The Turncoat (13 page)

“I think I’d prefer you to enthuse about my eyelashes now,” she replied, though she could barely hear her own words for the thrumming of her heart. She wanted his touch desperately, and knew now that this fervent need had nothing to do with Mrs. Ferrers, Washington, or her father’s safety. She was lying on her back, skirts pulled up, legs spread, for the pleasure of Bayard Caide, her enemy. And she wanted it all the same. Mrs. Ferrers had known.

She cried out when his hand covered her sex, the palm pressed firmly to her sensitive flesh. She writhed, unable to resist the friction.

Then he withdrew his hands to capture both of hers and pin them above her head. With his left hand he held her prone, while his right hand returned to worry her softening nipple.

“Lie still, Lydia, and I’ll give you what you want.”

“But I don’t know what I want,” she gasped. He could not possibly know the depth of her confusion. But he seemed to know the depth of her need.

His fingers returned to the entrance to her body and circled, making a slick inspection of her contours. She gave herself up to it entirely. Then without warning, he slid two fingers inside and turned, with a small motion of his wrist, her world upside down.

He stroked his fingers in and out, curling and uncurling them until she could no longer stay still, but thrust her hips up and down in time with his ministrations. He chuckled low in his throat and she opened her eyes once more. “My love, my joy, my Lydia, you’re doing all the work.”

Her body tensed like a bowstring. The next calculated swipe of his thumb released her. She subsided into his arms, wrung out and replete. He reclined beside her, and twined damp fingers in hers. Kate realized that this was the sort of lust, the sort of inappropriate desire, that had ruined the Hessian Colonel Donop.

She became aware of his erection, pressed against her thigh, and shifted to bring herself flush with it. She knew what she wanted now, and it had nothing to do with love.

She shifted again, and he groaned. “Stop that, Lydia. I’m not made of stone. And I’m not foolish enough to go further without some kind of assurance I won’t be court-martialed for it.”

He released her hands and laid his fair head on her breast, like a child seeking comfort.

“What do you mean?” she asked, stroking his hair, unnerved by his sudden tenderness.

“What are your parents like?” He sounded tentative, boyish. He was a baffling contradiction, this man.

She realized there was no reason to lie. “My mother died when I was twelve. She was witty and sensible in equal measure.”

“Like her daughter.”

“I suppose so,” she said, finding more irony in the context.

“And what of your father?”

Her father, her sources told her, was with Washington, and playing merry hell with Howe’s supply lines. She could picture him, ambushing Regulars in the backwoods of Pennsylvania in his fringed buckskins and beaver hat. “You might find him…rustic. He doesn’t tolerate fools.”

“Do you think he would like me?”

“Not a bit. Why do you ask?”

He lifted his head from her chest and tugged her chemise and gown into place. “Because I intend to present myself and declare my honorable intentions, so next time I have your skirts up I can have you without fear of hanging for it. There is only one thing you must know first. I’m a bastard.”

She laughed. “So I have been told.”

He sat up. “The truth is rather more literal than that. My mother became pregnant with me when she was fifteen. She would not name her seducer. Her family bought her a dupe of a husband, so I am, in the strictest sense of the law, legitimate, because I was born in wedlock. But my mother’s husband did not take kindly to the deception. He beat her, so she ran away from him. ‘Caide’ is my mother’s surname. I have no desire to use his. My mother’s cousins took us in, or we’d have starved. My great-grandfather was drawn and quartered for treason, and I myself am not exactly beloved in the country hereabouts.” His clever hands moved on her again. “But I think you want me anyway,” he said, then went about proving it once more with ruthless skill.

That day at the playhouse was the first and last time he made any mention of his family, and never did he speak of a connection with Peter Tremayne.

Their engagement, tentatively approved by the Valbys, waiting a letter of confirmation from Lydia’s supposed ship’s captain father, followed a week later.

With it came entrée to Howe’s inner circle. And everything Kate heard, Washington heard. He used her intelligence to tighten his grip on the rivers and roads, and within a month the occupation was a siege. A month more, and the river would freeze. Howe would be starved out of Philadelphia, Lydia Dare would disappear forever, and Kate could go home to Orchard Valley.

And not a moment too soon. She feared she did not have the heart for espionage. She’d lived in a state of fear for weeks. Of exposure, which would be deadly. And of her physical attraction to Caide, only barely held in check. Which could prove ruinous. She’d had enough of jewels and silks and fine entertainments, and she wanted to go home to pots and pans and the siren song of drafty, well-loved rooms and bristly groaning chairs. Her goal had been within reach just a few short hours ago.

Until Peter Tremayne came back.

Seven

Philadelphia, October 20, 1777

Peter Tremayne was not insensitive to the pleasures of music. Under other circumstances, he might have enjoyed a concert. As it was, he was acutely aware that less than thirty miles from where the musicians sat tuning, Washington’s army lay hungry, cold, and vulnerable.

“How can you stand it?” he asked Bayard Caide, who was scraping his boots meticulously free of mud on the porch outside Howe’s High Street mansion. The grand residence that Mary Lawrence Masters had built for her daughter not ten years before had stood empty since Congress dispatched her son-in-law to London with the luckless Olive Branch Petition. It was the largest house in Philadelphia, and when General Howe finally entered the City of Brotherly Love, after nearly a month spent delaying at Germantown, he had immediately commandeered it for himself.

“I have other consolations than war, cousin.” Caide sidestepped the water running freely from the roof of the portico, the gutters choked with decaying autumn leaves. “Howe should see to the damned gutters,” he added under his breath. “The rain stopped half an hour ago. Half the city’s been sacked already and the rest of it is falling to pieces.”

It was true. In the week that Tremayne had spent there, he’d fended off two attacks by Regulars attempting to pillage the small clapboard house where he’d found quarters. Caide had offered him digs with three other officers, but the atmosphere had felt more like a brothel than a barracks, and Tremayne chose instead the establishment of a bachelor reverend and his spinster sister. The pair had held out against quartering soldiers early in the occupation, and with good reason. The Regulars occupying the Old Barracks shat in the stairwells. But by the time Tremayne arrived, and real privation was being felt in the city, the reverend and his sister welcomed him, and his access to military stores and protection from uniformed looters, with open arms. The cleric was not associated with any of the more radical churches in town, though Tremayne suspected he was a deist. The house was small but warm and tidy.

Howe’s residence, on the other hand, was spacious enough to accommodate his personal household, and those officers on his staff he felt closest to. This did not include the charming Captain André, the author of the evening’s entertainment, whom Tremayne spied through the crowd, ushering guests to the neat rows of chairs in the front parlor. André had taken up residence in the abandoned home of Benjamin Franklin. Revolutionary or no, Franklin was a much-loved figure on both sides of the Atlantic. To occupy Franklin’s house was a show of cheek typical of André.

“It’s maddening,” Tremayne said. “Howe has the advantage and he will not press it. He could march on Washington’s forces and put an end to the war tomorrow.”

“He marched on Breed’s Hill and lost a thousand men,” Caide said. “He won’t risk it again. And the entertainments aren’t all frivolity. It keeps the officers out of trouble, for the most part. Although I’ll grant you, it takes its toll. Some poor sot passed out in Howe’s icehouse and froze to death last week. Go on inside. I should wait for Lydia, make sure she isn’t doused by water from these gutters.”

“What do you want a wife for anyway?” Tremayne asked, sounding, he realized, altogether too testy on the subject.

Caide laughed at him. “You don’t like her, cousin? What does any man need a wife for?”

And that, Tremayne decided, didn’t bear thinking about.

“I’m going home.” Tremayne turned on his heel. He would have taken a swing at any other man attempting to stop him, but when his cousin clapped a hand on his shoulder he checked his temper.

“You’re going inside. You’re going to flirt and make small talk and toady to André because he toadies to Howe. And you’re going to find that blasted bitch who unmanned you on the road to New York and get your command back.”

Caide was right, and Tremayne said as much. “But this is no way to win a war.”

“Have patience, cousin. And be sure to flatter the little Huguenot. He has Howe’s ear.”

The little Huguenot had spotted them. André’s savoir faire and dark good looks made him a favorite with the Philadelphia ladies. The concert was early enough that many of them, unmarried, still in their teens, and tottering under the ludicrously tall hairstyles so popular in London this season, flocked around him. André shed them like rainwater and emerged from the house to embrace Caide like a long-lost brother, pressing a small paper-wrapped package on him.

Caide fished in his purse. “I’ll have to owe you the rest,” he said to André, passing him a gold guinea. Whatever was in the package was expensive. Tremayne preferred not to know.

“You can bring me the money at the theater. We’re opening as soon as we can rent enough chairs,” André said, scanning the crowd.

Caide slipped the package into his tunic. “You’ll have to contend with both Peggys tonight, I’m afraid. Chew and Shippen. Lydia tried to stop it but she couldn’t dissuade the one because the other was already going.”

“No matter. So long as I seat them at opposite ends of the room, we should survive the first movement.” André turned his attention from Caide. “I have someone I would like you to meet, Major.”

“Go on, Peter,” Caide urged. “Women are always late.”

Tremayne followed André through the brightly lit rooms to the pretty green and gold double parlor where the doors were thrown back to reveal musicians in the smaller rear chamber. The players were a mixed assortment, half civilian and half soldiery.

André led him to a chair in the middle of a short row, quite near the front, and impossible to escape from once the concert started, blast the man.

The Hessian seated there, formal, exquisitely turned out in the scarlet-faced green of the Jaeger Corps, rose stiffly and bowed to André. Tremayne realized with sinking heart who this man must be: the officer largely believed to be responsible for losing Trenton, who had dallied at Mount Holly with the Merry Widow for three fateful days.

“May I present Colonel Carl Emil Ulrich Von Donop of Hesse-Cassel,” André said in the French of his fathers.

“It is an honor, Colonel,” Tremayne said in the same language.

“Colonel Donop. Major Peter Tremayne, Viscount Sancreed,” André said, completing the introduction.

The Hessian count inclined his blond head: a calculated acknowledgment of Tremayne. “I am acquainted,” Donop said, “with your cousin.” His accented French did not entirely disguise the ambiguity of the statement.

“I think you two will find you have much in common,” André said, and left.

The timing of his exit gave Peter Tremayne little choice. The row of chairs filled in behind him like the incoming tide. If he made polite apologies to the colonel, if he turned and fought his way upstream and out of the parlor, all eyes would be on him. As it was, he knew André was watching. He could do nothing that would draw attention to this carefully orchestrated tableau of two officers brought low by the same woman.