The Turncoat (31 page)

“I will never work for you. And we are not friends.”

“Are we not? We are of an age. We have both had cause to reinvent ourselves. We alone know each other’s secrets. If not friends, what does that make us?” He dropped her hand at last, and Kate realized the music had ended. André did not wait for her answer, but bowed and allowed himself to be swept up into the press of men and women selecting their next partners.

He was wrong, she told herself as she sought the fresh air of the stairwell, and when even that proved too stuffy, the cool dark of the back porch where the crowd spilled noisily into the yard. Perhaps she was the only person in Philadelphia privy to the secrets of André’s heart, but he was
not
the only man in Philadelphia privy to hers.

Peter.

She’d tried to ignore him at dinner, but whenever her eyes lighted on him, she’d felt stripped bare, as though everyone who looked at her could tell that she’d given herself to him. They’d lain together naked like Adam and Eve in the Garden, and sweated and cried out and been as vulnerable as newborns in each other’s arms. And tonight they sat swathed in silk and lace at opposite ends of a mahogany table and pretended not to know each other. They drank wine and talked with other people who seemed to Kate to have all the substantiality of ghosts.

He’d betrayed Phillip Lytton for her, and committed treason as damning as her own. Every time their lives touched, she brought him danger and dishonor.

“I know a place where we can be alone. Will you come?”

She thought at first that she had imagined his voice in the dark of the garden, but then she realized that he was standing behind her. She did not turn to face him. She said nothing. Her breath came fast, making a mist in the cool night air. He told her how to find the place, his directions precise and succinct, and then he was gone.

She resolved not to go to him and threaded her way back through the crowd in the yard. It had coarsened since she’d come outside. In the back hallway she noticed that the sound had changed subtly. Early in the night, all of Philadelphia had been abroad celebrating, but now the very young and the scrupulously virtuous had gone home. It was past midnight, and tipsy flirtation and mild wagering had given way to drunken propositions and high-stakes gaming. If she turned into the taproom under the stairs, she knew, she would find Caide betting on a fight, or stripping to the waist to take part in one.

The fall of Mercer and Mifflin, and the opening of the Delaware being celebrated tonight, had destroyed everything she had worked for since coming to Philadelphia. But it had bought her one priceless thing: time. She did not have to marry Caide right away. Pray God she did not have to marry him at all.

She ought to float to Bay’s side on a tide of rustling silk and admire his skill or his winnings, allow him to show her off the way he liked to when the company was becoming informal. He might draw her down to his lap and balance his glass on her busk, the condensation running in rivulets down her breasts.

Instead, she opened the door to the cellar. At the bottom she found a long brick corridor painted shimmering white, stretching the length of the tavern from back to front. She followed it past haphazardly stocked storerooms, disordered by the recent influx of goods from the supply ships. Behind one half-shut door she heard the fervent urgings of a vigorous tryst, and hurried farther, until she reached the door Tremayne had described.

Batten oak and brined with age and the proximity of the docks, it nonetheless opened silently on oiled hinges. A smuggler’s passage; two hundred narrow feet of smooth paving lined with boxes of contraband. It led straight to the river.

There was already a light burning in the tunnel, though there were no beeswax or spermaceti tapers here. It was rushlight, stinking of tallow and smoking like a forge. Her lover—and she realized with shock that was precisely what he was—lounged in the middle of the passage, ankles crossed, head down, shoulder negligently grazing a stack of wine crates. He looked up when she approached, and his expression of hope mixed with hunger gripped her like a vise. “I wasn’t certain you would come,” he said.

“I shouldn’t have. Peter, André had us followed to the cottage. He knows what you did to Lytton, and about my father’s presence behind your lines. He will destroy you if I do not give you up.”

She’d never observed him in such a confined space. He was all coiled emotion and violent passion held in check, but he didn’t move until she did.

She realized at once that it was a mistake. She sought his arms, desperate for comfort, but his hands on her waist were not gentle. He backed her into the crate behind her, and lifted her to sit on its edge. He gathered her skirts into a froth about her hips. “I’m not afraid of John André.”

But Kate was. Afraid for herself, afraid for Peter. She braced her palms against his chest. “Don’t.”

They were frozen like that, his hands beneath her skirts, hers on his shoulders, when the tavern door at the top of the stairs swung open and disgorged two men dressed in white, carrying canvas sacks. They pulled the door shut behind them and made it almost to the bottom of the stairs before they realized they were not alone. They stopped on the bottom step, the older man shielding the boy behind him.

Tremayne stepped in front of Kate, but not before she got a good look at them: soldiers, from their snowy stocks and gaiters, but the man in the lead was portly, balding, and red-faced, and would never see forty again, while the boy was wide-eyed, carrot-topped, and scarcely fifteen. And their coats were not white. They were red, like Peter’s, but turned inside out to show the cotton lining.

Tremayne was so close to her that she could feel the change in him, the way his body tensed and his center of gravity shifted when he took a second, smaller, but more calculated step in front of her to draw his sword. It echoed like a bell in the brick-roofed chamber.

The boy said something thick with consonants in a language she did not understand, but his fear was plain in his high-pitched voice and wide, panicked eyes.

Before the older man could answer, Tremayne spoke. “The boy has the right of it, Sergeant. You should go back to your barracks now.”

“Who are they?” Kate asked. She could not place the language, though she knew she had heard it before.

“Deserters,” spat Tremayne, “from the Royal Irish.” He was vibrating with anger. And something else she didn’t recognize.

The older man didn’t flinch. His drew a pistol from his bundle and curled his lips into a nasty smile. “You have a bit of the Gaelic, to be sure, my lord. All the better for slapping down them that speaks it. But I’m afraid we can’t oblige you. There’s a boat waiting for us at the end of this tunnel.”

“I cannot let you pass.”

“But you will, my lord. Because I know something the boy here doesn’t. That fancy piece you’re about to tup doesn’t belong to you. Better to let us meet the boat that’s waiting than bear tales back to them that might be interested.”

Caide. The threat chilled Kate to the bone. The man thought he was dealing with simple cuckoldry.

“Where will you go?” she asked the sneering sergeant.

He seemed surprised to hear her speak, then shrugged and answered her. “The boy was never cut out for a soldier. He has family in Lancaster who will take him. It’s the farmer’s life for him. Me, I favor a billet with the Continentals.”

“I’m sure you do,” Tremayne scoffed. “For long enough to collect the shilling. A man who will desert from one flag will desert from another.”

But Kate was already fishing through her pockets for the bag of coins her father had given her at Orchard Valley. She’d never needed pocket money since becoming the Widow’s acolyte. She did not need it now. She tossed the bag high into the air and the rogue caught it, suspicion writ large over his coarse features.

“And what would this be for?” he asked.

Kate placed her hand on Tremayne’s sword arm. “To speed you on your way,” she said, praying Tremayne would lower his blade.

“Kate,” warned Tremayne, never taking his eyes off the sergeant, “you cannot trust men like these.”

“They are better out of the city than in,” she said. “Lower your sword.”

Tremayne shrugged. “Just as soon as he lowers his pistol.”

The sound of the pistol being uncocked was as loud as a gunshot. Tremayne lowered his blade. The stocky sergeant sketched Kate a mocking bow as he passed close to her in the narrow hall, tugging the goggling boy along after him. They were lost quickly in the shadows at the far end of the tunnel, but a wash of cool air and the smell of the river told her that they had found the exit.

Tremayne was still standing over her. She saw the pulse beating at his throat. His sword lay unsheathed on the crate beside her. She felt strange. Hot and restless. She reached for him. “Peter, I…” She didn’t know how to describe it.

His hands rested lightly on her thighs. Her skirts were still drawn up over her knees, but he made no move to lift them. “It’s the threat of violence,” he said thickly. “The nearness of death.”

She saw now that his hands were trembling. She touched him through his breeches.

“Don’t,” he said. His jaw was clenched.

She ignored him. The buttons popped free between her fingers. His flap fell open, and he sprang thick and heavy into her waiting hand.

“You won’t like it. Not like this,” he warned.

But she did.

*   *   *

K
ate exited the cellar ahead of Tremayne on shaky legs. She’d done her best to repair her appearance, but she knew she looked like she’d been ravished, so she waited for the Shippens in the dark of their carriage. Peggy breezed in sometime later without noticing Kate’s dishabille, but Mrs. Shippen ran an assessing eye over her, and pursed her lips in distaste. No doubt she attributed Kate’s dishevelment to Bayard Caide. She thanked God for her fiancé’s louche reputation.

Peggy’s chatter on the ride home had a single theme: John André. Captain André was reopening the theater. Captain André was planning a ball. Captain André was building sleds for pleasure outings in the Neck. And while Peggy’s mother might be an indifferent chaperone, she was not a foolish woman. On the subject of John André, Mrs. Shippen was strategically silent. Canny city Quakers like the Shippens didn’t fraternize with soldiers so their daughters could marry lowly captains without name or fortune.

Listening to Peggy prattle on as the hot bricks on the floor of the carriage cooled and the chill night air crept in, Kate felt her chest tighten until she could barely breathe. Washington had told her to consider carefully what she might be giving up to become the Widow’s eyes and ears in Philadelphia. And she had considered. She’d considered that she would never see Tremayne again, and yet she could not imagine another man to suit her.

By the time the Shippen carriage deposited Kate at the Valby residence, she craved the solitude of her room, and took the stairs two at a time.

But her room wasn’t empty when she reached it.

“Kindly close the drapes and light a candle or two. I’m tired of sitting in the dark,” Angela Ferrers said. She sat in a shadowed corner, well away from the windows. Her appearance tonight was as surprising as ever. She was not the Quaker Widow of Orchard Valley, or the wiry groom of the Valby stables, or the oyster monger of Du Simitière’s museum. And she was certainly not the exquisitely turned-out lady who had tried, and failed, to seduce Peter Tremayne. This woman was a bourgeoise, a comfortable merchant’s wife, to judge by the richly figured velvet of her gown, too heavy to carry off its ruffled style, which ought to droop elegantly at the wrists and hem, but instead added bulk to her slim frame. It was a calculated lapse in taste, designed to relegate her firmly to the background of any gathering. And it would work. Amidst the overdressed burghers of Philadelphia tonight, Kate would never have given her a second glance.

“I thought we weren’t to meet again in person, Angela.” Kate found a hot coal in the firebox. The candle flared, then became a pinpoint of light in the deeper dark as the drapes fell closed.

“I had no choice but to come. You and André’s watchdogs disappeared for an entire night.”

Kate felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. She had not mentioned those events in her last dispatch, in the masked letter she’d deposited, two days ago, in the dead drop at the Haymarket. “Are you also having me watched?”

“Of course. Where did you go?”

“On a private errand.”

“You can expect no privacy. You are a spy. You watch and are watched in turn.”

“
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes
. Where I went is no one’s business but my own.”

“It is if you are working for John André.”

The suggestion stunned Kate for a moment. It was almost laughable, if it weren’t so plausible. André
had
attempted to recruit her. To a jaded spy like the Widow, who clothed herself daily in lies, mistrust and suspicion came naturally. And Kate had fed it unwittingly.

“I’m not working for André,” Kate said carefully. “I spent the night with Peter Tremayne.”

The Widow rose and stalked to the cold hearth. She crossed her arms, leaned against the mantel, and took a deep breath. “At Grey Farm I said you were either very clever, or very stupid. Facts begin to weigh toward the latter. Bayard Caide might be besotted enough with you to forgive a great deal, but not, I think, that.”

“There is more to this tension between Peter and Bay than the fact that they are closer cousins than society thinks. What aren’t you telling me?”

“You’re right. There is more. Their family tree is gnarled like an oak, and only a fool would place herself between those two men.”

“Tell me what they are to each other and allow me to decide for myself.”

“If you knew the truth, you wouldn’t be able to conceal your knowledge from Bayard Caide. Believe me when I say that you are better off not knowing, and that you must give up Tremayne.”

Kate knelt at the hearth and used a penknife to loosen a brick in the fireplace. She withdrew a sheet of paper and held it out to the Widow. “As you gave up Carl Donop?”