The Turncoat (39 page)

“There
are
no British lines, Kate. The attack failed. Your warning made it through. Howe’s troops have withdrawn to Philadelphia to begin evacuation.”

He waited for her reaction, but there was none. Her flesh felt cold. Too cold. And the weals patterning her shoulders clearly continued down her back, beneath her stays. He did not know what else might have happened to her, but she was deep in shock. She needed clothing, shelter, and food, and he was at least sixteen miles from Valley Forge. They would never make the journey before nightfall.

He rode for another hour or so with her clutched tight to his chest, because he could not risk stopping so close to Caide’s camp. She stirred when he lowered her to the ground, and he wrapped her in his coat while he built a fire. Then he pulled her into his arms, trying not to touch her back, and dribbled brandy from his flask into her mouth.

Her eyes opened. “I didn’t mean for him to die,” she said.

“He may yet live,” Tremayne said.

“Not Bay. Lieutenant Dyson. I killed him.”

That explained the bloody kettle. “Dyson deserved his fate. A mad dog. The man…” Tremayne knew the awful truth offered Kate absolution for the death of Caide’s henchman. “He tortured Angela Ferrers.” And I did nothing to stop him, he reminded himself.

“Bay is your brother,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She knew.

“Yes.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since I was fourteen and he twelve. The year his mother died.”

“And how long has he known who his father was?”

That Kate could still care about anyone or anything but herself was astounding, when she lay spattered in the gore of the second man who’d tried to violate her in the space of as many days. Tremayne owed her nothing less than the complete truth. “Bay has always known.”

She tried to sit up. Her skirts rustled like paper, stiff with dried blood. She looked down at the stains. “Does it ever get easier?”

“To kill a man?” He considered carefully. “Yes. That is the mercy and the horror of it. It becomes all too easy.”

She nodded. “You can’t come all the way to Valley Forge with me.”

He took the coat from her shoulders and turned it inside out, then slipped it back over her arms. He knew better than to wear scarlet in the territory they were traveling now. “You are an exceedingly stubborn woman. I’ve made my choice, and I have no regrets.”

She shook her head. “I won’t allow you to make the sacrifice.”

“It is the same one I asked of you,” he pointed out gently.

“And you were right when you said I had far less to give up. Take me to within a mile of Washington’s camp.”

“They’ll hang me if I go back. I have nothing left to bargain with. André told me where to find you in exchange for the letters.”

“But I can give you something new to bargain with. Elizabeth and Joshua Loring are American agents. Howe knows, and he will protect you if you keep his secret.”

It wasn’t possible. “Loring can’t be a spy. He is Commissioner of Prisoners. Everyone knows the man’s been starving his American charges all winter and siphoning the money into his own coffers. Even I’ve seen the numbers of Rebels leaving the Walnut Street jail in pine boxes.” Even as he said it, he saw the brilliance of it.

“They weren’t all dead, were they?” he said. “He was smuggling prisoners out.”

“Yes. And the supplies he diverted have gone to Valley Forge. I didn’t know any of this myself until last week, when I remembered something the Widow had said about another spy, caught like a fly in amber. I guessed—hoped—it might be Mrs. Loring, because I needed her help to escape the city. Howe knows she is a spy. André holds this information over him, but the general will not give her up. Now you know too. It means you can go home. To Sancreed.”

“My home is with you.” He only realized how true it was now that he said it, but her expression told him he had far to go to convince her. She looked like she might make further argument, but he hustled her back onto his horse. They had a great deal of ground to cover, and he did not think her burst of lucid energy would last.

He was right. She was limp in his arms again inside of an hour. Despite his coat, which kept falling from her small shoulders, her skin was cold and clammy to the touch.

The moon was full; otherwise, keeping hold of a half-conscious girl and controlling his horse over rough terrain would have been impossible. They were in deep woods now, the road they were following no more than a cart track. Even so, he should have heard them. Would certainly have heard ordinary soldiers.

But not these men. His horse was rearing and a bayonet pricking his throat before he even saw their faces. Backwoodsmen in forest green and deerskin boots.

One demanded his name and his purpose. He would have told them, but before he could utter a word, the motion of his restless horse pitched Kate from his arms and to the road below, where two of the men caught her. His coat slipped from her shoulders, and the moonlight showed clearly the red of his regimentals, and the deeper crimson staining her tattered skirts.

They pulled him from his horse. He begged them to see her safe to Arthur Grey, but they paid him no heed. He caught a glimpse, as they surrounded him, of Kate, limp and unconscious, being carried away in the arms of a hulking Rebel scout, her bloody skirts trailing on the forest floor. Then they began clubbing him with the butts of their rifles.

“Washington will want him alive for hanging.” The voice of their leader, bandy-legged, unshaven, and armed to the teeth, halted the rain of blows. The man placed a foot on Tremayne’s chest and asked, “Does the name Nathan Hale mean anything to you?”

Hale. The young schoolteacher Howe had hanged in New York last year, without trial, and in the face of Washington’s most heartfelt pleas. It was well known that Washington had vowed to return the favor. And Tremayne, an officer and an aristocrat, would make an ideal object for the Rebel general’s retribution.

The American grinned widely. “I can see it does.”

Tremayne was under no illusions about his predicament. He’d been captured, out of uniform, behind Rebel lines. It would not speak in his favor that he was in possession of his regimentals, since they were wrapped around the abused body of one of their most beloved commander’s daughters.

Tremayne’s captors bound him hand and foot and slung him over the back of his horse. They traveled a mile like that through thick forest. Then they reached the perimeter of the camp.

He had read the reports coming out of Valley Forge, heard of the staggering losses to cold, privation, and disease. Influenza, typhus, and dysentery had run wild through the camp. Every intelligence the British had received painted a picture of a rebellion on the brink of collapse.

Tremayne saw no evidence of that now. Admittedly, his was not the best vantage point for making accurate tactical observations, slung as he was over the side of his beast and mildly concussed. But what he could see—row upon row of rude log huts—was neatly laid out and solidly built. There was the sound of a military drill, crisp and precise, somewhere in the distance, and he recalled a bit of gossip he’d heard from Ewald over the winter: that the Americans had acquired a mountebank Prussian who styled himself “Baron von Steuben” and had undertaken to teach them proper warfare. From the sound of that drill, the Prussian’s military training, if not his pedigree, was genuine.

His captors cut his bonds and deposited him in one of the log huts, a little removed from the rest. They barred the door from without. It was a more comfortable prison than the powder magazine at Mercer, but a prison all the same. Dirt floor, brick chimney, plank bunks. There was no fuel, no light, no tinder. No mattress or even a blanket. The day had been pleasantly warm, but the May evenings were still cool, and in only his shirt and breeches, the night would be chill indeed.

He lay down on his side on one of the bunks, nursing a sore head and bruised ribs, and curled up to contain his bodily warmth. He did not want to die, but he could not regret the step he had taken today. Provided the Americans did not try him as a spy and hang him, as they very well might, he knew that he and Kate could build a life together, wherever fortune dictated. The passion they felt now might one day be tempered by time, but the joy they took in each other’s company, the life of ideas they might share, would not fade with the passing years. He had only to win through the next few days.

When the bar was lifted and the door opened a few hours later, he knew it would be more difficult than that. Arthur Grey stood silhouetted in the torchlight, his face a grim and forbidding mask. Of course it was. No doubt he’d seen the state in which Tremayne had returned his only daughter.

“Kate?” It was the first word out of his mouth. Everything else could wait.

“My daughter will live,” said Arthur Grey. “You, sir, are another matter entirely.”

Nineteen

It was a kitchen. She knew that before she knew anything else because she knew the sounds of kitchens. The low ring of the spoon in the pot, the clink of stacked plates, the pat of shoes on hearth tiles.

It was warm, and there were quiet voices, but she wasn’t ready to make sense of them yet. It was so very good to feel warm. She wanted to stretch and turn over on her back, but then she remembered. Everything.

And because she had not been waking up in good circumstances lately, she schooled herself to remain still, to breathe evenly as in sleep, and to listen.

“Isn’t there anything else you can do for her?” A voice, female, low, cultured, mature. Not a girl, a woman. Who spoke with the drawling cadences of the Southern states.

“Someone’s already cleaned her stripes as well as I could have.” A man’s voice. Smug.

“Something for the pain, then. You must have opium.” The woman again, firm, patient.

“Madame.” He didn’t mean
madame
. He meant
woman
. And he said it like
bitch
. “Madame, I have two hundred men dying of fever and infection in my infirmary. I can’t spare opium for some lobsterback’s whipping whore.”

Silence, during which Kate could hear only the snap of the fire and a third person moving about the kitchen. A servant, then, because they did not have the leisure to stop or the status to take part in the conversation.

At length the woman said, “You are misinformed, sir.”

He snorted. “The whole camp knows she came in half naked on the horse of a Redcoat. And it’s plain she went willingly under the lash. I’ve treated men who weren’t whipped half as badly and their wrists were bloody from the ropes. Hers are as fine and unmarked as swan’s down.”

“Nevertheless. If you cannot spare some opium, then we can broach the general’s supply.”

Kate had heard enough. She was home, she was safe, and no one had lied to her about how hard it would be. She no longer had the Widow to turn to, but she did have her example. “Opium,” she said, clutching the sheet to her breasts and rising from the cot, “will not be necessary. But a glass of watered rum would not go amiss.”

It was smaller than her kitchen at Grey Farm, and the clutter told her it was serving a larger household than intended. Her champion was a woman decidedly past forty, sensibly and expensively dressed, but without style. There was a black serving woman as well. Kate noted that she didn’t pause for a second about her tasks but took quiet note of every spoken word. A slave, then.

The man was middle-aged, overdressed for the country in gray silk, and no friend of Kate’s. She was acutely aware of the way he looked at her in her state of undress, in a bedsheet, wrapped togalike, and she stood to put distance between herself and this man, who had, she realized with revulsion, touched her while she slept.

He failed to take the hint. He slapped her rump and laughed. “See. The slut will be on her back again in no time.”

She knotted the sheet and lowered her hand, because she did not want to appear to cringe in front of this creature. “I think it only fair to inform you that the last man who touched me without leave is wearing his brains on the side of a cast-iron kettle.”