The Turncoat

by Donna Thorland

  He carried her upstairs and set her down in a bedroom overlooking the fields behind the house, and cut her bonds. He helped her out of her cloak, and she was too sore and weak to reject his aid out of pride. It occurred to her then that she had not eaten since breakfast yesterday morning. Though she felt no hunger, she knew she wasn’t safe here, and should try to keep up her strength. But the thought of food made her head ache.

  All this passed through her mind while she stood surveying the room, taking in the solid pine bed with its dusty blue wool hangings, the matching curtains on the windows, the single chair by the fire, the iron kettle and pot stand. This had once been someone’s home. The easel in front of the window told her it was now Caide’s. And the Chinese paint box sitting on the floor beside it, which she had bought him all those months ago, told her she was now Caide’s as well.

  She must have swayed slightly, because his hands were suddenly beneath her elbow and around her waist and his voice was cutting through the blackness, raw and panicked. “Sit down, Lydia.”

  She couldn’t remember sitting but suddenly she was in the chair and Caide was kneeling beside her, tipping her head up and looking into what she knew must be her glazed eyes. He looked worried. “I warned you that you wouldn’t be fit to ride this morning without more sleep. Let me give you something for the pain.” He was touching her cheek, and if she closed her eyes, she could pretend he was Peter. She leaned into the caress for a moment, tried to draw some strength from it.

  Then she opened her eyes and shook her head. “No.” To be drugged and helpless here with Dyson and those men outside would be madness. And she needed her wits about her to escape.

  Caide swallowed hard, unhappy with her resistance. “I could force you to take it,” he threatened.

  “But you won’t,” she chanced.

  His shoulders sagged. His eyes fluttered shut and he lowered his head to her lap. She brushed his hair from his face. He was not Peter, and she did not love him as she loved Peter, but she felt something for him, a strange sort of kinship. “I didn’t mean to hurt you so badly,” he murmured into her lap. “You should have cried out. Asked me to stop.”

  When she didn’t reply, he captured her hand, pressed it to his mouth. “I must see to the men. Don’t try to run, Lydia. Not even I can control them when their blood is up, and a chase would rouse them like nothing else at this point. You’ll be safe enough in here with the door locked.”

  He got to his feet and shouted into the corridor. “Lytton!” The young man appeared instantly in the doorway, his face carefully blank. “Make her comfortable. Bring her anything she asks for.” Then he favored her with an apologetic smile. “Apart from a pistol and a horse.” Then he was gone.

  And she could take refuge in practicalities. “A needle and thread, Mr. Lytton. And pins. As many as you can find. And something to eat.” Lytton nodded, then left.

  She watched the door close and listened to the key turn in the lock. That was another skill against which she had stood on her principles and failed to acquire. If she knew how to pick a lock, she might be away and across the fields by now.

  The windows at least offered some hope. She tested the casement nearest the bed. Nailed shut. As were the others.

  When Lytton came back he brought her a carpet needle, scarlet thread, and a rattling wooden box full of pins, along with a few slices of stale toast and a pitcher of water. He lit her a fire and locked the door again when he left. She stripped off her gown and petticoat, and loosened her stays but left them on. She was too stiff to lift them over her head, and she didn’t think she could get them laced again later on her own. She washed in the water provided, tied her stays and petticoat back on, then sat down beside the fire and began pinning her tattered dress back together. The gown was so delicately constructed and so badly torn that she quickly emptied the box of pins.

  While she worked, the sounds from the yard changed in tone. The clatter of horses and the jangle of tack were replaced by the hum of a crowd, pierced by occasional shouts. The boxing match. The noise rose and ebbed in time with the fight.

  The door must have opened on one of the swells, because she never heard the key in the lock. Just the heavy tread of Dyson crossing the room.

  She put down her sewing and stood. Dyson was the kind of predatory animal that could smell fear. “What do you want?”

  “Cooperation.” He struck fast like a snake, seizing her wrist and yanking her off balance. His strength was frightening—her shoulder felt wrenched from the socket.

  She tried to run, but that was a mistake. She should have screamed. He clapped a sinewy hand over her mouth, and kicked her legs out from under her. She fell, her knees cracking against the floor, and he followed her down, his body a deadweight on her back. No no no no no.

  “Shut up,” he snarled.

  Kate couldn’t have stopped screaming if she’d tried, but his hand muffled her sobs. She thrashed and kicked and bit until she tasted blood in her mouth and he cursed her. She felt his weight shift, and he reached for something.

  Then he stiffened and screamed. His grip loosened and she twisted away from him. She scrambled toward the hearth and seized the black iron kettle. She turned to find him kneeling and holding out a handful of bloody silk bristling with pins. Her sewing. He’d meant to gag her with it.

  “You bloody bitch.” He lunged at her. She hefted the kettle and brought it up in an arc that caught him on the jaw. He tottered, and she struck him again. He sprawled on his back and twitched, and she brought the kettle down again. And again. And again.

  * * *

  The afternoon light was already waning when Tremayne reached the outskirts of the farm. André had given him the location of Caide’s new camp in exchange for those damning letters.

  The sound of a raucous crowd met him at the gate, washed over him like a wave of sickness. But he checked his urge to gallop in and walked his horse, as if he had every right to be there, straight up to the ring of shouting, surging men.

  They parted for him and silence fell. A boxing match. Thank God. And Bay, presiding over it like a Roman emperor, enthroned on the low stone wall that circled the house and yard.

  He leapt down from his perch, but didn’t come any closer. “Turn around and go home, Peter.”

  “I’ve come for Kate.”

  “She isn’t here.”

  There came a single, high-pitched, bloodcurdling scream from the little stone house, abruptly cut off. Tremayne slid from his saddle and strode to his brother.

  “Fine,” said Caide. “She’s here. But you’re not taking her.”

  “She isn’t safe here.”

  “That scream was Dyson, if I’m not mistaken, and it sounds like he got what he deserved for disobeying me. Now turn around and go home, Peter. You can’t fight thirty men.”

  “I’m not here to fight thirty men. I’m here to fight you.”

  “Leave it. Content yourself. You have Sancreed, and I have Lydia.”

  “Her name is Kate. And I would trade Sancreed for her if I could.”

  “But you can’t. It’s yours. And now she’s mine.”

  “She doesn’t love you.”

  “That didn’t matter last night,” Caide said quite softly. “She didn’t flinch. Not even when I whipped her.”

  Tremayne drew his saber. It was a poor weapon for a duel, graceful on horseback for a cavalryman’s slashing cuts, but cumbersome as hell on the ground. A pistol would have been the wiser choice, but he knew he could not level a gun at Bay, at the brother he had protected since boyhood.

  “My sword,” Caide said with a sigh, opening the fingers of an outstretched hand expectantly.

  Tremayne, with sinking heart, recognized the young man who brought it. “Lytton,” he said.

  “My lord,” acknowledged the subaltern.

  “You see, Peter. You can’t keep her. Too many people know what she did. She’ll hang. Or worse.” He flicked the blade, like a negligent leveler cutting tall poppies down
to size, and smiled at his brother.

  “If I win, she leaves here unharmed.” Tremayne said it loud enough for the crowd to hear.

  Caide shook his head. “She won’t leave with you. Not after what we did last night.” He made a tentative feint at Tremayne and fell back when steel met steel. “I didn’t have a birch, so I used the little black riding whip I bought her.”

  Tremayne lunged. “She was your prisoner. She didn’t have the power to stop you.”

  Caide sidestepped neatly. “Ah, but she did, you see. She could have stopped me with a word.”

  He knew what Caide was trying to do: get him angry, throw him off his guard. But he had a purpose, and he would not be deterred. “Only a fool or a madwoman would have fought you,” he replied evenly, drawing back a pace after one of his brother’s economical attacks.

  Caide smirked. “I would show you my handiwork, Peter, if you had any appreciation for the whip, but her back isn’t the real masterpiece. No. If you want to see something extraordinary, you should see mine.”

  Tremayne rushed him. They were so well matched, in speed, in age, in skill, that Caide should have sidestepped easily. But he didn’t. He froze, his eyes fixed on something beyond Tremayne’s shoulder. At the house. Tremayne didn’t look. Whatever it was could wait. He drove the point of his sword into his brother’s shoulder.

  Caide looked down, then sank to his knees without a sound. And Tremayne turned to see what had captured his brother’s attention.

  The door to the farmhouse was open. Kate stood on the porch, swaying, her eyes blank. Her white damask stays and gray silk petticoats were spattered with blood. Her bare arms hung limply at her sides, and a black iron kettle, barnacled with bits of hair and bone, dangled from one hand. She wove unsteadily down the steps and into the yard.

  “Kate,” he said gently.

  She looked up at him, but her puzzlement was plain. Then she looked down at herself. “Don’t worry,” she said dreamily. “It isn’t my blood.”

  But it would be soon if he put a foot wrong now. He surveyed the crowd warily. Hard-bitten men, by birth and circumstance, as well as Caide’s sterling example. They were stunned for the moment, but that wouldn’t last long. And Caide…

  “Take her and go.” Caide was kneeling on the ground, covering his wound with a hand that looked freshly dipped in crimson paint. He was bleeding, his shirt wet with blood, but it was impossible to know how bad the wound was. He might live. Or not.

  Lytton crouched beside him, surveyed the wound, then looked up at Tremayne. “No one will detain you, my lord. I’ll see to it.”

  Caide laughed, the sound a little strained. “Poor Mr. Lytton. Always trying to do the honorable thing.”

  Tremayne crossed the remaining ground between himself and Kate, and loosed her grip, one finger at a time, from the grisly kettle. He had to place her hands on the pommel, and shove her up onto his horse. When he mounted up behind her, and his arms circled her waist, they slid through the gore on her petticoat.

  He didn’t dare look back. He spurred his horse out of the yard and sped from a trot to a canter once he was on the road. Kate was as limp as a rag doll in his arms, bereft of wit and senses. Or so he thought, until he turned his horse off the road and began cutting through an orchard budding with new fruit.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I’m taking you home to your father.”

  “We’ll never make it past the British lines.”

  “There are no British lines, Kate. The attack failed. Your warning made it through. Howe’s troops have withdrawn to Philadelphia to begin evacuation.”

  He waited for her reaction, but there was none. Her flesh felt cold. Too cold. And the weals patterning her shoulders clearly continued down her back, beneath her stays. He did not know what else might have happened to her, but she was deep in shock. She needed clothing, shelter, and food, and he was at least sixteen miles from Valley Forge. They would never make the journey before nightfall.

  He rode for another hour or so with her clutched tight to his chest, because he could not risk stopping so close to Caide’s camp. She stirred when he lowered her to the ground, and he wrapped her in his coat while he built a fire. Then he pulled her into his arms, trying not to touch her back, and dribbled brandy from his flask into her mouth.

  Her eyes opened. “I didn’t mean for him to die,” she said.

  “He may yet live,” Tremayne said.

  “Not Bay. Lieutenant Dyson. I killed him.”

  That explained the bloody kettle. “Dyson deserved his fate. A mad dog. The man…” Tremayne knew the awful truth offered Kate absolution for the death of Caide’s henchman. “He tortured Angela Ferrers.” And I did nothing to stop him, he reminded himself.

  “Bay is your brother,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She knew.

  “Yes.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Since I was fourteen and he twelve. The year his mother died.”

  “And how long has he known who his father was?”

  That Kate could still care about anyone or anything but herself was astounding, when she lay spattered in the gore of the second man who’d tried to violate her in the space of as many days. Tremayne owed her nothing less than the complete truth. “Bay has always known.”

  She tried to sit up. Her skirts rustled like paper, stiff with dried blood. She looked down at the stains. “Does it ever get easier?”

  “To kill a man?” He considered carefully. “Yes. That is the mercy and the horror of it. It becomes all too easy.”

  She nodded. “You can’t come all the way to Valley Forge with me.”

  He took the coat from her shoulders and turned it inside out, then slipped it back over her arms. He knew better than to wear scarlet in the territory they were traveling now. “You are an exceedingly stubborn woman. I’ve made my choice, and I have no regrets.”

  She shook her head. “I won’t allow you to make the sacrifice.”

  “It is the same one I asked of you,” he pointed out gently.

  “And you were right when you said I had far less to give up. Take me to within a mile of Washington’s camp.”

  “They’ll hang me if I go back. I have nothing left to bargain with. André told me where to find you in exchange for the letters.”

  “But I can give you something new to bargain with. Elizabeth and Joshua Loring are American agents. Howe knows, and he will protect you if you keep his secret.”

  It wasn’t possible. “Loring can’t be a spy. He is Commissioner of Prisoners. Everyone knows the man’s been starving his American charges all winter and siphoning the money into his own coffers. Even I’ve seen the numbers of Rebels leaving the Walnut Street jail in pine boxes.” Even as he said it, he saw the brilliance of it.

  “They weren’t all dead, were they?” he said. “He was smuggling prisoners out.”

  “Yes. And the supplies he diverted have gone to Valley Forge. I didn’t know any of this myself until last week, when I remembered something the Widow had said about another spy, caught like a fly in amber. I guessed—hoped—it might be Mrs. Loring, because I needed her help to escape the city. Howe knows she is a spy. André holds this information over him, but the general will not give her up. Now you know too. It means you can go home. To Sancreed.”

  “My home is with you.” He only realized how true it was now that he said it, but her expression told him he had far to go to convince her. She looked like she might make further argument, but he hustled her back onto his horse. They had a great deal of ground to cover, and he did not think her burst of lucid energy would last.

  He was right. She was limp in his arms again inside of an hour. Despite his coat, which kept falling from her small shoulders, her skin was cold and clammy to the touch.

  The moon was full; otherwise, keeping hold of a half-conscious girl and controlling his horse over rough terrain would have been impossible. They were in deep woods now, the road they were following
no more than a cart track. Even so, he should have heard them. Would certainly have heard ordinary soldiers.

  But not these men. His horse was rearing and a bayonet pricking his throat before he even saw their faces. Backwoodsmen in forest green and deerskin boots.

  One demanded his name and his purpose. He would have told them, but before he could utter a word, the motion of his restless horse pitched Kate from his arms and to the road below, where two of the men caught her. His coat slipped from her shoulders, and the moonlight showed clearly the red of his regimentals, and the deeper crimson staining her tattered skirts.

  They pulled him from his horse. He begged them to see her safe to Arthur Grey, but they paid him no heed. He caught a glimpse, as they surrounded him, of Kate, limp and unconscious, being carried away in the arms of a hulking Rebel scout, her bloody skirts trailing on the forest floor. Then they began clubbing him with the butts of their rifles.

  “Washington will want him alive for hanging.” The voice of their leader, bandy-legged, unshaven, and armed to the teeth, halted the rain of blows. The man placed a foot on Tremayne’s chest and asked, “Does the name Nathan Hale mean anything to you?”

  Hale. The young schoolteacher Howe had hanged in New York last year, without trial, and in the face of Washington’s most heartfelt pleas. It was well known that Washington had vowed to return the favor. And Tremayne, an officer and an aristocrat, would make an ideal object for the Rebel general’s retribution.

  The American grinned widely. “I can see it does.”

  Tremayne was under no illusions about his predicament. He’d been captured, out of uniform, behind Rebel lines. It would not speak in his favor that he was in possession of his regimentals, since they were wrapped around the abused body of one of their most beloved commander’s daughters.

  Tremayne’s captors bound him hand and foot and slung him over the back of his horse. They traveled a mile like that through thick forest. Then they reached the perimeter of the camp.