Mistress Firebrand

by Donna Thorland

  * * *

  She was a stubborn little thing. He quite liked that about her, but it meant that he was going to have to be cruel. He could not give her his word that her aunt would be spared. He wished he could, but there were some lies that even he could not tell. The woman knew how to get to Angela Ferrers. Even if Severin was not himself capable of breaking that formidable agent, there were other men in government—specialists of a sort—who were.

  He needed Jennifer Leighton to leave. She wasn’t going to release him, which meant he had to release himself, and that was going to require work.

  “Get out, Jenny.”

  “You have earned my help,” she insisted. She took a step forward in the dark. If she discovered that his hands were free, he would have to prevent her from raising the alarm. He did not want to do that. With his legs and chest still tied to the chair, there was no way he could reliably subdue her without the risk of doing her a serious injury.

  “I don’t need the help of a naive little provincial like yourself. You proved too much the rustic to manage John Burgoyne. Don’t fancy yourself my equal, or my savior, now.”

  She blanched at his crudeness. It did not come easily to him, and he could not keep it up for very long, but hopefully he wouldn’t have to.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  “Because you are of no further use to me.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I’m an actor. I know a performance when I see one.”

  “No . . . you don’t. You were completely taken in last night. You thought I was refraining from fucking you on the bakery table out of tender concern for your innocence. That you were special. That is what every opera singer wants to believe. That is how the poxed rake who infected your aunt convinced her to engage with him without protection. I am no different, only more fastidious. I planned to return to John Street tomorrow night with a pocketful of French letters to enjoy the fruits of your touching gratitude.”

  “I will not get another chance to come back,” she warned. “The Widow is out now and Aunt Frances could not stop me, but once the Widow returns I will have no second chance.”

  Neither would Severin. He heard it a moment before she did, footsteps on the other side of the door, the key scraping in the lock.

  Her expressive eyes went wide with fear. She looked frantically for a place to hide, but the small chamber was bare. She took a deep breath as though preparing to step onto the stage, squared her shoulders, and moved to the center of the room.

  The door swung open.

  Robert Hallam stopped on the threshold, his lips a little apart, his eyes fixed on Jenny.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Hallam.

  She edged away from the entrance and Hallam—and a little closer to Severin. Almost within his reach. If she took another step, he would be able to grab her, even tied to the chair. He could threaten to break her neck. Trade her life for his release. It would be a bluff, but Hallam could hardly know that.

  “Devere saved my life last night,” she said.

  “And we have spared his,” replied Hallam. The actor’s attention, fortunately for Severin, was entirely locked on Jenny.

  “The copper mine is a death sentence, and you know it.”

  “It is that, or cold-blooded murder. If we release him, he, or one of his friends in government, will come for Frances. Isn’t that so?” Hallam turned at last to Devere.

  And saw the slack ropes hanging loose behind the chair.

  The actor moved, fast as a snake, to grasp Jenny by the arm and snatch her back out of Severin’s reach.

  She gave a shocked cry.

  “His hands are untied, Jenny,” said Hallam. He stepped in front of the girl, putting himself between her and Severin.

  Her eyes settled on the loose hemp hanging from the back of the chair and her face fell. She knew now how vulnerable she had been with him before Hallam’s arrival.

  And how safe.

  She looked Devere in the eyes and said, “You are indeed a better actor than I gave you credit for.”

  He regretted the performance now. In the process of saving her last night he had glimpsed a spirit more compatible with his than any he had ever known. They should not part like this, with harsh words and too much left unsaid between them. He felt a flash of insight, bittersweet.

  We should not part at all.

  “Go upstairs, Jenny,” said Hallam. “Mr. Devere and I have matters to discuss.”

  “What kinds of matters?” Jennifer Leighton, who was nowhere near as naive as he had accused her of being, asked sharply.

  Hallam’s attire spoke to the business at hand. His hair was not powdered and he wore practical wool breeches and a linen shirt in dark, telling colors that would not show blood. Their tailoring, of course, was impeccable.

  “Mr. Dearborn,” called Hallam.

  The theater’s manager appeared in the door with a lantern.

  “Escort Miss Leighton upstairs,” ordered the man’s employer.

  Jenny looked helplessly from Hallam to Devere and back again. “You’re not going to hurt him.”

  “Of course not,” said Hallam, who was also an excellent actor.

  “It will be all right, Jenny,” said Devere, though he knew it would not.

  Thirteen

  Jenny followed Mr. Dearborn out of the basement. Upstairs the chandeliers over the apron were lit and Angela Ferrers was waiting for her, center stage, dressed now in an elegant gray riding habit. The Widow stood the boards as though born to them, but Jenny suspected that the woman did a great many things with seemingly effortless grace, and she knew from long study that nothing in the theater was effortless. All was craft.

  “Is my aunt really dying?” She could not hold the question back.

  “Did Devere tell you that?”

  “He wanted me to release him.”

  “You understand now why we cannot, I hope.”

  “I do.” Because he would turn Aunt Frances over to the wolves to capture this dangerous creature. “Was he right? Is it syphilis?” Even now, it was difficult to give voice to the word.

  “That was not Devere’s secret to tell.”

  “So it is true.”

  “Yes. It is true.” She did not reach out or offer Jenny any kind of comfort. She was not, that Jenny could see, that kind of woman.

  “How did she come by it?”

  “The same way as anyone else.”

  “I meant, did she get it working for you?”

  “I am no Mother Midnight, Miss Leighton. Seduction is a tool of my trade, not an end in itself. And your aunt never worked for me in that way. She was an established actress with a string of lovers already behind her when first we met. I wanted to learn stagecraft to improve my art, and I sought out the best of teachers.”

  That was not the whole story. “You mean you sought out the best teacher who would be sympathetic to your aims. One who had played Calista from The Fair Penitent, both onstage and off. One who knew she was capable of more than domestic devotion, who had been early denied the world’s acquaintance, and all the joys of freedom, by virtue of her sex.”

  “Whereas you have been denied even the opportunities the Divine Fanny had by virtue of being born and bred on the wrong continent. ‘Wherefore are we born with high souls,’” quoted Angela Ferrers as she gracefully crossed the stage, “‘but to assert our selves, shake off this vile obedience they exact, and claim an equal empire over the world?’”

  Aunt Frances had tried to claim hers, through the narrow channels open to a woman of beauty and intelligence without fortune or rank. She had tried to help Jenny gain access to those same narrow channels, because it was the only route she knew.

  “Why did she not trust me with the truth?”

  “It was not a matter of trust,” said the Widow, taking a s
eat in the wing chair at the edge of the stage. “It was a matter of time. She knew that hers, with you, was limited, and she did not want it to be shadowed by the fate that hung over her last years with Harry. It may console you, Miss Leighton, to know that she always spoke of you as the daughter she never had. She visited America, of course, when you were but a child.”

  “She brought me a box of plays. And a wig,” said Jenny.

  “She and I were working together at that time,” said the Widow. “She came back from her visit with your family and vowed she would return for you, so your promise wouldn’t go to waste in New Bumpkin, as she dubbed it. You were, apparently, a prodigy at eleven, reading everything you could get your hands on and spinning the most fantastical stories. She wanted very much to take you with her then—to raise you as hers with Harry, in the little house they kept in London—but your parents thought that sort of upbringing would fit you for nothing but whoring. Their limited experience and ambitions meant your own father and mother could not see you for who you were, for what you might become.”

  But Aunt Frances had. “Devere said that she killed Harry, for giving her syphilis.”

  Angela Ferrers raised one plucked eyebrow. “You have lived with your aunt these past two years. Do you really think her capable of murder?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have your answer.”

  “I do not think that is the whole truth,” said Jenny, who was learning to see through this woman’s evasions.

  “Then take it up with Frances. Tell her you know about her condition and press her about Harry. Shatter the happiness she has found here with you, and this remarkable swain of hers, who is content to read and drink brandy with her. A rare bird, that one.”

  Fairchild. Jenny had not known, though she should have guessed. There had been so much she had not understood, so much she had not valued sufficiently. “You want me to lie to Aunt Frances.”

  “No, not lie. Act. Act as though nothing has changed, or you will color the rest of your time together with desperation—with anxiety—she does not now feel or need.”

  “How long does she have?” Time had been slipping away without her knowledge these past two years.

  “That is impossible to say. Harry lasted a decade, with his health waxing and waning. The disease is unpredictable. It disfigured her lover, but it has entirely spared her beauty.”

  “But it is taking her mind, a thing she would gladly have traded her beauty to be valued for.”

  “Yes. Frances gambled . . . and lost. Or perhaps not. She is going to die, badly, but she has lived boldly, and that is not something most women—or men for that matter—can say.”

  “She is going to die,” seethed Jenny, voice breaking, “because her only choice was to cater to the selfish whims of powerful men or to live in obscurity.” She loathed showing so much emotion in front of this cold and calculating woman, but she was angry, at the world, at her aunt, at herself.

  “We cannot choose the circumstances into which we are born,” said the Widow. “Frances made the best of hers. The question you must ask yourself is: are you bold enough to do the same?”

  “Devere warned you would try to recruit me.”

  “Devere was wrong. You don’t have the stomach for our work.”

  Jenny wanted nothing to do with Angela Ferrers, but her dismissal somehow pricked. It was too much like Burgoyne’s. “I brought you Jack Brag’s invasion plans.”

  “Is that what they are calling him now? I like that. I do hope it catches on. So much more fitting than ‘Gentleman Johnny.’ The plans will come in handy, provided he doesn’t simply publish them in the London Times himself prior to embarking.”

  “You spared Devere in exchange for them.”

  “I did not say they had no value, but burglary and espionage are different trades. The former can be practiced by anyone with a light step and lighter fingers. The latter can only be practiced—in the long term—by men and women who can purge themselves of sentiment and survive without strong attachments.”

  “Devere is not devoid of sentiment.”

  “No,” Angela Ferrers admitted, “he is not. That is why he is tied up in a cellar right now and I . . . am not. He should have garroted me—naked and unguarded—in that bed we shared in Boston, but he hesitated. You see where that has led him.”

  Devere had told her he had tried to turn the Widow, and that, failing that, he had tried to assassinate her. It had all sounded so bloodless. He had neglected to mention that they had been lovers.

  It set Jenny’s teeth on edge to think of Devere in bed with this woman—sharing confidences, endearments, bodies—no matter that he had never met, nor even heard of, Jennifer Leighton when the tryst had taken place. But he had not told her, she was certain, because he did have feelings for her. All doubts on that score had fled from her mind when she had seen the slack ropes hanging from the back of the chair.

  She had been alone with him in the cellar for a quarter of an hour, and he had not been helpless. He could have overpowered her, even in those final moments—used her to force Bobby to release him. Yet he had not—even when he knew what awaited him in Connecticut. That spoke to a depth of feeling she could not deny. He had arranged her meeting with Burgoyne, but she could not blame him for it, any more than she could blame her aunt for following the only paths and patterns open to her. And in all other ways he had acted nobly toward her.

  She had, as Aunt Frances predicted, finally met a man to tempt her, and she was obliged to betray him, because he cherished an illusion about himself that was as flawed as her imagining of Drury Lane.

  Devere, she could see, had good reason for keeping his liaison with the Widow secret, but Jenny also understood now that people like Angela Ferrers gave nothing away without a purpose. The casual disclosure of their coupling, the telling detail of her own nakedness—to limn a more indelible image in Jenny’s mind—the Widow meant to harden her heart against the man. More than that, as long as Angela Ferrers thought she cared for Devere, it was leverage that the Widow could use to manipulate her—a dangerous attachment.

  “I am not holding a tender for Severin Devere,” lied Jenny.

  “I beg leave to doubt that, Miss Leighton. You are developing nicely as an actress, but you are hardly on the Divine Fanny’s level yet. Do not allow Devere’s chivalrous gesture and handsome face to sway you. You have the potential to be more than a powerful man’s plaything or a poor man’s helpmeet, even if I do not think your gifts fit you for my business. You move like an actress, which is an asset in any profession. You have some skill with a blade, I’m told, at least onstage, which is useful. But you lack nerve.”

  “I stabbed a man last night.”

  “But you did not, I think, do the killing. And you didn’t have the resolve to see the matter through with Burgoyne, to engage his passion, his trust, his confidence. Such a small sacrifice.”

  She relived it vividly, the taste of the brandy in her mouth, the feeling of his warm flesh in her trapped hand, his knees pinning her petticoats to the chair, his breath coming hot and fast against her temple. All that, but it was his words that raised bile in her throat.

  “It was his condescension I could not stomach.”

  “That is a feeling you have in common with the fifteen thousand men camped outside of Boston. They too are tired of condescension, and of being told they should be grateful that all their most important decisions are made for them.”

  “That is why Aunt Frances let me go to Burgoyne. Against her wishes, and advice. So I could enjoy the privilege of making my own mistakes.”

  “Was she wrong?” asked Angela Ferrers.

  “No.” Jenny shook her head. “I would never have learned any other way.”

  “Fortunately not all Americans are as hardheaded as you Leightons. They do not have to live through injustice and suffer thwarted ambition thems
elves. They can experience—and triumph over—those things vicariously. And no matter what Congress dictates, they are hungry to do so.”

  At last, Jenny knew where this was leading. “Through the theater, you mean.”

  “There is a good reason that Parliament controls the licensing of the playhouses in London. They know that satire is a powerful weapon, that it can sway public opinion and bring governments down. That is why Walpole drafted the Licensing Act in the first place, to ensure that the English theater would be nothing but bread and circuses. Dry bread, saccharine circuses. No man repeats the contents of a proclamation, or a sermon, to his fellows. But give him a tale worth telling about a hero—or a heroine—worth rooting for, and he will declaim the prologue, the play, and the afterpiece for you.”

  Angela Ferrers was trying to recruit her, but not as a spy. And the woman was right. Jenny did not have the stomach for espionage. She did, however, know how to spin a story. The real dilemma was whose story she should tell.

  “The great difference,” said Jenny, “between me and the Rebels presently besieging Boston is that a change of government might actually win them their rights. Mine will forever be limited by my sex.”

  “And here I thought you were a bold thinker, Miss Leighton, full of ambition.”

  “I was. I have become a realist.”

  “A realist would tell you that an army of farmers and shopkeepers could not keep ten thousand regulars bottled up in Boston. History is not made by men—or women—who see only what is plain before them. It is made by visionaries. Small minds turn inward after an encounter such as you had with Burgoyne—they retreat to safety, and diminish themselves. A greater one may instead look beyond its narrow demesnes, perhaps for the first time, and translate individual misfortune to universal experience.”