Mistress Firebrand

by Donna Thorland

  “I drugged his brandy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I owed a debt to Angela Ferrers.”

  “The woman he calls the Widow?”

  “The same,” said Frances Leighton.

  “And you wrote to her in Boston. You told her Severin was here in New York. And she sent the killers who attacked us in the street.”

  Aunt Frances looked away. “I could not have foreseen that you would be in his company.”

  “But you knew she wanted to kill him.”

  Aunt Frances looked her direct in the eye. “That is the business they are in.”

  “That you were in too,” said Jenny.

  “Not really,” said Frances. “Never like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “With such conviction. That is what makes them dangerous, people like Devere, people like Angela. They entertain no doubts. They never hesitate. They just act. And people get killed. Sometimes at their hands, and sometimes at the hands of others, but such distinctions make little difference to those bereft, and none at all to the dead.”

  Jenny had seen it firsthand. She had helped Severin dispatch two men in the street. He was a killer. She could not deny that. But he was also something more. He could have arranged a far nastier accident for their pursuers in the burnt house, or sprung back over the wall to take them unawares after they blundered into the pit. He could have left the mob to its own devices and Jenny to her fate in the riot, because Burgoyne had been safely aboard the Boyne at the time. He could have turned her over to Hartwell aboard the ship, or left her to find her own way home at the dock, especially when he must have suspected the danger to himself.

  “You are wrong about Devere,” said Jenny. “He saved my life.”

  “Because he wanted you.”

  Jenny flushed.

  “That much,” said her aunt with asperity, “was obvious in the greenroom. Men will sometimes act foolishly over a woman they desire, but they rarely make real sacrifices for women like us. Honor is reserved for their wellborn wives and sisters.”

  “He made Burgoyne look like a fool in order to spirit me off the Boyne.”

  “Yet he did not challenge him to a duel or bring him before a court of law.”

  “To be fair, Burgoyne was unconscious and there is no court of law in New York at the moment.”

  “So Devere did what was expedient,” said Frances Leighton. “He smoothed over a potentially embarrassing episode with a highly ranked officer and an actress who would have been presumed a whore, and if I did not mistake the way you were mooning at each other last night, he took the opportunity to exploit your gratitude.”

  “He didn’t, actually,” said Jenny, “because we had no French letters.”

  The Divine Fanny’s face betrayed her surprise. “Well, there is a point in his favor, but it does not change what he is.”

  “And what is that?” Jenny asked.

  “A wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Aunt Frances. “He may dress and speak like a gentleman, but he is not.”

  “This is America, Aunt Frances. Indian blood is not so very uncommon here. And he makes no secret of his origins. He told me he was born on the frontier.”

  “But not how, or to whom. It is an old scandal, but it was fresh enough still in London when I made my debut on the stage. Devere was born on the frontier. His noble father was a second son with an appetite for land and he dragged his wife and their firstborn, Severin’s older brother, into the borderlands to get it. Unfortunately the man lacked the temperament for taming a wilderness. He abandoned his family to the care of servants in favor of the lure of town life.”

  A fair number of the men who frequented the greenroom kept their wives and children on estates in the Hudson Highlands or in the Jerseys. “Husbands like that are not so very uncommon,” said Jenny.

  Aunt Frances shrugged. “Men are what they are. The Deveres had, I heard, a fine house and many servants and hired men, but no contacts or goodwill among the Indians, something essential to living in their domains. Servants and hired men look to their own when trouble threatens. Accounts vary, probably because they are to no one’s credit, but this much is certain. There was a raid on the house. Devere’s mother and her son were taken by Indians, and by the time his father came back it was too late to track them. Elizabeth Devere disappeared into the wilderness with one child. Ten years later, with a war brewing, she returned from that wilderness with two. It has always been assumed that Severin Devere is the get of the savage who raped her.”

  “But he calls himself Devere,” said Jenny. And a bastard surely could not.

  “His mother claimed, and her husband did not dispute, that she was pregnant when she disappeared. By the time she came back, the elder Devere had inherited an earldom and wanted an heir. He had been trying for years to get his wife declared dead so he could remarry, but reports of her survival continued to reach Albany, so the courts refused to grant his suit. And indeed, she was very much alive, and she had brought his firstborn back to him. No doubt when husband and wife were reunited they struck some mutually agreeable bargain about her bastard.”

  “What will happen to him now?” asked Jenny.

  “I would worry more about what will happen to you,” said a cool voice from the doorway.

  The woman on the threshold gave the appearance of being tall, but Jenny knew that height could be an illusion, increased by pattens and heels and enhanced by the color, shape, and cut of an ensemble. The lady—her confidence marked her as such—wore head-to-toe deep blue worsted with a subtle sheen, the gown plain in front, the petticoat sewn from the same fabric. It emphasized her slenderness, the length of her neck, the elegance of her simply dressed hair. This was free of powder, but Jenny could not tell if the color was the woman’s own or altered with dyes.

  “You’re Angela Ferrers,” said Jenny.

  “That is one of the names I use,” said the lady, with a nod of her head.

  “You tried to kill Severin.”

  “He tried to kill me first.”

  “That is a child’s response.”

  “And you are not playing a children’s game,” said the lady softly. “You are bargaining for the life of a man whom you have just learned is a savage.”

  Jenny snorted. It was not a pretty sound. “Severin Devere did not kill your assassins with a war whoop and a tomahawk. He skewered one neatly with a sword and broke the other’s neck with a very modern wrestler’s maneuver, in perfect silence. He refrained from killing the others, even when opportunity presented itself. His job was to protect Burgoyne, as Aunt Frances said, but the general was safely aboard the Boyne, and he risked himself to save me from the mob during the riot anyway. An aberration for a spy, but hardly a savage one. Apart from an unfortunate susceptibility to dangerous women, he does what is expected of him. I cannot imagine a man more English.”

  “You are perceptive, Miss Leighton, but you have missed a crucial fact about Severin Devere, the very root of the matter. Grasp that, and you grasp everything. He is more English than the English because he has to be. When Earl Devere went into the borderlands to retrieve his wife ten years after he misplaced her, he wanted the eldest son, Julian, who he was certain was his heir. The Mohawk Ashur Rice who held Elizabeth Devere handed her and both boys over, without a fight. Severin Devere is a man without a country. Neither his Indian nor his English father wanted him. His own half brother barely acknowledges him. Only by acting where others hesitate in the service of the British government has Devere made a life for himself. A man like him will not give up such hard-earned status lightly. He saved you last night, but he would be obliged to throw your aunt to the wolves tomorrow if we freed him—because he knows that through Frances he can get to me.”

  “What do you intend to do with him?” Jenny asked.

  “Devere’s fate, until I have determined
how best to protect you and your aunt, will remain an open question. Let us speak of yours, now that Hallam knows you defied him, and both London and John Street are lost to you.”

  “Bobby knows?”

  “When one wishes to hold an unconscious man prisoner in another’s cellar, some explanation is usually required. As you see, everything has its price. Devere is still alive, but it has cost you something. What will you give so that he might keep on breathing?”

  * * *

  Devere woke in total darkness. He was lashed upright to a chair, and the ropes circling his chest made his bruised ribs ache and his breath come short. His hands were bound behind him and his feet together in front of him, and he could not, at first, feel either. When circulation returned to his fingers, he discovered that the knots had been tied expertly. When the blood returned to his feet, he could feel that his shoes and stockings had been taken. The bare skin of his heels rested on cold, damp stone. Not surprising, if the Widow was involved, because she was a professional, and the woman never left anything to chance.

  He was not gagged, which indicated he was someplace that no one would hear his shouts . . . or screams. Never a good sign.

  And even more worrying, he could hear no other breathing, detect no other warmth in the darkness. Jennifer Leighton was not with him. He ought not to find that perversely satisfying withal, but he did. A wave of schoolboy giddiness washed over him. The aunt had drugged her too, which meant the girl was not in sympathy with their plans for Severin.

  Which told him that, unlike all of his other affairs since adulthood, everything that had happened between them last night was real and meaningful. And that he had to get out of here.

  He tested the ropes first. The ones around his wrists had indeed been tied well. Extricating himself would cost him skin and blood, possibly even a few small broken bones.

  It would have to be his left hand, then. He would need his right to pick the lock of whatever door separated him from freedom. And to deal with whoever might be guarding him beyond it. That was provided that his lock picks were still in his pocket. If they had been taken, there was another, smaller set, sewn into the seams of his coat, along with ten gold sovereigns and ten silver shillings, concealed inside the leather-covered buttons.

  He was not given enough time. He was still bound helpless to the chair, blood running down his hands from his efforts, when the world erupted into noise and light. A door opened, scraping loudly across the floor, and a lantern blinded him. Too late to shut his eyes against it, he looked away to give his vision a precious moment to adjust. A gust of warm, dry air hit him, and he realized how very cold his prison had been.

  He turned back to the light. The nimbus resolved into the graceful shape of a woman carrying a lantern.

  “I shan’t apologize to you for the quality of the hospitality,” said Angela Ferrers, “as it is still better than a coffin.”

  “To what do I owe your forbearance?” he asked. Her perfume was different. It had been neroli in Boston. It was gardenias now. He thought neroli might have suited better, but then, he was not certain he really knew her at all.

  She smiled. It was an unusual smile, slightly crooked and full of delight—a glimpse, perhaps, of the real woman behind the nested masks. He felt, even now, the pull of her. Like attracts like.

  She set the lantern atop a crate so that light shone down on him, and she took his chin in her slender, agile hands and tilted it so that he was forced to look up at her. “Are you vain, Devere? Would you like me to say it is your pretty . . . face?”

  “You liked it well enough in Boston.”

  She shrugged. “That was a game we both played.”

  “You seemed to enjoy it at the time.”

  “And that is a game all women are obliged to play, on occasion. Did you really hope to turn me in your bed?”

  He tasted bile. He felt, no doubt, somewhat as Jennifer Leighton had in the hands of John Burgoyne.

  She laughed and her hand left his chin. “The noble savage act, I am sorry to inform you, did not entirely move me. Better had you shown me the real Severin Devere, as you did Jennifer Leighton. She was moved.”

  There was a crate opposite his chair. The Widow pushed it, wisely, several feet back before lowering herself onto it, so that if he took the desperate chance of heaving himself, chair and all, at her, his effort would fall short.

  She sat, arranging her blue wool skirts, which were every bit as sensual as the cool touch of silk, on a woman who knew how to use them. From her pocket she drew a folded sheaf of papers, written in a familiar hand.

  “Where did you get those?” he asked.

  “From Jennifer Leighton, as it happens. In exchange for your life.”

  Burgoyne’s plans, which Severin had locked in his cabin for safekeeping. Where he had also put Jennifer Leighton—for safekeeping—while he called the steward and fabricated his tale and left instructions that the Boyne was to sail without him if he did not return.

  Jenny had stolen them.

  Burgoyne’s manuscript was a rough outline of the plan he would present to the King in London. King George, of course, knew little of military strategy and had no firsthand experience of America. Severin understood both. The plans were daring—possibly even a work of genius. The colonies were vast, their peoples spread over varied terrain, their cities and towns—the traditional objectives of European wars—unimportant. It was controlling travel, the waterways, the corridors of trade—north to south and east to west—that truly mattered.

  Burgoyne’s strategy, if successful, would cut New England off from the rest of the colonies and secure Britain’s hold on America. Jennifer Leighton was unlikely to grasp all of that, but she was not stupid, and she must have understood the value of the papers she held in her hands. Must have known they could be traded for a measure of security from the Liberty Boys, for herself or for her beloved theater.

  She had instead traded them for Severin Devere, to this very dangerous woman.

  Foolish, lovely Jenny. He had saved her from Burgoyne, but that had just been out of the frying pan and into the fire, because the Widow was in many ways a far greater threat.

  “Jennifer Leighton is nothing to do with you and me,” he said.

  “What a very ungracious thing to say. I will admit she surprised me,” said Angela Ferrers, to whom he had made vigorous love in a performance, he now realized, worthy of the stage, but to whom he had shown nothing of his real self.

  “Frances proved a weak reed, but Jenny . . . now, Jenny is promising.”

  He remembered Frances Leighton’s admission about Angela Ferrers last night. She helped me once, when I very much needed her. That, along with the rumors he had pieced together about the Divine Fanny’s former, very dead lover. “Harry’s wife accused Frances Leighton of murder,” he guessed.

  “It was never brought to trial,” replied Angela Ferrers.

  “But it’s true, isn’t it? She killed Harry. And you supplied her with the poison.”

  “I helped her when she needed me. As friends are wont to do.”

  “I didn’t know you had any.”

  “They are, admittedly, most often a liability in our line of work. An indulgence we can ill afford. They may even lead to rambling conversations in damp basements.”

  “Harry wasn’t political. That makes Frances Leighton a murderess. And poison is a coward’s weapon.”

  “Poison is a woman’s weapon, you mean. Yet one you and I both use. What a lovely English fiction, to pretend that it is only employed by the fair sex. Frances is not lacking in intelligence or courage. Only in ruthlessness.”

  “I beg to differ. She sent Jenny into Burgoyne’s hands unprotected, exposing her to the same fate.”

  “Don’t be so quick to judge the Divine Fanny. She is what the whims of powerful men have made of her. And she only came to America to see fo
r one last time the lovely Jenny. And Jenny—well, Jenny has proven far more interesting than I anticipated.”

  “Your quarrel is with me,” said Devere. “Leave her out of this.”

  “You would be dead now if it was not for her,” said Angela Ferrers bluntly.

  He had not wanted Jennifer Leighton ruined by John Burgoyne, but the Widow posed a threat to more than her virtue and self-regard. “You have embroiled her in treason.”

  “And you, dear sir, offered her up on a platter to John Burgoyne. Who, after all, would care about the honor of an obscure provincial girl of undistinguished birth and no fortune, who fancies herself a playwright and an actress?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You again, Devere. When push came to shove. And that is why you are still alive. Because I think it is just possible that you may remember that you are an American yourself.”

  “Being born in a manger does not make a man an animal.”

  “Ah, if only your masters were so enlightened. But they are not, are they? You have worked to be more English than the English, these past twenty years, and they barely tolerate you. It soothes their consciences to send a man like you to carry out their injustices, grand and petty, because they can blame the butcher’s bill—blame their savageries—on your heritage.”

  “Are you trying to turn me now?” he asked. “Because this chair is considerably less comfortable than the bed I found for us. Though I am sure we could improvise nicely on the crate. Untie me, and I will demonstrate.”

  “No, thank you,” she replied, meeting his eye. “A command performance will not be necessary. I somehow doubt you would show me the genuine passion you demonstrated for Jennifer Leighton, and outside professional demands, I have no tolerance anymore for the counterfeit kind. I cannot, of course, release you. Nor can I keep you tied up in Hallam’s basement forever.”

  Here was the crux of the matter. She could slit his throat now and he would be able to do nothing to stop her. He’d try, of course. His body was already tensed to upset the chair if she approached.