The Turncoat (32 page)

Angela Ferrers made no move to take the letter. “What foolishness is this?”

“The count wrote to you on his deathbed.”

Angela Ferrers accepted the folded missive from Kate’s hand and carried it to the candle. Kate thought she meant to read it, but the Widow held the folded paper to the flame.

“No!” Kate snatched it, the corner just beginning to burn, and threw it on the hearth. She dropped to her knees and smothered it with the loose brick.

The edges were singed but the message remained intact. Kate rose from the floor, brushed the soot from her skirts, and held out the letter once more. “You were loved by a man who was willing to die for you. Who
did
die for you.” Kate laid the letter on the table between them.

The Widow made no move to touch it. “I advise you against following my example. Don’t take up with a man who will die for you. Find one who will kill for you instead.” But after a moment, Angela Ferrers reached out to finger the singed edge of the letter. “I cannot leave here with this,” she said. “It is too dangerous.”

It took a moment for her meaning to penetrate. The Widow wanted to read the letter here and now, but alone. Kate picked up the water jug from the washstand and went out of the room. She wondered, not for the first time, if anything touched Angela Ferrers, if the woman had any feelings at all, and decided that given tonight’s display, the answer was a resounding no.

When she returned from the kitchen pump with fresh water, a chill wind met her at the door. The sash was up. The shutters were thrown back. Moonlight slanted into the room.

Angela Ferrers stood in the open window for anyone to see. She wore her fur-trimmed mantle, the hood casting her face in shadows. Kate could see nothing of her expression, but the Widow’s hands were visible resting on the sill, white and trembling.

“Where did you get it?” the Widow asked.

She meant the letter, now ashes on the hearth.

“From Peter Tremayne.”

Kate caught only a glimpse of the Widow’s face as she passed on her way out of the darkened room, but it was enough to tell her how very wrong she had been.

*   *   *

I
t was the patter on the stairs that woke him. He was up and wrapped in his banyan before the reverend’s bony sister knocked on his door.

Tremayne’s first thought was of attack. The Rebels had crept up on Trenton last year in the dead of night, in the bone-rattling cold, and on Christmas Eve no less.

“There’s a woman downstairs.” Not an attack then. The reverend’s sister stood barefoot in the corridor wrapped in a patchwork quilt. She had exceedingly large feet for a woman, he noted, recalling Kate’s perfect proportions.

It must be her downstairs. Kate. He knew no other woman in Philadelphia who would seek him out in the middle of the night.

His room beyond the bed curtains was chill, the hall outside even more so, but the reverend’s sister hesitated there, her message delivered, and Tremayne knew what she must be thinking.

“I’ll be down in a moment. Thank you,” he said. He dressed hastily, wishing there was a glass in his room. He was afraid for Kate, of course. Nothing but disaster, most likely in the form of imminent arrest, would bring her to his door at this hour. But he was also relieved. The crisis was come. There might yet be time to spirit her away. If not, he would intercede for her. No one liked to hang pretty young women. Howe had a soft spot for her. And no one would be surprised if a rich lord saved her from the gallows to install her in his bed. It was the way of the world.

She was waiting in the reverend’s tiny parlor, but he knew before she threw the hood of her furred cloak back that it was not Kate. Even in the bulky velvet gown, the Widow was taller and more slender than Kate, boyish almost. He could think of only one reason why she might be here. “What has happened to Kate?”

“Nothing, my lord. She’s safely tucked in bed, though it would please me immeasurably if in future you refrained from joining her there.”

“Are you warning me off?”

The Widow looked suddenly older than he remembered, and bone-weary. She took a seat in the carved chair by the fire—a relic of one of the reverend’s Pilgrim progenitors—and it creaked beneath even her slight weight. “We both know I’m a hypocrite, Major Tremayne. But Kate would be safer if she would do as I advise, rather than as I have done.”

“I will not give her up,” he said flatly. “Is that all you have come for?”

“No.” She reached into her cloak. He recognized the folded paper and the bold, flowing hand, though not the scorch mark that now marred it. “You were with him at the end.
Tell me
.”

After what the woman had done to him, he did not think he could possibly pity her. If she had cried, he would not have. But Angela Ferrers sat perfectly still in the ancient chair. It would have given away her slightest motion with a plaintive creak. And he did pity her.

There was no sound in the room but his voice, and faintly, from the hall, the irregular tick of the battered case clock.

She listened to it all. Donop’s delight in the Ferguson, his admiration of the Widow’s skills with a rifle and her seat on a horse, his determination to take Fort Mercer, to regain his honor, the details of his terrible wound, and his deepest regret upon dying: that he would never see his beloved again.

Tremayne wanted to offer some words of comfort, but he could find none, and he was very close to an unseemly display of emotion himself. The Widow clearly did not permit herself the luxury of weeping, and he rather doubted she had much patience for the shedding of manly tears. So he swallowed the lump in his throat and ignored the tight feeling behind his eyes, which was as much for what he feared he was doing to Kate as for what had befallen Carl Donop and the Widow, and made the only safe gesture left to him: he stood up and offered her his hand.

She never took it. The sound of booted feet outside the window froze her for only a second, then she was up and scanning the room for exits.

There was only one, and before she could reach it, the front and back doors of the house were battered open by the carbine butts of a squad of dragoons.

The parlor door opened, Captain André strolled in smiling, and the Widow adopted a pose of murderous rage and smacked Tremayne hard across the face. “You told me you loved me, Peter. That you would marry me. That you would take care of me. All to lure me into a trap.”

Tremayne was stunned. André looked intrigued. And General Howe—following the little Huguenot in with the expression of a pleased parent on a school visit, studiously ignoring the shabbiness of the house and furnishings—looked delighted.

“Well done, Major.” Howe clapped his hands and darted quick glances around the room. “Clap her in irons, Captain André, and then we must have a glass of brandy.”

“Yes, very well done, but I’m afraid the celebrations must wait, General. We need the names of the Widow’s confederates before they are alerted to her capture.”

Howe nodded, willfully ignoring the nastier implications of André’s statement. “By all means. Let’s have done with it.”

“Not here, I think,” André said, inclining his head toward the reverend’s sister, and the reverend himself, who was blinking sleepily in the doorway.

“She is entitled to a trial,” Tremayne said.

“Perhaps. If she were an Englishwoman. Are you?” André inquired of the Widow.

She said nothing. André smiled, and Tremayne realized with certainty that John André, like Donop, was privy to some secret intelligence, knew who the Widow really was, and would not say. And neither, it was clear, would she, even if her rank or the circumstances of her birth could save her from torture and imprisonment, or entitle her to a trial by a jury of her peers.

They did not clap her in irons, but she made a break for it in the street and took down two men, who would not be addressing attentions to their sweethearts anytime soon. It took four to subdue her. André bound her hands with rope himself, and then once she was mounted pillion behind a dragoon, he tied her feet to the stirrups as well. Through all this Howe looked away, vaguely embarrassed, and fell back on praising Tremayne for his efforts. “A new command in the spring, Major. You can rely on it.”

They expected him to join them, he realized, as the detachment mounted up and prepared to depart. He could feel the furtive eyes of the neighbors peering through their shutters. With scenes like these, he wondered how many loyal subjects would be left in the city when this winter was done.

He did not want to go with them, for what was certain to be an interrogation, a trial, and an execution. He wondered if the dapper André did his own dirty work, or left that to others. He tried to beg off, pointed out the vulnerability of the reverend and his sister with both their doors off the hinges, but in the end André detailed a guard to protect the house and Tremayne had no choice but to accompany them.

They rode in silence, because their errand was secret and, to Tremayne’s mind at least, shameful. The route was different but he recognized their destination long before they reached the Neck. He could not inquire whether the idea was André’s, who had, he knew, traced him with Kate to the pretty stone cottage, or Bay’s, who stood languidly waiting for them in the door of the house beneath the chalked warning that bore his name.

THIS HOUSE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF BAYARD CAIDE.

Caide was not alone. The dragoons, of course, had been his. André chose well. A dirty job, for men who would not ask questions. But even Caide had some scruples and Tremayne did not think his cousin was capable of torture.

That was why Dyson was there.

They bundled the Widow, still silent, into the kitchen, André taking the lead and Dyson padding in after them like the predator he was. Howe nodded and strode out the front door of the little cottage, distancing himself from the proceedings until they achieved the desired result. Tremayne watched the kitchen door close and turned to find Caide scrutinizing him.

“I didn’t think you had it in you, Peter.”

He didn’t, of course. He’d told Kate he would give them the Widow in her place, but he’d never have gone through with it. He’d seen torture, and knew what the low voices, the scrape of furniture over floorboards, the soft snap of the fire all meant.

He had no illusions about what was taking place behind that door. Everyone talked under torture. The best he could hope for was that Dyson was clumsy or cruel, that the Widow died before naming Kate.

Tremayne was poised on a knife’s edge. He could ride to warn Kate now, and give her away for certain. Or he could wait and pray God the Widow did not break.

John André had proved himself more clever than they had realized. Tremayne had noticed Kate’s watchdogs. He could not fail to. Beaver Hat and Alley Loafer made no attempts to hide. And so Tremayne had not suspected that he himself might be watched by more subtle agents.

Caide returned from the parlor with a flask, and the same delicate cut glasses Tremayne had shared with Kate. Peter was thankful that his hands did not shake when he took his.

“We should get drunk,” Caide offered, with rare sympathy.

“Afterwards,” said Tremayne.

They waited.

Caide, never squeamish, sat beside him in the cold dark hall. But he was not unaffected. Bay was not ordinarily a man to drink purposefully toward oblivion, but he did so now, neglecting even to offer Tremayne the flask again.

Then the door opened, Howe was summoned, and the door closed again.

Tremayne and Caide waited once more, listening to the low voices and the occasional hoarse, shuddering moan. It could not go on much longer.

It didn’t. Captain André opened the door, looking, for once, suitably grim. “My lord, matters are near a conclusion and your presence would be helpful.” He oozed polite deference. His linen, Tremayne noted, was spotless, but there were dark glistening speckles patterned over his boots.

Bay followed Tremayne in. He could only be coming out of solidarity. Under other circumstances, Tremayne would have welcomed his support, but not tonight. If Angela Ferrers broke, if she told them what she knew of Kate, and if Bay heard it, if he learned that his adored fiancée was a spy and, more, Tremayne’s lover, her life would hinge on who reached her first, and whether or not Tremayne could kill a man who had been raised as—and whom he still considered—his brother.

They must have tidied the room and the prisoner before admitting Howe. Angela Ferrers wore her shift, but it was bloodstained in telling places. She was tied to a straight-backed chair now, but bloodied ropes still dangled limply off the edge of the pine table.

Dyson had not tidied himself, and Howe took pains not to let his eyes light on the man. “I am sorry, Peter,” said Howe, “but you must remember what she is, and what is at stake.”

The lives of at least twenty thousand British soldiers and an equal number of loyal civilians. He knew it too well. They had fallen for her ruse at the reverend’s house. Of course they had. Her performance, her outrage—the way she had slapped him—had been thoroughly convincing, worthy of Drury Lane. They thought he’d made love to her and was witnessing the violation and torture of a woman who had taken him into her body. And he might as well have been, because all he could see when he looked at her was Kate.

“Mrs. Ferrers has already been kind enough to give us the names of her couriers and the locations of her dead drops,” André explained, in a voice an octave deeper than the dulcet tones he favored with the belles of Philadelphia. “We are trying to establish now the events of the night the lady entertained you in Orchard Valley. We need to know who else in that house was working with the Widow. And whom else she might have working for her here in Philadelphia.”

“Orchard Valley. Was that the name of the place?” Tremayne replied, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice. “It was a provincial backwater, a hamlet full of dour Quakers. I cannot believe Angela had accomplices there.”

André shrugged, and Caide’s brute, Dyson, took his cue. He stepped forward, blocking the Widow from Tremayne’s sight. Tremayne knew he had a knife, suspected what he was doing with it, knew for certain when he heard her muffled cry. He could not control the muscle in his cheek that spasmed at the sound.