The Turncoat (12 page)

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I
t had been more than a week since Kate had last encountered Bayard Caide, and Peggy Shippen was examining a miniature landscape in a gold frame at George Haughton’s Tuesday auction. The London Coffee House on Front Street, hard by the docks, was not suffering as other businesses during the occupation were. Though the Rebels still controlled the Delaware, and no merchandise had reached the city for weeks, the vendue masters continued to hold regular auctions, their inventory swelled by the estates of those who had fled the city, and replenished by the Regulars and Hessians who looted, in their spare time, what was left. From his headquarters in Germantown Howe had attempted to stem the tide of looting and rape in Philadelphia with threats and proclamations, but court-martials remained a near daily occurrence. Desperate to protect the inhabitants from his own men, Howe had begun hanging convicted offenders.

“It will look lovely over my dressing table,” Peggy opined.

“Very handsome,” Kate agreed. Her eye was drawn to the paint box—Chinese, lacquered, with a scene of the Pearl River Delta, Macao most likely—that lay unregarded in a heap of knife boxes and snuff cases. She didn’t care to think of how it had arrived there.

The top and sides of the box were largely intact, but the bottom was disfigured with chisel marks. Kate suspected it had been pried off a lacquered stand. Her father had bought her a similar painting table when she embarked on her short artistic career. Inside, the pigments were largely in good condition, and barely used. Brush marks feathered the surface of most of the colors, but only lightly, and none was dried or cracked.

“I thought you gave up painting,” Peggy said over her shoulder.

“Colonel Caide has had a difficult time finding paint in the city. I thought I might purchase this and offer it to him next time we meet.”

“You’re just lucky that your father’s away at sea. My family let me know they won’t abide Caide, no matter how much money he has. He has a terrible reputation, unlike André,” Peggy said, trying on a Chinese shawl.

“I suppose it hasn’t occurred to them”—or you, Kate added silently to herself while dabbing her finger in the paint box—“that André might simply have a better reputation because he’s better at hiding his sins?”

“You’re quite set on snaring Caide, aren’t you?” Peggy observed, in a rare moment of lucid interest in something besides herself.

“As set as you are on André,” Kate replied. Although for entirely different reasons.

Peggy’s eyes sparkled with what Kate realized was as close to cunning as the girl would ever come. “Then buy your paint box. Because I know where the colonel has been spending his days.”

Kate did not have sisters growing up, and by the time she would have confided in siblings about her daydreams and infatuations, her mother, to whom she would naturally have turned, was gone. She recognized wistfully the steady stream of speculation that poured from Peggy, as they navigated the maze of warehouses near the dock, as the heady effluvia of puppy love. She wondered aloud about André’s parents, his childhood, his education, his plans for family and children.

And Kate allowed her to ramble on, because even if she were willing to crush Peggy’s dreams, the sort of insight she possessed about André was entirely outside the purview of her assumed identity. She had recognized in him the same calculated approach to human interaction that Mrs. Ferrers preached and practiced. When he thought no one was looking, André examined Peggy as he might a horse, to see how far and fast she would run. He was always assessing, adjusting, manipulating. To what purpose, Kate was uncertain, but she knew it could be nothing good.

Her own mind did not run in a romantic direction with Bayard Caide. She could not imagine what circumstances had produced such a paradoxical man, at once violent and artistic. When she did daydream about houses and children, about what it would be like to present a man to her father and profess her intention to marry, it was Peter Tremayne who inhabited her fantasies. But he was an ocean away because of her, and if circumstances ever conspired to reunite them, she would hang. The empty warehouses they passed, still redolent with the mingled scents of departed tea, nutmeg, and pepper, were silent testimony to the effectiveness of her espionage. It was because of spies like her that the Americans still held the river, still held a hope of retaking Philadelphia. And for that, if the British caught her, she would die.

Kate recognized immediately the building to which Peggy led her: the Southwark Theater. She had never been there herself, but knew it from an engraving that had appeared in the
Gazette
when it was built a decade ago. The theater had a spotty history, closing and reopening as Puritanical fervor waxed and waned. Congress had closed it down during their session in the Quaker city, and the resident players decamped for Jamaica. Most recently it had served as a hospital for the British wounded at Germantown.

The back door was open, and Peggy and Kate climbed a set of dirty wooden steps to a narrow hall. There were two doors at the top, but Kate had no doubt which led to Bayard Caide. The door on the left was painted in a masterly trompe l’oeil, with the doorjamb done as a stone portal and the door itself a fiery abyss. In the foreground, a three-headed black dog barked, all mouths open, on a chain.

“What an ugly dog!” Peggy said, scrutinizing the figure.

“It’s Cerberus,” Kate supplied. “Guard dog of the Underworld.”

The door opened.

“Be careful,” drawled Bayard Caide. “He’s carnivorous. And hungry, like his master.”

Peggy took a step back, revealing Kate to the slightly dilated eyes of Bayard Caide.

Kate stood her ground. “You’re drunk. We’ll come back later.”

Caide moved quickly and unexpectedly. He grabbed Kate round the waist and whisked her inside, kicking the door shut on a shocked Peggy Shippen. He threw the bolt and caged Kate, her back to the door, in the prison of his arms.

She smelled no alcohol on his breath, only a curious smoky spice that she did not recognize. But his eyes betrayed his altered state of mind, even as they raked her from head to toe at close range. She found them mesmerizing. Neither spoke a word. Only the head-splitting sound of Peggy pounding on the door interrupted the silence.

“Let me in!” Peggy screamed. “Or let her out!”

“Go away, Miss Shippen,” Bay said firmly, his eyes challenging Kate to object.

“I’ll bring back the law,” threatened Peggy.

The Crown, of course, was the law in Philadelphia at the moment. And the Crown’s representative was General Howe, who doted on Caide like a wayward son.

“You can go, Peggy,” added Kate. “I’m fine.” I hope, she added to herself.

Kate was uncertain if she heard Peggy sniff on the other side of the door, or if she merely imagined it. She certainly heard Peggy’s slippers scuffing the stairs as the girl departed, but her eyes never broke from Bayard Caide’s.

She opened her mouth to speak at last and he silenced her with his own. He had barely touched her in any other way and he made no effort to close the distance between them now; only persisted skillfully in an oral communion that sapped the strength from Kate’s limbs.

He tasted like nutmeg and pepper, his tongue gliding over hers, insistently sharing the ghost of whatever strange narcotic he had consumed.

He broke away and stepped back. “Your plumage is brighter than that of all the other birds but you’re nothing like those fluttering magpies.”

“I try not to flutter. It’s uncomfortable in tight stays.”

Caide laughed. With his body no longer blocking her view, Kate took in the room. Or theater, as she realized. They were standing on the stage.

It was a disaster. Its recent use as a hospital had left it wrecked. A pile of burnt chairs indicated where the seating had gone. Most of the paneling had been ripped from the walls and presumably burned as well. The windows were filthy, and the curtains had been torn from their rails for God knew what purpose. Shredded green baize dripped from the dented brass fittings.

But the light was dazzling. Unshadowed by taller buildings, facing the water, with all its glorious reflections, the stage was bathed in sun from the Palladian window at the back of the hall. Light played over the unfinished canvas that stretched from one end of the boards to the other: a meandering brook beneath a shade tree, with the Delaware River Valley in the background.

“What are you doing here, Miss Dare?”

She wondered for a moment if he had an inkling of her purpose, some preternatural ability to see past her assumed identity. She conquered her moment of panic and said, “I thought you could use the paints.”

“No politely reared young girl would visit a man like me on her own.”

“I wasn’t on my own. I came with Peggy.”

“But she’s gone now, and you aren’t.”

“Are you asking me to leave?”

“No,” he said, taking care to keep well away from her. “I’m asking if you know what you are doing. I’m not nice. I’m not safe. I want you. Howe takes a dim view of his officers debauching the locals, so I stopped coming to the square in order to put temptation out of my way. But now you are here, alone with me. Temptation indeed.”

“Do you want the paints or not?” Kate said, her voice unnaturally loud from nerves.

He seized the box, took it to a chaise placed in the center of the stage, stretched his lanky form across the tattered upholstery and began examining the contents. “Why ever not? These are quite good. Too good to waste on André’s daub.” He indicated the scenic painting with a nod of his head. “Where did you get them?”

For the moment, she realized, she was safe from further seduction. The paints held all his attention. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that. Relieved, certainly, but disappointed as well. His mercurial temper was well known, but this erratic, keyed-up state was a product of something else.

“At George Haughton’s vendue sale at the Coffee House. I should go. Peggy Shippen is a notorious gossip and will ruin my reputation if I let her.”

“I thought she was your friend.”

“She is. But she subscribes to a variety of feminine friendship that prizes novelty over loyalty.”

“Most women do. But not you.”

And she was once again the focus of his intense gaze.

“No. Not me. But I must go.”

“Don’t.”

“People will talk. I’ll hurt my chances of finding a husband.”

“You mean you’ll hurt your chances of shackling yourself to a boring milksop. Stay. I’ll teach you to paint properly.”

“You say paint, but I think you mean something quite different.” She edged toward the door, watching for the move he would make to stop her.

“I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.”

She laughed nervously. “That is exactly what I’m afraid of. It’s a rather sentimental landscape,” she said of the monumental canvas.

He took the change of subject with good grace. “André’s work. Not mine. I’m painting it in for him. In exchange for the use of the theater.”

She noticed his easel then, dwarfed by the giant backdrop. She crossed to the painting, and examined it critically. It was Icarus, naked, silhouetted by a blazing sun, dripping wax and blood. The carmine had run down the canvas, pooling on the lip of the easel. Kate felt an overwhelming desire to dip her finger in it.

“Most people think the Greeks were the great artists,” he said.

“They understood proportion. They sculpted ideals,” she replied.

“They understood nothing. They created soulless mannequins. The Romans were the true artists. They believed in gravitas. They saw the beauty in every line on a senator’s face. They were unafraid of experience, unafraid to paint the truth.”

“But you never paint what you see in front of you.”

“I paint the truth. The truth and what I see in front of me are two different things.”

“What kind of drug have you been taking? You’re not drunk. Or belligerent.”

“Opium. Would you like to try it?”

“No, thank you. One form of ruin is all I can tolerate in a single day.”

She was reaching out, unconsciously, to touch the pooled vermilion. He caught her hand. Their eyes met, and he studied her face with an artist’s discernment. “Does that mean you consent to the more conventional kind of ruin? I can’t decide if you’re endearingly trusting, or just deliciously reckless.” He led her by the hand to the chaise he had only recently vacated.

Her heart pounded and her breath grew short but she had determined before coming not to flinch beneath his touch. “A little of both, I should expect.”

His arm circled her waist, and he lifted her and set her to lie lightly on the frayed damask.

It still held his warmth, and with it, the promise of intimacy. Desire slid through her, fast and sweet, like sap down a maple, but her courage failed her. “Colonel, please don’t.”

“Don’t what? And you may call me Bay.” He hadn’t touched her since setting her down, but his posture on the edge of the chaise foretold mischief. Now he traced the line of her cheek, her jaw, her neck, with his delicate artist’s hands.

His finger outlined her mouth and she parted her lips, tasted his fingertip with her tongue. His other hand traveled south to draw lazy patterns over her décolletage. His touch was intoxicating. When he slung a leg on the chaise to part hers, her hips rose to meet him.

“Good girl,” he coaxed. “Do you trust me?”

“No,” she said, but made no move to stop him.

“That’s because you aren’t stupid.” His lips nudged hers apart, his tongue darted in to lick hers, and the teasing hand at her breast slipped beneath the fabric of her gown, her stays, and her chemise. She groaned into his mouth when his thumb circled her stiff nipple.

He lifted his head. “Look at me, Lydia,” he commanded, in the voice that she dimly recognized he must use with his men.

Her eyes snapped open. He was smirking in satisfaction. “You’re like me, Lydia,” he said, releasing her breast to pull her skirts up around her waist. He drew her knees up until her heels were flat on the chaise. “There’s something broken in you. Something that doesn’t care what Peggy Shippen and the wagging tongues say. A reckless thing that will risk pain to snatch pleasure.”