The Turncoat Page 5

  Then the Widow fired. The second dragoon tumbled from his horse to land with a sickening crack on the packed-dirt road.

  Then Angela Ferrers was beside her again, galloping into the dark night with the pistol tucked into her saddle. She met Kate’s heartsick stare with a level gaze and said, “I told you not to look back.”

  After that they left the road and cut across country.

  Dawn was close when they reached Wilmington. Dead horses were the first indicators of the Continental presence. The smell was the second. Thousands of unwashed men were camped in sorry disarray around the small Dutch-roofed house. Here and there were pockets of order—small, disciplined bands led by commanders with some training or aptitude—but mostly it was chaos, and the contempt in which Peter Tremayne held the American militia appeared well earned.

  They were challenged twice. The first sentry had no shoes, the second no shirt. Both times Mrs. Ferrers spoke a password, and they were allowed to continue.

  The farmhouse was ancient; men, trestles, maps, and chairs were crowded to the walls of the structure by the massive central chimney. Clerks sat two to a stair on the narrow flight that buttressed the door, hunched over ledgers balanced on their knees. The east side of the house was serving simultaneously as a hospital and a common room, with instruments and bandages heaped together with cooking utensils. Kate stifled her impulse to tidy it.

  Mrs. Ferrers kept her hood on, and drew Kate to a corner of the parlor to wait.

  A meeting was breaking up in the room next door. Kate studied the men as they filed out. The officers of the Continental Army looked like farmers, merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and trappers, because that was what they were. Kate recognized the quiet desperation of men who have gone too far down a dangerous path to turn back. If the war went badly, these men would all hang. And so would her father.

  The house emptied, became quiet. Then they were summoned.

  Sitting before a trestle covered with maps was a man Kate recognized from her father’s description, some twenty years out of date. Even seated, he towered over the other man in the room. Washington wore a dark blue velvet suit, well cut but bald at the cuffs and collar. Beside him, a slender, fair-haired youth sat copying orders.

  Both men rose when the women entered. Mrs. Ferrers, as Kate was learning, had a theatrical turn of mind. She threw back her hood and laid the packet on the table before the general with a flourish.

  The young man closed his book and prepared to leave, but Washington put a hand on his shoulder. “Stay.” He nodded to Mrs. Ferrers. “You were successful?” he asked, opening the packet. He scanned each page and passed it to the young man. “Have a look at this, Mr. Hamilton. You were quite right.”

  “Only partially,” Mrs. Ferrers admitted, drawing up a stool and seating herself. Kate followed her example. “Caide didn’t come. Peter Tremayne was the courier.”

  The young man blanched. “Caide is still at large?”

  “I’m afraid so, Alex. And there is worse. Howe is arresting members of Congress in secret. We encountered a party of dragoons riding with muffled spurs in the Jerseys, and I am sorry to report that they did not observe the niceties of war.”

  Kate fought nausea once more as she remembered the sounds coming from the barn. The niceties of war.

  Washington set the final page down and addressed Mrs. Ferrers. “Have you read this, Angela?”

  “Yes. Howe means to invest Philadelphia for the winter. He thinks he can end the war by taking the capital and holding it.”

  “He has the men to do it, too.”

  Washington’s secretary spoke. “Let the British have Philadelphia. Howe has mistaken a symbolic target for a strategic one. It’s not worth risking the army in an open battle.”

  Washington smiled thinly. “Congress will expect us to make a stand for Philadelphia.”

  “Then it’s a pity they haven’t given us the money or the men to do it,” replied Hamilton.

  “It is a fight we must make all the same.” Washington spread a map on the table. Running across the bottom was an engraving of the city as seen from the Jersey side of the river, a forest of steeples, masts, and brick. “Philadelphia lies in the fork of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. She is approachable by land only from the north. If we can hold the rivers and the roads to the north, we can cut off Howe’s supplies. With no food and no fuel he must surrender his army or march it through the Jerseys, where he has made no friends this past year.”

  “Philadelphia is not Boston,” Hamilton insisted. “There is no high ground on which to mount cannon. We cannot hold the river indefinitely. We don’t have the men to defend the forts. Mercer was built for a garrison of more than a thousand, and Mifflin is nearly as large.”

  Their argument reminded Kate of her own debates with her father. It obviously pained Hamilton to disagree with Washington, but he did it anyway.

  “You don’t need to hold the river indefinitely,” Kate interjected. “Only until it freezes.”

  “This is Miss Kate Grey, Arthur’s daughter,” supplied Mrs. Ferrers.

  If Washington was surprised by her presence, or her ready grasp of tactics, he didn’t show it. “You are correct, Miss Grey.”

  “Howe will understand the danger. He will do everything in his power to take the river,” Hamilton insisted.

  “Yes,” the general agreed. “That is why we must keep one step ahead of him.”

  “What of our agent in Boston?” Hamilton asked.

  “Still with Howe, but trapped like a fly in amber,” Angela Ferrers said. “And I can’t get near Howe. His intelligence officer, John André, knows me by sight.”

  “Cinaedus,” Hamilton said under his breath. A lover of men, Kate knew, though her knowledge was gleaned from an unusually thorough classical education, and not from hearing the insult hurled. Quakers were not inclined toward oaths or epithets.

  Angela Ferrers shrugged. “Whatever else Captain André is, he is a shrewd spymaster. He will be alert to espionage. And unfortunately for us, most of our allies will flee with Congress. Philadelphia will be entirely in the hands of Quakers and Loyalists.”

  A chair screeched over the floorboards. Kate realized belatedly that it was hers. “I will go,” she said. She said it without thinking, only dimly aware that she had stood up, moved by the same spirit that had called her, only very occasionally in her life, to speak at the meeting.

  Washington looked at her closely. “I’m sorry? You will go where, Miss Grey?”

  The Widow and Hamilton were watching her as well. Kate wished the spirit had more staying power. She sat back down and turned to Angela Ferrers. “You told me there are other ways to fight, without killing. You said Philadelphia is full of Quakers. I’m a Quaker. I can go to Philadelphia and watch General Howe.”

  “The Quakers of Philadelphia are not like the country Friends you grew up with,” Washington said gently. “Howe’s circle is dissolute. His officers drink, gamble, and chase women. Such a task is not something I would ask of any gently raised woman. Mrs. Ferrers is…unusual.”

  “You don’t need to ask me. I’m volunteering. Manners and fashion can be learned, like Latin or Greek. No one is born like that. It’s all artifice: beauty, and grooming, and fine clothes. I can learn to be like Mrs. Ferrers.”

  Mrs. Ferrers’ flash of annoyance was quickly replaced by amusement. “Yes, I rather think you could,” she agreed. “But your father would never consent.”

  “He thinks I’m at home.” It was the truth, but it would lead to a lie, which Reverend Matthis said tarnished the soul. But silver also tarnished from disuse, and after what she had seen tonight, Kate did not think she could keep her soul clean in a cupboard. “My father does not know I am here. Since we arrived in camp, Mrs. Ferrers has not spoken my name outside this room. And if I leave for Philadelphia tonight, my father need never know I was here.”

  Washington and the Widow exchanged glances. “If you go to Philadelphia and spy on Howe, you will be in c
onstant danger,” he warned. “Mrs. Ferrers knows and can tell you that the British will not trouble themselves to try a woman caught spying. They fear losing what popular support they have.” Washington looked uncomfortable. “There are other dangers for a woman, as well. You would do well to consider your future, and how it might be altered, your prospects changed by this undertaking.”

  Kate didn’t need to consider. Her mind was made up. Tonight she had glimpsed something of the life she might have led as the lover of a man with a lively intellect and a passionate nature. Circumstances had closed the door on such a connection, almost as soon as it had opened. Tremayne was her enemy, and after what she had seen his countrymen do, she could not think of him otherwise.

  “By prospects, you mean marriage. I have none to alter. As for the other dangers you speak of”—she took a deep breath and tried to banish Milly and the dragoons from her mind—“they are as likely to befall me in my home as in Philadelphia. In which case, I would rather meet my enemy by day than find my door battered down in the middle of the night.”

  “Miss Grey,” said Washington, with something approaching amusement, “you have had the great good fortune to inherit all of your father’s character, and none of his looks. I am only sorry we have not met before.”

  “It was an unlikely circumstance while my mother was alive,” Kate answered honestly, aware that Washington had come north on business in the past, and her father had been forced to meet him in a tavern. “She would not abide slaveholders in the house.”

  Angela Ferrers raised her manicured eyebrows. Hamilton looked discreetly away. And Washington stood and bowed. “Fortunately for me, Congress has not the principles of your late good mother. Godspeed you to Philadelphia, Miss Grey.” He passed Howe’s plans to his secretary. “Copy these and add them to the packet for Congress. It would be a great favor to me if you carried the papers yourself.”

  “Of course, General,” said Hamilton.

  She was going. It took a moment to sink in. She would not sleep in her own bed tonight, might not return home for several weeks. She remembered her father’s letter, safe now in her pocket. “Will you take this, too, Mr. Hamilton? It’s from my father, to Congress.”

  “Of course.” Washington’s secretary favored her with a courtly bow and an appraising look. He must think her an unlikely spy, Kate realized.

  She drew the letter from her pocket. Dawn light was filtering into the room, and though the paper looked right, the seal was wrong. It was not her father’s signet.

  She took the letter to the window and broke the seal.

  Washington addressed Mrs. Ferrers. “Madame, is there anything you require for your journey?”

  “Fresh horses would speed us on our way.”

  Kate unfolded the single sheet of paper in the envelope. The couplet was Latin, clever and lewd. She laughed out loud at the effrontery of it.

  It was signed simply, Tremayne.

  Four

  The Germantown Road, October 8, 1777

  Another man would have gone home. Another man, disgraced, demoted, stripped of command and given the choice to rebuild his career from the ground up or retire quietly into private life, would have chosen retirement.

  Viscount Sancreed escaped court-martial in New York with his life, but he lost his command and his standing. Caught in a judicial limbo, Peter Tremayne lingered in the city, writing letters of apology to General Howe for losing the man’s dispatches, and requests for aid to friends and superiors, in particular Bayard Caide. Caide was one of Howe’s favorites, part of the select company who danced, diced, and drank with the general well into the night.

  In the end it was Caide who secured his return, intervening with Howe and arranging for Tremayne to become an officer on the general’s staff. Tremayne’s official duties would consist of discouraging looting in occupied Philadelphia. He had lost his troop, but a staff office was better than languishing in New York.

  It was also better than the long trip home to England, which would be full of self-recrimination. He had weighed carefully the alternatives, and it was the prospect of that journey, the long weeks in his cabin, meals in the company of naval officers, noses a-twitch with the scent of scandal, that convinced him to remain and redeem himself if he could.

  All this he had considered in New York. Now, six weeks later, in the saddle beside Bayard Caide, patrolling the farms north of Philadelphia, he was beginning to regret his choice. Tremayne had arrived to take up his staff post only last night, and Bay had instantly swept him out for this foraging party in the morning.

  Bay, his kinsman, whom he had grown up alongside in Somerset, had been a wild youth. As teens and fellow cavalry officers they had gambled, drunk, and whored their way through London until the army sent Bay to India and Peter to Ireland.

  India had done nothing to curb Bay’s wildness. He returned from ten years’ service under hotter suns with new vices and a high-handed arrogance, tolerated because the Subcontinent had forged him into an officer of extraordinary skill and charisma. Bay insulted his fellow officers, seduced their wives, beat his servants, and was throughout it all utterly and devastatingly charming. His peers envied him. His men loved him, albeit with an affection tempered by fear.

  They reined up outside a pretty clapboard farmhouse surrounded by rolling fields of winter wheat and barley. A faint aroma of malt indicated a brewery somewhere on the premises.

  “Dyson, find the beer, and some wagons to carry it.” Bayard Caide’s voice was controlled arrogance, almost musical—that of a man who expected to be heard and obeyed. He slid from his horse with the natural grace he had possessed since boyhood. The wind ruffled his wheat-colored hair, which curled around the collar of his jacket. His eyes, Peter had first noted as a child, were the same pale blue as his own.

  He looked up at Tremayne. “Don’t go offering to pay for the beer, Peter. Or anything else, for that matter. The brewer is a Rebel, and as such, his property is forfeit.”

  “How do you tell the Rebels from the Tories, Bay?”

  “The Rebel women are prettier.” He slapped Tremayne on the back and led him into the stone-walled kitchen.

  It was a well-scrubbed and busy room, with an ancient sideboard groaning under the weight of mismatched pottery. The two women standing behind the pitted trestle table were indeed unusually pretty. The older was no more than thirty, and her sleeves dripped with muslin frills and Mechlin lace. The mistress of the house, no doubt. The younger was barely out of her teens, and from her dated skirts and cheap leather stays, she must be the maid.

  Caide bowed politely to the lady. “Ma’am.”

  He reached for her hand, but she stepped back. Her black brows knitted, and an angry flush crept over her fair skin. “What do you want?” she asked.

  The maid, more attuned to Bay’s mood than her mistress was, sidled toward the low door. Lieutenant Dyson, a hulking brute from some northern factory town, and just the sort to toady to Bay, appeared in the doorway, cutting off her escape and blocking the light. He advanced, not on the girl but on the kegs racked against the wall.

  “Beer, to start with,” said Caide, but he wasn’t looking at the beer.

  The keg nearest the door was already tapped. Dyson turned the handle, and the beer pattered onto the floor and spread over the stone tiles.

  “You’re no better than thieves,” the lady said.

  Bay fingered the cord hanging from the clock jack on the mantel, and pulled a sprig of sage out of one of the bundles drying overhead. “Cooperation, second,” he said, inhaling the pungent herb, “or perhaps you would rather watch your livelihood run out over the floor?”

  Dyson took another tap from a set hanging on the wall, and hammered it into the next keg. The lady flinched at each blow, and the maid began sobbing.

  “What will it be?” asked Bayard Caide.

  Tremayne barely heard him. The structure possessed none of the classical elegance of Grey House. The woman behind the trestle was not poised or q
uick-witted, nor did she have pie crumbs in her hair, but the situation reminded him all too much of a Quaker girl he couldn’t get out of his head. The room seemed suddenly overpoweringly hot and close.

  Caide advanced on the women. “If you are loyal subjects, you will of course want to help His Majesty’s trusty servants in any way they might require.”

  Tremayne knew this preamble all too well. Once, he would have shared in it.

  “Excuse me. I think I’ll go see to the wagons.”

  Bay turned, the women forgotten for the moment. “Come on, Peter. It will be just like old times.” He scooped a tankard from the sideboard and held it under the spluttering tap, then offered Tremayne the beaker. “And there’s beer.”

  “I find I’m not thirsty.” He was parched, but he knew he would choke on that beer, and what would come after it.

  Caide shrugged and downed the beaker. “Suit yourself. Dyson, watch the door.”

  Out in the crisp air, Bay’s men were loading wagons with sacks of barley. From inside the farmhouse, Tremayne heard a loud crash. The trestle table, overturned. Then the musical note of a single, fine piece of china dashed against a wall, followed by the deeper chord of a shelf full of earthenware swept to the ground. The curtains rustled, and Tremayne knew that Bay’s ugly little drama had reached its climax.

  It would have been easier to bear if he had not been guilty of similar indulgences. Certainly, as a young officer he had used his authority to commandeer supplies and other less tangible benefits. He knew all too well how it was done. You put the men to some heavy-lifting task, set a lackey to guard the door, demanded goods or information the locals were unlikely to have, then bargained, and finally threatened, until the line between coercion and force became indistinct.

  Before Kate, before Grey Farm, he might have done the same. Hell, at Grey Farm, truth be told, he had almost done so. Now, with little sound coming from the ravaged kitchen, all Tremayne could picture was Kate, plain, disheveled, disarmingly clever Kate, at the mercy of someone like Caide, at the mercy of someone like himself. He felt sick.