Mistress Firebrand Page 2

  He meant his farce, being rehearsed for a benefit night at Faneuil Hall, though Severin had never known the proceeds of such events to reach any of the advertised widows and orphans.

  “Give me leave to doubt the noteworthiness of a general missing the odd theatrical event when his country is at war,” said Severin.

  “War is theater,” said Burgoyne. “I should have thought that a man with your . . . expertise . . . regarding the savages of North America would know that. Do the Mohawk not paint their faces before going into battle?”

  Severin’s Mohawk ancestry was one of the reasons he had been chosen to fetch Burgoyne, so he might advise the general, who desired to employ native allies in his proposed campaign next year. The difficulty was that Burgoyne had proved disposed to respect the opinion of an Englishman—any Englishman—on native questions more than that of a man who had lived among the Mohawk, especially one the general believed was tainted by Indian blood, like Severin.

  “Think of our visit to New York as a mummer’s play, then,” advised Severin, “and perform the role accordingly. Lord Germain does not wish the Rebels informed of your movements, sir. There must be no more transactions with Van Dam, or anyone else in New York.”

  Burgoyne sighed. “I do not need your advice on dealing with shopkeepers, Devere. If I had not used my name, Van Dam would have sent me an inferior vintage at double the price.”

  “And now he will make up his loss on the wine by peddling the news that you are in New York. For those alert to affairs of consequence, your recall to London will tell them all they need to know about the character of the next campaign.” Generals Gage and Howe had always treated the colonials like brothers, because they were decent men and they had ties to America. They were doing everything within their power to avoid bloodshed and bring about a peaceful resolution to the conflict. “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne would not.

  The general made a little show of setting down his fork and leaned back in his chair. “Have you considered that such news might serve to scare sense into these people?”

  It was a widely held opinion that the Americans were spoiled children, that a show of force was all that was needed to bring them into line.

  “Lexington Green and Bunker Hill,” said Severin, “argue otherwise.”

  Burgoyne waved away the two biggest British military disasters in recent memory. Evidently he not only preferred an Englishman’s understanding of Indians, but gave little weight to an Indian’s views on the English. “Poor planning and poorer leadership.”

  Severin drew the other letter from his pocket. In the close quarters of the cabin he discovered that it was scented with more than scandal. It had a hint of orange about it. Not the sophisticated tincture of neroli, but the bright perfume of freshly peeled fruit.

  It made Devere long for uncomplicated pleasures, for warm summer afternoons far from war and intrigue. For a moment, Severin did not want to part with the smooth, scented envelope.

  But he had a point to make. “We have already been the target of sabotage.” The spoiled beef in the Boyne’s stores had almost undoubtedly been poisoned, and the ship’s spar had been intentionally damaged. “Now that the Americans know you are here, they will try again.”

  “Let them,” said Burgoyne, breaking the seal and scanning the letter. For a moment the bouquet of orange intensified, then faded. Then Burgoyne barked with laughter and tossed the letter, along with a slender booklet, to Severin.

  “An actress,” he crowed. “One enterprising harlot knows I am in New York. So much for your ‘consequences.’ One rather provincial invitation to sin.”

  Severin picked the letter up off the table. He noted the round feminine hand once more. It was the product of a thorough education in penmanship, every character neat and well formed. There were no showy flourishes, which indicated restraint and taste. Scarcely the hallmarks of a harlot. But the contents, calculated to elicit Burgoyne’s interest, roused Severin’s suspicions.

  The missive opened with effusive praise for Burgoyne’s skills as a playwright and closed with an invitation to occupy the royal box at the John Street Theater. This was accompanied by a printed pamphlet-bound play, The American Prodigal, by Miss Jennifer Leighton.

  Burgoyne shed his banyan and reached for his coat.

  “You are not going to accept her invitation,” said Severin.

  “Of course I am. It’s the last opportunity I’ll have for a gallop until we reach Portsmouth.”

  “Possibly at the cost of your life.”

  “Not unless the little rustic is well and truly poxed.”

  That was the far more common contradiction of their age. That an English gentleman could be as devoted to his wife as Burgoyne was to Lady Charlotte, but cavalierly betray her when opportunity presented. Fidelity, for men like Burgoyne, meant not keeping a mistress. It did not mean forgoing convenient “gallops.”

  That still didn’t make it safe. “New York is not London, General, and the John Street Theater is not Drury Lane. In ’sixty-six, after the business with the stamps, a mob of Liberty Boys tore down the theater on Chapel Street and whipped the players from the Battery to the palisade. This could be an innocent”—if somewhat gauche, he thought to himself—“invitation, or it might be a plot to lure you into the city and capture or kill you under the cover of a riot. I cannot allow you to go.”

  Burgoyne tied his neck cloth and rummaged through a jewel case. “I genuinely don’t see how you can prevent me.”

  “I can take measures.”

  Burgoyne stiffened. For a moment all was stillness in the cabin and the cries of the sailors at work above could clearly be heard. Then Burgoyne set the diamond pin he had just selected on the table with a click and looked Severin over. “That,” he said coldly, “is why your kind make such good informers and spies. Honor offers you no impediment.”

  “So I have been given to understand,” said Severin smoothly. That, he knew, was how the government saw him: as a ruthless savage who made a useful tool. It was not how he saw himself. Until recently he had not cared much what others thought of him. Lately, since Boston, that had begun to change.

  He pocketed Jennifer Leighton’s orange-scented letter.

  “Very well,” said Burgoyne. “We are both men of the world. You desire that I should stay aboard the Boyne, and I desire to bed a pretty actress before we sail.”

  “You don’t even know that she’s pretty. Or that she exists at all.” The oranges, though, were real enough.

  “Then find out for me,” said Burgoyne, retaking his seat. “And if she’s pretty, bundle her back to the Boyne.”

  “I am not a procurer.”

  “Of course not.”

  Burgoyne left the words unspoken. What you are is scarcely more honorable.

  And he was right, because men like Severin gave him the luxury of being right, of being honorable. Severin did what was necessary, and carried it on his conscience, so that others did not have to.

  “Give me your word, as a gentleman,” said Severin, “that you will remain aboard the Boyne and write no more letters to shore, and I will go fetch you your actress.”

  Two

  Jenny stood in the wings waiting for her cue. She could feel the tidelike pull of the stage, the lure of the flickering footlights. She played only the small roles, the maids and messengers and next-door neighbors with few lines. Acting was not her talent, but that did not diminish the thrill of being part of the performance.

  Aunt Frances, of course, was the real star. The sweetheart of Drury Lane. A name that sold tickets, even if sometimes she was not entirely herself.

  Like tonight. The Divine Fanny was wandering. Jenny knew the signs, could read volumes in the dreamy look on her aunt’s lovely, distracted face. Frances might be standing at the center of the raked stage, framed by pastoral scenery meant to evoke Arcadia, but her usually sharp mind
was somewhere else.

  The audience had not yet noticed, but Bobby Hallam, John Street’s manager and leading man, had. He put himself right in her line of sight to deliver his speech, demanding her attention.

  “My greatest fear, madam,” he declaimed in a rich tenor that carried to the back of the house, “is not that I should lose this duel, but that I should acquit myself in such a manner as to disgrace my ancestors.”

  Jenny mouthed the words along with him. She knew every line, because she had written them. She waited for Aunt Frances’ response, but the silence lengthened, and the audience grew restless.

  Far, far too late, she replied: “I cannot speak to disgrace, sir, but I fancy they might find your intemperate haste to join them a little . . . disappointing.”

  Her delivery saved the joke. Almost. The audience, catching the conceit like a bouquet, tittered. Not the gale of laughter that usually swept the gallery, but it was something.

  That made twice this week. Frances’ spells were getting more frequent, harder to hide from Bobby Hallam and the ticket-buying public.

  Jenny couldn’t help but look up at the royal box where she hoped Burgoyne sat. Her heart sank when she heard it. The beginnings of the speech that had made Aunt Frances’ career. The lines that had brought her to the attention of David Garrick, the role that had caught the eye of her first titled lover.

  She had gone off book entirely.

  “How hard is the condition of our sex?” asked Frances Leighton, turning to the audience. “Through every stage of life the slave of man?”

  “How now?” asked Bobby Hallam, who didn’t know Nicholas Rowe’s play at all, because it wasn’t in the company’s repertoire. “It’s to be pistols at dawn,” Bobby asserted, trying to draw Aunt Frances back into the scene. “Will you pray for me?”

  Apparently she would not. Aunt Frances ignored Bobby completely. She was no longer playing Mistress Spartan in Jenny’s American Prodigal, but was reciting Calista’s speech from The Fair Penitent.

  “In all the dear delightful days of youth, a rigid father dictates to our wills—”

  “Surely not so rigid,” Bobby coaxed, taking her arm.

  Frances shook him off and walked downstage to the footlights, her leonine grace and bold striped polonaise drawing every eye in the house. “And deals out pleasure with a scanty hand.”

  The stage manager, Mr. Dearborn, touched Jenny’s shoulder and spoke in her ear. “It’s a fine speech. But it’s not in the play. Shall I lower the curtain?”

  It was how Bobby had dealt with Frances’ little spells in the past. If the Divine Fanny couldn’t be coaxed back to book, Bobby ordered the curtain lowered and rushed Miss Richards, who sang prettily, out onto the apron.

  It would save the show and safeguard their box office, but the humiliation would crush Aunt Frances. Jenny had seen it happen, and she could not do that to Fanny again.

  She had to get her aunt off the apron, gently, so she could come back to herself in private. Jenny doubted any of this would impress John Burgoyne, but she couldn’t worry about that right now.

  Upstage, Bobby Hallam nodded his powdered head, an unmistakable signal for the curtain to close—unless Jenny could stop it.

  * * *

  Devere made his way on foot north from the Battery. New York was a tiny city, barely a mile from Fort George to the palisade. The town resembled less an English port and more a Garden of Eden. Every lane was shaded by towering elms and beeches: a verdant roof in summer, now an autumn canopy of fiery gold.

  Severin followed Broad Street, lined with the painted-brick mansions of the rich, to the intersection of Nassau and Wall streets, where a subtle change took place. The paint on the houses was not as bright here, the pigments cheaper, the coats thinner. The dwellings grew smaller, then began to jostle with shops and taverns. One thing remained constant, though: the presence of slaves. New York was the Sparta of the new world, a quarter of her population in chains, all of them obliged to carry a lantern after dark, a legacy of the slave plot to burn New York in ’41.

  Slavery gave the lie to all the Liberty Boys’ cries for freedom, but that didn’t make the rabble any less dangerous, so Severin wore a more than ornamental sword at his hip and kept a close eye on the alleys that opened between houses.

  He turned left onto John Street and found the theater on his right. It looked like most provincial British playhouses—long, narrow, and featureless—but at home it would have been constructed of brick or local stone. Here it was clapboard painted a deep, dark red that appeared almost black in the failing light, save where lanterns brought the color to life.

  Severin would not have paused in the bare, cold lobby save for the playbill pinned to the chipped white paneling. It was the name, printed in bold capitals above the list of comedies, that caught his eye: Frances Leighton.

  The sweetheart of Drury Lane, who had spurned a titled lover for a merely rich and talented one. An accomplished woman, to be sure. Severin recalled she had a volume of well-received poems and a novel to her name, but scandal, in the form of a dead lover and the man’s vengeful wife, dogged her.

  “I didn’t know you were in New York, Devere.”

  The voice was familiar to Severin. Though it had been many years since he had heard it, the effect was like listening to an orchestra strike up a favorite air. It filled him with sudden nostalgia and threw his isolation and loneliness into high relief.

  “And I thought the garrison had withdrawn to the safety of the Asia after the Liberty Boys stormed the Battery,” Severin replied, turning to face Courtney Fairchild. His old classmate was not wearing his usual red army regimentals but a suit of fine worsted like Severin.

  “Just so,” agreed Courtney, “but the officers are tolerated in the town so long as we dress in mufti.”

  Severin was glad to hear it. After two weeks of Burgoyne’s company, seeing Fairchild, who had been more brotherly to him than his own brother when they were at school, was a balm for the soul. “I have tickets for the royal box,” said Severin. “Would you care to join me? Unless you have other plans.”

  “I’d like that very much.” Courtney beamed and projected the same manly bonhomie that had seemed oversized for his scrawny frame at school but suited the bluff soldier he had become. “The Divine Fanny is performing tonight and everything but the gallery is sold out.”

  Inside, the actual theater was warm and surprisingly pretty in a provincial way. The galleries were painted in a classical scheme of swags and garlands, all pale green and rosy pink, with the names of the great English dramatists—Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dryden, Rowe—inscribed in cartouches above the stage. Including the pit and the gallery, the theater probably seated seven or eight hundred, though barely half that number were in attendance. The “royal” box was just a small enclosure overhanging the apron above the proscenium doors.

  The play was surprisingly enjoyable. Severin forgot entirely about spotting Burgoyne’s harlot and became caught up in the drama. The characters might have been stock, but they were well drawn and had been cleverly tweaked for an American setting. The country bumpkin in homespun was fresh from a Massachusetts farm, the charming rake in silk was a Dutch patroon, and the Divine Fanny played an aristocratic Philadelphia lady of fashion and prodigious carnal appetite. It was a knowing slant on Frances Leighton’s offstage persona, an inside joke for the sophisticated theatergoer.

  “They say she has no protector in New York, though Van Dam has offered a fortune and Stanwyck is known to be paying her bills in hopes of future gratitude,” whispered Courtney.

  “Are you in the running?” Severin asked with amusement. Frances Leighton was slender, graceful, and impossible to look away from. Only her leading man was able to hold his own onstage with her. The other players came and went leaving little impression—save for the somewhat mousy girl acting the part of the maid, the younger brother, and the g
ossipy neighbor, in a series of equally unattractive costume changes. Severin noticed her only because of the distinctive way she darted on and offstage.

  Yet for all of the Divine Fanny’s obvious appeal, Severin did not find her greatly attractive. She was a little too like a certain lady he had met in Boston, a very dangerous lady. His ribs still ached from that encounter.

  “I don’t have the depth of pocket,” said Courtney Fairchild, with a sigh, “to support the Divine Fanny. She is a damnably expensive trollop. But I attend her salon, and I plan on visiting the greenroom after the play to see if anything else tempts my eye. Will you be joining me?”

  Severin hadn’t spotted Burgoyne’s harlot yet, so he would be obliged to attend. He was about to say so when Frances Leighton cocked her head and began to declaim a speech utterly at odds with the action of the scene. Severin could not place it, though he was certain he had heard it before.

  “In all the dear delightful days of youth,” spoke Frances Leighton, as though from heart and not from memory, “a rigid father dictates to our wills, and deals out pleasure with a scanty hand.”

  Whatever Frances Leighton was doing, it was not part of the planned entertainment. A frisson of real tension, not playacted, electrified the stage and Severin found himself sitting forward in his chair, knees pressed to the kicking board.

  “To his, the tyrant husband’s reign succeeds, proud with opinion of superior reason. He holds domestic business and devotion all we are capable to know, and shuts us, like cloistered idiots, from the world’s acquaintance, and all the joys of freedom. Wherefore are we born with high souls, but to assert our selves, shake off this vile obedience they exact, and claim an equal empire over the world?”

  She froze there in front of the footlights, her lithe body outlined by the bold lavender stripes of her polonaise, and waited for someone—the audience, her leading man, the voice of God perhaps—to answer.

  Wherefore indeed, Severin thought, his mind teasing potential meanings and messages out of the appeal.