The Turncoat (33 page)

“This will go on until you give us names,” André advised the Widow. “And your suffering pains Lord Sancreed almost as much as it does yourself. Have some pity on the man and bring this to an end. You
have
other agents in Philadelphia. Who are they?”

Dyson stepped close again.

“Give her a chance to answer first, man.” Howe looked decidedly uneasy. Tremayne sensed there were deeper currents running here, that André and Howe were not after the same thing. He forced himself to look at the Widow.

She curled her lips into a snarl. “Which lord did you mean, Captain André? Peter Tremayne, or his cousin, who is surely
twice
as entitled to be called Sancreed.”

Bay tensed beside him. The room became dangerously silent.

“You have an accomplice in the city, Mrs. Ferrers,” André persisted. “A woman who is feeding you information. Give us the name or I will clear the room and allow Lieutenant Dyson to persuade you.”

Howe looked stricken and anxious. “I think that’s enough, Captain André. The woman has nothing more to tell us. She’s just spewing bile now.”

“Oh no, General, I have more to say. But first…” It was as though a dam had burst and what had been withheld might now be revealed.

The Widow turned her face to Caide. “It was you I was waiting for in Orchard Valley, Colonel. I’ll confess, I was relieved when your cousin came instead. Tell me, does your pretty fiancée know what her children will be? If so, she has a stronger stomach than I. Children? Sickening enough just to lie with a bastard whose—”

Tremayne guessed what she was doing a moment too late. “Don’t,” he said, but Caide had already smashed the delicate glass in his hand against the table. Dyson twisted with a tigerish grace out of his master’s way. And before Tremayne could reach him, Caide jerked his arm down in a graceless arc.

Tremayne heard the hiss, but mercifully he did not see the glass slice through the Widow’s throat. There was a gurgle. The ropes groaned. The chair creaked. Then all was silence.

For a second no one moved.

Then André shoved Caide aside and bent over the Widow. “You imbecile,” André spat at Caide. But Bayard Caide didn’t hear him.

Bay stood trembling beside the chair, and by the time Howe placed an arm on his shoulder and turned him, shirt spattered in a thick red line, away from the body, that is what it was. Angela Ferrers’ eyes were closed. Her chemise was soaked, the blood saturating the silk and dripping in a steady stream from her torn hem onto her bare feet.

The woman was dead. Tremayne knew he should see to his cousin. But Howe was doing that, herding Bay toward the door, calling him “my boy” and murmuring that it was all very understandable and that the woman had goaded him.

And so she had. To protect Kate. The Widow had known, or hoped, what Bay would do.

Dyson threw the corpse over his shoulder like a sack of meal and strode out through the summer kitchen. André watched him go with visible distaste. “Do not think I enjoy this,” he warned Tremayne, wiping his boots with a kitchen towel.

Tremayne shut the door to the hall and turned to face Howe’s spymaster. “Let us speak plainly. What is the price of Kate’s safety?”

There was genuine surprise in André’s gold-flecked eyes. “Plain speaking indeed, my lord. But that is what it always comes down to for your sort, isn’t it? Money. You think you can buy anything or anyone. But you could not buy a woman like the Widow.”

The bloodstained chair stood in mute testament.

“You sound as though you admired her,” Tremayne said, light-headed with revulsion and anxiety.

“I did. I had never met her equal, except perhaps Miss Grey. She may be as great as the Widow, someday. And that is why you have nothing to fear from me. I do not wish Kate Grey dead, and now that I have broken the Widow’s network, I do not need her dead. But make no mistake, Major. Miss Grey is mine.”

“I was given to understand that you have little use for women, Captain.”

“Not so. I esteem them greatly. I even bed them when necessary. But my passion I bestow elsewhere.”

“Tastes such as yours can be expensive to conceal,” Tremayne said, hating the idea of blackmailing the man for this. Bay was right. A great many men of their class engaged in buggery as youths, the practice sanctified by the cloistered air of the public school. Some even continued the practice into adulthood, hiring linkboys in Drury Lane, or accommodating servants. But the privileged prosecuted their inferiors when they dared follow suit.

“If money does not tempt you, Captain, then tell me how I may be of service to you. Invitations, introductions to men of power and influence. In exchange for the liberty of one rather ordinary girl.”

André laughed out loud at his last statement. “The ‘girl’ in question is anything but ordinary, as you have cause to know. Still, there might be another I could groom to take her place in my plans. I shall consider your offer, my lord. Only tell me, how are you so certain she won’t betray you?
Again
.”

There was no point, Tremayne decided, in lying. “I’m not.”

Fifteen

General Howe’s winter revels proceeded with the forced gaiety of a cuckoo clock, and Kate found herself trapped in the works, called upon to twirl hourly like an automaton. The playhouse opened shortly after Christmas. The deep January snow ushered in sledding in the Neck. And ice skating. And toboggan races. Between Smith’s City Tavern, the private subscription clubs formed by the officers, and Howe’s own appetite for conviviality, there were dances at least three nights a week. The Quaker City had never known such merriment.

The Valbys said nothing about it, of course, but there was the problem of money. All Kate’s expenses had been paid publicly by the Valbys, but were reimbursed privately by Angela Ferrers. The money stopped coming at the same time as her instructions, the day after the Widow’s midnight visit. For her own safety and theirs, Kate did not know the Widow’s other agents in Philadelphia, but after two weeks passed in silence, she called upon the only person she knew to be in Angela’s confidence, Anstiss Black—only to discover that the dressmaker and her husband had also disappeared.

It was February, and Philadelphia was shingled with ice, when she remembered what the Widow had said in Washington’s headquarters at Wilmington. There was another agent in Philadelphia.
Still with Howe, but trapped like a fly in amber.
Now Kate was trapped as well.

To her great relief, Caide was much away on business for Howe, foraging, and when he was in Philadelphia, he was attentive but distant. Something had changed in him since the Widow had disappeared, though Kate was hard-pressed to name exactly what.

Since their reckless encounter in the tunnel beneath the tavern, Kate caught only glimpses of Peter Tremayne. She understood that he continued to work to stem the tide of vandalism in the Neck and looting in the city, and that he protected the property of absent Rebels with the same zeal as that of absent Loyalists. Angela’s disappearance strengthened Kate’s resolve to stay away from him. Whatever had happened to Angela, Kate knew it could be nothing good. She did not wish the same upon Tremayne.

Then it was March and the news spread like wildfire: General Sir William Howe was being replaced. The British planned to withdraw from Philadelphia. It was as though the entire Loyalist population woke up from a winter-long drunk with a spectacular hangover. They’d been so confident when the Rebels fled—so quick to offer their absent neighbors’ houses to the British, even pocket a few items, or an entire business, for themselves, when Howe invested the city with twenty thousand men. Now, in the harsh morning light of retrospect, some of the Loyalists’ actions appeared unwise.

In April, the ground thawed but the local inhabitants grew frosty. If Howe’s officers noticed a certain coolness, they ignored it. The general’s staff was too busy anyway, planning his farewell celebration. A river flotilla, a tournament with knights and ladies and jousting, a ball, a dinner, fireworks. It sounded fit for a conquering Roman general, rather than a defeated one. Captain André had dubbed it the Mischianza, a medley, a bit of everything.

In the first week of May, Kate found that she was to play a leading part in the entertainment. If she did not drown first. She returned from a rainy rehearsal bedraggled and choking under twelve yards of sodden cotton tulle. She dripped up to her room at the Valbys’ and knew a moment of déjà vu. She looked into the shadows between the window and the fireplace, but no one was seated there. But her instinct had not been wrong. There was someone in the room with her. She realized what it meant a moment too late.

A strong arm fell over hers like a bar, and a man’s hand smothered her cry. This was it then; André had decided he did not need her after all. At least it would be her death and not Peter’s. But she was afraid. When André had poisoned her, she’d had no time to be frightened. But pinned in the dark, she had the unwanted leisure for fear.

“Easy, Kate. It’s me.”

Peter.

She sagged in his arms, and he went from holding her prisoner to holding her up. He led her to the bed, placed her hands on the counterpane to steady her. “Stay here,” he said. He knelt at the hearth and lit the fire. “You look like a drowned rat. And you’re shivering. We should get you out of those wet clothes. Good God, what are you wearing?”

“It is one of André’s costumes for the Mischianza,” she said of the transparent polonaise plastered to her breasts. “I’m to play one of the Ladies of the Blended Rose, and Captain André is to be my champion. It was supposed to be Peggy, of course, but her father withdrew his permission, and now here I am.” She curtsied, and the turban fell from her head, releasing her dripping hair.

Tremayne laughed, and she smiled wearily back at him, and he reached for her laces. She’d been holding on by her fingernails, alone and threatened from all sides, for months. And now Peter was here in her bedroom. One by one he peeled her sodden garments away and then she was naked. His finger followed a drop of water as it fell from her hair, ran over her breast, and formed again over her nipple. “This isn’t precisely why I came here,” he said, circling the hardening bud.

She couldn’t speak. Fear and relief were all mixed up inside her and she couldn’t sort them out because her body was not her own anymore. Not with him so near.

He backed her to the bed, the wool of his breeches absorbing the moisture on her thighs. He threw off his jacket as her calves hit the bed; then his shirt was plastered to her dripping breasts and there was no place that their bodies, hers naked, his clothed, did not meet.

“You should stop me,” he said, his breath feathering her cheek.

She shook her head, slipped her arms around his neck, drew his mouth down to hers.

He reached between them to free himself from his breeches and test her readiness. Then he lifted her by the knees, perched her on the edge of the bed, and slid inside.

Kate hadn’t spoken since he first touched her, but he could not possibly mistake the tenor of her cries, low and throaty and needful, as he rode her. The wool of his breeches scratched her damp skin, an erotic contrast to the wet glide of his body inside hers.

It was only the third time she had done
this
with a man, but she sensed by his grip on her thighs, the speed of his thrusts, the fierceness of his expression, that he was going to reach his peak before her. She didn’t care. She just wanted to be close to him, intimate with him, like this.

He slowed, then stilled, and she expected him to pull out. Instead, he unwrapped her arms from about his neck. “Lie back.”

Her perch on the bed was precarious. She leaned back tentatively. He held on to her wrists, lowering her back to the mattress, watching her eyes intently.

“Oh.” The sound popped out of her mouth as she felt the angle change deep inside her. She meant,
how wondrous
. He was hitting her there. In a spot he had not taught her a name for, but he’d found with unerring skill the first time they made love.

“Yes,” he said, a little smirk of triumph kissing the corners of his lips. “Like that, my love.”