The Turncoat (11 page)

“Tea. Yes, tea. Mrs. Curran says there’ll be no more by the end of winter, that we’re already really drinking the powder out of the soldiers’ pockets. Then we’ll all have to drink chocolate, like the Rebels.”

*   *   *

T
he next day Kate took her easel, her paints, and her appalling lack of artistic talent to the square in front of the old Third Street Barracks where the Regulars drilled. Peggy Shippen accompanied her, complaining ceaselessly about the cold.

Shortly after noon, Caide appeared, in company again with Captain André. “The result might be somewhat improved if you spent more time looking at the canvas,” Bayard Caide opined, standing over Kate’s easel with a critical eye.

She stepped back from her work. “It looks better from a distance.”

“Really?” Caide asked, taking another step back. “How far do you suggest? Boston?”

“I suppose you can do better?”

“It’s really a subject for charcoal, anyway.” Caide picked up the sketchbook lying on the grass, selected a crayon, and sat cross-legged on the ground.

Kate settled opposite him with the drilling soldiery at her back. Watching him, she couldn’t help but think of Peter Tremayne, of the intensity of his gaze that night in her bedroom, and later, when he plucked the ribbon from her bodice. Bayard Caide brought that same focus to the blank page.

He handed the tablet back to her.

Bayard Caide had drawn her. Not as she sat, swaddled in a heavy wool cape with her back to the marching men in red, but in the guise of a classical goddess. One of the more carnally minded ones. Beneath the few strokes delineating, for decency’s sake, wisps of drapery, were the contours of her body as it rested on the sloping ground. But her attitude was subtly altered, more languid and sensual. This was in keeping with the company surrounding her on the page: satyrs and nymphs drilled in formation in the background.

Kate blushed. “Howe’s men,” she punned, “have never looked so Martial.”

“My goodness, Miss Dare, did your tutor forget to lock away the dirtier epigrams?”

“My mother, actually. She had a great affection for the lustier Roman poets. May I keep this?”

“Of course. Although I would hesitate to display it in gentle company,” Caide said, riffling through her paint box. “Would you like me to color it in for you?”

“I’m not certain I’ve brought enough pink for all the nipples.”

He laughed out loud. “You might show it to your friend Peggy. She seems like the sort who might benefit from a diagram.” He pitched his voice only to Kate, but there was no need. Peggy and André were strolling the other side of the square, Peggy’s shrill laughter the only noise capable of carrying so far. “And André is no schoolmaster,” he added.

“No, he’s not,” agreed Kate.

“I’m partial to oil myself, but pastels will do,” he said, rummaging through her supplies. “Good paint is damned hard to come by in this Puritan backwater, mind you. Don’t you like André?”

“No. I don’t like him.”

“Good God. A gently bred lady with an opinion. You’re not supposed to have them, or didn’t anyone tell you?” Caide selected several colors, including pink, and set to tinting the sketch.

“I thought we were allowed opinions on bonnets, ribbons, and bows.”

“Well, do you like
them
?”

“I’ve developed a recent affection for them. André manipulates Peggy. He’s not in love with her,” Kate observed, watching Caide’s hands move over the drawing.

“How can you tell, Miss Dare, when a man is in love?” He used the pads of his fingers to blend the colors.

“I think,” said Kate, remembering evenings in Grey House when her mother was alive, “that when two people are in love, they pay each other the compliment of honesty. Like my parents. I never once heard my father enthuse about my mother’s eyelashes, but they shared everything with each other. My father would relate some story he read in the
Gazette
, and my mother would tell him some goings-on among the neighbors and then one of them would connect it to a story from scripture or a tale among the Ancients and before you knew it they’d spun some theory out of whole cloth that explained the weather, the new taxes, and the fall of the Roman Empire all in one.”

“So I mustn’t speak of eyelashes if I’m to win your affection?” Caide teased.

“I really wish you wouldn’t.”

“Win your affection or speak of eyelashes?”

It was the first of many meetings. And like all Kate’s activities in the City of Brotherly Love, it fed the river of information that flowed through her to Washington. She might be appallingly bad at sketching, but she was exceedingly good at counting. She committed to memory the number and types of soldiers drilling in the yard, both Hessians and Regulars, and noted the sizes and positions of their guns.

She did not meet more than once a week with the Widow and could not, of course, record such matters in straightforward letters to Hamilton. Howe was no fool. All of the post leaving the city was monitored. And even the best cipher, if used too frequently, could be broken. So she followed the protocol that she and Hamilton had established between them for their clandestine correspondence. She drafted a letter to “cousin Sally” in the country. She used a paper mask, a stencil of a bird in flight, laid atop the smooth cream bond. Hamilton possessed its twin. Inside the lines she wrote her true message. She thought of these words as the underpinnings, the petticoat and stays of her report. Then she removed the stencil and dressed the words in a frothy nonsense about balls and recitals and engagements. Hamilton had only to place his mask over the missive to read between the lines and the message would be clear.

Kate returned the next day to discover Bayard Caide and his easel occupying what she thought of as her spot. “You can’t paint worth a damn,” he told her when she pointed out that he had usurped her, “but you’ve got an excellent eye for composition. And light. This spot is perfect.”

“Yes, but it’s
my
spot,” Kate insisted.

“There’s plenty of room,” he drawled. “You can set up next to me.”

“I can’t. People will say you are courting me.”

“Am I?”

“Are you what, Colonel?”

“Courting you?”

“I suppose that depends on whether you come back tomorrow.”

He did. And the day after.

He made an ill-starred attempt to tutor her on the finer points of painting, and learned what better-paid pedagogues had discovered before him: she was hopeless.

“I’ve seen better efforts from twelve-year-olds,” he critiqued, as she attempted to draw the church steeple—and several of Howe’s gun placements that happened to be in the foreground.

“I won’t inquire as to circumstances. In any case, I’m doing my best,” she said, knowing that her best was awful.

“Here,” he said, and came to stand behind her, close enough that she could feel his breath on the back of her neck. He took her right hand in his. “Take your thumb and forefinger, like so, and look through them. Now raise your hand until the steeple is between them. Do you see?”

“Yes, I see.”

He leaned close, his lips almost touching her ear, and said patiently, “Pretend the steeple is a tiny model, and you can grasp it between your thumb and forefinger. Do you have it now?”

His breath was warm against her neck. What she had was an overwhelming urge to press her body back against his. “Yes, I think so.”

He drew her hand down to the page, his arm brushing against her breast. “There. That is the size of the steeple in your picture. Like so.” He guided her fingers, and she drew two parallel lines. “Now the roof. Take your pencil”—he lifted her hand again—“and line it up with the angle of the roof. Now lower it,” he said, and this time, his left arm snaked around her waist and drew her back against his hard body.

He held her there, perfectly still. She realized that her body had stiffened and that she was breathing in short, shallow gasps. She felt as if she were teetering on the edge of an abyss with this man, and there was a voice inside her head urging her to jump.

She found her own voice, but it sounded tiny and far away. “I think I understand, Colonel.”

He let her go and stepped away abruptly. “I rather think not,” he said. “You are a lovely girl and I’ve enjoyed these meetings, but I won’t be here tomorrow,” he told her, folding his easel and wiping his hands on the grass.

“Because I’m unteachable?” she asked, blindsided by his sudden retreat.

His manner changed abruptly. He struggled to hide it, but regret crept into his voice. “Because I could teach you altogether too much, Miss Dare.” He did not step closer, but only reached out and took her hand, holding it well away from his body. “I am not a good man, not a nice man. I don’t have any of the virtues your provincial parents would desire in a suitor. And you are, despite your tart tongue, an innocent.” He bent his head, brushed his lips over her outstretched fingers, and said simply, “Good-bye.”

He turned his back on her and strode toward the barracks.

“Will I see you at the City Tavern?” she called after him, wondering what had gone wrong.

“Probably not. I’ll be away for several days. And His Majesty, or at least his agent here in Philadelphia, has other work for me. Foraging. Visiting some Rebels in the countryside who have been reluctant to sell us stores. Farewell, Miss Dare.”

Kate felt the chill of the day strike through her fur-lined cloak. She knew the tactics Bayard Caide employed while “foraging.” She had forgotten, briefly, who and what he was.

Her interest in Caide ought to be entirely professional. He was close to General Howe, and could be a source of high-level intelligence. But in the days that followed, Kate realized that she missed their meetings for entirely different reasons. When she was growing up, men treated her as the woman her father raised her to be: an equal. There was no subterfuge, no artifice, no flirtation. She was a simple girl, and she thought those arts beyond her reach.

Mrs. Ferrers had admitted her to the mystery: that nothing was beyond the grasp of an intelligent woman. Not even conquering a man like Bayard Caide. And there was a thrill to matching wits with a man—however abhorrent—who was her equal. It was a thrill she had first tasted with Peter Tremayne.

She reminded herself that Caide was a monster, away on monstrous business, that he was an enemy, and that he was not Peter Tremayne. None of that stopped her from listening intently for news of him.

At the end of the week she learned that he was back in the city, but he did not return to the square, and Kate abandoned her artistic efforts altogether. It was getting too cold for painting outdoors anyway. Neither did he appear at Mrs. Curran’s, or at the Thursday-night dance at Smith’s City Tavern, where respectable girls went to meet British officers.

Kate lingered long into the night at Smith’s, and only gave up and called for her carriage when Peggy’s complaints became too much. Kate was late meeting Mrs. Ferrers in the Valbys’ darkened kitchen. The Merry Widow took great care not to be seen going into or out of their home. She never visited by day, only after dark, and then quite briefly. Kate had no knowledge of the means she used to smuggle information out of the city and to Washington’s camp. It was safer that way, but Kate was acutely aware of how fragile her connection to home and safety had become.

“Tell me about Bayard Caide,” she said to Mrs. Ferrers. Glamorous Aunt Angela had disappeared, and in her place had materialized, depending on the night, a plain, middle-aged maid, or a taciturn, lean, and wiry groom. Tonight she wore men’s clothes, and drank whisky, neat, from one of Mrs. Valby’s fine cut glasses. She poured Kate a dram and pushed it across the table.

“He is the man I came to Grey Farm to destroy,” she said, and waited.

Kate had shed her shimmering silk day dress, brushed the tinted powder from her hair and now sat in a voluminous damask robe at the simple wooden table. The grandeur of the Valby home, and of the elaborate mansions and meeting rooms of the city, had filled her senses when she first came to town, but there was a comforting familiarity in the Valby kitchen, with its well-worn, sturdy pine surfaces, and the faint but lingering scent of warm bread from the slowly cooling bake ovens, which plinked reassuringly as their brick expanded in the chill night air.

“Yes. He was as you described,” Kate said. To herself alone she added: Except for his eyes. You didn’t tell me he had eyes like Peter, pale blue, cold and mischievous by turns. “Tell me more.”

“Bayard Caide is not a simpleton like Peggy Shippen, or a romantic like Peter Tremayne. You cannot play him as you have them. He is far too steeped in corruption and far too intelligent for that.”

“You want to know Howe’s next move. No one is closer to him than Caide.”

“And no one is more dangerously mercurial. Would you like to know why he was posted, so young, to India?”

Mrs. Ferrers narrated the story with dispassionate candor: how Caide had whored and drunk his way through London as a young officer; how he had a proclivity for dueling, and had killed three men in that way; how he might have gone on in that manner had he not beaten a young subaltern almost to death; how his cousin, and best friend, had taken the blame, and been posted to Ireland, before the whole sordid tale came out.

Caide had escaped the incident with a reprimand and a punitive posting to Bombay, where his behavior didn’t alter, but was channeled into the violent business of Empire. There he acquired a taste for opiates and hashish, which he continued to indulge when he returned to England. He rose swiftly in rank, while his cousin, Tremayne, attainted by scandal and hampered by scruples, stalled in his career.

The tactics of fear and intimidation that Caide had learned on the Subcontinent were proving unpopular, but effective, in the Pennsylvania countryside. “His men are not quartered in the city. Howe won’t have them here. He launches his raids from a rural camp which we have failed to locate. I could bring you men he has tortured, women he has abused.” Angela Ferrers spoke with distaste. “Some women are drawn to a man like that. 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.” And with that, she drained her second glass of whisky and left.