The Turncoat (23 page)

It was seductive, as Caide had intended. “At least I’m getting something between your thighs today,” he murmured in her ear. He caressed the leather of the seat, but it was as if she could feel his hands on her. He knew, of course, and he enjoyed watching her respond. “You’ll be hard-pressed to find fodder for her in the market, so I’ll stable her for you until the river is opened.”

He was right. She had only to glance at the scrawny nags passing in the street to know how little fodder was reaching the city. And all of it was going to the army, whose horses were stabled in the “seditious” churches: Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Baptist.

Their little party set out: General Howe on his charger and Mrs. Loring on her strawberry roan, with Bay and Kate following, trailed by Dyson and the general’s servants.

Before the occupation, the Neck had been a pretty suburb of garden cottages where the rich retreated from the bustle of the city, but now it was abandoned. Splintered fences marked where soldiers had foraged for easy fuel.

When Howe halted in front of a handsome stone cottage, larger and more impressive than its neighbors, the rest of the party was obliged to do likewise.

Caide looked at the house and swore under his breath.

In chalk over the lintel was a faded warning: UNDER THE PROTECTION OF GENERAL HOWE. Across the door in black paint was a more permanent and effective admonition: UNDER THE PROTECTION OF BAYARD CAIDE.

Though the garden was ruined, the house was untouched, down to the black iron shutter dogs.

Howe snorted.

“It’s Peter’s idea of a joke. On me, not you,” said Caide. “You
did
put him in charge of discouraging looters here.”

“As though I needed further reminder of my impotence,” Howe said. “So kind of your cousin to oblige. Major Tremayne would have done better to focus on that other business I entrusted to him.”

Kate attempted to keep her face bland, her eyes fixed on the ostentatiously rustic cottage. She counted the quoins over the windows, the dentils over the door.

“He was ordered to Mercer with Donop,” Caide said evenly.

Kate counted the slate tiles of the roof, the stones in the foundation.

Howe sniffed and turned his mount back toward the road. “I gave the man a task, and he allowed himself to be diverted from it. What the devil was his quarrel with André?”

“A private matter,” said Caide, quite softly.

Howe shot him a sidelong glance and Caide added hurriedly, “Nothing like that.”

“Captain André has his uses,” Howe said, “but at times he overreaches. I sent my surgeon to look at Donop before he died. He also treated your cousin’s wounds. The Americans would like to trade Tremayne for some of their prisoners in the State House, but André advises me against it. What do you say?”

Caide turned to look at her, and she did her best to keep her face blank.

“The Americans will make better deals in the spring when they’re desperate for officers for the new campaign.”

Howe turned his horse toward the river. Kate realized she had fallen behind, and Caide with her.

“It’s not your fault,” Caide said.

She’d been lost in her own thoughts, which were entirely of Peter, and that was dangerous, with Bay watching her.

“What isn’t?”

“André sending Peter to Mercer over whatever happened at the concert. He’s always been a chivalrous idiot. I told Peter you were perfectly capable of handling the little Huguenot,” Caide said, with a pride she found oddly flattering.

“Then why didn’t you press the general to trade him back?” She was courting danger by asking, and she knew it.

“Can’t you guess? Surely you noticed Peter watching you at the concert. My dear cousin wants you. And he’s had
everything
that should have been mine, including Sancreed. He won’t have you. Don’t pity him, Lydia. He is a viscount. He’ll be well treated. And by the spring, when he’s traded back, you and I will be married and he’ll see that you are the one thing he can’t take from me. Besides, if he’d had his way this past summer he’d be with Burgoyne now, and no better off.”

“In New York?” She knew of General Burgoyne’s plan to attack Albany from Quebec, and his strategy to separate New England from the southern Colonies. She knew also that Howe liked neither the plan nor its author. She did not know why they were talking of Burgoyne.

“You’ll hear soon enough. It can’t be kept secret. We didn’t just lose a battalion strength of Hessians at Mercer. We lost the entire northern army. Burgoyne surrendered to Gates and the Rebels at Saratoga six days ago.”

An army of eight thousand, defeated. Kate could not take it in. There was nothing to compare with it. Up to now, the Continentals had won only skirmishes like Trenton. It had been a war of retreat and survival, not battles and victories.

“What will happen now?”

“Burgoyne’s entire force will be sent home to England. Under the terms of surrender, they can’t fight again in this conflict. It was Burgoyne’s plan, and Burgoyne’s fiasco, but Howe will be blamed because he didn’t throw his army away supporting Burgoyne’s madness. Howe will resign, naturally.”

It had not occurred to her that a general could resign. Her father couldn’t. If Arthur Grey left the army, if he returned home, he’d hang as a traitor. Resignation was a British luxury.

“Howe hasn’t any choice now,” Caide was saying. “He can’t go on coddling Washington, or he’ll face an inquiry, maybe even a trial, back home. He’ll have to take Mercer and Mifflin no matter what it costs, or we’ll be starved out of Philadelphia. It would be best if we married now, in case the city must be evacuated.”

She’d never thought of the engagement as real. It had always been a ploy, an achievement that elated her when she told Angela Ferrers. The marriage was an eventuality that would not, could not come to pass. “But my father is not yet returned,” she said carefully.

“But you are of age, and of an independent turn of mind,” Bayard Caide observed, his blue eyes hungry—and startlingly vulnerable.

“What if you married me and then my father turned up and you discovered him to be a hopeless rustic?”

He shifted his gaze for a moment, checking distances and proximities like a soldier. “Lydia, your father is long overdue. Howe issued a landing pass more than a month ago. Nothing can get near the coast without encountering a navy ship, so he must know he has permission to land. And that prices are sky-high in the city. There are only two kinds of merchants who would not land their cargo under such circumstances. A dead man, or a Rebel.”

She didn’t bother to deny it. “What will you do?”

“I don’t care a fig for your father’s politics. Or yours, for that matter. Though I must insist you keep your views private. I’m not unambitious. I’ve never hidden that from you. My family is only a few generations removed from the taint of treason. I cannot dabble in it here. You understand?”

“Yes.” She understood perfectly. She had been risking her life to safeguard Mifflin and Mercer for weeks. She’d sacrificed Peter to the cause. Now, when it seemed she might have succeeded, she would have to sacrifice herself to Bayard Caide.

*   *   *

T
hey buried Donop, as he had asked, in the mass grave with his countrymen. The Americans rendered him full honors. Colonel Greene was in grudging attendance, but Du Plessis-Mauduit traded his homespun for a suit of white satin with blue facings. He was the picture of Gallic military splendor. Donop would have been pleased.

After the service was concluded, Greene took Peter Tremayne aside to ask a series of gruff questions about his family and military connections. Tremayne answered those few he felt did not violate his trust as an officer, and Greene left, more quizzical than satisfied.

That afternoon, Ann Whitall removed the stitches in Tremayne’s face. She grasped his chin in her bony hand and turned his head this way and that, then declared, in her outmoded Quaker patois, “Thou’ll do.” Later, he inspected himself in the shaving mirror over the basin. The scar was ugly, bisecting his cheek and pulling up the corner of his mouth. Yes, he would do. His expression seemed frozen in wry amusement. He supposed it was better than a perpetual scowl.

Colonel Greene summoned him to the fort the next day. The Hessian sergeant Bachmann was not allowed to accompany him, and he was advised against wearing his red tunic. Greene, he surmised, did not have total control of his men, could not ensure Tremayne’s safety if the Rebel infantrymen felt inclined to mischief. A month ago Tremayne would have insisted that the Americans could not triumph without adopting British discipline. Elected officers and volunteer soldiers did not, in his experience, win battles. At Mercer he had been proved wrong.

Tremayne had thought the squalid guardroom in Mercer insultingly poor accommodation, but Greene’s own quarters were no better. His desk was pulled up in front of a camp bed. He offered Tremayne the only other seat in the room, a chest riddled with bullet holes.

“I have a letter here,” Greene began with no preamble, “from my cousin, begging me to release you. I should like to know how you are acquainted with him.”

“Who, sir, is your cousin?” Tremayne had few American friends. He wondered if Kate would consider herself among them.

“Major General Nathanael Greene.”

Tremayne did not know the general, and said as much.

“I thought you might be one of his Masonic connections,” Greene said. “A widow’s son in need of aid. I can conceive of no other reason why he might ask me to let you go. You appear to be a capable and experienced officer. You have seen how things stand with us here. You know the strength of our garrison. Your release could do us a great deal of harm, so I must ask you: why does the Fighting Quaker want you freed?”

Like many of his brother officers, Tremayne was a Freemason, but was not acquainted with Greene, did not even know to which lodge the man belonged. The Fighting Quaker. There were only so many involved in the American cause—these men disowned by their faith—and most of them surely knew one another. If Greene was known to Arthur Grey…“Might I ask what your cousin has to say in his letter?”

Greene passed Tremayne the missive, but he must already have known its contents by heart. “My cousin begs, for the sake of a personal matter of the most delicate nature and involving an old and valued friend of his, that I provide you a horse, a servant, coin—which he encloses—and a pass to see you safely to your own lines.”

Tremayne handed the letter back.

“An extraordinary request. He leaves the decision up to me, as the safety of my garrison is at stake.”

“Would it make a difference to you if I assured you that I am pursuing no military purpose by returning to Philadelphia? That I intend to put right a personal matter involving an American lady whose welfare has been endangered by my absence?”

“No, Major. It would not. In any case I would be extremely unlikely to believe you, save that today I received another letter, from a lady who is herself a particular friend of Washington, and who desires me to keep you here at all costs. She also cites the welfare of an unnamed lady, though she avers that this woman would be put at hazard by your return to Philadelphia.”

The lady who had written could only be Angela Ferrers. She would not give up such a well-placed spy as Kate so easily. Grey must have discovered his daughter missing and Tremayne captured. Perhaps he had approached Angela Ferrers first. He was a direct man. Unfortunately, Angela Ferrers was a subtle and devious woman, and Arthur Grey could not possibly know how valuable his daughter had become to the Merry Widow. And forewarned, Angela Ferrers must have made a countermove. Tremayne’s only hope was that she could not be everywhere at once, that he could reach Grey without her interference. “Might I be permitted to write a letter myself?”

“I’ve already informed your commanding officer of your presence here,” Greene replied curtly. “I’ve received no offers for a trade.”

And none would be forthcoming if André had anything to do with it. “The letter I would like to write is to one of your own commanders. Colonel Arthur Grey.”

Greene raised a single querulous eyebrow. “What a lot of American friends you have made in your short time in our country, Major.” He gave him paper and ink, but no privacy, and Tremayne was not fool enough to think the letter would reach Grey without passing through many hands. He must be discreet.

Later the guard came to remove him. He was not surprised when they turned away from the open gates of the fort. He knew where they were going. They marched him into the dank brick walls of the fort, along a corridor lit only by the fractured beams of the gun slits, to the black depths of the powder magazine.

*   *   *

T
hey had given him back his coat, and for that he was grateful.

Tremayne knew as soon as the door shut behind him that the chill, dark powder magazine was meant to be his tomb, a convenient solution to Colonel Greene’s problem. He did not intend to die in the cold and darkness, so he set about the business of survival as soon as his eyes adjusted to the dark.

Only the barest sliver of light entered beneath the batten door, which was reinforced on both sides with iron plates. He took care not to look directly at it; in this blackness it would blind him like the sun. He stood soaking up the darkness, breathing in the chemical smells of old powder and fresh mold, and reining in the panic that threatened to overwhelm him. It was like being underground, being buried. The unseen vault must be at least three stories above him, and the emptiness held all the childhood terrors of the night, and the decidedly adult terror that came with the knowledge of all the ways a man might die in such a place.

He wanted to sink to the paving where he stood, wrap his arms around himself and withdraw into his own mind. But he was determined to live, to inconvenience the coldly practical Colonel Greene, to get back to Philadelphia and Kate.

He forced himself to pace the outer wall of his prison, running his hands along the masonry. When he had gone thirty paces, he felt the liquid splash of water beneath his boots, and discovered the jagged run of brickwork where the magazine was broken. This, then, was why it was empty. The foundation must have cracked during the brief bombardment from Donop’s guns, and let the river in. When the water became ankle-deep Tremayne retraced his steps and retreated toward the door. Cold and damp were his enemies, and there was a putrid smell to the water that indicated it might filter through a rubbish tip—or worse—before reaching here. He felt along the shattered wall for loose bricks and rubble, anything that might be of use if he were to attempt an escape.