The Turncoat (19 page)

“I have no desire to arrest you, Miss Grey. I wish, instead, to employ you. The Merry Widow has a rare eye for talent. To find amidst the rye and barley fields of New Jersey a girl who could captivate not only Peter Tremayne but also Bayard Caide is testament to the Widow’s acumen. And your nerve. Few women could stomach the two of them, knowing their relationship.”

“Their grandfathers were cousins. They are distant relations,” she said.

“They are surely more than that, Miss Grey. Only close kinship could produce such congruity of form and figure. And the eyes, Miss Grey. Such strikingly pale blue eyes are rare. Neither Bayard Caide’s mother, nor Tremayne’s, had such eyes.”

She realized that he was talking about more than illegitimacy, which was common enough. He had her at a disadvantage, knew some secret about this ancient family that he hoped to use against her, so she said, “No man is responsible for the circumstances of his birth.”

“Quite so. And yet he must live with them nevertheless. I am an ambitious man, but I labor under the taint of my proclivities, with which I assure you I was born, and of my French blood. Through you, I could wield power over the Tremaynes. It is a difficult choice: to make you the mistress of a lord with the ear of the king, or the wife of a coming man who might rise even higher.”

“My services are not for sale, Captain André.”

“No? Then consider this. You have been under constant surveillance since the concert. When the Merry Widow next tries to contact you, my men will take her. You will be alone. If you try to leave the city, you will be arrested. You were, until a few months ago, the spinster daughter of a man loyal to the king. Now you are the daughter of a traitor, and living under an assumed name. You have only the skills of a spy or a courtesan, and to practice either craft you must have a protector. Work for me, Miss Grey.”

André stepped back, inspected Kate dispassionately. “Become my agent, or the next garment I fit for you will be a shroud.”

*   *   *

A
nd Mr. Lytton?” Donop asked, when the turkey had been eaten. They were seated in the Haddonfield farmer’s snug kitchen, around a table littered with the remains of the crazy-eyed gobbler from the woods.

“Taken by the enemy,” Tremayne replied smoothly. The turkey had tasted like ashes in his mouth. He’d handed a man under his command over to the enemy. Arthur Grey had agreed to take Phillip Lytton prisoner, and let Tremayne go. In return Tremayne had sworn to return to Philadelphia to rescue the man’s stubborn daughter. Tremayne wondered what Kate would think of the sacrifices made in her name.

“Too bad,” said Donop, with no sympathy whatsoever. “But he is a gentleman of good family, and will no doubt endure confinement in comfort until he is traded back to us. Besides, he seemed a bit of a prig.”

Then the brandy was passed, the merits of the Ferguson were discussed, and no further mention was made of Phillip Lytton.

When Mercer came into sight the next day, crisp and neat in the midday sun, with the river sparkling silver through the trees, Tremayne cursed. Two weeks ago the fort had been a tumbledown pile of bricks buried in orchard groves, but the Rebels had been busy. Now it stood in an efficient clearing, devoid of cover, the felled trees put to wicked use as an abatis.

Donop surveyed the works through a spyglass. “You do not think I should attempt it, Peter.” It was not a question.

Tremayne answered anyway. “Not without a crack team of engineers equipped with axes to cut through the abatis.” They’d used apple trees, probably cut down a whole orchard. It was a technique as old as war, to fell trees and ring forts with their tangling branches. Fruit trees, apple, pear, and peach were best, with their small but closely growing branches. It would take hours to clear that ring of snarled boughs.

Donop offered him a small fatalistic shrug. “We will use our artillery.”

It was not a job for a small battery of artillery. Donop’s guns would only blow a narrow hole in the abatis and the wall behind it. A bottleneck. The worst possible way to attack a fortification. The Hessian must know it, but could not, with honor, turn back now.

It was late afternoon by the time the lines were drawn up and ready for attack, and Tremayne’s impatience must have showed. Donop smirked at him and said, “Are you eager to attack, or eager to get back to the girl, my friend?”

“What girl?” Tremayne said.

“The small one who is fucking the cousin of yours who should be Lord Sancreed.” And that was about as plainly put as the matter could be.

“She isn’t sleeping with him.”

Donop slapped him on the back. “Very well. There is no girl, and she is not fucking your cousin.” He made a sweeping gesture toward the fort. “Tonight, this shall be called Fort Donop, or I shall be dead.”

He ordered the artillery crew to open with their guns, and the gravel from Mercer’s rooftops flew black against the orange sunset, like the crown of an exploding volcano.

The bombardment lasted less than ten minutes, consumed the bulk of their powder, and blew a hole twenty feet wide in the east wall, at the end of the two-hundred-foot extension that ran parallel to the river. Then the Grenadier battalion, five hundred strong, charged through the breech, screaming.

Tremayne and Donop followed. They emerged in a long, narrow enclosure filled with shouting Grenadiers. There were no Rebel defenders. The extension was abandoned.

Tremayne turned to the east, where von Lengerke should have been coming over the bastion wall with another five hundred Hessians, and where the barracks and powder sheds should lie. Instead, there was another abatis, and behind it another set of walls. A fort within the fort. Which made the area they were standing in a killing ground.

“
Mein Gott.
If you have not the men to defend the perimeter, then build smaller walls within.
Ja
. It is what
I
would do. I am impressed,” Donop acknowledged.

“Don’t be.” Tremayne felt only disgust. “The Rebels didn’t build this. This means they have French engineers. And French powder. And French guns. Turn back. The odds are changed. Honor does not demand this.”

Donop shrugged, noted his subalterns’ efforts to impose some order on the milling Grenadiers. “The odds might be different, but the stakes remain the same. In any case, I prefer the French as adversaries. At least they are professionals. Shall we?”

They were halfway to the second abatis and the little inner fort when the American gunships on the river announced their presence with a volley of grapeshot, driving the Hessians toward the landside wall. Tremayne didn’t like it, the men massing so close under the breastworks, but Donop pressed on: undaunted, invigorated if anything by the chaos of the battle, the smell of powder, the din of shot and shell.

With military engineers trained to deal with enemy field fortification—or even with good axes—an abatis was no impediment, but the Hessians had neither. The Grenadier column of five hundred men, already squeezed tight to escape the deadly fire from the river, began to coil like a spring behind the obstruction.

There was nothing to do but go forward, so Tremayne began hacking a path through the trees with his saber. A wiry Grenadier sergeant with the look of an old campaigner, his mustache and boots both a fine, sooty black, fell in behind Tremayne nodding and offering what Tremayne believed to be encouragement in German.

He was almost through the first ring of trees when he turned to check the progress of their advance. The abatis was crawling with men making similarly slow paths.

On the parapet of the south wall, something glittered in the setting sun, and a rank of Rebel gunmen, musket barrels glimmering, rose up and fired on the Hessians.

It was the purest form of slaughter Tremayne had ever seen. The Hessians were penned like cattle by the fire of the naval guns. There was no cover from the muskets on the rampart above. The men who survived the first volley threw themselves into the tangling trees, only to die there, limp bodies hanging like macabre scarecrows.

To turn back was certain death, and pausing to return fire at the occasional Rebel face or arm glimpsed through the smoke of powder was folly. The Grenadier sergeant understood this as well, and had continued hacking, cool as you please, without a glance behind him or up at the rampart.

They pressed on until Tremayne heard the drum and the bugle that could mean only one thing: retreat. He turned to his companion, and opened his mouth to speak, but the Rebel artillery spoke instead. A shell sang through the air overhead and ripped a hole in the abatis that no amount of saber work could have accomplished.

The explosion deafened him. Hot pain tore through his right cheek, chipped his front tooth, and hurtled out his mouth, leaving behind the peppery tang of powder and blood. After that, everything moved with dreamlike slowness. He heard, as from a distance, the branches twang and snap as he fell into them; felt the burning impact of another bullet tearing through his tunic and into his arm. Then the soft quiet closed in around him.

Ten

Kate was being watched not by one man but by two. The ruffian who observed the front door of the Valby mansion was difficult to spot at first, but when the crowd in the street had changed several times over, when the knife grinder had come and gone, and the boy who sold the
Gazette
and the tinkers and peddlers had finished their trade for the day, a lone figure in a beaver hat still lingered.

The man at the back was easier to spot, because the Valby cook did not like layabouts and any man loitering in her alley who did not take up a broom or a barrel for the coin offered was set upon in short order by the groom, who knew on which side his bread was buttered.

Kate must reach the Widow, and she must not be followed, but by seven she still had no idea how she was supposed to evade the men André had set to watch her.

While she stood hesitating in the parlor window, a fight broke out. There were four toughs, dockworkers by the look of them, all three sheets to the wind, singing at the tops of their lungs and taking good-natured swipes at one another, staggering down the street. When they came level with Beaver Hat, they tried to sweep him into their party and off for a dram. When he refused, they cajoled. When he demurred, they took offense, and a punch was thrown.

Kate snatched her cloak and was out the door and up the street without a backward glance.

She arrived at Mr. Du Simitière’s lodgings in Arch Street, just above Fourth and around the corner from Christ Church, at exactly half past. She had never been to visit the peculiar artist and antiquarian before, and was surprised when he asked, however politely, for a sum of fifty cents for the pleasure of calling on him.

“It is for the support of my museum, my collection. For I must devote myself,” the plump, bespectacled Swiss said in perfect but odd English, “to the acquisition, cataloging, and display of these artifacts to the detriment of my earning a living.”

Such devotion was also plainly to the detriment of his personal appearance and housekeeping, but Kate felt compelled, now that she had paid for the privilege, to investigate the exhibits. His rooms were stuffed full of natural and artificial curiosities.

“Your work as an artist must provide you with some income,” Kate said. The man had been commissioned by Congress to commemorate the Declaration with a medal, and to provide the new nation with a suitably grand seal. Surely he could afford a brush for his coat.

“Alas, Congress and Mr. Adams are more generous with suggestions than with cash.”

Du Simitière opened an English cabinet, black with age and carved with that peculiar combination of the geometric and organic favored by the Jacobeans. “My Indian department is deficient, particularly in representative pieces from the tribes of the more northerly states, and those of Canada. Should you be traveling north, might I prevail upon you to keep an eye open for any such collectibles as may appear? The governor of New York was formerly a reliable source of information and artifacts, but I have sent him three missives in the last month about my need for information on the diet of the Cayuga people, and he has failed entirely to respond to me.”