The Turncoat (36 page)

He reached the last door at the end of the corridor and scratched before entering. Then he opened the door and led her in.

Her heart stopped when she saw the man standing in the window. His back was to her. Moonlight limned his silhouette, and in the silvery light all was shades of black and gray. And she thought: Tremayne. Then he turned and dispelled the illusion. She struggled to breathe. And her heart started again with a single, painful stroke.

“Hello, Kate.” It was her fiancé. Bayard Caide.

*   *   *

P
eter Tremayne swam upstream through the dancers in the vast, temporary banqueting hall. A hundred mirrors, borrowed, and in some cases stolen, no doubt, from the householders of Philadelphia, gave back the light of a thousand candles. The air was perfumed with flowers and beeswax and costly scent, and every surface was painted to look like something it was not. Plaster painted to look like marble, pasteboard painted to look like mahogany, and cloth painted to look like blue, cotton-clouded sky.

It was a carpentry simulacrum of his world. The merchants of Philadelphia playing at being English aristocrats. And the English gentlemen playing at being chivalric heroes. Everyone pretending to be something they were not. Except for one girl, who was not here, because she was no longer playing at being anything but herself.

His progress was halted when the fireworks began, and the orchestra put down their instruments, and the tide of dancers turned in his direction and flowed out onto the lawn, leaving him a path to the end of the hall where Captain André sat with one particular Lady of the Blended Rose drying a tear-streaked face.

“I thought you would be happy to see me,” Peggy Shippen murmured. André murmured something soothing in return.

Tremayne didn’t bow or offer any kind of greeting. “A word with you.”

Long-lashed, gold-flecked eyes looked up at him with more sympathy than they had mustered for the teary girl. “In private, I think,” replied André.

The Shippen girl pouted miserably and André chucked her on the chin. A brotherly gesture, or something one might do to a favorite dog. Tremayne did not know why it disturbed him so.

There was a room, or a closet really, at the end of the hall, lit by sconces too utilitarian for the ballroom, and piled with bunting and building supplies and broken chairs. Painted double doors, most likely “borrowed” from someone’s home in town, divided it from the ballroom. André gestured for Tremayne to precede him in, closed the doors, twitched the skirts of his black coat behind him and sat, gracefully, on the only unbroken chair.

Tremayne remained standing. “We had an agreement.”

“In which I kept my part,” replied André smoothly. “Please don’t mistake me for a twopenny villain. I do nothing without a purpose. There are twelve thousand men marching through the dark for Valley Forge. Honest soldiers in scarlet coats who do not disguise their business. Balance them—and the Crown’s will—against the life of one girl, who is, I must remind you, a spy.”

“And you are a spymaster.”

“But like Anubis, the weigher of hearts, I am not obliged to place my own upon the scales. She was a fool to make the attempt. Brave, but a fool. We captured her several hours ago.”

Tremayne’s worst nightmare, come to pass. “She is an English woman. She deserves a trial.”

“You would bring her back here just to see her hang?”

“I would use every ounce of influence and my entire fortune to see that she did not. What have you done with her?”

André regarded him with something akin to pity. “I will not tell you, my lord, because while your political support might advance my career, your disgrace could destroy it. And if you follow Kate Grey, there is only one end for you. On the gallows. The king will have little love for the man who put you there, so I find that I am obligated to save you from yourself.”

Tremayne drew the packet of letters out of his pocket and handed them to André. “In exchange for Kate.”

He had not seen them before, that much was obvious. André swallowed, and it was the first unconscious thing Tremayne had ever seen the man do. Brushing his finger over the careful slanted script was the second. The gesture was imbued with all the sensuality that had been absent when he touched Peggy Shippen.

André wanted the letters. Not to burn. Though he would have to.

“Where can I find her?”

André looked up at him. “She is by now with Bayard Caide.” He said it with the same intonation as if the words had been “She is dead.”

“Where?”

“He may have already killed her.”

“Bay is many things, but he is not a murderer.”

“The Merry Widow might beg to differ, if Caide had not opened her throat.”

“You and I both know Angela Ferrers goaded him into doing it, to save Kate.”

André still held the letters lightly, reluctant to take full possession. “Consider carefully, Lord Sancreed. Miss Grey has been gone more than twelve hours. You will not be arriving in the nick of time like the hero of some tawdry stage play. If nothing else, he has had her by now. She will not be the same girl you knew.”

It was true, and Tremayne knew it. Was prepared for it. But he was not prepared for what André said next. “Colonel Caide has always been bent on self-destruction, but I did not expect to find you so ready to reenact your parents’ tragedy.”

The music struck back up then, and the doors shook under some invisible onslaught. When Tremayne did not reply, André slipped the letters into the breast pocket of his waistcoat. “I beg you to consider some other way I might pay you for these letters.”

The doors burst open, revealing a glittering tableau. The ensigns had been running races across the dance floor, with a drunken embellishment: skating the final few yards on the gilded wooden shields of the Knights of the Burning Mountain. Two of them had overshot the finish line, broken through the doors, and fetched up at Tremayne’s feet.

He experienced it all with the dreamlike slowness of a ballet. The bright-eyed women in their towering hair and shimmering silk, pouring a starting line of sugar across the dance floor. The young men taking their places for the next meet. The slipping and sliding as they ran and dove onto their improvised sleds. The casual lewdness at the fringes of the crowd, promising more direct encounters in the dwindling hours.

And John André, standing at his shoulder, speaking in his ear like a coryphaeus. “If you leave tonight, my lord, I will not be able to keep your name out of it. You will lose everything. Title, lands, and fortune. There will be no turning back.”

*   *   *

P
hillip Lytton laid her pistol and her dainty black whip on the baize-covered table and retreated to stand beside the door, blocking her escape.

Bayard Caide rose from his seat and strolled to the table. He picked up the pistol and removed the flint and emptied the pan. With care, he slid the ramrod down the muzzle and fished out the ball. Then he set the harmless weapon down and brushed his fingertips over the whip with the same care he reserved for his paints and his brushes, and his adored fiancée. “Thank you, Mr. Lytton,” he said, his eyes finally searching out Kate’s, and holding them. “You may go.”

“I gave Miss Grey my word,” said Phillip Lytton unwisely, “that she would not be mistreated.”

A smile quirked the corner of Bayard Caide’s mouth, and for a moment he looked more than ever like Peter Tremayne. She willed herself not to flinch.

“And I gave you an
order
, Mr. Lytton.” His eyes didn’t leave Kate’s. “Now kindly shut the door and leave us.”

“She needs a chaperone,” insisted Lytton. “One of the barmaids, or the innkeeper’s—”

“That will do, Mr. Lytton.”

Lytton stood hesitating in the doorway.

“Thank you for your concern, Mr. Lytton.” She hoped that would pass for absolution. She did not want to be on anyone’s conscience but her own.

“I am sorry,” the young officer replied. He retreated from the room but did not close the door, and she heard Caide sigh behind her. He crossed to the door and shut it himself, then turned to face her.

He looked tired. And dangerous. “I don’t even know what to call you,” he said. “Are you Kate, or are you Lydia?”

She didn’t know. “My name is Katherine Lydia Grey.”

“Who were you for Peter?”

“Kate. I was always Kate for him.”

He leaned back against the door and thrust his hands into his hair. “I began this day thinking the end was in sight. That we would take Valley Forge, and the war would be done. That you and I would marry. Then André came to me this morning and told me you planned to run away with Peter. But if you did not, if you made a run for the Rebel lines to warn Washington, I must deal with you. I scarcely knew which outcome was more desirable, or deserved.”

“I am sorry.”

“Sorry? You made a murderer of me, Lydia. I killed her for you.”

There was suddenly not enough air in the room. “Who?” But she knew already.

“The Merry Widow. Angela Ferrers. I slit her throat. To keep her from speaking your name.”

“But,” Kate said, her voice almost a whisper, “how did you know I was working for her?”

“I didn’t, not for certain. Not until that night. It all made a terrible sense then. The way Peter always watched you so intently. His inability to find the spy in Philadelphia. I could tell he wanted you, but I convinced myself it was the same old rivalry—and that
you
had chosen me. Do you know what the worst part was? Howe thanked me. For killing the Widow. He thought I did it for him. Slit that woman’s throat to protect his precious mistress, Elizabeth. Mrs. Loring’s spying is an open secret on the general’s staff. But I didn’t do it to keep Howe’s paramour safe,
Lydia
. I did it for you.”

“What will you do with me?” she asked. She sounded braver than she felt.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“My father,” she began tentatively, “is less than ten miles from here. Let me go to him.”

“No.” Absolute and final. “Of all the men in Philadelphia, for God’s sake why did it have to be Peter?”

“I love him.”

“Some things,” he said, crossing the room and turning her roughly to face the window, “aren’t about love.”

The courtyard below was filled with dragoons. There were thirty men, and only half a dozen women scattered among them. Some must have been professional whores, and willing, but the rest were not.

She tried to back away from the sight, but he was there behind her, blocking her escape and pressing her forward until her shins barked the window seat and she was forced to grip the molding to steady herself. They remained frozen like that, his chest pressed to her back, her knuckles white on the fluted woodwork, the scene below playing out an awful prelude to what she knew was to come. His breath danced in her ear. “It’s better this way, I’ve decided. Now we need be no one but ourselves.”

His fingers settled over the neck of her immodest gown, gripped, and tore, splitting the flimsy gauze easily down the middle. He lifted her gossamer skirts, piling them around her hips, positioned himself, and entered her. He had done nothing to court her pleasure, but found a slick, shaming welcome in her body all the same.

He worked her methodically until he coaxed a response. She broke and shuddered for him, openmouthed, rigid and wordless with mortification. Her legs buckled and his hands seized her waist, held her in place. He was still as her heartbeat slowed and her skin cooled. Waiting for her to become aware of the intrusion of his body in hers. The thick pulse of his cock lodged inside her.

Then she felt it. His spasm of release, held deliberately in check, because he’d wanted her to know this moment fully. It came in total silence. He didn’t groan or cry out. Only a rush of liquid warmth inside her, humiliating and final.

He slipped, still hard, from her body, and she sagged against the open shutters, pressing her cheek to the cool wood there. She felt his hands busy at the hooks and laces on her back, his touch all solicitousness now that he had shown her what she was.
You may be tempted, because of your upbringing, to despise and punish yourself for what you have become. Do not use Bayard Caide for that purpose. No man or woman deserves that.

Angela Ferrers had understood Kate only too well. Kate did despise herself. She had betrayed Peter Tremayne when she rode out of Philadelphia, and her father when she failed to shoot Phillip Lytton in the road. And this was exactly the reckoning she deserved.

He stripped off the tatters of her clothes and led her by the hand, naked, to the edge of the bed, and bent her over the quilted counterpane. He was skilled, even with the dainty little crop, whose weight and contours must have been unfamiliar to his hand. He placed his strokes precisely, feathering them down her back in a neat pattern that kissed her shoulders and mimicked the print of her absent stays. Only the first few strokes were painful. The rest were something else. She heard his breathing grow uneven, in the utter silence of the room. And then he stopped and turned the whip hand over to her.

Seventeen