“Because Mr. Fraunces courts Whigs with his wax displays as well as Tories with his cakes?” asked Jenny, incredulous.
“Because Black Sam Fraunces has been spying for both sides and must decide, soon, where his loyalties lie.”
“Loyalty,” said Jennifer Leighton, in wisdom largely acquired, Severin feared, in the last few hours, “is a luxury that not all in New York can afford—and it is fragile as spun sugar.”
In the end they did nothing to put Mr. Fraunces’ kitchen to rights, though Jenny obviously felt guilty leaving it in such a state. Devere convinced her that there was no point in letting the cake go to waste, and he cut several more slices from the top layer and wrapped them in the banquet hall’s best linen napkins for her to tuck in her pockets. She insisted that he take one as well, and he did not tell her the truth: that he had no appetite for cake if it wasn’t tasted from her lips.
He made her tuck his knife, the one his father had given him the day they parted, snug in its quilled sheath, into her stays, in case they met with further trouble on the way. By the time he closed the batten door to the kitchen behind them, dawn was not far off, and when they slipped out through the hidden opening in the hedge, it was light enough that the whores had gone to bed. The first fires of the morning were smoking from the chimneys on Nassau Street and servants were stirring, and the water sellers were pushing their laden carts through the tree-shaded lanes.
They were safe enough now. Too many eyes, too many witnesses for murder at such an hour. This was all to the good, because Jennifer Leighton was dozing on her feet and Severin himself was beginning to feel the lack of sleep as they turned onto John Street.
The little blue house next door to the theater had also been awake all night. There were empty firing glasses, their bowls sticky with the last drops of punch, lined up on the granite porch, and someone’s neck cloth was tied around one of the railings, ends waving like a pennant in the breeze.
The sight cheered Severin. It was his first signal of victory in America. He had failed with the Widow, and it would be a stretch to call his current errand with Burgoyne a success, but he had determined to get Jennifer Leighton home safe, and short of encountering Robert Hallam on the stairs, he was bidding fair to do so.
On the porch Jenny produced a shiny brass key from her pocket, streaming with lilac ribbons that had once matched her unmourned gown. She aimed it at the lock but she was clumsy with exhaustion and missed. Severin took the brass from her cold fingers and let them into the house. There was an unexpected intimacy to it that made him wish that this was her home alone, that he had a pocketbook full of French letters, and that he was staying for the next several hours.
Both parlors were littered with empty plates and glasses. The card tables stood open, their green baize surfaces seeming to stare up, exhausted, at the ceiling. Gleaming mother-of-pearl counters, carved like flowers and fishes, along with a square set bearing a very exalted monogram—a trophy, no doubt, of the Divine Fanny’s—were heaped in piles at the corners. The bones of a whole salmon hung from the chandelier, and beneath it sat a patient gray cat with a put-upon expression; fortunately, there were no unconscious partygoers amongst the litter, and there was no sign of Robert Hallam.
A door opened on the landing above and light spilled out. Frances Leighton descended the stairs in a blue silk night robe with her fair hair unbound. She stopped when her eyes lighted on Devere.
She had not expected to see him, which raised the question of who she had expected. Burgoyne, no doubt, come to whisk Jenny off to London, playing Caesar to her Cleopatra.
The Divine Fanny surveyed her niece, half dressed in her soot-stained stays with her petticoats frosted in castor sugar. Finally she said, “Comedy or tragedy?”
“A little of both,” replied Jennifer Leighton.
Frances nodded at the open shutters in the parlors. “Close them,” she said, “and then come up and tell me the whole story.”
Devere helped Jenny shutter the windows and followed her up the stairs to a snug little parlor that was a study in contrast with the dissipation on the ground floor. It reminded him of the best room in his childhood home, the furniture worn but comfortable, the painted floors bare but clean. There was an old-fashioned daybed with a yellow silk cushion pulled up to the fire, and opposite that, a set of wing chairs in the same frayed damask and a little tilt-top table where Frances Leighton was pouring two glasses of brandy with her elegant ringed hands.
Jenny kicked off her silk shoes and flung herself on the daybed, petticoats streaked with sugar and soot, and accepted a glass of brandy from her aunt. Devere took the fireside chair opposite Frances, and a noticeably fuller glass of brandy, with gratitude.
Seeing the homey little parlor, he could understand how Jenny might live above the greenroom of a theater but remain, to a remarkable age for a woman of her profession, a virgin. The cozy space more resembled the salon of a Boston or London bluestocking than the private precinct of an expensive courtesan. The scene also lent credence to Fairchild’s insistence that his romance with the Divine Fanny abided in chastity.
There were closets on both sides of the fireplace, their lower cabinets fitted with paneled doors, the tops with clear glass to show off the household’s treasures, which in this case were not china plates or sparkling crystal but books. There were bound collections of plays and works in Latin and French, and a small selection of novels from the city’s most popular circulating library.
Jennifer Leighton proceeded to tell their tale. She turned out to be not only a talented playwright and promising actress, but also a skilled raconteuse. The events of the night were only a few hours old, but she had already begun shaping them into a coherent narrative, shaving off the rougher edges, summarizing the duller passages, and burnishing the hero of the piece.
Severin doubted that he had ever been the hero of anyone’s story before. The fact that he had arranged the disastrous assignation to start with was glossed over. Miss Leighton omitted the detail that together they had killed two men in the street, revealing only that he had fought off a pair of footpads. But her description of that action was both evocative and flattering.
She gave no specifics of her encounter with Burgoyne, but said only: “I changed my mind about the value of the general’s patronage. He strove manfully to persuade me that it was necessary to my career and future happiness. At some point I brained him with a bust of one of the Muses.”
Frances Leighton’s plucked brows rose at this, but she made no comment.
There was no mention of moonlit gardens, scented bakeries, trestle tables, or the regrettable want of French letters. When she was done with her recitation, Jennifer Leighton drew her feet up onto the chaise and rested her head against the cushioned arm.
Severin tried not to stare. There was something sensual and uninhibited about her posture that called to him, something decidedly erotic about the sight of his quilled knife hilt peaking above her stays. He had always enjoyed a healthy appetite when it came to the fair sex, but he could not recall a time when it had ever seemed so acutely focused on one girl.
And he had lately surrendered his only real chance to have her. The irony of the situation was not lost on him. He had worked tirelessly for a week to make the Boyne ready to sail, partly out of duty and partly out of a well-developed instinct for self-preservation, but also, it had to be admitted, to prevent Jennifer Leighton from meeting with John Burgoyne. And now it was he who was out of time.
The object of his desire stretched and then curled like a cat on the frayed silk cushion and favored Severin with a sleepy smile. He fancied it was the same expression she would have bestowed on him if he’d found them a sturdy bed, initiated her with care, and then when she was awake to the business, tupped her silly, showing her just how much fun a man and a woman could have when they came together as equals.
He discovered, sitting there watching h
er, that he did not want to leave New York just yet.
His efforts had saved the Boyne a week’s delay. His powers as outlined in Lord Germain’s orders were broad enough that he could forestall Hartwell from sailing for a day. And a night. And under the guise of intelligence gathering he could find a bed and a fire, and perhaps teach Jennifer Leighton how to tie a French letter on him with a firm knot and a jaunty bow.
“It seems we owe Mr. Devere a debt,” said Frances Leighton, interrupting Severin’s erotic idyll.
“I would never have gotten off the Boyne without him,” said Jennifer Leighton, capped by a yawn.
She would not have been on the Boyne at all without him—or her aunt’s connivance—thought Severin, but he was drinking the woman’s excellent brandy and enjoying her fire and it would be churlish to remark upon such a thing, so he kept silent. Frances Leighton was probably no one’s idea of an ideal chaperone, but she was the girl’s aunt, and in any case his mind was running in a different direction entirely, imagining just what forms Jennifer Leighton’s touching appreciation might take in bed.
“The difficulty with debts,” said Frances Leighton, recalling him once more to the present and the prosaic, “is that a woman who makes her own way in the world accumulates a number of them, and sometimes they conflict. You saved my niece, and for that you have my gratitude, but you also tried to kill a woman who was, at one time, like a sister to me—and she very much wants you dead.”
It took a minute for her meaning to penetrate. For a fact, his mind was not working fast, fuddled with exhaustion and blunted with frustrated desire and set free to wander by good brandy.
She meant the Widow. Also known as Angela Ferrers.
The bits and pieces began to fit themselves together in a pattern he should have discerned earlier. It was unusual to keep ipecac in a personal medicine chest. And somewhere in Angela Ferrers’ obscure past had to be an acquaintance with the theater, with wigs and costumes and paints and disguises, with accents and voices and distinctive manners of walking and speaking.
“You work for the Widow, then,” said Severin.
“I did once,” replied Frances Leighton. “I don’t work for Angela anymore, but she helped me on an occasion when I very much needed her, and I still count her among my close friends.”
Jenny’s copper eyebrows knitted. “Your friend in Boston,” she said, and tried to rise. She fell back upon the chaise, swaying. “You never write letters,” she said, with a puzzled look on her face. The brandy glass fell from her boneless fingers and her eyes fluttered closed. She teetered there, clutching the cushion and trying to stay upright.
Severin’s capacity for underestimating women, apparently, was without limits.
“I had a very particular set of talents, you see,” said Frances Leighton. Her face had begun to blur in the candlelight.
“Poisons,” guessed Severin, though the word was thick in his mouth. Memory teased at him, something to do with Frances Leighton, a piece of information he had picked up somewhere, but he could not seize hold of it in his disordered mind.
“Drugs,” she corrected. “My father was an apothecary and he trained me to mix his compounds. I see you are familiar enough with the workings of toxins to know better than to get up.”
He did know better. Movement would only speed whatever bane—nonfatal, he hoped—had been in the brandy that was now coursing through his veins and had already begun to steal his wits. He knew from experience—because he’d had occasion to employ potions himself—that he would just lose consciousness faster that way, and the distance to the floor, when he fell, would only be farther.
Jennifer Leighton lost her struggle with the drugged brandy and slid from the chaise to the ground, quite insensible.
Reflex trumped good sense and training and Devere started toward her. The ceiling lurched and the walls spun. He managed to stand upright, but either the room swayed or he did, and his first step was also his last. The polished surface of the table rushed to meet him. He clutched at it for support. His numb hand knocked the crystal decanter to the floor, where it shattered. He grasped the heavy mahogany pedestal, and knocked it over as he fell.
His shoulder smacked the painted floor. He rolled his head to see Jenny lying beside him, facedown, only inches—that might as well be miles—away. A rivulet of spilled brandy snaked between them and disappeared between the wide pine planks.
He was too deep in the drug’s clutches to move now, but with his ear pressed to the floor he could hear Frances Leighton push back her chair and cross the room, her small feet light on the boards, her steps quick and close together. He heard the latch rise, the door swing open, and the threshold creak. Then a different set of feet entered and walked with a more measured pace to within a few inches of his motionless head.
The important thing was to use what little time he had wisely, to try to gain some control over the situation, to threaten, to bribe, to bargain, with whoever held him in their power. To save himself.
But the words that tumbled from his mouth were not for him.
“What did you give her?” he asked thickly. An associate of the Widow might be capable of anything, and he was unable to tell from the floor if Jennifer Leighton was still breathing.
A shadow fell over him. The wooden heel of a shoe bit into his shoulder and pushed him onto his back, and he was staring up not at the Divine Fanny, but at a far more dangerous woman.
“Juice of poppy,” said Angela Ferrers smoothly. “It was only opium.”
She was as beautiful—in face and form—as he remembered. But her eyes were far, far colder.
“Don’t hurt her,” he tried to say, but his tongue felt furred, would not wrap itself around the words.
The sense must have been plain enough, though, because Angela Ferrers placed one delicate slippered foot upon his chest, leaned over him, and said, “Jenny will wake up in the morning, Mr. Devere. The question is, will you?”
Eleven
Jenny could feel the ropes beneath the mattress digging into her back. It took her a moment to remember why that might be; then she recalled borrowing feathers from her bed to stuff the cushions in the royal box. She had done that for Burgoyne, but Severin Devere had come instead.
Her head ached. She was not prone to migraines like Aunt Frances and she did not usually wake so muddled. She could not immediately recall what day it was, or what play she had acted the night before. There had been the performance on Wednesday . . . that had ended with John Street sacked. And then last night she had gone to Burgoyne.
The events aboard the Boyne came back to her in a rush and she did not know how she could have forgotten them even for a few fleeting moments upon waking, but then she recalled a similar morning, long before, at home in New Brunswick. Her hale and hearty Grandmother Ackerman had dropped dead crossing the street, to the shock and surprise of the whole community and to Jenny, her constant companion, most of all. The Ackermans were venerable Dutch stock, absurdly long-lived, pickled in spirits and thorny as the symbol of their tenacious old church.
Jenny had come home from the funeral and discovered that the house sounded different without Grandmother in it. The rhythm of roof and beam had altered irrevocably and would never be the same again. She had served out the funeral breakfast, the pies that Grandmother had been alive just days before to make, and went to bed that night feeling the hollowness and lack to the marrow of her bones.
She had woken up the next morning without a care in the world and thrown off the covers and then she had remembered. Grandmother was gone. Everything was different.
This morning felt the same. Only it was her dream that had died.
She opened her eyes on the familiar pale ceiling of her room. In lieu of a tester, she and Aunt Frances had pushed the low bed to one wall and strung blue wool curtains across the side. They were closed now. Jenny reached to part them and let the world
in.
The sun was midday bright and the window was open and the bustle and noise of John Street floated in through the casement, reminding Jenny that she was not the only person in New York whose fate had hung in the balance last night.
Severin Devere.
He’d gotten her off the Boyne and saved her from likely imprisonment and hanging. And they’d almost . . . and then it had come to an abrupt end, all for want of French letters, which Aunt Frances had said were scorned by the kind of men whose patronage she sought.
She hadn’t wanted patronage from Severin. She’d wanted . . . his hands, his mouth, his hard, trained body, his wicked invention, and his dangerous smile, for herself. Something pure and untainted by barter or ambition. She’d enjoyed playing opposite him in the street, evading their pursuers, and sparring with him verbally in the empty pleasure garden. After the interlude in the kitchen, though, her memory of the evening was murkier. She could recall passing familiar landmarks on the walk home, the firing glasses lined up on the granite steps, the cold brass heft of the door key in her hand, Severin taking it from her gently and then . . .
The parlor. Aunt Frances. You saved my niece, and for that you have my gratitude, but you also tried to kill a woman who was, at one time, like a sister to me—and she very much wants you dead.
Jenny sat up and pulled the bed curtains wide and looked out. The shutters were open and the room was light, but it was not the brightness of midday; it was the wan sun of a December afternoon.
Frances Leighton sat in the chair beside the window looking down into the street. She was rubbing her temples, as she did sometimes during one of her headaches when she thought Jenny wasn’t looking.
“Are you all right, Aunt Frances?”
The Divine Fanny dropped her hand and looked up, plastering a serene smile across her face. “Of course, dear. Just tired. We had rather a late night, if you recall.”
She did. All too well. “What did you do to Severin?” Jenny asked.
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