The Turncoat

by Thorland, Donna

  “I am sorry.”

  “Sorry? You made a murderer of me, Lydia. I killed her for you.”

  There was suddenly not enough air in the room. “Who?” But she knew already.

  “The Merry Widow. Angela Ferrers. I slit her throat. To keep her from speaking your name.”

  “But,” Kate said, her voice almost a whisper, “how did you know I was working for her?”

  “I didn’t, not for certain. Not until that night. It all made a terrible sense then. The way Peter always watched you so intently. His inability to find the spy in Philadelphia. I could tell he wanted you, but I convinced myself it was the same old rivalry—and that you had chosen me. Do you know what the worst part was? Howe thanked me. For killing the Widow. He thought I did it for him. Slit that woman’s throat to protect his precious mistress, Elizabeth. Mrs. Loring’s spying is an open secret on the general’s staff. But I didn’t do it to keep Howe’s paramour safe, Lydia. I did it for you.”

  “What will you do with me?” she asked. She sounded braver than she felt.

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “My father,” she began tentatively, “is less than ten miles from here. Let me go to him.”

  “No.” Absolute and final. “Of all the men in Philadelphia, for God’s sake why did it have to be Peter?”

  “I love him.”

  “Some things,” he said, crossing the room and turning her roughly to face the window, “aren’t about love.”

  The courtyard below was filled with dragoons. There were thirty men, and only half a dozen women scattered among them. Some must have been professional whores, and willing, but the rest were not.

  She tried to back away from the sight, but he was there behind her, blocking her escape and pressing her forward until her shins barked the window seat and she was forced to grip the molding to steady herself. They remained frozen like that, his chest pressed to her back, her knuckles white on the fluted woodwork, the scene below playing out an awful prelude to what she knew was to come. His breath danced in her ear. “It’s better this way, I’ve decided. Now we need be no one but ourselves.”

  His fingers settled over the neck of her immodest gown, gripped, and tore, splitting the flimsy gauze easily down the middle. He lifted her gossamer skirts, piling them around her hips, positioned himself, and entered her. He had done nothing to court her pleasure, but found a slick, shaming welcome in her body all the same.

  He worked her methodically until he coaxed a response. She broke and shuddered for him, openmouthed, rigid and wordless with mortification. Her legs buckled and his hands seized her waist, held her in place. He was still as her heartbeat slowed and her skin cooled. Waiting for her to become aware of the intrusion of his body in hers. The thick pulse of his cock lodged inside her.

  Then she felt it. His spasm of release, held deliberately in check, because he’d wanted her to know this moment fully. It came in total silence. He didn’t groan or cry out. Only a rush of liquid warmth inside her, humiliating and final.

  He slipped, still hard, from her body, and she sagged against the open shutters, pressing her cheek to the cool wood there. She felt his hands busy at the hooks and laces on her back, his touch all solicitousness now that he had shown her what she was. 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.

  Angela Ferrers had understood Kate only too well. Kate did despise herself. She had betrayed Peter Tremayne when she rode out of Philadelphia, and her father when she failed to shoot Phillip Lytton in the road. And this was exactly the reckoning she deserved.

  He stripped off the tatters of her clothes and led her by the hand, naked, to the edge of the bed, and bent her over the quilted counterpane. He was skilled, even with the dainty little crop, whose weight and contours must have been unfamiliar to his hand. He placed his strokes precisely, feathering them down her back in a neat pattern that kissed her shoulders and mimicked the print of her absent stays. Only the first few strokes were painful. The rest were something else. She heard his breathing grow uneven, in the utter silence of the room. And then he stopped and turned the whip hand over to her.

  Seventeen

  A little after dusk the pickets on the line south of Valley Forge were interrupted at their dinner. A boy came running into their midst. Skinny and panting. He stopped to catch his breath and spoke two words. They sent a man each running in opposite directions, one to the next picket just over the hill, and another down into the valley, straight to Washington’s headquarters.

  Persephone rising.

  The same words turned out the Life Guard, Virginians chosen for height and strength and skill at arms to defend the commander in chief. They brought the battalion commanders running and woke the general’s staff, including the man known to so many as the Grey Fox, and sometimes the Fighting Quaker, Arthur Grey.

  It took no more than an hour to muster the sleeping army that had weathered that unkind winter, and when the British scouts advanced to within rifle range of Valley Forge, they discovered an unbroken line of blue coats and bluer steel, and turned back. Howe’s commanders lacked the men and materials for a pitched battle. There would be no surprise attack, and thus no attack at all, on Valley Forge.

  The Rebels remained in their lines through the dark watches of the night, just to be certain that General Sir William Howe had really abandoned his attack, and with it his career, in earnest. By dawn every other man was allowed to stand down, and a few hours later only a heavier than usual guard remained.

  And Arthur Grey. He was not waiting for an attack. He was waiting, without hope, for a single rider, because he had known in his bones the moment he heard those two words who had borne that message out of Philadelphia.

  But she did not come.

  Eighteen

  She woke in pain. She was lying on her stomach, her cheek pressed to a pillow stuffed with more quills than down. Someone had built the fire up, which was a mercy because she was bare above the waist.

  She opened her eyes to find Caide sitting in a deep chair beside the bed. It was still night, and the room was dark. His face was lost in shadows; his hands rested palms up on the upholstered arms. She did not know if he was awake, but he had dressed himself carefully while she was unconscious, and she was acutely aware of the brightness of his linen, the polish on his boots, and the shine of his buttons.

  She tried to lever herself off the bed, but fiery pain shot down her back and she gasped with shock.

  “I cleaned the stripes on your back,” said Caide from the shadows, “while you slept.”

  Which explained the smell of strong spirits. And the burning, blinding pain. She wondered if he had tended similarly to his own marks. His back, when he had offered it to her, had told of long acquaintance with the whip. “What happens now?” she asked, but her mouth was dry and it came out a hoarse whisper.

  “André told me you were mine to dispose of as I saw fit, so long as you never trouble him or the British Army again. Which means we cannot stay with the army, or I in service. But I see no reason why anything else should change.”

  Then, in answer to her silence, he added, “I didn’t mean to hurt you last night. You mustn’t let me do it again. I would have stopped, had you asked it.”

  She’d thought he was her punishment for all the things she had done, was ready to allow him to destroy her. But she hadn’t understood him—or herself—until last night. And the truth was worse than anything she had imagined. They would destroy each other. And that was not a fate she could submit to. “André won’t just let you keep me.”

  “He won’t have a say in the matter. This war is going to be over in a matter of days. I’ll keep you out of sight until Howe is done mopping up at Valley Forge, and then I’ll resign my commission, and we’ll go to India. I found the life there congenial enough. So will you. And I’m not opposed to being a company officer.”

&n
bsp; “What about Peter?”

  “He won’t want you back.”

  “Because you’re his cousin?”

  “No.” He paused. “Because he is my brother.”

  It fit. It explained their extraordinary resemblance, the way she could close her eyes and mistake the touch of one man for the other. An affinity that went deeper than physical similarities. A family tree, the Widow had said, more gnarled than an oak. And if what she deduced was true, it meant only one thing: incest.

  Caide must have read her face, even in the near darkness. He’d stripped her bare in more ways than one tonight. “He didn’t tell you, did he?”

  Her voice wouldn’t come, so she shook her head.

  “Dear ‘Uncle’ James spent his entire life trying to wrest Sancreed back from the Tremaynes. When he finally understood it wouldn’t happen in his lifetime, he took steps to ensure that no matter what, his blood would succeed to the title. He abducted Peter’s mother, Lady Sancreed, and raped her until he got her with child. And then he seduced his own sister and got a child on her as well.”

  “Your mother.”

  “My mother,” Caide agreed. “James wanted an heir, because there was always a chance one of his suits would succeed and the title would revert to the Caides. But no respectable family would tie their daughter to him. To a man like that, seducing his own sister and buying her a husband to legitimate the child must have seemed an elegant solution to his dilemma. I doubt he lost much sleep over it.

  “But guilt drove my mother mad. She was always highly strung. So loving, so gentle. So sad. Perhaps if I hadn’t been born she might have made some life for herself, but, for all the love she tried to show me, I was a constant reminder of her weakness, her sin. She drowned herself in the lake at Sancreed when I was twelve.”

  “It’s monstrous,” Kate said, wondering how her pillow had become wet, then realizing she must have been crying for some time.

  “My father was a monster,” said Caide simply. “There’s a glass by the bedside. It’s wine, with something to dull the pain.”

  “I won’t take opium.”

  “I measured the dose carefully. It’s only enough to help you sleep. André didn’t know what he was doing when he tried to drug you.”

  “You know about that too?”

  “The Huguenot bastard told me. I expect he thought he was enlisting me against you, that my jealousy would ensure my cooperation. But all I could think while he was talking was all the myriad ways I might enjoy killing him. I will kill him, for you, when the time is right. But for now I need to get you someplace safe and out of the way. Most of my men are camped at the Kearsley Farm on the other side of the river. I had Dyson round up the patrols and pickets once you’d been intercepted. Dawn is only a few hours off. If you don’t sleep now, you won’t be able to ride in the morning. Drink the wine.”

  * * *

  She hadn’t been able to take the opium. The spicy scent of the drug swirling in the glass had turned her stomach. Her body remembered the stuff, and it bore a grudge, even now, when the poppy promised relief rather than destruction. She slept fitfully, waking to the sound of movement in the room and opening her eyes to the cold dawn light. She guessed that no more than three hours had passed. The skin on her back felt stretched as tight as a drumhead. She moved stiffly, and dressed with the help of a battered girl who must have been one of those women pressed into unwilling service in the courtyard last night.

  Kate had the girl lace her stays as loosely as possible, but she still nearly blacked out from the pain when the silk met her back. She tied on her petticoats, and pinned the tattered gown together as best she could. Her cloak was plain heavy wool. She’d chosen it to cover her outlandish costume once she was out of the city, in the hopes that the homely garment would make her inconspicuous and keep her warm. The weight of it on her lacerated shoulders would be agony, but she brought it all the same, because she had no intention of baring herself before Bay’s men. And because today, on the road, offered her best chance of escape.

  Phillip Lytton met her at the door. She knew that in the light of day the gown was nearly transparent, and she felt a stab of pity as Lytton tried to find a safe place for his eyes to rest that did not require him to look into hers. “I was to be one of André’s Ladies of the Blended Rose,” she said, by way of explanation and because the situation beggared almost every avenue of conversation.

  “I wanted very much to be there,” answered Lytton, and he was once again the theater-mad boy she had met at Grey Farm. “Knights and Ladies and jousting.” But only for a moment. Then he remembered that he was her jailer and sobered. “I am a poor Galahad, Miss Grey.”

  He took the cloak from her arm. She tried not to wince when he settled it on her shoulders, but she must have failed because anguish was writ plain on his face. “You should have shot me on the road,” he said bleakly, and then he bound her wrists together and pulled her cloak closed so that no one would have to see her shame.

  They didn’t speak after that. Lytton led her down into the courtyard, his hand discreetly beneath her arm, supporting her and sheltering her from the press of men and horses, and servants frantic to see these soldiers gone.

  The yard smelled of stale beer and horse.

  She shrank when she saw Caide’s creature Dyson, whom she had always instinctively disliked, holding her mount and smirking. She clutched frantically at Lytton. “Would you give me a leg up, Mr. Lytton?” She did not want Dyson to touch her.

  And blessedly Lytton offered no false reassurances, because she was certain she would have begun screaming if he had. Instead he helped her into the saddle while Dyson held her mount, and lingered, checking her girth and her stirrups with meticulous care until he could find no further pretense for delay, and finally had to leave to see to his own horse.

  Which left her alone with Dyson. His cold eyes appraised her. She saw hatred. The venomous kind possessed only by very young children and madmen. She pulled on her reins and tried to back away, but the brute had her horse by the bridle, and her struggles only made him smile. “You thought you could humiliate him,” he said, his hand slithering around her ankle. “But look at you now. I’m looking forward to my turn, woman. You’ll think you can’t sink any lower when the colonel’s through with you, but I’ll show you different. Like I did for the other one. The jaded bitch thought there was nothing she couldn’t stomach, but she was wrong.”

  Even without the opium, Kate was sure she was going to vomit. What had happened with Caide last night had been inevitable. What Dyson promised was beyond her ability to endure.

  “Take your hands off her, Lieutenant.” Caide’s voice cut across the tumult in the yard. “No one touches her.” He’d pitched it to include all those in the yard, but he was looking straight at Dyson. “Is that clear?”

  Dyson released her ankle. “As you say, sir,” he said calmly, but his eyes, as he strode off into the throng, promised no such obedience if he chanced to get her alone.

  Caide took the reins out of her bound hands and tied her wrists to the pommel. When he tied her ankles to her stirrups as well, she knew she had no chance of escape on the road today. His voice, now low for only her to hear, came light and ironic as he mounted up on the animal beside her and began leading her horse. “I’ll teach you to ride and to shoot properly in India. And how to defend yourself from rogues like Dyson. It took four men to subdue your impressive aunt Angela when they took her.” He smiled. “Of course Dyson wasn’t one of them.”

  “She offered to teach me to fight, but I was brought up a Quaker.”

  “Were you, by God?” He laughed, and turned to her with the same look of delight he’d so often favored her with during their courtship. “You might be the first person in my sorry life that my Roundhead ancestor would have approved of.”

  They’d been on the road for an hour when Lytton drew up level with them and spoke quietly to Caide. “The men are growing restive. They don’t like being cut out of the attack
on Valley Forge to chase your doxy across country.” And here he had the good grace to cast Kate an apologetic glance. “Their words, not mine.”

  Caide was unperturbed. He’d been keeping an eye on her, as they rode, and had slowed the pace incrementally as the night began to catch up with her. But he’d never been less than fully aware of the men riding behind them. “They’ve no cause for complaint,” he said evenly. “They’ve had beer and bawds and a night under cover instead of tramping through the woods. And it’s because we ran down ‘my doxy’ that the attack proceeds and prevails.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Lytton.

  She expected Caide to dismiss him as he had last night, but the appraising glance he gave the younger man reinforced her opinion: Lytton had grown up over the past year. That some of his maturity was due to months spent with her father was a strange irony. It had given him the will to face her down on the road.

  “They can have an afternoon of organized bloodshed. Just the thing. Have Dyson set up a boxing match when we reach camp,” said Caide. “But try to discourage the deeper sort of betting. It only leads to bloodshed of the disorganized kind later.”

  It was midafternoon by the time the detachment reached the farm. It was the kind of smallholding so common in these parts. Not a great acreage like Grey Farm, but a reasonably substantial one. Enough to support barley and rye, some fruit trees, kitchen vegetables, and a few pigs and goats. Or at least it had been. The fields were lying fallow. There was no sign of livestock in the yard or the barn, and the broken shutters on the two-story stone house with its sloping Dutch roof and wide, comfortable porch spoke of a winter of neglect.

  Kate was surprised to find the ground floor tidy, but suspiciously short on furniture. She paused at the bottom of the stairs, looking up the banister and wondering how she could compel her aching body another step, when Caide bent at the waist and lifted her over his shoulder like a sack of grain. And pathetically, she was grateful for it. She wanted only to be at rest, somewhere, anywhere. And if he had lifted her any other way, her back, which had quieted since she’d gotten off the bloody horse, would riot with fresh pain.