The Turncoat

by Thorland, Donna

  But the hands now clasped around Kate’s waist were the same hands that had held the farmer’s wife down that morning, in the pretty clapboard house with the stone-walled kitchen.

  “Bay,” she murmured in his ear, “I’m tired. I want to find Peggy’s mother and go home.”

  “No, you mustn’t go.” He released her and swung her round him like a child. “Peter’s only just arrived. And I’ve promised Robert a rematch.”

  “There will be other nights.”

  “I’ll take her to find her chaperone,” Tremayne offered. “I’ve had enough carousing myself.”

  Caide rolled his eyes at his cousin, as he had done since they were twelve and he first began cajoling Tremayne into wilder and wilder adventures. “My cousin, the Puritan.” Bayard pulled Kate to him and kissed her possessively, then turned to Tremayne. “Off you go, then. Take her and join the other women.”

  * * *

  Kate faced a dilemma. To remain was to risk exposure: public, devastating, deadly. To be left alone with Tremayne put her at equal risk. She had ruined his life. He might do anything.

  When in doubt, Kate reflected, go on the offensive. “I believe the last time we met I asked you to deliver a letter for me, Major Tremayne.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I still have it.” He touched the breast of his tunic, indicating the presence of the letter. “I’m afraid I was forced to open it, when I couldn’t determine its direction.” His manner was genial, courteous.

  This time she used her fan to hide her face from him, flicking the rice paper and rosewood open with a practiced gesture. “It’s nothing but old news now, I expect. I shall take it back.” She struggled to sound as languidly disinterested as he did, and dared to hope for a moment that he might indeed return her father’s letter.

  “On the contrary. I found it very illuminating.” He offered her his arm instead, and Kate took it. She had learned from Mrs. Ferrers to distrust the timbre of a man’s voice, the set of his shoulders, how he used his hands. All these could be schooled, controlled, practiced. The eyes, though, rarely lied.

  Peter Tremayne had mastery over his voice. His posture was relaxed, his hands moth-light upon her arm. But his eyes were cold.

  “Really? Did others find it so?” Kate risked a quick glance at her fiancé, already to grips with his opponent, a circle of gamblers surrounding the match, as Tremayne led her from the room.

  “Let’s find your chaperone, shall we?” His grip was light but firm. She had no choice but to follow.

  She paid little attention to the direction he took until a short, sharp tug pulled her out of the crowded hall and into a darkened room. The chamber was tiny, barely big enough for the two of them. Tremayne threw back the shutters, flooding the room with moonlight.

  “Hello, Kate,” he said, his bitterness unmasked. “Or is it Lydia? I should have guessed. The heroine in Lytton’s awful play.”

  “Lydia is my middle name. I’m Katherine Lydia—”

  “Grey.” He cut her off. “Yes. I know. I read your father’s letter to Congress. You are the daughter of Arthur Grey. The Grey Fox. An old friend of Washington’s, and now one of his most trusted commanders.”

  “I thought I would never see you again.” She attempted to keep all emotion out of her voice.

  “You certainly saw to it that my return to Philadelphia was unlikely.”

  “I thought you would be court-martialed,” she explained.

  “I was, thank you. My cousin interceded for me. Damn it, Kate. Who the hell are you? The farm girl, or this…bird of paradise…who would marry a man like Bayard Caide?”

  “He’s your cousin.”

  “Yes, and I probably know him better than any living man. I can tell you that he is no fit husband for a woman like Kate Grey. But for this creature I see before me, he may be very fit indeed.”

  He was angry, as Kate had never seen a man angry. Mrs. Ferrers had been right to bring her away that night.

  “Will you expose me?”

  “We had a bargain.” He spat the words. “The letter in exchange for your company.”

  “You never gave me the letter.”

  “You and your aunt laid a trap for me.”

  “Not for you.” It came out before she could stop herself. She could no longer control her emotions, so she turned away from him. The room was so small and he was so close that when he spoke, she could feel his breath on the back of her neck.

  “No. Not for me. For Bay. You wanted Bay. And now you have him.” His disgust was palpable. He grasped her shoulders and turned her roughly around. “You claim to be a Quaker, a pacifist.”

  “I am.”

  “The intelligence you are feeding to Washington will starve this city and compel twenty thousand men and God knows how many women and children on a forced march through hostile territory.”

  “Yes. A forced march. Not a pitched battle. An evacuation, not a bloodbath.”

  “You’re deluding yourself if you think there won’t be blood on your hands. Do you have any idea what it would be like to march this army and its followers through the Jerseys in winter? Thousands will die. Civilians first, make no mistake. Women and children certainly. But armies don’t lie down and die on the road. They’ll cut a bloody swath through your blueberry and rye fields and make no distinction between Rebels and Tories before the end. And still, they will die.”

  She shut the images out of her mind. “No. It won’t be like that. Howe won’t leave it too late. If he goes before the ground freezes, he can make it to New York. There doesn’t have to be any killing.”

  “Good God, you really believe that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed then, but there was no humor in it, and she realized his patience had snapped. He advanced on her, backing her against the wall. “Howe offered me my troop, my career, my honor back if I brought him the spy in his midst. If I brought him you.”

  She was trapped. Her heart pounded. “What are you going to do?”

  “That depends on you.”

  “I’m not a whore.”

  “You’re a spy. In a woman, they are one and the same. My cousin pays you, unwittingly, in secrets. I’ll pay you in silence.”

  And he kissed her. Openmouthed, aggressive, demanding. So different from his coaxing kiss at Grey Farm. But still him. And still her. So she met the challenges he made with his tongue, his lips, his teeth, and returned the startled look in his eyes when he lifted his head and showed himself to be as much affected as she was.

  But bitter. “Very nice. What else has Bay taught you?” He reached for her skirts and gathered the silk in greedy handfuls.

  She wrenched it back and glared at him. “If you intended some sordid coupling in this closet, I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

  “You, madame,” he replied, taking a deep breath and composing himself, “are a lying bitch. You want me as much as I want you.”

  “I want independence more.”

  “You are a fanatic.”

  “No doubt fanatical whores are a new experience for you.”

  “Yes, the common ones lack all conviction. Speaking of which, where is your dear aunt?”

  “New York, I think.”

  “A pity. Because I must deliver up a spy to Howe, and Aunt Angela would have done nicely.”

  She tried to get past him. He put his arm out, barring her way.

  “The price of my silence is not negotiable.”

  “The letter. Give me the letter as a token of good faith, and I shall consider your demand.”

  He reached inside his jacket, but he did not produce her letter. Instead, he drew forth a shabby filament of embroidered silk. It was the ribbon he had torn from her bodice at Grey Farm.

  “You may think me cruel, Kate, but the man on your trail is crueler. André knows Mrs. Ferrers is in the city. He is, at the moment, unaware of your existence.”

  She stared at the tattered ribbon in Tremayne’s fingers. “You didn’t tell them about me?
At the court-martial?”

  His lips twisted into a smirk. “Neither then in New York, nor just now with the general.”

  But he had not been the only witness to her actions at Grey Farm. “What of Lytton and your other officers?” she asked.

  “They were not required to testify. I took full responsibility for the loss of the dispatches. Do not mistake self-interest for chivalry. It is one thing to be tricked by a notorious temptress and spy. It’s quite another to be duped by a farm girl. Give me Mrs. Ferrers, and I will protect you.”

  “But you were duped by the farm girl, and you did want her.”

  He tucked the ribbon back into the breast of his tunic and turned to go, then paused on the threshold. “I still want her, Kate, but I can make do with the whore instead.”

  Six

  He left, slamming the door behind him. Kate found her own way to the stables, and called for her own carriage, pausing only to dispatch a message for her chaperone pleading sudden illness. She was stopped, twice, by acquaintances attempting to cajole her into staying, but she put them off deftly. From the time she left the room to the moment the carriage door closed, her public mask never once slipped.

  Kate had arrived in Philadelphia at the end of August, shortly before Howe’s army, her fictitious identity already carefully established by Mrs. Ferrers’ agents. She posed as the cherished niece of a childless merchant couple. The couple, selected by Mrs. Ferrers, was real enough. The Valbys dealt in lumber. They’d kept their politics to themselves in the early days of the war, and had provided a steady stream of useful, albeit low-level, intelligence to the Rebels since the capture of the city. Since they were too old and too staid to run with Howe’s fast set, their respectability established Kate’s own.

  Kate was not wholly unsuited to the role of heiress. Though rural Quakers, her parents had shared an inquisitive turn of mind and desired Kate to have all the advantages of both a practical and a feminine education. From her mother she had learned Latin, French, and Greek, and from her father, geometry and history, and his own passion, tactics. For the feminine accomplishments, the Greys had employed, briefly, a drawing master, a needlewoman, and a music teacher. Drawing and needlework were unmitigated disasters. Music was Kate’s only success.

  To this pedagogy Mrs. Ferrers had added tutelage in subterfuge and espionage, for which Kate displayed an affinity and talent. She taught Kate how to encipher messages, apply paper masques, and mix invisible inks; to conceal scraps of paper inside a button; and to lie with a honeyed tongue.

  These were the arts of the spy, whom the Ancients considered the most despicable of men, the snake in the grass. In this case, Kate reflected, the snake came in chintz, voile, and silk. Her entire wardrobe had previously consisted of two sets of practical stays in cotton canvas and her mother’s sturdy hand-me-downs. Now she possessed two painted chests filled with gowns selected and fitted by the Widow. For a Quaker girl raised to “keep out of the vain fashions of the world,” it was like donning the costume of an exotic nation: Kate Grey, Princess of Abyssinia.

  “You have good eyes, good bones, but your neck is too long for your height, your shoulders over-broad, your waist too low,” Mrs. Ferrers dictated, as Kate stood stiffly before the dressmaker’s mirror, pins like porcupine quills bristling over the unfinished gown. “The Greeks understood proportion. They sculpted ideals.” She gestured as she spoke. “The shoulders so far apart, the waist, so high, the neck so long.

  “So we bring the waist up here, the shoulders in here, and”—the seamstress pinned furiously to carry out Mrs. Ferrers’ bidding—“the cuffs up here…and we use color, shape, and light to fool the eye.”

  The final result, Kate was forced to admit, was striking.

  Bayard Caide had agreed.

  She had not set out to snare Caide. Before Cornwallis invested the city with his advance guard of three thousand men on September 26, her goal had been to cultivate the Tory daughters of the town. It was they, Mrs. Ferrers advised her, who would have access to the most freely spoken military gossip. It was they who would flirt daily with Howe’s officers in the salons, parlors, and coffeehouses. Her goal must be to become one of the decorative, simpering girls privy to the military gossip bandied so casually about by the general’s men: to become invisible.

  Befriending the ubiquitous Peggy Shippen was not difficult. Kate had encountered door latches with more personality, broader interests, and deeper discernment. It was easy to practice Mrs. Ferrers’ tactics on the seventeen-year-old girl: to listen more than speak, to ask flattering questions, to feign excited interest. It had not worked on Peter Tremayne, but it was balm to the spirit of a spoiled creature like the Shippen girl.

  Once established as Peggy’s boon companion, Kate went everywhere: to the lunches, whose groaning boards turned her stomach when she thought of Washington’s starving army; to the violent games and races designed to keep the soldiery out of trouble; to the genteel concerts hosted in the assembly houses.

  Respectable girls like Peggy and Kate, however, were not invited to the private parties Howe threw with the pretty but married Mrs. Loring by his side. Only girls engaged or married to officers attended such events.

  At first, Kate’s presence went unremarked. Her fictitious wealth and very real allure were not extraordinary among the loyalist families who had sought refuge in Philadelphia. She was, as she had hoped, invisible. Until she opened her mouth.

  It was the chessboard that attracted her attention, on that gray and rainy afternoon. Peggy Shippen was prattling on about the handsome, but to Kate’s mind dangerous, Captain André, as the girls moved through the crowded rooms of the fashionable City Tavern. Half the high command had drifted to the elegant redbrick building to play cards, drink tea, and fight boredom.

  She noticed the board, and the fatal move that would follow, before she noticed the sandy-haired man playing opposite André. Her dislike of the remarkably handsome captain with his coal black hair and gold-flecked eyes, instant and irrational, had been formed the day before, when she’d seen him manipulate Peggy Shippen as skillfully as she herself did. Maybe more so.

  Malice got the better of Kate, and she came to the aid of André’s opponent. “If you move your rook, you’ll be in check in two,” she said.

  The man’s hand had been hovering over the piece. Without turning, he spoke. “I had been attempting to advance my pawn to the end of the board, to make it my queen.”

  He turned. She noted the full lips, the eyes of startling, cold, familiar blue, and the pointed, almost feral jaw. “But now”—he stood up and took Kate’s hand—“I have eyes for no other woman.”

  Kate did not blush. For a fleeting moment, she looked into this man’s eyes, and her mind was filled with Peter Tremayne. Then the illusion passed. The two men could not be more different. Except for their eyes. “Perhaps that’s why you play so badly. You don’t spend enough time looking at the board.”

  André snickered, but his fair-haired opponent only cocked his head at Kate.

  “American women defeat me utterly,” he said. “Pray God the Rebels never throw any of their ladies against us, or the Colonies are lost.”

  “If your brother officers are as charming, all they need do is coax the women from the field,” Kate said, and meant it. There was something about the man’s swagger, his unassailable confidence, the fact that he had turned to his advantage a barb that might otherwise have humiliated him in front of another man, that intrigued Kate. Until André spoke.

  “Leave off, Bay. Miss Dare isn’t commanding an army at the moment. Make your move.”

  Bay. Bayard Caide. She felt suddenly light-headed. Caide touched her hand to his lips. “I will see you in the field, Miss Dare.”

  Kate, aware that this was as close to fainting as she had ever been in her life, took Peggy Shippen’s arm in what appeared to be a display of sisterly affection. Peggy giggled and led her from the room. Kate could barely hear her.

  “Rich. Richer than eit
her of us. I’ve heard he amassed a fortune in India. I think he’s a baronet. That would make you a lady. They say he’s slept with half the women in London, sometimes with more than one at a time, though I’m not sure how that would work. He’s almost as good-looking as André.”

  “Peggy, let’s have a cup of tea.”

  “Tea. Yes, tea. Mrs. Curran says there’ll be no more by the end of winter, that we’re already really drinking the powder out of the soldiers’ pockets. Then we’ll all have to drink chocolate, like the Rebels.”

  * * *

  The next day Kate took her easel, her paints, and her appalling lack of artistic talent to the square in front of the old Third Street Barracks where the Regulars drilled. Peggy Shippen accompanied her, complaining ceaselessly about the cold.

  Shortly after noon, Caide appeared, in company again with Captain André. “The result might be somewhat improved if you spent more time looking at the canvas,” Bayard Caide opined, standing over Kate’s easel with a critical eye.

  She stepped back from her work. “It looks better from a distance.”

  “Really?” Caide asked, taking another step back. “How far do you suggest? Boston?”

  “I suppose you can do better?”

  “It’s really a subject for charcoal, anyway.” Caide picked up the sketchbook lying on the grass, selected a crayon, and sat cross-legged on the ground.

  Kate settled opposite him with the drilling soldiery at her back. Watching him, she couldn’t help but think of Peter Tremayne, of the intensity of his gaze that night in her bedroom, and later, when he plucked the ribbon from her bodice. Bayard Caide brought that same focus to the blank page.

  He handed the tablet back to her.

  Bayard Caide had drawn her. Not as she sat, swaddled in a heavy wool cape with her back to the marching men in red, but in the guise of a classical goddess. One of the more carnally minded ones. Beneath the few strokes delineating, for decency’s sake, wisps of drapery, were the contours of her body as it rested on the sloping ground. But her attitude was subtly altered, more languid and sensual. This was in keeping with the company surrounding her on the page: satyrs and nymphs drilled in formation in the background.