The Turncoat

by Thorland, Donna

  Kate blushed. “Howe’s men,” she punned, “have never looked so Martial.”

  “My goodness, Miss Dare, did your tutor forget to lock away the dirtier epigrams?”

  “My mother, actually. She had a great affection for the lustier Roman poets. May I keep this?”

  “Of course. Although I would hesitate to display it in gentle company,” Caide said, riffling through her paint box. “Would you like me to color it in for you?”

  “I’m not certain I’ve brought enough pink for all the nipples.”

  He laughed out loud. “You might show it to your friend Peggy. She seems like the sort who might benefit from a diagram.” He pitched his voice only to Kate, but there was no need. Peggy and André were strolling the other side of the square, Peggy’s shrill laughter the only noise capable of carrying so far. “And André is no schoolmaster,” he added.

  “No, he’s not,” agreed Kate.

  “I’m partial to oil myself, but pastels will do,” he said, rummaging through her supplies. “Good paint is damned hard to come by in this Puritan backwater, mind you. Don’t you like André?”

  “No. I don’t like him.”

  “Good God. A gently bred lady with an opinion. You’re not supposed to have them, or didn’t anyone tell you?” Caide selected several colors, including pink, and set to tinting the sketch.

  “I thought we were allowed opinions on bonnets, ribbons, and bows.”

  “Well, do you like them?”

  “I’ve developed a recent affection for them. André manipulates Peggy. He’s not in love with her,” Kate observed, watching Caide’s hands move over the drawing.

  “How can you tell, Miss Dare, when a man is in love?” He used the pads of his fingers to blend the colors.

  “I think,” said Kate, remembering evenings in Grey House when her mother was alive, “that when two people are in love, they pay each other the compliment of honesty. Like my parents. I never once heard my father enthuse about my mother’s eyelashes, but they shared everything with each other. My father would relate some story he read in the Gazette, and my mother would tell him some goings-on among the neighbors and then one of them would connect it to a story from scripture or a tale among the Ancients and before you knew it they’d spun some theory out of whole cloth that explained the weather, the new taxes, and the fall of the Roman Empire all in one.”

  “So I mustn’t speak of eyelashes if I’m to win your affection?” Caide teased.

  “I really wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Win your affection or speak of eyelashes?”

  It was the first of many meetings. And like all Kate’s activities in the City of Brotherly Love, it fed the river of information that flowed through her to Washington. She might be appallingly bad at sketching, but she was exceedingly good at counting. She committed to memory the number and types of soldiers drilling in the yard, both Hessians and Regulars, and noted the sizes and positions of their guns.

  She did not meet more than once a week with the Widow and could not, of course, record such matters in straightforward letters to Hamilton. Howe was no fool. All of the post leaving the city was monitored. And even the best cipher, if used too frequently, could be broken. So she followed the protocol that she and Hamilton had established between them for their clandestine correspondence. She drafted a letter to “cousin Sally” in the country. She used a paper mask, a stencil of a bird in flight, laid atop the smooth cream bond. Hamilton possessed its twin. Inside the lines she wrote her true message. She thought of these words as the underpinnings, the petticoat and stays of her report. Then she removed the stencil and dressed the words in a frothy nonsense about balls and recitals and engagements. Hamilton had only to place his mask over the missive to read between the lines and the message would be clear.

  Kate returned the next day to discover Bayard Caide and his easel occupying what she thought of as her spot. “You can’t paint worth a damn,” he told her when she pointed out that he had usurped her, “but you’ve got an excellent eye for composition. And light. This spot is perfect.”

  “Yes, but it’s my spot,” Kate insisted.

  “There’s plenty of room,” he drawled. “You can set up next to me.”

  “I can’t. People will say you are courting me.”

  “Am I?”

  “Are you what, Colonel?”

  “Courting you?”

  “I suppose that depends on whether you come back tomorrow.”

  He did. And the day after.

  He made an ill-starred attempt to tutor her on the finer points of painting, and learned what better-paid pedagogues had discovered before him: she was hopeless.

  “I’ve seen better efforts from twelve-year-olds,” he critiqued, as she attempted to draw the church steeple—and several of Howe’s gun placements that happened to be in the foreground.

  “I won’t inquire as to circumstances. In any case, I’m doing my best,” she said, knowing that her best was awful.

  “Here,” he said, and came to stand behind her, close enough that she could feel his breath on the back of her neck. He took her right hand in his. “Take your thumb and forefinger, like so, and look through them. Now raise your hand until the steeple is between them. Do you see?”

  “Yes, I see.”

  He leaned close, his lips almost touching her ear, and said patiently, “Pretend the steeple is a tiny model, and you can grasp it between your thumb and forefinger. Do you have it now?”

  His breath was warm against her neck. What she had was an overwhelming urge to press her body back against his. “Yes, I think so.”

  He drew her hand down to the page, his arm brushing against her breast. “There. That is the size of the steeple in your picture. Like so.” He guided her fingers, and she drew two parallel lines. “Now the roof. Take your pencil”—he lifted her hand again—“and line it up with the angle of the roof. Now lower it,” he said, and this time, his left arm snaked around her waist and drew her back against his hard body.

  He held her there, perfectly still. She realized that her body had stiffened and that she was breathing in short, shallow gasps. She felt as if she were teetering on the edge of an abyss with this man, and there was a voice inside her head urging her to jump.

  She found her own voice, but it sounded tiny and far away. “I think I understand, Colonel.”

  He let her go and stepped away abruptly. “I rather think not,” he said. “You are a lovely girl and I’ve enjoyed these meetings, but I won’t be here tomorrow,” he told her, folding his easel and wiping his hands on the grass.

  “Because I’m unteachable?” she asked, blindsided by his sudden retreat.

  His manner changed abruptly. He struggled to hide it, but regret crept into his voice. “Because I could teach you altogether too much, Miss Dare.” He did not step closer, but only reached out and took her hand, holding it well away from his body. “I am not a good man, not a nice man. I don’t have any of the virtues your provincial parents would desire in a suitor. And you are, despite your tart tongue, an innocent.” He bent his head, brushed his lips over her outstretched fingers, and said simply, “Good-bye.”

  He turned his back on her and strode toward the barracks.

  “Will I see you at the City Tavern?” she called after him, wondering what had gone wrong.

  “Probably not. I’ll be away for several days. And His Majesty, or at least his agent here in Philadelphia, has other work for me. Foraging. Visiting some Rebels in the countryside who have been reluctant to sell us stores. Farewell, Miss Dare.”

  Kate felt the chill of the day strike through her fur-lined cloak. She knew the tactics Bayard Caide employed while “foraging.” She had forgotten, briefly, who and what he was.

  Her interest in Caide ought to be entirely professional. He was close to General Howe, and could be a source of high-level intelligence. But in the days that followed, Kate realized that she missed their meetings for entirely different reasons. When she was growing
up, men treated her as the woman her father raised her to be: an equal. There was no subterfuge, no artifice, no flirtation. She was a simple girl, and she thought those arts beyond her reach.

  Mrs. Ferrers had admitted her to the mystery: that nothing was beyond the grasp of an intelligent woman. Not even conquering a man like Bayard Caide. And there was a thrill to matching wits with a man—however abhorrent—who was her equal. It was a thrill she had first tasted with Peter Tremayne.

  She reminded herself that Caide was a monster, away on monstrous business, that he was an enemy, and that he was not Peter Tremayne. None of that stopped her from listening intently for news of him.

  At the end of the week she learned that he was back in the city, but he did not return to the square, and Kate abandoned her artistic efforts altogether. It was getting too cold for painting outdoors anyway. Neither did he appear at Mrs. Curran’s, or at the Thursday-night dance at Smith’s City Tavern, where respectable girls went to meet British officers.

  Kate lingered long into the night at Smith’s, and only gave up and called for her carriage when Peggy’s complaints became too much. Kate was late meeting Mrs. Ferrers in the Valbys’ darkened kitchen. The Merry Widow took great care not to be seen going into or out of their home. She never visited by day, only after dark, and then quite briefly. Kate had no knowledge of the means she used to smuggle information out of the city and to Washington’s camp. It was safer that way, but Kate was acutely aware of how fragile her connection to home and safety had become.

  “Tell me about Bayard Caide,” she said to Mrs. Ferrers. Glamorous Aunt Angela had disappeared, and in her place had materialized, depending on the night, a plain, middle-aged maid, or a taciturn, lean, and wiry groom. Tonight she wore men’s clothes, and drank whisky, neat, from one of Mrs. Valby’s fine cut glasses. She poured Kate a dram and pushed it across the table.

  “He is the man I came to Grey Farm to destroy,” she said, and waited.

  Kate had shed her shimmering silk day dress, brushed the tinted powder from her hair and now sat in a voluminous damask robe at the simple wooden table. The grandeur of the Valby home, and of the elaborate mansions and meeting rooms of the city, had filled her senses when she first came to town, but there was a comforting familiarity in the Valby kitchen, with its well-worn, sturdy pine surfaces, and the faint but lingering scent of warm bread from the slowly cooling bake ovens, which plinked reassuringly as their brick expanded in the chill night air.

  “Yes. He was as you described,” Kate said. To herself alone she added: Except for his eyes. You didn’t tell me he had eyes like Peter, pale blue, cold and mischievous by turns. “Tell me more.”

  “Bayard Caide is not a simpleton like Peggy Shippen, or a romantic like Peter Tremayne. You cannot play him as you have them. He is far too steeped in corruption and far too intelligent for that.”

  “You want to know Howe’s next move. No one is closer to him than Caide.”

  “And no one is more dangerously mercurial. Would you like to know why he was posted, so young, to India?”

  Mrs. Ferrers narrated the story with dispassionate candor: how Caide had whored and drunk his way through London as a young officer; how he had a proclivity for dueling, and had killed three men in that way; how he might have gone on in that manner had he not beaten a young subaltern almost to death; how his cousin, and best friend, had taken the blame, and been posted to Ireland, before the whole sordid tale came out.

  Caide had escaped the incident with a reprimand and a punitive posting to Bombay, where his behavior didn’t alter, but was channeled into the violent business of Empire. There he acquired a taste for opiates and hashish, which he continued to indulge when he returned to England. He rose swiftly in rank, while his cousin, Tremayne, attainted by scandal and hampered by scruples, stalled in his career.

  The tactics of fear and intimidation that Caide had learned on the Subcontinent were proving unpopular, but effective, in the Pennsylvania countryside. “His men are not quartered in the city. Howe won’t have them here. He launches his raids from a rural camp which we have failed to locate. I could bring you men he has tortured, women he has abused.” Angela Ferrers spoke with distaste. “Some women are drawn to a man like that. You may be tempted, because of your upbringing, to despise and punish yourself for what you have become. Do not use Bayard Caide for that purpose. No man or woman deserves that.” And with that, she drained her second glass of whisky and left.

  * * *

  It had been more than a week since Kate had last encountered Bayard Caide, and Peggy Shippen was examining a miniature landscape in a gold frame at George Haughton’s Tuesday auction. The London Coffee House on Front Street, hard by the docks, was not suffering as other businesses during the occupation were. Though the Rebels still controlled the Delaware, and no merchandise had reached the city for weeks, the vendue masters continued to hold regular auctions, their inventory swelled by the estates of those who had fled the city, and replenished by the Regulars and Hessians who looted, in their spare time, what was left. From his headquarters in Germantown Howe had attempted to stem the tide of looting and rape in Philadelphia with threats and proclamations, but court-martials remained a near daily occurrence. Desperate to protect the inhabitants from his own men, Howe had begun hanging convicted offenders.

  “It will look lovely over my dressing table,” Peggy opined.

  “Very handsome,” Kate agreed. Her eye was drawn to the paint box—Chinese, lacquered, with a scene of the Pearl River Delta, Macao most likely—that lay unregarded in a heap of knife boxes and snuff cases. She didn’t care to think of how it had arrived there.

  The top and sides of the box were largely intact, but the bottom was disfigured with chisel marks. Kate suspected it had been pried off a lacquered stand. Her father had bought her a similar painting table when she embarked on her short artistic career. Inside, the pigments were largely in good condition, and barely used. Brush marks feathered the surface of most of the colors, but only lightly, and none was dried or cracked.

  “I thought you gave up painting,” Peggy said over her shoulder.

  “Colonel Caide has had a difficult time finding paint in the city. I thought I might purchase this and offer it to him next time we meet.”

  “You’re just lucky that your father’s away at sea. My family let me know they won’t abide Caide, no matter how much money he has. He has a terrible reputation, unlike André,” Peggy said, trying on a Chinese shawl.

  “I suppose it hasn’t occurred to them”—or you, Kate added silently to herself while dabbing her finger in the paint box—“that André might simply have a better reputation because he’s better at hiding his sins?”

  “You’re quite set on snaring Caide, aren’t you?” Peggy observed, in a rare moment of lucid interest in something besides herself.

  “As set as you are on André,” Kate replied. Although for entirely different reasons.

  Peggy’s eyes sparkled with what Kate realized was as close to cunning as the girl would ever come. “Then buy your paint box. Because I know where the colonel has been spending his days.”

  Kate did not have sisters growing up, and by the time she would have confided in siblings about her daydreams and infatuations, her mother, to whom she would naturally have turned, was gone. She recognized wistfully the steady stream of speculation that poured from Peggy, as they navigated the maze of warehouses near the dock, as the heady effluvia of puppy love. She wondered aloud about André’s parents, his childhood, his education, his plans for family and children.

  And Kate allowed her to ramble on, because even if she were willing to crush Peggy’s dreams, the sort of insight she possessed about André was entirely outside the purview of her assumed identity. She had recognized in him the same calculated approach to human interaction that Mrs. Ferrers preached and practiced. When he thought no one was looking, André examined Peggy as he might a horse, to see how far and fast she would run. He was always assessing, adjusting
, manipulating. To what purpose, Kate was uncertain, but she knew it could be nothing good.

  Her own mind did not run in a romantic direction with Bayard Caide. She could not imagine what circumstances had produced such a paradoxical man, at once violent and artistic. When she did daydream about houses and children, about what it would be like to present a man to her father and profess her intention to marry, it was Peter Tremayne who inhabited her fantasies. But he was an ocean away because of her, and if circumstances ever conspired to reunite them, she would hang. The empty warehouses they passed, still redolent with the mingled scents of departed tea, nutmeg, and pepper, were silent testimony to the effectiveness of her espionage. It was because of spies like her that the Americans still held the river, still held a hope of retaking Philadelphia. And for that, if the British caught her, she would die.

  Kate recognized immediately the building to which Peggy led her: the Southwark Theater. She had never been there herself, but knew it from an engraving that had appeared in the Gazette when it was built a decade ago. The theater had a spotty history, closing and reopening as Puritanical fervor waxed and waned. Congress had closed it down during their session in the Quaker city, and the resident players decamped for Jamaica. Most recently it had served as a hospital for the British wounded at Germantown.

  The back door was open, and Peggy and Kate climbed a set of dirty wooden steps to a narrow hall. There were two doors at the top, but Kate had no doubt which led to Bayard Caide. The door on the left was painted in a masterly trompe l’oeil, with the doorjamb done as a stone portal and the door itself a fiery abyss. In the foreground, a three-headed black dog barked, all mouths open, on a chain.

  “What an ugly dog!” Peggy said, scrutinizing the figure.

  “It’s Cerberus,” Kate supplied. “Guard dog of the Underworld.”

  The door opened.

  “Be careful,” drawled Bayard Caide. “He’s carnivorous. And hungry, like his master.”