The Turncoat (43 page)

“I see you continue to make friends wherever you go,” she said.

André rose, of course, and bowed, and kissed her hand, and surprised her utterly by addressing her, “Lady Sancreed.”

“I do not style myself so, Captain, as it is only a matter of time before my husband loses the right to call himself Sancreed. Of course he may choose to accept the annulment you have offered him and keep his title, but in either case I will not long be Viscountess Sancreed.”

“You give me too much credit.” André smiled. “I had no part in that particular stratagem. It was the king who suggested the annulment. He could not believe Tremayne would betray him so. And I have often asked you to call me John. But if you will not, at least address me as Major. I have been promoted.”

“Congratulations.”

“May I offer you something? Rum punch, perhaps?”

She laughed. “Major, the last time I had a drink from you I spent the next twenty-four hours casting up my accounts. Why did you send for me?”

“Because I want to live. And I know where your husband is.”

He was alive. She wanted privacy in which to react. In which to cry and scream at the same time. Instead, she held Peter’s life in her hands, fragile as an egg.

“Then why didn’t you ask to be traded for him?”

“It is not as simple as that. Peter Tremayne is hardly an ordinary prisoner.”

“What makes you think I can do anything to help you?”

“It is common knowledge that Washington has promised you a favor.”

Not so common as all that, surely, but she let it pass. “And you wish me to call in this favor to make certain you do not hang.”

“I’ve saved your life in the past. I told Lord Sancreed where to find you that night.”

“Forgive me if I am not swayed by that particular kindness. You also told Bayard Caide.”

“I was reasonably certain Sir Bayard would not kill you. And I was correct. Here you sit today. A lady. And a very wealthy one. Angela Ferrers and I have been the making of you.”

For the first time in a very long while, she felt the scars across her back. “Where is my husband?”

“Do we have a bargain?”

“That depends. On whether Peter still lives or not.”

“Ah.”

She wished now she had accepted the offered drink. “Tell me.”

“Tremayne lives. But only until the end of the week. When he refused the king’s pardon, it was decided that he might become too much a folk hero if he were tried publicly. He cuts quite a dashing figure, after all, throwing it all away for love. Assassination—a broken or battered body—would only fuel the legend. Better for the world to think him fled, that he abandoned you.”

It was cruel, but she bore it.

“You see, I cannot be traded for Peter Tremayne, because he does not exist. He was taken up without the authority of the king. He cannot now reappear in the world, or General Clinton and the others who arrested and hold him would be disgraced.” A pause. There was worse, and he was readying himself to say it. “He is aboard one of the hulks.”

Do not think about it, Kate told herself. Just do what must be done. “How do I free him?”

“You cannot. He is being held with the other political prisoners. Men who it has been decided
must
disappear. They are taken out, one each night, by a party of marines, and rowed across to the Jersey shore, where they are made to dig their own graves, and then shot. Tremayne and four others will die this way next week. You would need a ship of the line, or a fleet bigger than anything Washington has at present if you wished to take the hulks. And in any case, the political prisoners would be slaughtered before you got close enough to hear their screams.”

“What you have given me is nothing, and you will hang.”

“When I said you cannot free him, I meant without my help. If you secure my release, I will give you the information you need to rescue your husband. The rest is up to you.”

She could speak to General Washington, have André released, and rescue Peter. It could all have been so easy, but it wasn’t. “I will speak to Washington, but there is something you must know first. Arnold fled this morning. He is safe, on the
Vulture
.”

André laughed, not without a touch of bitterness. “That is rich. Two years of wooing the man, like a virgin in a whorehouse. You know he’s going to give it up, but not until he’s squeezed every penny out of you. I could scarcely bear his company. I would not have met with him in person at all but that Peggy insisted she had news that could not be committed to paper. And then of course Arnold knows nothing of this and has mapped and lettered to a nicety, and I am forced to tramp across New York with my boot stuffed with evidence. The damnable girl was a poor substitute for you.”

“Peggy did not get away with Arnold. And neither did her child.”

André pursed his lips thoughtfully. “She’s safe enough. They have nothing against her. I never wrote anything incriminating to her, and all of her letters to me are secure.” The words lacked his customary confidence.

“John,” she said. He blanched. She had finally used his Christian name. For the first time since she had arrived, he was very obviously afraid. “They have incontrovertible proof against Peggy, and she will most assuredly hang. You have a son.”

He deflated like an empty bladder and shook his head. “She insisted on it, you know. Said she’d taken precautions. Wouldn’t believe that I loved her otherwise. And of course I didn’t. But, still in all, to have it come to this. To lose one’s mother thus,” he added wistfully. “To have your life twisted down a dark path before you have the years and mind to choose your own. Tragic. It can’t be borne.”

Kate thought of the letters from André’s boy lover, and the spy’s explanation of why he hadn’t consummated that relationship. She said nothing, but met his gold-flecked eyes, so like the babe’s.

She realized that his decision had been made when he said, “Will you have that drink with me now?”

“Yes, of course.”

He scratched on the door, and his jailers summoned the innkeeper. Shortly thereafter, they brought two glasses of punch, and André paid for another for his guard and one for the innkeeper and his wife. It tasted better than Kate expected, rich with molasses and tart with fresh limes.

“I have a different, smaller favor to ask of you,” he said, setting down his drink. “You have a pressing engagement with your husband at the end of the week, and I would not keep you from it, but this business here, I fear, will be concluded within a very few days, and I should like for you to be there.” The business, of course, was his hanging.

Kate saw Peggy only once more, to deliver Washington’s orders for her release and safe conduct. The girl left in a flurry of tears and recriminations, blaming Kate for her lover’s impending death, her husband’s failures, her own predicament as the mother of a bastard. Kate wished her Godspeed.

Kate stayed through the brief trial and was in the crowd when André took the scaffold. Afterwards she walked to the little church nearby and prayed—not for the man who had just departed this earth, because he had gone well and almost gladly, as if buoyed by his one selfless act—but for Peter, and for herself.

Then she rode with Hamilton and a party of six picked men to the Closter Dock in Jersey, where the forest gave way to a rocky shore, and a row of shallow graves scalloped the tree line.

“You have hired a company of rogues,” she observed to Hamilton, as his mercenaries scoured the woods for cover and began digging pits in which to conceal themselves for the night.

“This is a job for hard men,” he replied. “I’ve had cause to know such in this war.”

A job for hard men, Kate thought. He was right.

“The identities of the political prisoners are a closely held secret,” André had told her. “The same marine detail will bring one prisoner each night—they dare not trust more than four men with this duty, to know the face of the condemned, to compass his cold-blooded murder. And you must do nothing until you are certain it is Tremayne, because if you raise the alarm, the detail will choose another spot the next night, or burden the next few corpses with lead weight, and sink them in the mud. And you will never even know where your husband’s body lies.”

She checked her pistol for the third time and lay down in the shallow depression dug for her among the six cutthroats and Washington’s most trusted aide-de-camp. The moon was up, the sky was cloudless, and she felt naked and exposed, with only brush for cover and blacking on her face, but Hamilton had assured her they were invisible. She need only be silent.

It was impossible. Because the boat was coming, and there were only four men in it. All Royal Marines. Hulking in their red coats. Moonlight glimmered off their bayonets. Cast their pale faces in a corpselike glow, floating above their black neck stocks like disembodied heads.

More gruesome still they beached the boat and began digging immediately, not thirty feet from where Kate lay.

Only when they were done, and soft earth yawned to accept their planting, did they drag something out of the boat that had once been a man. She started, but Hamilton grasped her wrist and held her fast. She saw all of it, every detail but the man’s face, because they had covered it with a sack. They kicked the body into the grave, replaced the soil, and left.

Not until the boat was out of sight did Hamilton release her, and she scrabbled on her hands and knees over fresh graves to reach the freshest ones, then dug like a dog until her fingers scratched bloody burlap. Hamilton had tried to stop her once, then decided against it. Now he dragged her away by force, and ordered the other men to watch her while he cut open the sack.

“It isn’t him,” she said flatly.

Which meant they must do this again.

“You should not come with us tomorrow.”

But she did, because she could not stay away.

This time the man’s face was uncovered, but the moon balked them. They made the man dig, and taunted him while he did so, but he was silent, and offered no clue as to his identity. Kate tried to scrutinize the man’s silhouette, his height, the length of his arms, but the darkness played tricks on her, and first he was, then he wasn’t her husband.

Then, when they made him stand at the bottom of the pit he had dug, and asked him if he had any last words, he shrieked and tried to scramble away. Kate knew then it was not her husband. Peter would make a better end. She hoped. Reason told her any man’s courage might desert him at such a moment. Faith said Peter’s would not.

Hamilton uncovered the body after the marines had gone. For one suffocating moment she feared she had been wrong, but Hamilton shook his head and she began to breathe again. It was not Tremayne.

And there were still three more nights on this bleak shore.

On the next, a fog rolled in and settled over the beach, so that even though the moon was full, its light was so diffuse and murky that Kate could barely see Hamilton lying a few feet away from her. She heard the boat before she saw it, first as a disturbance in the steady lap of the waves, then as the scrape of oars in their locks, and finally, the slide of the hull onto the rocky shingle.

Five men emerged, crunching over gravel. Two in the lead, wraiths in the mist, surveying the empty strand. Two in the rear, prodding a fifth man who trod cautiously over the rocks, balance impaired, hands bound before him.

The fog muted their voices, blunted the chink of the shovel in the sand, as the condemned man dug. Kate lay tense beside Hamilton, her eyes fixed on the prisoner.

The mist confounded her. At first she was certain she saw Peter’s black hair, lank and loose around his shoulders. Then she thought the man’s hair might be brown. Or gray. Or blond. His shoulders broad and strong like her husband’s, then hunched and narrow and unknown to her.

She vibrated with tension, her trembling pistol trained on the marine sergeant, because it was he who had fired the killing shot the night before. The moon came out of hiding for a second, but the prisoner’s back was turned and she almost sobbed when the clouds raced in to cover it once more. She was struck by a sudden madness as the condemned man dug, to end it now. The waiting and the uncertainty. If she shot the sergeant dead tonight, and the man was not her husband, she would lose all chance of saving Peter, but this ordeal—watching men die in horror, doing
nothing
—would be over.

Then the pit was deep enough, and the marine sergeant called a halt to the digging. He stood over the helpless man at the bottom and spoke. “Do you have any last words?”

“A message,” said the voice that was unmistakably Tremayne’s, “for my wife.”

Peter.

Kate fired.

The marine jerked, struck. His pistol went off, the flash muted by the fog, the muzzle still pointed at Tremayne, who fell back onto the sand with a dull thud. The marine crumpled into a heap a second later.

Both men lay on the ground, Tremayne and his executioner, and instead of scrambling over dead men to reach them, Kate lay frozen with fear.

Hamilton’s rogues, fortunately, were not. They rushed the remaining three marines with fixed bayonets. Two of them died before they even saw the black-faced men emerge from the darkness. The last ran away down the beach, but didn’t get far. She heard his strangled scream.

Hamilton ran to Tremayne. Kate, still prostrate, watched him. If she stood up, if she crossed the uneven ground to where Peter lay, it would be real. He would be dead. The part of her life that had held him and the promise of happiness would be over.

“He is only grazed,” Hamilton called out to her.

She stood up on shaky legs. One foot in front of the other. To reach him.

“Please tell me you did not bring my wife,” said Peter Tremayne, sounding nothing like a man who had just dug his own grave.

“You should know your wife well enough to realize that
she
brought me, my lord. Permit me to help you up.”

Then they were both standing above an open grave, and Kate was crossing the distance between them and she was in Peter’s arms and it was all all right. It was finally going to be all right.