The Turncoat

by Donna Thorland

  “There is nothing civilized about war. I cannot afford to offend the Frenchman. He insisted on bringing both you and the count into the fort. Donop is crippled. You are another matter entirely. You’ve seen the strength of my garrison, the condition of my walls, the size and number of my guns up close. You pose a threat to us. I don’t like to shoot a man in cold blood, but I can’t waste a man guarding you. If the count dies, you’ll be locked in the empty magazine until I can figure out what to do with you.”

  As an officer Tremayne was entitled to genteel—if spartan—lodgings during his imprisonment, but as a practical matter, this was entirely up to the discretion of the officer who held him. Tremayne understood perfectly what Greene was telling him: he would prefer not to kill him, but confinement in the powder magazine was only death deferred. Windowless, unheated, and damp, it would kill him just as surely as a bullet, only more slowly.

  Greene let himself out the garden gate, then turned, the river sparkling behind him. “I am sorry, Major, but I am not fighting a gentleman’s war here.”

  * * *

  I should like you to deliver a letter for me, Peter,” Donop said.

  “Of course.” Tremayne did not need to ask to whom it would be addressed.

  “Can you reach her, through the girl you wish to steal from your cousin?”

  Donop had lingered in good spirits but in agonizing pain for five days, but now most certainly he was dying. The time for subterfuge was over. “How did you know she was an agent of the Merry Widow?”

  Donop’s face grew wistful. “A lovely creature, your lady. Too young for my taste. I prefer a more seasoned woman. But there is a resemblance between them. If you look carefully, you can often detect something of the mistress in the maid. And, of course, Angela spoke to me of her protégé.”

  Donop’s dalliance with the Widow had taken place last December, almost a year ago. Tremayne did not believe for a moment that Kate had been the Widow’s protégé at Grey Farm in August. Which meant…

  “When, exactly, did you speak with her, Carl?”

  “We met at Head of Elk, in the summer. And at Germantown. I have seen her several times in Philadelphia. Delightful occasions, if too brief. I offered to make her my mistress. She refused. So I offered her marriage. Morganatic, of course.”

  “Of course,” Tremayne said dryly.

  Donop shrugged. “You English disapprove of the practice, but it solves many problems.”

  “Marriage is a tricky business at the best of times, especially where a succession is concerned. Best not to tinker with it.”

  The bitterness in Tremayne’s voice betrayed him. Donop’s amusement fled, and he said softly, “Tell me, Peter, is it true? You are not the last Viscount Sancreed’s son?”

  He had never admitted his bastardy to anyone, but Donop was dying, and however brief their acquaintance, Tremayne now counted him a friend. “Yes. It’s true. I am not the late viscount’s son. My real father was James Caide. The same Caide whose Roundhead ancestor was attainted by treason and lost Sancreed, and the same Caide who spent his life trying to wrest the title back from the Tremaynes.”

  There. He had said it. He waited for Donop’s appalled reaction. Not just to his bastardy, but to his true parentage. It was well known that James Caide had been a vicious man.

  “I am sorry,” Donop said, with no trace of pity whatsoever.

  Here was a man Tremayne might have counted a friend all his days, and he was dying. There was finally someone he could speak with about this, and the man was leaving him. Tremayne poured forth his story, sordid and painful. “James Caide spent his life and fortune attempting to reclaim Sancreed. Finally, after decades of trying, he realized he could not buy or litigate the title back. There was only one way he could be certain that a child of his blood would be viscount.”

  “By forcing himself on the viscount’s young wife, your mother, and getting her with child. There was talk of an abduction,” Donop said.

  “He held her for a month, until he was certain he had succeeded.” How strange to speak of his hateful conception so dispassionately. He’d only learned the details, pieced together from the hushed whispers of servants, as a young man. But when he thought of his smiling, delicate mother, Emma, his mind skittered away from what she had endured. She had been a warm and affectionate parent until he’d gone away to school; the summer he was fourteen he left a boy and returned a man, and his mother never touched him again. She did not, he later learned, touch any man after James Caide raped her.

  “But under such circumstances, surely the last Viscount Sancreed might have obtained a divorce and removed you from the succession. And yet he raised you as his son.”

  “He loved my mother. He could never put her aside.”

  “He also took in the disgraced sister of James Caide, along with her dubious child, did he not? A generous man, the late viscount, to be so charitable toward the sister and nephew of the man who despoiled his beloved viscountess.”

  “The late viscount was a good man,” Tremayne agreed. Bay’s secrets were not his to share.

  Donop’s sly smile returned. “I think I would have liked the last Viscount Sancreed very much. No matter your true relationship, you are very much his son.” Donop handed him the letter. “You must read it, of course, or you could not in good conscience deliver it. There will be no British secrets in it. I wish you to know that the Widow had no intelligence from me at any time. My only folly was tarrying so long with her at Mount Holly. In all our other meetings I was discretion itself.”

  “I thought you said you searched the Jerseys for her for a year.”

  “I did. I never found her. She always came to me on her own terms, at times of her own choosing. I flatter myself that she took some care to protect my tarnished honor.”

  It all made sense. Donop’s single-minded quest to regain his honor, his compulsion to take Mercer and be free of the stain of Trenton, his desire for liberty to pursue the Widow—all these were not passions born out of single tryst more than a year old. His certainty that she would accept him if he could find her and was in a position to make some kind of permanent offer spoke of an established romance.

  Donop’s breathing had become shallow. He lay very still.

  “Do not pity me, Peter. I have few regrets. I worry, of course, what the Landgraf will say. I lost so very many men. And they died so far from home. I should like to be buried with them, not apart. I underestimated the Americans. Greene is not a gentleman, but he has the mettle of a soldier. Had I to do it over again, it would not be in my nature to behave differently. My only regret is that I have not the opportunity to offer for her again.”

  “You think the answer would be different this time?”

  Donop’s voice was weak now, but he went on doggedly. “In the beginning, I did not trouble to inquire too deeply into her past, for fear I would not like what I found. But then I thought better of it. How lowborn could such a woman be? She rides and shoots like one born to such a life. So I made inquiries. There was never any need to offer her a morganatic contract. She holds a title in her own right, though she has taken great care to obscure her real identity. This time I would have offered properly for her, and if your young lady was coming along as she hoped, I believe she would have accepted me.”

  The idea of Kate following in the Widow’s footsteps, of taking up her furred mantle and marching through an endless succession of wars, turned Tremayne’s stomach. But he could not resist asking. “Who is she, Carl? Who is Angela Ferrers?”

  There was no answer. Carl Emil Ulrich Von Donop was dead.

  * * *

  At the end of October reports of a crushing defeat began trickling into the city. Kate listened, breath held, for news. Six hundred men lost. Twenty officers killed. Donop missing. Donop wounded. Donop captured. But no mention of Peter Tremayne.

  She did not see Bayard Caide for nearly a week. The failed attack and its aftermath plunged the high command into turmoil. Messengers came and w
ent at all hours, and the lights in Howe’s mansion burned late into the night, until there were no more beeswax tapers, and Black Billy was forced to read by rush and tallow light, like everyone else in the starving city.

  Then Caide wrote to her: a short note asking her to come to Howe’s and join them for an outing to the Neck. Hungry for news, she agreed at once.

  On the cobbles in front of Howe’s mansion Kate encountered three liveried footmen scrubbing the outside of the Loring carriage in studious silence. A rouge smear told where much of the graffiti had been removed, but blazoned across the door of the box was the gist of the Rebel sentiment: WHORE.

  She thought the scene outside awkward, and hurried past the poker-faced footmen, only to be confronted by an even more confounding scene in the parlor. The house was clearly in an uproar of some kind, and the maid didn’t bother to knock when she showed Kate into the best room at the front of the house.

  She walked in on them. Not on Mrs. Loring and Howe, which would not have embarrassed her in the least. They made no secret of their carnality. But on Mrs. Loring and Mr. Loring. It wasn’t a lewd embrace, which somehow made it all the more shocking. It wasn’t even all that intimate. He had only his hand on her shoulder, her forehead bowed to his chest, but the way they started when the door opened made it clear that Kate had intruded on something deeply private.

  Up to now she’d felt only scorn for a man who pimped his wife and a woman who allowed herself to be sold, but the sight filled her with a sudden and unwanted pity. Mr. Loring sketched her a hasty bow and left the room. Kate did not know how she ought to feel, had no idea what to say. It was Elizabeth Loring who spoke first. She offered Kate tea.

  The brew was watery and left a black sludge in the bottom of Kate’s cup. There was no fire, and the room was decidedly cold. The situation was not improved by Mrs. Loring’s insistence that the parlor doors remain wide open. She did not mention the epithet scrawled on her carriage door, and while she made pretty small talk, Kate was certain that their conversation commanded only a fraction of the woman’s attention and that Elizabeth Loring had, at all times, one ear cocked to the ceaseless activity in the hall.

  Kate recognized most of the Hessians, many of them injured, all of them haggard, who filed into the house as the morning wore on. The British officers were less disheveled but far more tense. Caide could spare her only a curt nod. She had never seen him so anxious.

  Captain André arrived late. Kate did not blanch when she saw him. They knew each other now, had made their respective positions clear. Soon he would press her for an answer, and she would be forced to use the letters. She did not like it, but when he stopped in the parlor doorway and acknowledged her with an elaborate bow, Kate was struck with a curious irony: the people who knew her best in this strange life of subterfuge were all opponents of one kind or another. It was easier, with that in mind, to see how Angela Ferrers might love a man she had set out to disgrace. Easier to understand why she herself cleaved to Caide.

  Howe’s mistress suggested a game of piquet to pass the time, and Kate agreed. Now that the men had gone into their meeting, Kate offered to close the parlor door against the draft.

  “It would be better for you if we were not seen conferring behind closed doors, Miss Dare,” said Elizabeth Loring, dealing cards over the green baize table.

  Kate thought of the graffiti on the carriage. “Peggy Shippen has already informed me that I can sink no lower, now that I am engaged to Bay.”

  Elizabeth Loring raised an artfully tinted eyebrow. “That is convenient, as I was about to warn you that there is no chaperone who could make our outing respectable for you if I am included.”

  She proceeded to play like a taproom cardsharp.

  Then the door to Howe’s private office opened and an argument in highly idiomatic German, French, and English spilled into the hall. Both women forgot their cards.

  “Enough.” Billy Howe didn’t shout. His voice carried. And the noise stopped. “Thank you for your advice, gentlemen. I’ll take it all under consideration.” Kate heard the impatience in Howe’s tone, saw the anxiety printed across Elizabeth Loring’s heart-shaped face.

  Kate studied her as the men made their grumbling exit. Kate’s own allure was half artifice: the gloss of high fashion; the careful highlighting of her best features; the camouflaging of her worst. But Elizabeth Loring would turn heads even in a flour sack.

  Howe’s spurs rang across the polished marble hall. Just before he appeared in the doorway, Elizabeth Loring donned a smile wholly feigned but entirely convincing.

  Howe’s thin answering smile was less persuasive, but he seemed determined to put the morning’s conference behind him. “Let’s be off. Where’s Caide? He was here a moment go.”

  André hovered in the doorway. “We must talk about Burgoyne,” he said softly.

  “Not now.” Howe waved him away like a mosquito and ushered the two women out to the yard.

  Kate assumed they would go by carriage, but when they emerged from the house the Lorings’ rig was gone, and the footmen were leading three horses up the drive.

  “Have you missed me?” Caide asked. She turned to find him lounging against one of the pillars of the porch. A fey smile quirked the corners of his mouth.

  She knew it was a betrayal of Peter Tremayne, but she had missed Caide. Perhaps because in many ways the two men were so alike. True, Caide was fair and mercurial and had sly artist’s hands, while Tremayne was dark and serious and had a wry, fleeting smile, but they were struck from the same mold, and she was drawn to them both. Her mouth felt dry. Somehow she knew that if she spoke the words, said, “I have missed you,” she would fall further from grace. As things stood, she had made no declarations of love. Caide had offered for her and she had accepted, but the attraction was not one-sided, and he knew it.

  “I don’t have a mount,” she said.

  “Soon to be rectified. But in the meantime, I bought you a horse.”

  He led her out to the street. “Do you like her?” he asked.

  The chestnut mare stood clean-limbed and freshly groomed on the cobbles. Caide’s hulking lackey, Dyson, whom she did not like at all, held the reins.

  It was a lavish gift. Horses were scarce in the occupied city. And there was more: a saddle with a red velvet seat, leather flaps tooled with acanthus, and a dainty black whip.

  She had never owned a mount of her own, and tack, in the Grey household, had been an amalgam of secondhand bridles and saddles from her father’s service in the French and Indian War: heavy, cumbersome, and built for a man. This saddle, though, was sized for Kate, elegantly decorated, and as supple as silk.

  It was seductive, as Caide had intended. “At least I’m getting something between your thighs today,” he murmured in her ear. He caressed the leather of the seat, but it was as if she could feel his hands on her. He knew, of course, and he enjoyed watching her respond. “You’ll be hard-pressed to find fodder for her in the market, so I’ll stable her for you until the river is opened.”

  He was right. She had only to glance at the scrawny nags passing in the street to know how little fodder was reaching the city. And all of it was going to the army, whose horses were stabled in the “seditious” churches: Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Baptist.

  Their little party set out: General Howe on his charger and Mrs. Loring on her strawberry roan, with Bay and Kate following, trailed by Dyson and the general’s servants.

  Before the occupation, the Neck had been a pretty suburb of garden cottages where the rich retreated from the bustle of the city, but now it was abandoned. Splintered fences marked where soldiers had foraged for easy fuel.

  When Howe halted in front of a handsome stone cottage, larger and more impressive than its neighbors, the rest of the party was obliged to do likewise.

  Caide looked at the house and swore under his breath.

  In chalk over the lintel was a faded warning: UNDER THE PROTECTION OF GENERAL HOWE. Across the door in bl
ack paint was a more permanent and effective admonition: UNDER THE PROTECTION OF BAYARD CAIDE.

  Though the garden was ruined, the house was untouched, down to the black iron shutter dogs.

  Howe snorted.

  “It’s Peter’s idea of a joke. On me, not you,” said Caide. “You did put him in charge of discouraging looters here.”

  “As though I needed further reminder of my impotence,” Howe said. “So kind of your cousin to oblige. Major Tremayne would have done better to focus on that other business I entrusted to him.”

  Kate attempted to keep her face bland, her eyes fixed on the ostentatiously rustic cottage. She counted the quoins over the windows, the dentils over the door.

  “He was ordered to Mercer with Donop,” Caide said evenly.

  Kate counted the slate tiles of the roof, the stones in the foundation.

  Howe sniffed and turned his mount back toward the road. “I gave the man a task, and he allowed himself to be diverted from it. What the devil was his quarrel with André?”

  “A private matter,” said Caide, quite softly.

  Howe shot him a sidelong glance and Caide added hurriedly, “Nothing like that.”

  “Captain André has his uses,” Howe said, “but at times he overreaches. I sent my surgeon to look at Donop before he died. He also treated your cousin’s wounds. The Americans would like to trade Tremayne for some of their prisoners in the State House, but André advises me against it. What do you say?”

  Caide turned to look at her, and she did her best to keep her face blank.

  “The Americans will make better deals in the spring when they’re desperate for officers for the new campaign.”

  Howe turned his horse toward the river. Kate realized she had fallen behind, and Caide with her.

  “It’s not your fault,” Caide said.

  She’d been lost in her own thoughts, which were entirely of Peter, and that was dangerous, with Bay watching her.

  “What isn’t?”

  “André sending Peter to Mercer over whatever happened at the concert. He’s always been a chivalrous idiot. I told Peter you were perfectly capable of handling the little Huguenot,” Caide said, with a pride she found oddly flattering.