Twin Speex: Time Traitors Book II (40 page)

He frowned and also shook his head, but with mock sadness. “And all this time, I thought we were close.”

She laughed. “Now where would you get that idea, I wonder?”

“Maybe from the fact that I hold a lien against this ship that I’ve not seen fit to enforce.”

She sat back abruptly, all the raillery gone from her voice, “What do you mean?” she asked with barely suppressed hostility.

“I mean what I say,” he replied keeping his poker face firmly in place, “I won a lien on this ship off the rather dim nephew of one Rodger Hawkins, an early financer of yours, I believe.”

Her mouth was clamped shut, thin-lipped with fury. Rodger Hawkins had died in a knife fight two years ago, and Sally had hoped that any documents he held over her had made their way into the trash heap. It seemed she was wrong. “Why ain’t you ever told me this?” she asked, suspicion creeping into her voice. “You’ve always paid for information before.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You’re smart, Sally.”

She cocked an eyebrow in response, a little of her mocking self-confidence returning. “You want me for something bigger.”

“The war is coming, and we’ll need information.”

“I don’t take sides. It ain’t profitable.”

“Just so,” he agreed, “Your intelligence will be more valuable because it won’t be colored by ideology or politics.”

She sat back in the wooden captain’s chair, one she had padded with worn cushions. Sally was a buxom woman whose full figure had filled out upon entering middle age. She didn’t actually have a peg leg. It was a joke from her supposed pirate days. She kept her thin strawberry blond hair short; her face was lined and weathered, but Hershel could tell she must have been quite attractive in her youth.

“And after all this is over? When the war is fought and won by whichever side?”

“I’ll tear it up in your presence.”

She smiled and nodded, squinting a little in his direction. “Let’s hope I live to see the day.”

“Let’s hope we both do,” he replied. “In the meantime, I need information on a matter that may or may not have to do with the impending war.”

“Oh?”

“The Godfather? And this syndicate? Know anything about it?”

She threw her head back in a full-throated laugh of real amusement. “And here I thought you needed me for the important stuff.”

He looked at her unblinkingly. “So it’s not real?”

“Oh, it’s real all right,” she answered, wiping her eyes and brushing the hair back from her forehead, “It’s just been… how do you say it? Exaggerated… yeah, that’s the word.”

“So, there’s no Godfather?”

“There’s definitely someone,” she replied, “but it ain’t no all-knowing Chinaman who’ll slit your throat soon as look at you, although there’s plenty who believe it.”

“You don’t?”

“This is what I know,” she told him straight-forwardly, “ ’Bout half a year ago, lots o money started filtering through the docks, secret-like, buying up property on the wharf. Some boats come in carrying large payloads, but some of me contacts say there was nothing in ’em. And nothing in the warehouses either.”

“Empty?”

“Yeah, like decoys.”

Hershel nodded knowingly, beginning to understand. “Smoke and mirrors,” he mumbled under his breath, and then said more loudly, “Someone wants us to believe there’s a far-reaching criminal syndicate.”

She nodded in agreement, and added, “There ain’t no syndicate, but there is something. Someone’s got a plan afoot and enough money to make it seem like something else.”

“Like a loyalist plot.”

Sally looked at him sharply. “I hadn’t thought ’o that, but, yeah, there’s money and ammunition going to the loyalists.”

“And the Godfather?”

“He’s just a story. No one’s ever seen ’em… just the woman…”

Hershel stopped now to look back down King Street, turning this conversation over and over again in his mind. Sally had described the woman as middle-aged, blond, and pretty. He had to fight the old-fashioned urge to dismiss the possibility that this elaborate ruse had been designed by a woman. After all, he had just left the presence of a woman who, by all accounts, was as formidable as any of the ruffians who ran their schemes up and down the coast. As if his own wife and her associates weren’t enough of an example.

With one final look, he retreated from the busy docks and turned up Walnut Street, heading for home. He and Cara occupied a set of rooms in an old, spacious house they shared with its elderly owner. Their landlord was a spry eighty-year-old who needed little help outside of his two servants. Even so, Cara and Hershel made it a practice to check in with him on a daily basis. But the old man routinely waved them on with a gentle, “I’m fine, I’m fine. You needn’t bother.”

While it was perfectly acceptable for him to enter through the front door, Hershel preferred ascending the side stairs to a balcony door that opened into their private foyer. He divested himself of hat and cape and heard the muffled snippets of a lively conversation emanating from behind the door of their small sitting room. A split second later, that same door was opened abruptly by Evelyn.

“Uncle Hershel, how glad I am that you’ve finally returned!” she exclaimed.

Jimmy emerged from behind her as she rushed over and grasped both his hands in her own. Hershel was not a physically demonstrative man, but his years as Evelyn’s “uncle” had accustomed him to the girl’s impulsive warmth, and he returned her grasp firmly.

“What is it, my dear?” he asked, concern clouding his face. “Why have you been waiting for me?”

She had been so distraught after Billy’s death that there was little anyone could do to console her. Even Benjamin Franklin’s gratitude for the comfort she had rendered his grandson only heightened her feelings of failure and inadequacy.

Hershel could see that she was struggling with something momentous and ushered her and Jimmy back into the sitting room. “Sit down and tell me calmly what it is you need,” he insisted, himself sitting in a chair next to the fireplace.

“I know… I think I know who killed Billy,” she said in a rush.

Hershel looked quickly over at Jimmy, who nodded seriously in agreement.

“Tell me what you have learned,” he urged her.

Evelyn did, beginning with the postmortem examination and ending with the declaration, “So, it’s poor Mrs. Lynch who’s been killed, and this woman has taken her place. Billy must have figured it out somehow. That’s why he said she was false. That man was really a woman, and I think she killed him to keep him from talking.”

Hershel raised his eyebrows at this. What Billy had or hadn’t uncovered would likely never be known for certain. But he wasn’t going to disabuse Evelyn of a conclusion that obviously gave her comfort.

He got up and paced over to the window, turning his back on the view to look at the girl and boy sitting on the sofa.

“We have a woman, Mrs. Lynch, the innkeeper and Mister Thornton’s sister-in-law, who you believe was murdered several weeks ago and thrown into the Schuylkill,” he recited. “Another woman took her place, presumably disguised so expertly as to fool even her brother-in-law.”

“And me!” Evelyn declared intensely. “I saw her at the market. We spoke several times since the discovery of the body. I tell you, Uncle Hershel, that marking is too distinctive. I noticed it when we first stayed at the inn. Mother called it a port-wine birthmark.”

“Next, we have the inn—” he began again.

“The bakery next to the inn,” Evelyn corrected.

“Right, the bakery,” he continued. “We have a common point of intersection of loyalists throughout the city that leads back to Mrs. Lynch, or rather, her impostor.” He looked contemplatively down at his feet. “But why?” he practically whispered to himself.

“What better way to infiltrate our ranks than by taking the identity of someone trusted?” Jimmy pronounced. “Mrs. Lynch wasn’t really active in the movement. No one took much notice of her, but everyone knew her. She was a fixture; her presence wouldn’t have been questioned.”

“I know it sounds unbelievable,” Evelyn implored. “But—”

Hershel shook his head smilingly and held up his hand. “It is no more unbelievable than a woman who fronts for an imaginary crime boss and creates the illusion of loyalist support.”

They looked at him in confusion.

“The Godfather and this syndicate are a sophisticated hoax, apparently perpetrated by a woman.”

“But why?” Evelyn questioned to no one in particular.

“I suspect we won’t know ‘the why’…,” he answered her, “…until we know ‘the who.’ ”

“Lillian Brandon.”

They turned as one to find Fancy and Cara standing on the threshold.

“Archibald Brandon’s daughter!” Hershel exclaimed disbelievingly.

“You knew he had a daughter?” Cara replied in astonishment as she walked into the room.

“Indeed, I did,” he responded. “We runners were often deployed as security for important officials and sometimes for their family members. Sir Archibald was particularly paranoid regarding his daughter.”

“With good reason,” she told him. “He—” She broke off, looking uncomfortably over at Evelyn and Jimmy.

“He abused her terribly,” Fancy declared as Cara hesitated. “He used her only as one should… well, relations that should be restricted to husband and wife.”

Evelyn and Jimmy looked at each other in confusion. Hershel merely asked in his even, straightforward way, “Do you mean, there was an incestuous relationship between Sir Archibald and his daughter?”

“Yes,” she replied tightly.

Evelyn felt a sickening chill and walked over to warm herself at the fire.

“This begins to make sense,” Hershel declared, turning to Evelyn. “Do you remember the dates on the gravestone at Saint Peter’s?”

She looked over at him and swallowed convulsively. “Yes,” she finally was able to reply. “The boy, Sewal, was born in February, 1758 and died barely four years later in April, 1762.”

“You don’t mean…?” Cara uttered in a horror-filled whisper.

“Lillian, was what? Sixteen… seventeen, when her father died?” he said, keeping his own voice level and matter-of-fact. “I think if we were to look back at the passenger logs between the years 1757 and 1762, we might find that a young woman, of her age and description, perhaps pregnant or with a small child, sailed from England to Philadelphia.”

“Could it be?” Cara asked, shaking her head in disbelief. “Could it be that she has somehow revived her father’s plot and brought us all here, where her son died? How? How could she possibly do it?”

Hershel’s steel-trap of a mind, always so sensible, always so practical, latched on to the unknowable with an investigator’s sense of certainty. He cast a cautious look over at Jimmy standing with Evelyn by the fire and leaning close to his wife, whispered, “She is time’s pawn.”

Twenty-Nine

THE YEAR WAS 1760, early winter. The ship was a privateer out of Liverpool named the
Clara Anne
. Its owner was one of the few to eschew the slave trade, which is why Laurent had waited an extra three weeks to embark.

“The smell,” he had insisted, delicately touching his nose with a scented handkerchief, “would be unbearable.”

Lillian found him insufferable; a pompous ass and likely sodomite, she nonetheless relied on him and his company to get her to America. The journey would prove very difficult, and with her two-year-old son in tow, Lillian needed his wealth and protection to survive the voyage.

She had fallen in with Laurent and his touring company several months after her father’s death. Her mother’s overdose from laudanum had barely registered in her consciousness. The woman had been a blithering idiot, weak and clingy, an unfit mate for the great Sir Archibald Brandon. She shed not one tear when the woman was laid to rest in the churchyard next to her father. Her mother would have been of no help anyway, Lillian had reasoned, only one more burden.

At the time of her father’s death, Lillian knew she was pregnant. Her condition would soon become apparent, and no one in her mother’s family could be trusted. Her great aunts, Constance and Patience, saw too much and asked too many questions. They were nosey and perceptive, and also talkative. They would sniff out her secret and blab about it to anyone who would listen. They would expect her to be ashamed and would demand to know the father of her baby. Sheltered as she had been all her life, they might even gain an inkling of the truth.

No one would understand her sense of joy and purpose. How could they? Lillian had lived in a secret, special world where she had been elevated above all others. And now she was to be a mother. Not like her own mother, but better, stronger, as her father had intended.

She was lucky to have money. Not a fortune; that had dissolved into the ether with the appearance of debt collectors and money lenders. But it was enough. In the months after she went into hiding, it bought her comfort and a decent midwife and then a plausible identity as a young widow in search of a place to belong… a place where she would draw little notice. She had found it in the touring company of Monsieur Laurent Allard.

Laurent wasn’t stupid. He knew that this proud, genteel young woman was likely not the widow of a dead sailor, regardless of the documentation she possessed. He needed her, nonetheless. For his company to perform in residence at the Theatre Royal, a respectable chaperone was required for his female players. While almost too young, Lillian still fit the bill. She was well-educated and modest in dress and deportment. So he looked no further than the obviously forged papers and hired her anyway.

The memory of that year at the Theatre Royal was one that the older Lillian often tried to push down into the void of her subconscious. Her psyche was the absolute reverse of a sane person’s. It would actively purge the wholesome, the normal, and the healthy. Anything that challenged her warped perspective was quickly repressed.

But the younger Lillian was not yet so disciplined. The lighthearted banter and warm acceptance of the young actresses and dancers awoke confusion and ignited a strange longing within her. They spoke often of their relationships with men, whether they were brothers, fathers, friends, or lovers. Among themselves, they often squealed with derision at the lecherous attention of the middle-aged and elderly nobles, some very like her father. They treated her with friendly respect and teased her that she should marry again.