The Turncoat (35 page)

The little Huguenot himself appeared on and off here and there like a lightning bug. For the myriad parts of the Mischianza hung together only with the constant attention of its impresario. One moment he was instructing the galley captains, the next he was directing the crowd. Tremayne noticed that for once, Kate was acting sensibly and avoiding the man.

It took an hour to load the boats, and another two to make the trip downriver to the Neck. He could see now why André was so insistent that Kate take part in the pageant. The route was lined with navy boats, the
Cerberus
and the
Dauntless
and the
Roebuck
, and there were marines stationed on every galley. An honor guard, they would appear to the blameless guests. A prison detail, they must seem to Kate.

The disembarkation was a fussy affair. Wharton’s private dock was draped in silk bunting, and the broad way to the jousting ring and stands was festooned with swags and garlands and punctuated by two triumphal arches. André had managed to cobble together nearly an entire orchestra out of at least eight disparate military bands, and Howe had wasted a fortune attempting to dress them uniformly. There was a good deal of trumpet fanfare alternating with Handel, meant to sound vaguely medieval.

The Knights and Ladies and well-heeled guests processed to the jousting lists. As a professional horseman, Tremayne enjoyed seeing a bit of trick riding, and the way the Knights handled the unfamiliar baggage of gilt shields and gilt plaster breastplates. André himself was passably good. Tarleton was spectacular but brutal. He seemed not to have grasped that the tilting was entirely for show, and managed to unseat his opponent, a red-faced major who refused to shake hands afterwards and stalked from the field dragging his broken lance. Tremayne made a private vow to avoid Tarleton for the rest of the night. The boy was obviously spoiling for a fight and Tremayne had no intention of being drawn into a senseless duel, not now.

There was a bit of stagey drama when the Ladies of the Blended Rose stood up as one and begged the Knights of the Burning Mountain to leave off their contests. Their favor was won, they declared, and they would unveil.

But they could not go directly into dinner yet. The Knights and their Ladies were to lead the way into the banqueting hall, miraculously constructed in under a month and outfitted, it was rumored, at a cost of six thousand pounds. Each Knight in turn was to ride to the viewing stand, receive his Lady’s favor, watch appreciatively as she unveiled, and then escort her in to dinner. The business was going to take forever, which was regrettable, because Tremayne hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

Servants dressed as pages had been coming and going all night, and Tremayne had paid them little attention, but now there was one climbing the stands directly toward him. “For you, my lord,” the boy said, depositing an oilskin package in Tremayne’s hands and departing the way he had come.

The unveiling was proceeding painfully slowly. Only a quarter of the Knights had claimed their Ladies when Tremayne opened the oilskin package. He knew Kate’s writing at once, though he had never seen it before: bold, neat, and graced by unexpected flourishes.

Only the first page was in her hand. It was brief, and to the point. Where she had gone, André would be waiting, but she had no choice but to try. To get a message to Washington, of course, Tremayne knew, heart sinking. The contents Kate had enclosed, if he kept a copy, would ensure that André did not trouble him further.

There were only three Ladies left on the platform, including the one he had assumed to be Kate. He leafed quickly through the rest of the letters in the packet. From a boy. To André. Detailed and damning. The price of Tremayne’s safety. He had put his life in her hands, and she—she had handed it back to him.

He looked up then to see John André approach the stand, lower his javelin, and come alongside the platform. His Lady stepped forward, laid a laurel wreath on his head, and lifted her veil.

Tremayne did not need to see her face. He saw the ripple of surprise that ran through André. Then the spymaster laughed. Openmouthed, appreciative, and not at all welcome to the girl who stood on the platform, who had clearly been expecting an altogether different reaction.

Because the lady was not Kate. She was Peggy Shippen.

*   *   *

I
t had not been difficult to convince Peggy to take part in the deception. She already owned the dress. Her scandalized father had withdrawn his consent only at the last moment, and that was when Kate was drafted to take her place.

It helped that Peggy had been growing desperate. The expected proposal from André had never materialized. He’d seemed to her singularly unconcerned when she’d told him she was barred from attending the Mischianza. He was slipping through her fingers.

Kate doubted very much that Peggy would win André’s favor with this escapade, but she could not afford to worry about one spoiled girl’s broken heart. She had sent Peggy off to the docks, turbaned and veiled, assuring her that she was a veritable Cleopatra, sneaking past the guards rolled in a rug to meet her Caesar. Kate refrained from mentioning that the Egyptian did not come to a good end.

She waited until the galleys shoved off, because the Widow had taught her that lies are most successful when they contained a grain of truth, then ran to the Presbyterian Church, where Bay had stabled her horse. She was out of breath and in a hurry and desperately needed to get to the Neck, because she was one of the Ladies of the Blended Rose, and had missed her boat.

They believed her, of course. She was wearing one of the scandalous costumes after all, and no well-bred lady, not even Caide’s lady, would run around in such a thing in broad daylight to no purpose. Her acting, she realized later, did not have to be of the first quality, because the quantity of calf and bosom on display guaranteed that the grooms and stable hands were not looking at her face.

She was astride in a matter of minutes, mounted on the horse Bay had bought her, seated in the saddle he’d had made for her, using, with purpose if not with skill, the dainty black leather whip.

Her destination was north of the city, on the road to Valley Forge, but she could not ride in that direction. Not yet. She was supposed to be going south to the Mischianza. So for a while, she did. It was easy to pass the sentries on the main roads below the city, because so many people were attempting to do so: caterers and carters and brewers and drapers all hurrying last-minute goods to the party. She was a last-minute good as well, and threw saucy comments back at guards who winked and complimented and wished her luck arriving at the Wharton Mansion in time for the joust.

Then, when she reached a quiet stretch of road with no one to witness, she turned her horse down a narrow lane, barely a cow path, overgrown with new spring grass and wildflowers, and cut across to a smaller, less-traveled road, and began heading north. It took her an hour to get clear of the city, and then the trouble started.

The first sentries, posted by Howe to keep messengers from alerting Washington to the attack, swallowed whole her story about rushing to the Mischianza, and politely pointed her in the right direction, back the way she had come. She cut across country again to avoid them, and got a few miles farther north, when she encountered another line of pickets. They were equally polite but much more firm, and assigned a gawking young ensign to escort her back down the road.

He was much taken with her, and difficult to shake, but eventually he was persuaded to leave her. She cut across country again and found her way to the farm where she had been assured by the Lorings that a change of horse waited, but she knew her luck would run out sometime soon. She said a silent prayer of thanks that she had memorized the route, and carried no maps or documents, because if she was taken, she would be searched. And soldiers would fall on the little farmhouse with the wide red porch and the sky blue ceiling where the tan-faced boy sat peeling apples.

The boy was no more than twelve, she guessed, and growing bored with a responsibility that had seemed awesome in November, palled by January, and appeared entirely ludicrous now that it was May and the hated British were leaving anyway.

But the skinny boy knew at once who and what she was. Ladies in nearly transparent dresses silvered with spangles were not a common sight hereabouts. Especially not beautiful ones, with elaborately piled hair that matched the silken sheen of their chestnut mare.

He stood up and dropped his apple, but not his knife, because this was a dangerous business in which even pretty ladies still needed passwords.

She spoke it. And he ran. Straight into the barn. He emerged so quickly that she knew the horse must have been kept ready at all hours. Exercised, no doubt, regularly, because it would be ridden fast. Bored or not, the boy and his family had not shirked their part in this.

And if she failed them, if she did not warn Washington, these people would suffer for it, the way Milly and Andréw had suffered. If Howe destroyed the Continental Army, if the British were allowed free rein here, reprisals would be inevitable, and there would be nothing to keep the dragoons from their door in the middle of the night.

It was the work of a few minutes to change saddles, and as Kate watched the boy, she weighed her chances of reaching the King’s Arms. They were not good. Still, it was one thing to risk her own life, another to risk that of a child. Yet these were the kinds of decisions the Widow must have made all the time.

Then the Dutch door on the porch opened and a man strode out, lean, hard, and sun-browned, his features stamped with the same imprint as the boy’s. His father. But he was not in awe of her costume or her beauty. “Where is the Widow?” he asked.

“Dead,” Kate replied. And she was a poor substitute, she knew. “Howe is moving against Valley Forge tonight.”

“The roads are crawling with dragoons,” he said. “Do you have a pistol?”

She was a terrible shot, but she did have a pistol, the muff-size gun the Lorings had provided her. He held his hand out, and she retrieved the tiny pistol from her saddlebag. He held out his hand again, and she passed him the ball and the powder horn. He loaded it, primed it, and placed it in her trembling hand.

She knew she would not be able to fire it.

She tucked it in her saddle and strode into the barn, where the boy had gone to brush down the horse Caide had given her. She gave the boy a ruby, fat as a pigeon’s egg, from around her throat, and a message that would, if it reached the right ears at Valley Forge, wake a sleeping army. She watched him set off running across country, then returned to her mount to face the opprobrium of his father.

He said nothing. Merely gave her a leg up into her saddle. But as she turned her new mount toward the road, he spoke. “The boy has a better chance cutting across country on foot than you do on the road, whether or not you make good use of the pistol.”

Night was coming on fast when she passed the last of her memorized landmarks: a wooden bridge crossing a small stream built beside a rock as tall and wide as her horse. The King’s Arms lay three miles up the road.

The galleys would have docked at the Wharton Mansion by now. When the joust was finished, in a few short hours, her deception would be revealed. There was no going back. She would never see Peter Tremayne again. But he would be safe. She had sent him the letters that would buy his freedom from hanging and André’s blackmail.

Another mile passed, and then she saw them, a line of red and silver glinting in the moonlight strung out across the road. No ordinary picket, then. Joshua Loring had been right. André knew of the rendezvous at the King’s Arms. Her only chance now was to do as the Widow would have done: shoot her way past them and ride on to Valley Forge.

She drew out the pistol, wondered if it was better to shoot straight into the middle of their ranks and scatter the five horsemen, or aim for their flank and try to skirt them at the side of the road. Angela Ferrers would have known.

And the Widow would have crouched low over her horse and fired, even when she recognized the man who commanded them.

Kate slowed, then stopped, the dragoons less than twenty feet in front of her.

“Miss Grey, please lower the pistol,” said Phillip Lytton, with a gravity he had not possessed at Grey Farm. She wished then he had a weapon in his hands. She might be able to shoot him. The rest of the dragoons were armed, four carbines leveled at her breast.

“Tell your men to lower their guns and stand aside, Mr. Lytton,” she replied. “Or I will shoot you down.”

His mount pranced. Even if Lytton had learned to hide his nerves, his horse could sense them. But he was no longer the boy he’d been a year ago. “Shooting me will serve nothing, Miss Grey. You cannot outrun four well-mounted men. And we have orders to take you alive. The charges you face are serious enough without adding murder to them.”

She heard a burst of hysterical laughter and realized that it came from her. “We both know I will not face any sort of charges, Mr. Lytton, because I will not be tried. All in all, I think I should prefer a bullet.”

Phillip Lytton went rigid. “I spent five months a prisoner in your father’s custody, Miss Grey. I have dined at his table. I give you my word as a gentleman that you will not be mistreated.”

He wasn’t lying. He meant every word he said. And because of it, she couldn’t shoot him.

She lowered her pistol. He walked his horse forward and took it from her, along with the reins of her mount.

“Mr. Lytton,” she said, as he led her horse toward the lights of the King’s Arms. “Whatever happens to me tonight, please don’t ever tell my father the details.”

“I gave you my word, Miss Grey. Though you are a spy and a traitor, I promise you will not be molested. Your fate is for a court to decide. More than this I cannot say.”

Still, she knew there would be no trial.

The King’s Arms reared up on their left, a three-story stone, cross-shaped house with two projecting wings and a great walled yard. She could hear music and men and horses on the other side of the wall. The yard was bustling with dragoons. An entire troop in buff and scarlet. There was some regular custom as well, but the locals sat in quiet groups in the shadows, while the soldiers gambled and drank in raucous abandon. Lytton led her past the elderly innkeeper, who looked white and drawn, up the stairs and down a long hallway. It was quieter here, the sounds of the common room muffled.