And while André had admitted that he preferred lovers of his own sex, Kate suspected he was quite worldly when it came to women. Espionage, she was coming to learn, was a study of the human condition. André was unlikely to leave such a fundamental experience untried. Still, she could think of no reason he would want to compromise Peggy, so she asked, “Is this your idea, or his?”
Peggy bristled. “He is too much a gentleman to broach the matter.”
“And Caide is too much of an aristocrat to leave me unbroached?” Peggy goggled at her crudeness, but Kate plunged on. “If you are planning to become his lover, then discuss the matter with him.” Then she added, with genuine concern, “But Peggy, you would be better off not to—at least not without some formal promise from him. You might be left disappointed, or worse.”
She had been lectured, in occasionally shocking and often humorous detail, on the perils of intercourse. Angela Ferrers had tutored her in all the means available to prevent pregnancy and disease. Unfortunately for Peggy Shippen, the Widow had no recipe against heartbreak.
Which was a pity, because when Kate returned home to the Valby mansion that afternoon, Peter Tremayne was waiting for her in the parlor.
* * *
Tremayne had seen very little of the Valby house on his last visit. He remembered only a darkened hallway, an impression of grandeur about the double staircase, and shadowed swaths of drapery. The parlor he was shown into today was elegant and modern, if somewhat provincial in scale and ornament. The faux Titian over the fireplace gave away Kate’s equally false aunt and uncle for what they were: merchants with pretensions. Exactly the sort of people who shouldn’t be swept up in a revolution. The Indian cotton, Turkish carpets, and Chinese wallpaper said it plainly: they’d done well under the present regime. They had too much to lose. Like Kate and her father. Coming on the heels of Donop’s disastrous assault on Fort Mercer and Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga, it was worrying. A people who would not be cowed easily. Another Ireland waiting to happen.
Tremayne was so busy studying the room, lost in his own thoughts and misgivings, that he did not hear the door open. He had dreamed of Kate, in the cold dark of the powder magazine. Not the sophisticated coquette in silk he’d encountered at Germantown, but the farm girl from Orchard Valley whose cotton skirts carried the kitchen scents of nutmeg and vanilla.
Today she was everything clean and soft and domestic that he had longed for. Kate wore a striped polonaise in blue and cream sateen. The color set off her coffee eyes and chestnut hair; the pattern emphasized the neat curves of her body. The irony of a real country girl dressed as an aristocrat’s notion of a milkmaid was not lost on Tremayne, but he discovered then that his imagination lagged behind the reality. Kate now belonged to neither world, had transcended her rural upbringing and Angela Ferrers’ tutelage to become something entirely original.
She closed the door gently behind her and they were alone.
He had had a month to rehearse speeches for her: in the cold dark of Mercer; in the guardroom, where they allowed him to wash and dress, with the imperturbable Sergeant Bachmann assisting him, as the Rebels spiked their guns and prepared to abandon the fort; on the road home to Philadelphia, where the countryside had smelled of wood smoke and apples instead of gunpowder, mold, and rotting flesh. And now he was speechless.
He smelled her perfume: citrus and spice and vanilla, like a Christmas pastry. He remembered the feel of her fevered body, as she thrashed in the grip of the opium and he held her close on the bed upstairs. At the time, protectiveness had swamped lust, but now the memory came back to him colored with desire.
“Thank you,” she said, taking another tempting step closer to him, “for saving my life. It’s long overdue, but I am more grateful than I can say.” Her eyes lingered on his scar, still livid across his cheek, but there was no pity or horror in her expression.
It was his cue. He could take her in his arms now and taste her mouth, run his hands over her supple body, whisper all the things he planned for them in her ear. He reached for her, but she sidestepped him.
“But you must leave. And we cannot meet again.” The words left her mouth in a rush.
“Why the hell not?” The first thing he had said to Kate in a month’s time. And the very last thing on earth he could have imagined saying to her after weeks of captivity and deprivation. He’d come expecting gratitude. Sweet words, soft, yielding flesh, and ultimately, her carnal surrender. Not a curt dismissal. “Madame, the warmth of your welcome leaves something to be desired. I rather thought you were partial to me.”
“You know I am. And so far my partiality has gotten you court-martialed, lost you your command, and sent you into an ambush. Imagine the consequences if I loved you.” The last was said in a throaty voice that made his cock stir. He could imagine a great deal. He was about to tell her so in more than words when she slipped past him to the window. “Captain André has me watched. He will know you were here. You must leave now. A short visit from my fiancé’s cousin will arouse suspicion in no one but those who already know what I am. A long one will tempt André to scheme.”
“He knows who you are?”
“He knows who I am, and what I am doing here. The only reason I am not dead is that he wants to catch the Widow. He thinks he can trace her through me. He wishes to recruit me. His dilemma is whether he would wield greater influence if I were Caide’s wife or your mistress.”
Tremayne swore. “What a bloody mess. Come away. I can get you out of the city.”
“No. Howe is planning something. He has already written to the king, asking to be excused this duty, but he does not want to return to London in disgrace. He means to attack General Washington’s army in winter quarters and salvage his career before it is too late. I cannot leave now. My father is with Washington.”
“Then let me take you to him. He was a distinguished officer in the last war. You could convince him to resign his commission and accept Howe’s amnesty. You could both go home to Orchard Valley.”
“André knows my real name. I can never go home to Orchard Valley. Not while the British hold Philadelphia. And my father will not desert Washington, even for me and my safety. The only freedom you can offer me is the freedom to see him hanged.”
“When we met, at your father’s house, you argued tactics with me like a drawing room general. It was an intellectual abstraction for you then. Something has changed.”
“The dragoons came after you left.”
Her words washed over him like ice water, colder than the fetid dark under Mercer. He had given no thought to what might have happened to her later that night. He’d returned to Grey Farm and found her and his papers gone, and he’d burned with humiliation and anger. But his had not been the only troop of horse abroad that night. The political arrests he’d declined to take part in were midnight affairs of broken doors and broken bones and other, less palatable acts. “Tell me,” he said, dreading what he would hear next.
“The Widow would not allow me to stay at Grey Farm. She took me to my friend Milly’s, and planned to leave me there, but she couldn’t. Because the dragoons came, and they took Milly to the barn. She was pregnant. There were apples,” she added. Her eyes were fixed on some faraway point, and he knew she was reliving events in her mind. He led her to a chair and she floated down, a dandelion puff on the breeze. He would not force her to go on. He could guess the rest. He knelt beside her, careful not to come too close. “Did they touch you?” If someone had, there would be a death in it.
“No. They didn’t know we were there. The Widow, she made us hide. I wanted to help Milly, but Angela wouldn’t let me.”
“And quite right she was too. Has your friend brought charges?” he asked her gently.
“Milly’s husband is a prisoner in the State House. She doesn’t dare bring charges. Who knows what might become of him?”
It was just as well. Court-martials for rape and plunder had become a nearly daily occurrence in the city. He’d s
at in on his fair share before his capture. If the girl was pretty, there were plenty of officers who were not above condemning her rapist to hang, then dicing to determine who would offer her “protection.”
“They kept Milly for three days,” she said, as though finishing the story were her penance for running away, “and then abandoned her on the side of the Germantown road. Mrs. Ferrers’ people found her.”
“And the babe?” he forced himself to ask. He feared the answer.
“Delivered premature but safely. Mother and child are in hiding.” Kate stared at him, defying him to defend his countrymen. He had no excuses, and was not callous enough to tell her that this was the way of war, that she and her countrymen had brought it on themselves. He had only a desperate desire to take her someplace safe and see that she stayed there. And to do that, he was beginning to realize, he must break her formidable resolve.
He reached out, careful to keep a distance between them, careful not to loom or threaten, and tucked a stray lock of her hair behind her ear. “Keeping Washington’s army in the field for another season will not keep the dragoons from your door. You think you have experienced oppression. This is nothing compared to what will follow if this conflict drags on. If you continue to provoke Parliament, we will do here what we have done in Ireland. You will find yourselves barred from government, denied education, and turned, in a generation, into serfs. What happened to your neighbors will become commonplace.”
“Unless we win.”
“You cannot win against the Crown.”
“No one has told General Gates that.”
He laughed. It was a relief to see her wit surface. “Now that is the Kate Grey I met in Orchard Valley.”
She arched a plucked brow. “You prefer me with singed skirts and crumbs in my hair?”
“I prefer you safe, Kate. Let me take you to your father.”
“You can’t. André will arrest me if I try to leave the city. I’m being watched.”
“Yes. By a brace of ruffians,” he said, crossing to the window. He folded back a shutter to look down into the street. “I saw one of them outside. I presume there is a second at the back gate.”
“There are three of them, actually, since yesterday.” She slipped past the spinet to join him at the window and stare down at Beaver Hat and the newcomer; a lean, mustachioed man in a clean but threadbare brown serge coat.
“Ah. The third ruffian is Sergeant Bachmann. He belongs to me. Or at least I inherited him and no one seems to have demanded him back.”
“I should have realized. He did not skulk as well as the others.”
“Hessian Grenadiers are notoriously unsubtle,” he said. “But Bachmann can handle your watchers, and I can handle André. Will you come?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“I came back because I wanted to see you to safety, Kate, and because I had to see you. I can’t force you to go home to your father, but if you are determined to remain in the city, then I am not above blackmailing you into my bed.”
“You wouldn’t,” she said carefully. She was trying to convince herself. “You are not that kind of man.”
If she cried, he wouldn’t be able to go through with it, but she met his eyes, and only her lower lip quivered, so subtly he might have missed it were he not studying every breath she took. But she did not cry. And he was resolute in his purpose, so he said, “You will meet me tonight, Kate, or I’ll turn you over to André myself.”
* * *
She picked her way through the Valbys’ vegetable garden in the fading light, careful not to tangle her shot silk gown in the overgrown rosemary beside the gate. If this were Grey Farm, the bush would be trimmed, the excess branches drying in the kitchen, or adding fragrance to the fire. The wild plots would be cleared and organized with the most often used herbs—the parsley, rosemary, and sage—growing closest to the kitchen door. That she could still think this way, robed in pale blue silk, on the way to such an unwelcome assignation, was a peculiar comfort. No matter what happened tonight, she would still, somewhere inside, be Kate Grey.
Kate heard him before she saw him, the clop of hooves on stone, sure-footed in the darkness. Sound carried differently in the city. At Grey Farm his horse would have thudded softly over the packed earth. In the city, its shoes rang claxons on the cobbles. There were finer distinctions too. She could tell the difference between the sound of a horse and rider, a mellow, lasting note, and an unmounted beast, high-pitched and brief; so she was not surprised when Tremayne appeared around the corner leading his chestnut mare.
He wore his dress uniform, the scarlet a shade richer than his ordinary coat, the wool a finer weave. There was a froth of Mechlin lace at his collar and cuffs, silvery white in the fading light. His hair was loosely braided at the back of his neck and tied with a black silk ribbon. She remembered it falling free over his shoulder at Grey Farm, and felt the prickle of tears. Tonight would not be like Grey Farm. She blinked the tears away. They would streak her powder.
“You’ve come dressed for battle,” she said lightly.
He looped his horse’s reins over the saddle and used both hands to push back her muffling hood. He parted her furred cloak, and settled his warm hands over her collarbone, studying her. “So have you.”
She knew what he saw. She’d used the skills the Widow had taught her to armor herself. She’d dressed her own hair. It had taken an hour to curl the sides and braid the crown, then loop and pile her handiwork with mother-of-pearl combs. She had rouged her cheeks, blackened her lashes, and stained her lips berry red.
“Enchanting,” he said, but there was something wistful in his voice. If she did not know better, she might almost call it regret.
Unsettled by his tenderness, she pulled her furred cloak tight around her. “We shouldn’t linger.” She darted a glance at the lit windows of the service ell. “Someone might see us.”
“The Valbys are not in your confidence?” he asked, giving her a leg up onto the mare.
“I endanger them enough just by being here. The less they know of my activities, the safer they are.”
“If you are arrested, what will they say?”
“They will say I was an imposter. That they had not seen their niece since she was a girl. I’ve taken care to protect them as much as possible.”
He sighed, guiding her hands to the pommel. “And who will protect you, Kate?”
Before she could answer, he slung himself up behind her.
She was immediately aware of the easy grace of his body in the saddle, of the size and strength of him at her back. He was a professional horseman, of course, so this should not surprise her, but there was an unexpected intimacy in riding with him. It was more than the feel of his thighs pressed against hers, tensing and relaxing as he guided the horse. It was the understanding that she was being admitted to the private world between horse and rider where he often spent much of his day.
They followed the alley to another, and emerged on a side street Kate had never seen before. She realized how little she knew of Philadelphia outside the fashionable center. Here the houses were smaller, older, brick and stone giving way to painted clapboard and finally the weathered gray post-and-beam hovels of the poor.
The narrow streets were empty. It was a city under martial law, and only officers and rich Loyalists were exempt from Howe’s curfew. The ramshackle houses, with their shake roofs and bottle glass windows, were dark and forbidding.
Anything might happen in such a place. And no one knew where she was. The Valbys were not in her confidence. Peggy Shippen was little more than a child and too much under André’s influence. The Widow no longer met with Kate in person. If she did not come home tonight, no one would know where she had gone, or with whom.
There was light and music up ahead, and when they rounded a corner Kate recognized the name of the public house that loomed in front of them: a many-gabled, hardscrabble affair, notorious for the cheapness of the ale and the women. Jaded hussies in r
ude leather stays, merchants, and dockside laborers spilled out into the street, here where the guard did not bother to enforce the curfew, because that would curb their own entertainments.
Kate closed her eyes and remembered to breathe. It was going to be sordid. She had been hopelessly naive. Angela Ferrers had tried to warn her on the road that night. A privileged, powerful man like Tremayne had only one use for a country girl like her. There would be no pretense of courtship or romance. She would have to spread her legs for Tremayne amidst the smells of stale beer and urine. She’d lie on a sour mattress and he would grunt and shout above her, like the men in the barn with Milly.
She was not going to cry.
They drew level with the tavern and Tremayne tensed. “Easy, Kate. We’re not stopping here. It’s just the straightest route to where we’re going.”
She realized only then that she had been trembling.
“Do you hear me, Kate? I don’t want you to be frightened.”
“Yes, I hear you.” But she didn’t believe him. For all of Angela Ferrers’ lectures, Kate’s practical experience of intercourse was limited to what had occurred between her and her suitors, Tremayne and Caide, in the relative safety of parlors and drawing rooms. And what had happened to Milly in the barn.
The trembling became a shuddering that she could not control. Tremayne swore inventively, then threaded his hands beneath her cloak to circle her waist.
“Lean back against me, love,” he coaxed.
She knew she should not allow her guard to drop, but his hands were warm and reassuring.
“What I said in the parlor…” he began, but she shook her head, and didn’t want to hear whatever he was going to say next.
“Save your flowery words. We both know what this is.”
“Would you have come if I offered you any other choice?” he asked.
The Turncoat Page 18