The Turncoat (15 page)

And then Peter was carrying her in his arms, and she felt like a child in her father’s embrace, her cheek pressed to the soft wool of his tunic.

“Of course not, you silly bitch. You’ve been poisoned.”

*   *   *

T
he knot of drivers, servants, and footmen gathered around the fire behind Howe’s stables betrayed no surprise when a British officer carrying an unconscious girl demanded the use of the Shippen carriage. It was the first time Tremayne had felt even remotely grateful for the dissipation of Howe’s staff.

Inside the carriage he laid Kate on the bench, removed her gown, and unlaced her stays. She swatted at him ineffectually, then started up quite suddenly and found the strength to push the carriage door open and vomit into the street.

She collapsed onto the floor of the box in a heap, and lay looking up at him with glassy, dilated eyes.

“I told you that you were in danger. Now do you believe me?” he asked, coming to sit on the floor of the carriage beside her.

“Is the worst of it over?” she asked, wiping her mouth on the handkerchief he offered.

“I don’t know. There’s no way of knowing how much André slipped in your drink. Enough to put you out for the night. He was clever to pass you the glass through me, but I doubt he’s an expert with the stuff. He doesn’t seem the type. You probably only expelled the excess, which is fortuitous, because too much will kill you.”

“What was it?”

“Opium, I think.”

“But Bay takes more than André could have put in a single cup of punch.”

“Cousin Bay has built up a tolerance to the stuff.”

“André didn’t mean to kill me with the drink. He meant to leave me in the icehouse. It would have looked like an accident.”

Tremayne felt a hot white stab of anger. “I’ll call him out and kill him.”

“Brilliant. Then we’ll both be revealed and hanged as traitors.”

She was right. He could do nothing to Captain André without exposing himself and Kate. “Are you sleeping with Bay?” he asked, wanting the answer to be different this time.

“No. Not entirely.”

“Not entirely? What the hell does that mean?”

Despite her distress, she managed to roll her eyes at him in exasperation.

“Never mind,” he said. “I would prefer if you didn’t elaborate. But you won’t be able to put him off forever.”

“I know,” she said. And there it was again. The steely-eyed determination that she’d shown in that moonlit room upstairs at Germantown, the fortitude that must have carried her from the sleepy farm where she had been raised to the glittering court that was Howe’s dissolute circle.

“You would allow him to be the first?”

“It is a small matter in the scheme of things.”

“Not to me it isn’t.”

“Yes. As I recall, you’ve already offered to do the honors yourself.”

“Stop it, Kate. It doesn’t have to be me, but it damned well shouldn’t be Bayard Caide. If you think it’s such a trifling matter, that’s only because you’ve never done it. You can’t disengage your emotions at will.”

“My fiancé would beg to differ with you,” she said dryly. “I understand he disengages his emotions with alarming frequency, and with women far less willing to sacrifice themselves than I am.”

“Is that what it would have been with me, at Grey Farm? A sacrifice?”

“No.”

“Then for God’s sake, Kate, leave the city tonight. You heard André. He’s ruthless. He cannot move against you openly without evidence, which I will not give him, but he can certainly arrange another
accident
like tonight. Leave, or he will kill you.”

“I will take greater care in future,” she said, fists clenched against another wave of nausea.

“If he cannot remove you by assassination, he will find a way to arrest you. And God knows when one of the other officers who dined with us at Grey Farm might not turn up in Philadelphia—and recognize a certain Quaker girl behind Miss Dare’s exquisite facade.”

“I cannot leave.”

“You can, and you will. I’m taking you home now to rest. In a little while, after the party is done, I’ll return to Howe’s for my horse. I’ll get a pass, and we’ll ride out of the city together. I’m supposed to be protecting the houses in the Neck from looting. The guards will assume I’m taking my mistress there for a tryst, but once we’re out of the city I can take you wherever you want to go.”

“I have to stay. I have to…”

Her voice was fading, and Tremayne realized she was succumbing to the effect of the drug.

“You have to stay awake, Kate.” If she fell asleep, if she allowed the drug to take her now, she could stop breathing and suffocate. He’d seen it in battlefield hospitals, the killing dose, a mercy to the mortally wounded. How much had André given her? He had no way of knowing. Her best chance lay in remaining conscious and vomiting up as much of the stuff as possible. Tremayne shook her hard. “Lecture me on your damned Rebel politics, or rattle off your recipe for piecrust,
but for God’s sake stay awake
.”

Her eyes snapped open. “You patronize me by suggesting they are of equal importance.” She swayed, fought to keep herself upright.

He smiled. She couldn’t resist an argument. “I flatter you by speaking plainly, as I would to one of my peers. Politics or piecrusts. In a year’s time, the one will be as inconsequential as the other.”

He watched a wave of nausea pass over her, reached out to comfort her, but was swatted away. “Your peers? You think I’m your inferior because of a ludicrous accident of birth.” Her eyes narrowed, and he could see what it cost her to summon from memory the words best suited to her purpose. “‘To the evil of monarchy,’” she quoted, “‘we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and tho’ himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.’”

“Yes. I’ve read ‘Common Sense,’ Kate. And while I have every reason to know that Paine’s observations are entirely true—I’m not fit to hold my title, lands, or fortune—there are others who are even less fit than I. And I am acutely aware of the fact that it doesn’t matter. It never did. It never will. My great-great-grandfather was not the man who earned those honors. Bayard Caide’s was. Do you know
why
I am Viscount Sancreed, and not him?”

Something about his tone must have penetrated her drug-induced haze, because her eyes cleared and she looked straight at him. “No.”

He smiled bitterly. “Bay’s great-grandfather Edmund Caide was a Roundhead, and was guilty of regicide. He rode out with Cromwell’s New Model Army. He participated in the trial of Charles the First. He even consorted with your Quaker founder, George Fox, and his followers. He believed in equality, universal suffrage, and the rights of his fellow man, but when his fellow man could not sustain the burden of self-governance and invited Charles’ son back to the throne, Caide was hanged, drawn, and quartered, his head impaled on a spike at Westminster.

“Before he was executed, though, Edmund Caide was attainted traitor, stripped of all his lands and possessions, and forced to watch while everything he had earned and held dear was passed to a cousin—my great-grandfather William Tremayne—who had remained, if not steadfastly loyal to the Crown, if not valiant or honorable, then at least judiciously absent from the field and fray. Your revolution will end no differently.”

He had meant to keep Kate awake with argument, not torture her with his own guilt and self-loathing. But with his confession, the fight had gone out of her and he had no heart to torment her further. “How Bay must hate you,” she said simply, and slumped to the boards, eyes glazed, hands clenching and unclenching as waves of cramping and nausea passed through her.

Peter lifted her from the floor. She made no attempt to stop him. She curled on her side on the bench, and subsided with her head in his lap. She was half naked, and her painted lips were only inches from his cock, but he felt no stir of lust, only a desperate desire to protect the plainspoken girl who had reemerged on the carriage floor.

She was sick once more on the way to the Valby mansion, and he prayed she’d vomited up enough of the stuff. When they reached the house she was deeply unconscious, but her breathing was even and her pulse strong.

He carried her past the scandalized servants, who explained that the Valbys were out and attempted to bar him from Kate’s rooms, but he ignored them and deposited the girl on the bed, issuing orders for hot water and clean towels and a fresh fire.

He turned his back while the maid removed her stays, and got her settled under the counterpane. The housekeeper appeared and attempted to eject him from the room, but he wasn’t going to leave Kate until the worst of it was over.

She was sleeping comfortably now, but it wouldn’t last long. Tremayne had tried the stuff himself. Bay liked it for the dreams, feverish transports and horrific nightmares that fed his art. Tremayne could only imagine what kinds of visions a girl who had just narrowly escaped an icy death would have. He could not leave her yet.

She woke screaming an hour later and struck at the bed curtains like she was fighting off an attacker. He knew she was blind, still dreaming, lashing out at phantoms. He climbed onto the bed, caught her flailing arms in his, and held her while she cried herself to sleep once more.

He had dozed off himself, stiff and uncomfortable in the chair beside the bed, when the door opened.

He expected Mrs. Valby, or one of the servants, demanding that he leave.

Instead, it was Angela Ferrers.

He might not have recognized her in a crowded room. Her hair was bound tightly under a mobcap, her face was free of cosmetics, and the tiny lines around her eyes, which had been artfully concealed at their last meeting, were naked in the firelight.

No wonder Kate had refused to leave the city. She had planned to meet the Widow and pass on what she had learned about Mercer.

“What happened?” Angela Ferrers asked dispassionately.

“André. He slipped opium into her drink and tried to abandon her in the icehouse.”

The Widow made no move to come closer to Tremayne or the girl in the bed who lay between them. She barely glanced at Kate.

“Why? What is happening tonight that he wanted so much to conceal?”

“Damn your politics.
She almost died
.” Tremayne thrust the chair back as he rose and it screeched across the floorboards.

Angela Ferrers didn’t move an inch. “But she didn’t. And now she can’t tell me what André didn’t want me to know. But you can.”

“No, madame, because I am not a turncoat, and have no intention of becoming one. I am loyal to my king, and to my country, and to my commander, and for that reason, I am taking you now to General Howe.”

He advanced on her and she dropped languidly onto the footstool beside the bed. “No, you are not. If you take me, I will expose Kate. And then she
will
die. And not prettily, in her sleep.”

He stopped in his advance as though she’d physically struck him. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Try me, Major. I would have nothing to lose. It’s not an idle threat. You obviously don’t want to see her harmed. If you betray me to Howe, you sign her death warrant.”

“You’re both mad.”

“We’re both women of conviction.”

“And where do
your
convictions come from, Mrs. Ferrers? An ill-done-by husband? A murdered son? Do I detect a brogue beneath your clipped consonants? Whatever tragedy shaped you, whatever miscarriage of British justice made you the treacherous whore you are, it has not befallen Kate.
Yet.
She’s an innocent. And I’m going to see her clear of this mess and safe from you. Before she becomes what you would make her.”

“If you would save her, then take her place. I’ll send her back to her adoring father tonight. He’s probably getting suspicious by now anyway. He might even know she’s not home at Grey Farm.”

“I will not spy for you, woman. I won’t betray my country, no matter how incompetently it prosecutes this war.”

“Then I’m afraid you have no choice but to leave Kate Grey to the fate she has chosen for herself.” She stood. “Now, get out. She’s fine. And I have no patience for ineffectual romantics. Kate has the courage of her convictions, Major, and you do not. She deserves better.”

“She doesn’t deserve Bayard Caide.”

It was the first and last emotion the Widow betrayed. “No,” she said softly, her eyes flickering to the girl in the bed, “she does not.”

She turned to leave. He moved faster than she anticipated, wrenching her arms behind her back. “You’ll do me the courtesy of not screaming. Your discovery here, as you have taken pains to point out, would condemn us all.”

“Let me go, Major.”

“So you can warn Washington? Not a chance.”

“Warn him of what?”

“There’s only one thing important enough for André to risk murder. You guessed the moment you walked in this room. It’s the river forts.”

He ripped a strip from one of the bed curtains and worked quickly to tie her hands. She struggled briefly to get away from him; then, to his horror, she stopped struggling and pressed herself hard against him. “Is that your pleasure, Major? Does helplessness arouse you?” she asked, clearly offering herself, bound, to him.

His reaction sent her sprawling to the floor, but she must have realized even before he hurled her away from him that he was not in the least aroused by her offer.

“I’m sorry, Major,” she said from her unceremonious seat on the carpet. “Clearly that is not your preference. But you must know”—she made no move to rise—“
that it is Bayard Caide’s
.”

She might as well have punched him. It took all the air out of his lungs. On the bed, Kate stirred feebly, and Angela Ferrers struggled, hands bound, to her feet. “Let me go tonight, and I’ll take Kate with me to the Continental lines. Give me Mercer and Mifflin, and I will give you her safety.”