while he was a prisoner last year, such a thing could not be ignored.”

“André would hardly write such letters. He is, as you said, careful.”

“But his young lover was not. I have brought his letters. You may find them shocking, but you must read them now and commit their contents to memory. Be ready to quote them if André threatens you again, and warn him that if you disappear, he may be certain they will find their way to Howe.”

Kate turned the stack of letters over in her hands. André had tried to kill her, had threatened to try again if she did not comply with his plans. And yet she hesitated to untie the bundle. Instead, she voiced the question that had been worrying her since the Widow had arrived.

“You came to the house that night. You knew André had tried to kill me. Why did you leave me there?”

“Because if you disappeared, André would know Mercer had been warned, and the Hessians would have been recalled.”

“But that,” reasoned Kate, “would have saved Mercer from any attack at all. With no blood spilled.”

“For a day. Perhaps even a week. And then Howe would have moved in earnest. He’d make a fresh reconnaissance and plan a well-ordered attack. He’d do things right, and win. Instead he has sent the cream of the Hessian infantry into the jaws of an ambush. The British think Mercer is an oversized fort with an undersized garrison. But in the two weeks since their engineers saw the works, it has been rebuilt from the inside, and gunships positioned to support it from the river. Tell me, are you in love with Peter Tremayne?”

Again, the sudden change of subject. Kate understood the Widow’s game. She didn’t trust Kate to answer honestly where Tremayne was concerned. It was her reactions the Widow was gauging, her hands, her eyes, her breathing, in the seconds before she answered. “He saved my life.”

“That’s no answer. Tremayne acted out of instinct. Given time to consider what he was doing, time to make a decision, he might not have acted as he did. He has too much to lose: money, lands, title. If he preserved your life, it was only for one purpose, and when he has what he wants from you, the connection will end.” There was no unkindness in her voice, only a weary pragmatism.

It rankled all the same. “Really? Did Tremayne tell you all this while I was unconscious?”

“It is the way of powerful men, Kate, and no judgment of your value, or your virtue. And mostly we talked about the attack on Fort Mercer.”

“He was aware that you knew of the attack, and he let you go?” Kate was incredulous.

“No, he was too patriotic to let me go. And unfortunately for his masters, too gentlemanly to truss a woman properly.” Angela Ferrers favored Kate with a sidelong glance. “Escape is an art you would do well to master. You may have cause to need it.”

At least that explained the torn curtains and the strips of chintz tied to the bedside chair.

Kate lowered herself stiffly onto a mustard-colored settee, which, like everything in Mr. Du Simitière’s hodgepodge of a house that was unrelated to his collection, had seen better days. She picked at the flaking paint. “Whatever Tremayne’s motives,” she said, remembering the safety she’d felt in his arms, “I am alive because of Peter.” His Christian name, with which she had never addressed him, felt strange on her tongue.

“Yes. And because of that, André has sent him to Fort Mercer with Carl Donop.”

For a moment Kate forgot to breathe. Tremayne had saved her life, carried her bodily away from danger, risked himself for her, and she had sent him into an ambush, into the waiting guns of Fort Mercer. While she had sparred with André this afternoon, Peter might have been dying.

Angela Ferrers’ voice, melodious and cool, brought her back. “Mercer had to be warned, Kate, no matter what we might have at stake personally.”

We
, not
you
, Kate noted. It was like a lock tumbler clicking into place. “You’re attached to Count Donop.” Kate hesitated to use the word “love” in relation to Angela Ferrers. She had never met a woman more in control of her emotions. “You care about him, but you still disgraced him at Mount Holly. You’re the reason he’s determined to take Mercer.”

“And I am the reason he will fail. I am sorry, Kate, but there is no room for sentiment in our work. By saving you from Captain André, Peter Tremayne implicated himself in treason. André now has a hold over him. Those letters will give you a hold over André. Read them,” the Widow ordered.

The envelopes felt like dry leaves, the dead husks of a love affair. She did not want to open them.

And she did not want to confess to the Widow, but lying to Angela Ferrers had not so far produced pleasant results. “I was going to leave with Peter. He offered to take me out of the city. If he had come back for me, I would have gone with him.”

Angela Ferrers’ smile was sly and knowing, as it had been on the road to the Ashcrofts’. “But you survived on your own.”

She had. She’d survived the poison and its aftermath and, as she was coming to realize, had held her own against André. And she could do so again, if she must.

“And when Peter returns?” she asked.

“He saved your life. If he survives Mercer, you must return the favor. Keep him at arm’s length. You are a Rebel, a spy, and to him and his, a traitor. If you turn to him for help again, you’ll put a noose around his neck.”