The Turncoat (5 page)

Tremayne lifted his head and drew back to look down at her, tipping her chin up with one hand and caressing her neck with the other. “Say yes, Kate. Or say no, and I’ll leave.” He dropped his hands and stepped back from her, withdrawing his warmth with his touch.

He never heard her answer. The battering of the front door below drowned out her words, and the clatter of weaponry and opening of doors throughout the house signaled an end to their privacy.

Tremayne heard Lytton hammering on Kate’s bedroom door. He reached out and pulled sharply on the ribbon that bound her shapeless jacket closed. The amateur embroidery came away in his hand. It seemed all the more intimate because the handiwork, though clumsy, was her own. He pressed it to his lips, sketched a small bow, and slipped from her room, before his presence there could cause her any embarrassment.

Lytton, standing just outside her door, would not meet his eyes.

Tremayne collected his kit and found the rider below in the kitchen. The man was lean, old, and wiry, dressed in fine but plainly cut brown cloth. “Rebels. A raiding party. They’re pillaging a farm on the West Road. They mean to burn it.”

The man was obviously local and known to the Greys.

“How many?” Tremayne asked sharply.

“Forty. Maybe more.”

“On foot?”

The man shook his head. “Mounted. Well armed. Organized.”

“Damn. Right. Lytton. Mount up. This is what we’re paid for.”

Mrs. Ferrers arrived in the kitchen in a far more attractive, if less artless, state of dishevelment than the one in which he had left Kate. He wondered briefly what the girl would look like with a touch of her aunt’s polish and élan, and dismissed the thought just as quickly. Kate had her own charm, which needed no ornament.

“What’s happening, Mr. Talbert?” the widow asked.

The old man took his hat off. “Mrs. Ferrers. Ma’am. Rebels, attacking the farm to the west.”

“Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Ferrers.” Tremayne followed Lytton out into the hall and was about to dart up the stairs when he saw Kate, clutching her jacket closed, standing in the door to the parlor.

Her ribbon was still in his hand. “Your Rebel friends are attacking a farm to the west,” he said to her.

“Yes,” Kate said.

“I must go. Protecting His Majesty’s loyal subjects and such.”

“Yes,” she said again. He could see her chest heave and fall in the confines of her sensible cotton stays.

“Miss Grey?” He cocked his head, realization dawning on him. “Is that your answer?”

“Yes.”

She bit her lip, and he could tell she wished to say more. He waited.

“That is, you must understand, I have never said yes before. To anyone.” Then she laughed. “Not that anyone asked. But you are quite outside my experience, Major, in every way.”

“I rather thought so. And I’m glad of it.” He stepped close to her but could not touch her here in view of so many. He spoke quietly, for her alone. “I won’t take the responsibility lightly. Wait for me.”

The daunting prospect of an enemy engagement at night against men who knew the territory better than he dwindled to a minor impediment. He slipped her ribbon through the button loop on his sleeve and tied it, then bowed and was gone.

*   *   *

T
he Miller house was already burning when thirty-odd mounted men thundered to a halt outside the place. There were no Rebels to be seen. The house was old, at least a hundred years, and flames had already engulfed the steep gables and melted the lead from the casements.

“Waste. A vast, natural paradise. More land than anyone can settle. And this.” Tremayne spoke more to himself than to anyone else, but Silas Talbert, mounted on the horse that had earlier that day made a remarkable recovery, answered him.

“It’s a rare man on either side of this war whose reach is equal to his grasp.”

They watched the house burn. There was little to save, and no point in pursuit.

On the cold ride back after Talbert left them, Tremayne’s thoughts turned to Kate, and he fingered the ribbon at his cuff. A showy flourish, a bit of schoolboy romance, plucking the lace from her jacket, but well worth the result.

He recognized infatuation, though he’d not felt it in a long time. Affairs, some of them long and satisfying, he had pursued since his late teens when he had left home for the army. He had enjoyed briefer encounters as well, none more debauched than in the company of his cousin and brother officer, Bayard Caide. It occurred to him that there were elements of his past—and regrettably, with this late war, of his present—that made him an unfit companion for a Quaker girl.

Those considerations were for tomorrow, though. Today, she waited for him.

The house looked different in the cold blue light of dawn. The windows that yesterday had glowed softly with welcome now stared like empty sockets.

He’d hoped to wake only the servants by knocking quietly, but no one came. Lytton joined him on the porch. “There’s no smoke in any of the chimneys, sir.”

“What?” Fear stole over him. The viciousness that would cause a man to burn his neighbor’s house led to worse things in a conflict like this. England’s own Civil War had been rife with atrocity, and the Colonists seemed determined to replay that internecine struggle. He pounded hard on the door.

It swung away from his hand.

They searched the hall, parlors, and bedrooms, and finally the attics and cellars, calling out for the women; but of the servants, Mrs. Ferrers, and Kate Grey, they found no trace.

Recalling with sickening apprehension and the first cold sparks of anger Mrs. Ferrers’ anecdote about the cruelly deceived Hessian colonel, he reached for the oilskin packet in his bag, and the papers entrusted to him by General Howe.

The envelope was still there, but when he examined the pages in the cold morning light, they were utterly blank.

Three

After Tremayne had gone, Kate had remained in the parlor listening to the clatter of spurs and hooves on the paving. There was little talk. She was not surprised. She’d seen it before. Her father was one of the men their community called upon when Indian raids threatened, and she knew from experience that men who had been wakened in the middle of the night for skirmishing were rarely garrulous.

She slipped her hand into her pocket and was reassured to find her father’s letter there. Absently, she attempted to tie her jacket shut, and blushed when she realized that a man was now riding into the dark with her ribbon around his cuff. She subsided into the lolling chair where he had sat that afternoon and tried to get her mind around what she had just done.

Kate had always been the gray mouse of Grey Farm. Most of her friends were married or courting by now. She knew that some of them enjoyed an advantage of appearance and, most saliently, of disposition. Few farmers wanted a tart-tongued girl for a wife.

Marriage, of course, was not what Peter Tremayne was offering. Untempted by matrimony, Kate had never considered that she might discover needs not easily satisfied outside the bounds of wedlock. Or a man who brought out those needs.

Perhaps, had she not met Peter Tremayne, the matter would never have arisen.

She shut her eyes and replayed their encounter abovestairs, imagining what they might have done next had Silas Talbert not intervened.

It was then that it occurred to her that Silas Talbert had been rather too conveniently alert today. He had spotted the British on the road, when but for the lameness of his horse, he should have been miles away with Kate’s father. And he had spotted the Continentals tonight, at the unnamed farm to the west. Kate tried to remember which of their neighbors lived due west of them. Only the Millers, outspoken Tories, she realized, who had abandoned their property several weeks ago to seek the protection of the British.

She was still sitting in the lolling chair when Mrs. Ferrers found her. The Widow was no longer dressed in the brocade robe she had worn earlier that night, nor her shell pink satin, nor her sensible Quaker ensemble. Now she was dressed for riding in dark gray wool. Only her cloak, edged with costly furs, hinted at her earlier élan. “We haven’t much time. I hope you can saddle your own horse.”

“Yes, of course,” Kate said, and sat up. “But why?”

“You can’t be here when they come back. Tremayne will realize that these”—Mrs. Ferrers flourished a sheaf of closely written pages—“are gone.”

“You stole Howe’s letters,” Kate said hollowly. “How?”

“It was simple. I waited for Tremayne to visit you in your bedroom. It was clear this afternoon that you had the best chance of distracting him. You’ve done well, but I can’t leave you here. Is there someone in the neighborhood who can take you in until Howe goes to ground in Philadelphia?”

She could go to her friend Milly’s, of course. Milly’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Ashcroft, had been among the matrons fawning over Angela Ferrers that morning. Milly herself, six months gone with child and unable to travel, had stayed home. Kate considered what it would be like to shelter under her roof. To be the unwanted spinster guest, secretly pitied but welcomed as a pair of extra hands, though Milly would never treat her like that. Openly. But it would be true, all the same. Kate felt angry, manipulated. She had asked very little of life so far, and tonight she realized she had gotten even less.

“I’m not leaving. Major Tremayne is coming back,” she said, but even as the words left her mouth she recalled Mrs. Ferrers’ story of Donop the Hessian colonel, tricked by the beautiful rebel spy.

“Yes,” Mrs. Ferrers agreed. “He’s coming back. And not to steal ribbons from your jacket. Do you know what happens to spies, Kate?”

“They hang.” She recalled the boy from Connecticut caught behind British lines. Hale. His name had been Hale.

“No. They hang men. Women disappear. It’s only glamorous in novels, Kate. If we are successful, we can’t boast. Spying is a dishonorable trade for women, for precisely the reason you despised me this afternoon, and you despise yourself now. We exchange our virtue for their secrets. If we fail, we don’t have the privilege of a public trial and famous last words. Our reward for failure is an unmarked grave.”

“What will happen to him?”

“Tonight? Very little. They’ll find the Miller farm burning, much as the Millers deserve. Tomorrow, when he reaches New York without the packet, court-martial and a swift return to England, I should think.”

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Then do so quickly. I must reach Washington’s camp before Major Tremayne realizes we are gone.” Mrs. Ferrers turned to go, then paused in the door and betrayed, for the first time that day, a hint of unfiltered emotion. Kate realized it was pity. “I wouldn’t feel too sorry for him, Kate. He has money, power, and privilege at home. Even if he is just a decent man caught in circumstances beyond his control, he’s better off out of it.”

*   *   *

K
ate paid Margaret and Sara two weeks’ wages each and sent the girls home across the tall rye fields. She watched their lantern bobbing in the darkness, until the waving grain swallowed the light. Then she saddled her horse.

She had no desire for Angela Ferrers’ company on the road to Milly’s, and nothing further to say to her. The spy’s knowing manner and sudden, belated sympathy were an affront to Kate’s pride. But Mrs. Ferrers wouldn’t go away. She insisted on seeing Kate safely beyond the reach of Peter Tremayne before she continued on to the Continental lines.

Kate knew the Widow was not motivated by motherly concern for her safety. The truth was that Kate knew too much. If she was arrested, she could betray the woman, and worse, if Tremayne discovered who Kate was, she might be used as a bargaining chip against her father.

When Kate thought of Peter Tremayne, she recalled with shocking vividness the warm scents of leather and wool and whisky, the fine weave of his linen shirt beneath her fingertips, and the soft wool of his tunic. The memory brought a flush to her cheeks. She turned to find Angela Ferrers, on her horse, trotting alongside her with the negligent grace of a cavalier and watching her with unconcealed amusement. Kate spurred her mount to escape the woman, but she kept pace.