The Turncoat

by Thorland, Donna

  “Too bad,” said Donop, with no sympathy whatsoever. “But he is a gentleman of good family, and will no doubt endure confinement in comfort until he is traded back to us. Besides, he seemed a bit of a prig.”

  Then the brandy was passed, the merits of the Ferguson were discussed, and no further mention was made of Phillip Lytton.

  When Mercer came into sight the next day, crisp and neat in the midday sun, with the river sparkling silver through the trees, Tremayne cursed. Two weeks ago the fort had been a tumbledown pile of bricks buried in orchard groves, but the Rebels had been busy. Now it stood in an efficient clearing, devoid of cover, the felled trees put to wicked use as an abatis.

  Donop surveyed the works through a spyglass. “You do not think I should attempt it, Peter.” It was not a question.

  Tremayne answered anyway. “Not without a crack team of engineers equipped with axes to cut through the abatis.” They’d used apple trees, probably cut down a whole orchard. It was a technique as old as war, to fell trees and ring forts with their tangling branches. Fruit trees, apple, pear, and peach were best, with their small but closely growing branches. It would take hours to clear that ring of snarled boughs.

  Donop offered him a small fatalistic shrug. “We will use our artillery.”

  It was not a job for a small battery of artillery. Donop’s guns would only blow a narrow hole in the abatis and the wall behind it. A bottleneck. The worst possible way to attack a fortification. The Hessian must know it, but could not, with honor, turn back now.

  It was late afternoon by the time the lines were drawn up and ready for attack, and Tremayne’s impatience must have showed. Donop smirked at him and said, “Are you eager to attack, or eager to get back to the girl, my friend?”

  “What girl?” Tremayne said.

  “The small one who is fucking the cousin of yours who should be Lord Sancreed.” And that was about as plainly put as the matter could be.

  “She isn’t sleeping with him.”

  Donop slapped him on the back. “Very well. There is no girl, and she is not fucking your cousin.” He made a sweeping gesture toward the fort. “Tonight, this shall be called Fort Donop, or I shall be dead.”

  He ordered the artillery crew to open with their guns, and the gravel from Mercer’s rooftops flew black against the orange sunset, like the crown of an exploding volcano.

  The bombardment lasted less than ten minutes, consumed the bulk of their powder, and blew a hole twenty feet wide in the east wall, at the end of the two-hundred-foot extension that ran parallel to the river. Then the Grenadier battalion, five hundred strong, charged through the breech, screaming.

  Tremayne and Donop followed. They emerged in a long, narrow enclosure filled with shouting Grenadiers. There were no Rebel defenders. The extension was abandoned.

  Tremayne turned to the east, where von Lengerke should have been coming over the bastion wall with another five hundred Hessians, and where the barracks and powder sheds should lie. Instead, there was another abatis, and behind it another set of walls. A fort within the fort. Which made the area they were standing in a killing ground.

  “Mein Gott. If you have not the men to defend the perimeter, then build smaller walls within. Ja. It is what I would do. I am impressed,” Donop acknowledged.

  “Don’t be.” Tremayne felt only disgust. “The Rebels didn’t build this. This means they have French engineers. And French powder. And French guns. Turn back. The odds are changed. Honor does not demand this.”

  Donop shrugged, noted his subalterns’ efforts to impose some order on the milling Grenadiers. “The odds might be different, but the stakes remain the same. In any case, I prefer the French as adversaries. At least they are professionals. Shall we?”

  They were halfway to the second abatis and the little inner fort when the American gunships on the river announced their presence with a volley of grapeshot, driving the Hessians toward the landside wall. Tremayne didn’t like it, the men massing so close under the breastworks, but Donop pressed on: undaunted, invigorated if anything by the chaos of the battle, the smell of powder, the din of shot and shell.

  With military engineers trained to deal with enemy field fortification—or even with good axes—an abatis was no impediment, but the Hessians had neither. The Grenadier column of five hundred men, already squeezed tight to escape the deadly fire from the river, began to coil like a spring behind the obstruction.

  There was nothing to do but go forward, so Tremayne began hacking a path through the trees with his saber. A wiry Grenadier sergeant with the look of an old campaigner, his mustache and boots both a fine, sooty black, fell in behind Tremayne nodding and offering what Tremayne believed to be encouragement in German.

  He was almost through the first ring of trees when he turned to check the progress of their advance. The abatis was crawling with men making similarly slow paths.

  On the parapet of the south wall, something glittered in the setting sun, and a rank of Rebel gunmen, musket barrels glimmering, rose up and fired on the Hessians.

  It was the purest form of slaughter Tremayne had ever seen. The Hessians were penned like cattle by the fire of the naval guns. There was no cover from the muskets on the rampart above. The men who survived the first volley threw themselves into the tangling trees, only to die there, limp bodies hanging like macabre scarecrows.

  To turn back was certain death, and pausing to return fire at the occasional Rebel face or arm glimpsed through the smoke of powder was folly. The Grenadier sergeant understood this as well, and had continued hacking, cool as you please, without a glance behind him or up at the rampart.

  They pressed on until Tremayne heard the drum and the bugle that could mean only one thing: retreat. He turned to his companion, and opened his mouth to speak, but the Rebel artillery spoke instead. A shell sang through the air overhead and ripped a hole in the abatis that no amount of saber work could have accomplished.

  The explosion deafened him. Hot pain tore through his right cheek, chipped his front tooth, and hurtled out his mouth, leaving behind the peppery tang of powder and blood. After that, everything moved with dreamlike slowness. He heard, as from a distance, the branches twang and snap as he fell into them; felt the burning impact of another bullet tearing through his tunic and into his arm. Then the soft quiet closed in around him.

  Ten

  Kate was being watched not by one man but by two. The ruffian who observed the front door of the Valby mansion was difficult to spot at first, but when the crowd in the street had changed several times over, when the knife grinder had come and gone, and the boy who sold the Gazette and the tinkers and peddlers had finished their trade for the day, a lone figure in a beaver hat still lingered.

  The man at the back was easier to spot, because the Valby cook did not like layabouts and any man loitering in her alley who did not take up a broom or a barrel for the coin offered was set upon in short order by the groom, who knew on which side his bread was buttered.

  Kate must reach the Widow, and she must not be followed, but by seven she still had no idea how she was supposed to evade the men André had set to watch her.

  While she stood hesitating in the parlor window, a fight broke out. There were four toughs, dockworkers by the look of them, all three sheets to the wind, singing at the tops of their lungs and taking good-natured swipes at one another, staggering down the street. When they came level with Beaver Hat, they tried to sweep him into their party and off for a dram. When he refused, they cajoled. When he demurred, they took offense, and a punch was thrown.

  Kate snatched her cloak and was out the door and up the street without a backward glance.

  She arrived at Mr. Du Simitière’s lodgings in Arch Street, just above Fourth and around the corner from Christ Church, at exactly half past. She had never been to visit the peculiar artist and antiquarian before, and was surprised when he asked, however politely, for a sum of fifty cents for the pleasure of calling on him.

  “It is
for the support of my museum, my collection. For I must devote myself,” the plump, bespectacled Swiss said in perfect but odd English, “to the acquisition, cataloging, and display of these artifacts to the detriment of my earning a living.”

  Such devotion was also plainly to the detriment of his personal appearance and housekeeping, but Kate felt compelled, now that she had paid for the privilege, to investigate the exhibits. His rooms were stuffed full of natural and artificial curiosities.

  “Your work as an artist must provide you with some income,” Kate said. The man had been commissioned by Congress to commemorate the Declaration with a medal, and to provide the new nation with a suitably grand seal. Surely he could afford a brush for his coat.

  “Alas, Congress and Mr. Adams are more generous with suggestions than with cash.”

  Du Simitière opened an English cabinet, black with age and carved with that peculiar combination of the geometric and organic favored by the Jacobeans. “My Indian department is deficient, particularly in representative pieces from the tribes of the more northerly states, and those of Canada. Should you be traveling north, might I prevail upon you to keep an eye open for any such collectibles as may appear? The governor of New York was formerly a reliable source of information and artifacts, but I have sent him three missives in the last month about my need for information on the diet of the Cayuga people, and he has failed entirely to respond to me.”

  “I daresay he’s rather more occupied with General Burgoyne at the moment, Mr. Du Simitière. There is a war on,” she replied, but she was fascinated despite herself. The cabinet was lined with baize and stuffed with tomahawks, war clubs, pipes, bowls, baskets, and arrowheads. He was in possession of quite the largest stone hatchet she had ever seen. She thought she detected bits of bone and dried blood clinging to the blade. “Goodness. How did you acquire that?” she asked.

  “I write letters to people and ask them to send me things.”

  “I find it difficult to believe that this axe’s owner was much of a letter writer.”

  “The hatchet was unearthed on the farm of the late Dr. John Kearsley on the Frankfort Road, about four miles outside our city,” replied Du Simitière. “I’m confident its owner had no further need of it,” he added brightly.

  “You mean he was unearthed along with it.”

  Du Simitière was elated by her conclusion. “Quite so! Are you a student of antiquarianism, Miss Dare? I believe that much could be learned from studying America’s native peoples with the discipline that Herr Winckelmann has applied to the ancients. Grave goods can tell us much about how a people lived. Do you not agree?”

  Kate wasn’t certain she thought grave robbing was a legitimate form of scholarly inquiry. She agreed, however, that it might be informative, then demurred firmly when he tried to press upon her the loan of a copy of Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums.

  Delighted to have an appreciative visitor and eager to find more wonders to please her, he begged her to follow him into the next room, where his most recent paintings and drawings were on display.

  Du Simitière showed her quarto volumes of clippings detailing the progress of the revolt, from broadsides about the Stamp Act to engravings depicting Boston’s Tea Party. Sketches and miniatures of famous men on both sides of the conflict were bound together in his books, as they would never be in life. He was an impartial chronicler, preserving for posterity the Americans and British alike.

  She stopped at the easel of a portrait, only half finished, of a handsome, dark, young lieutenant in the scarlet coat and blue facings of the 7th Foot. Something about the gold-flecked eyes and full lips of the subject gave her pause.

  “Ah! That is a new commission. For Captain André. A portrait of his younger brother.”

  “You know Captain André?” she asked, attempting to keep her tone light and conversational, as she wondered if she had stumbled into a trap of the captain’s making.

  “Mr. Du Simitière knows everyone,” said Angela Ferrers, standing in the open door and dripping lightly on the compass rose painted floor. She wore homespun and coarse linen stays beneath a briny apron drenched with oyster liquor. “Your supper, Mr. Du Simitière,” she said with unusual cheer, setting a newspaper-wrapped parcel on a wobbling gateleg table.

  “Delightful! I shall endeavor to build my own shell mound like our native peoples on the shores of the Delaware!” Du Simitière snatched the soaking package away from his precious drawings and unwrapped the parcel. He produced a knife from his pocket and began shucking and slurping oysters with quiet murmurs of appreciation.

  “I had a message for you last night. Where have you been?” Kate asked, hating the petulance that crept into her voice.

  Mrs. Ferrers ignored the tone of her question. “Shucking oysters on the dock.”

  Her disguise was brilliant and practical at the same time. Kate couldn’t help but marvel at the woman. “Is that how you got into the city? With the fishing boats?”

  “Howe cannot afford to turn away any catch now. We control the roads and the river. There are almost no supplies reaching the city, save what we let pass. I must say”—the Widow smiled at Mr. Du Simitière, carefully removed her sopping apron, and drew Kate into the next room—“America is proving to be a second education for me. Who knew that opening mollusks required such skill?”

  “Anyone who has ever lifted a hand in the kitchen,” Kate said sourly.

  Angela Ferrers laughed musically. “I wonder if you’ll be quite so eager to take up your role by the hearth when you return to Grey Farm, after such a glittering winter.”

  “Howe means to attack Mercer,” Kate said.

  “Yes, I know. I came to your room last night. I knew that the troop movements I observed in the city and André’s attempt on your life must mean an attack on Mercer. Your work allowed me to put it all together and get a warning to Washington last night. By this afternoon, Mercer will have been reinforced, and Colonel Donop will find the road to Red Bank hazardous. Enlisting Tremayne to aid you was resourceful. You did well to get away from André that night, but you didn’t tell me Peter Tremayne was back.”

  The news that the Widow had been in her room when she was unconscious surprised Kate, and now the change in subject took her off guard. So she struck back. “You told me Peter Tremayne and Bayard Caide were cousins. André hinted that they are closer than that, but he did not say how.”

  Angela Ferrers leaned back and made a critical inspection of Kate. She wasn’t fooled by the carefully applied cosmetics, because she had taught Kate to use them.

  “Really? Did he happen to mention that while he was poisoning your drink? That was very careless of you, by the way, to take a drink you didn’t pour yourself. I taught you better.”

  “No. He told me today, when he offered to fit me for a shroud if I didn’t come work for him. He means to track you through me.”

  Even in sea-drenched rags, Angela Ferrers moved with a supremely confident swagger. She twirled in her tattered skirts and settled gracefully onto a threadbare stool. “How much do you know about the connection between Caide and Tremayne?” she asked.

  “I know that their grandfathers were cousins, and that they were raised together. That Bay’s mother, Ann, fled her abusive husband. And that she and Bay were taken in by Peter’s father. And that Peter’s title was once held by Bay’s great-grandfather Edmund Caide. The Caides lost Sancreed when he was attainted for treason.”

  “All of that is true. But it is not the whole story,” Angela said. “Edmund Caide’s descendants were embittered and twisted by the loss of Sancreed. None more than Ann’s brother, James. And James Caide lacked the principles that both ennobled and destroyed his grandsire. He spent most of his life trying to wrest the viscountcy back from the Tremaynes. When he feared he might never succeed, he abducted and raped Sancreed’s wife, Tremayne’s mother, to ensure that at least his child—and his own blood—would hold Sancreed again.”

  “And Peter was that child?” Kate sai
d. “Does he know?”

  “I have no doubt,” said the Widow.

  Kate could not imagine what it must have been like to grow up with such knowledge. “If the facts of Peter’s parentage were known, why was he allowed to inherit?”

  “The late Viscount Sancreed was a man of principle. James Caide counted on as much. He knew the viscount would not be persuaded to divorce his blameless wife, Emma, or disown her innocent child. Indeed, that he would raise it as his own. He loved her, you see. To quiet rumors, the viscount even went so far as to acknowledge Peter specifically in front of the king. Peter’s legitimacy is now a lie accepted at the most exalted levels, which makes it fact.”

  And a tragedy. “What became of Peter’s mother?”

  “Emma Tremayne was, by all accounts, a loving mother while her son was a boy. But it was widely known that after enduring James’s touch, she couldn’t abide the touch of any man, including that of the husband she loved.”

  Angela paused, studied Kate’s face a moment. “But none of that is your concern. You can’t involve yourself with Peter Tremayne. And you and I cannot meet in person again unless you have news that cannot be committed to a ciphered letter. John André is playing a deeper game than you are.”

  “How so?” Kate asked.

  “He is thinking beyond this theater and this conflict. Spymasters can become powers in their own right. Sometimes the power behind a throne. André has the talent and ambition for it, but he also has certain liabilities.”

  “He admitted to me that he prefers lovers of his own sex,” Kate said, wondering just when she had become the sort of woman who discussed such things with candor. “He did not seem to regard the knowledge as a liability.”

  “He is careful, and so long as he is discreet, Howe will turn a blind eye. But if Howe were to receive certain letters detailing André’s relationship with a young man he met while he was a prisoner last year, such a thing could not be ignored.”