The Turncoat Read online

  Peggy took a step back, revealing Kate to the slightly dilated eyes of Bayard Caide.

  Kate stood her ground. “You’re drunk. We’ll come back later.”

  Caide moved quickly and unexpectedly. He grabbed Kate round the waist and whisked her inside, kicking the door shut on a shocked Peggy Shippen. He threw the bolt and caged Kate, her back to the door, in the prison of his arms.

  She smelled no alcohol on his breath, only a curious smoky spice that she did not recognize. But his eyes betrayed his altered state of mind, even as they raked her from head to toe at close range. She found them mesmerizing. Neither spoke a word. Only the head-splitting sound of Peggy pounding on the door interrupted the silence.

  “Let me in!” Peggy screamed. “Or let her out!”

  “Go away, Miss Shippen,” Bay said firmly, his eyes challenging Kate to object.

  “I’ll bring back the law,” threatened Peggy.

  The Crown, of course, was the law in Philadelphia at the moment. And the Crown’s representative was General Howe, who doted on Caide like a wayward son.

  “You can go, Peggy,” added Kate. “I’m fine.” I hope, she added to herself.

  Kate was uncertain if she heard Peggy sniff on the other side of the door, or if she merely imagined it. She certainly heard Peggy’s slippers scuffing the stairs as the girl departed, but her eyes never broke from Bayard Caide’s.

  She opened her mouth to speak at last and he silenced her with his own. He had barely touched her in any other way and he made no effort to close the distance between them now; only persisted skillfully in an oral communion that sapped the strength from Kate’s limbs.

  He tasted like nutmeg and pepper, his tongue gliding over hers, insistently sharing the ghost of whatever strange narcotic he had consumed.

  He broke away and stepped back. “Your plumage is brighter than that of all the other birds but you’re nothing like those fluttering magpies.”

  “I try not to flutter. It’s uncomfortable in tight stays.”

  Caide laughed. With his body no longer blocking her view, Kate took in the room. Or theater, as she realized. They were standing on the stage.

  It was a disaster. Its recent use as a hospital had left it wrecked. A pile of burnt chairs indicated where the seating had gone. Most of the paneling had been ripped from the walls and presumably burned as well. The windows were filthy, and the curtains had been torn from their rails for God knew what purpose. Shredded green baize dripped from the dented brass fittings.

  But the light was dazzling. Unshadowed by taller buildings, facing the water, with all its glorious reflections, the stage was bathed in sun from the Palladian window at the back of the hall. Light played over the unfinished canvas that stretched from one end of the boards to the other: a meandering brook beneath a shade tree, with the Delaware River Valley in the background.

  “What are you doing here, Miss Dare?”

  She wondered for a moment if he had an inkling of her purpose, some preternatural ability to see past her assumed identity. She conquered her moment of panic and said, “I thought you could use the paints.”

  “No politely reared young girl would visit a man like me on her own.”

  “I wasn’t on my own. I came with Peggy.”

  “But she’s gone now, and you aren’t.”

  “Are you asking me to leave?”

  “No,” he said, taking care to keep well away from her. “I’m asking if you know what you are doing. I’m not nice. I’m not safe. I want you. Howe takes a dim view of his officers debauching the locals, so I stopped coming to the square in order to put temptation out of my way. But now you are here, alone with me. Temptation indeed.”

  “Do you want the paints or not?” Kate said, her voice unnaturally loud from nerves.

  He seized the box, took it to a chaise placed in the center of the stage, stretched his lanky form across the tattered upholstery and began examining the contents. “Why ever not? These are quite good. Too good to waste on André’s daub.” He indicated the scenic painting with a nod of his head. “Where did you get them?”

  For the moment, she realized, she was safe from further seduction. The paints held all his attention. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that. Relieved, certainly, but disappointed as well. His mercurial temper was well known, but this erratic, keyed-up state was a product of something else.

  “At George Haughton’s vendue sale at the Coffee House. I should go. Peggy Shippen is a notorious gossip and will ruin my reputation if I let her.”

  “I thought she was your friend.”

  “She is. But she subscribes to a variety of feminine friendship that prizes novelty over loyalty.”

  “Most women do. But not you.”

  And she was once again the focus of his intense gaze.

  “No. Not me. But I must go.”

  “Don’t.”

  “People will talk. I’ll hurt my chances of finding a husband.”

  “You mean you’ll hurt your chances of shackling yourself to a boring milksop. Stay. I’ll teach you to paint properly.”

  “You say paint, but I think you mean something quite different.” She edged toward the door, watching for the move he would make to stop her.

  “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.”

  She laughed nervously. “That is exactly what I’m afraid of. It’s a rather sentimental landscape,” she said of the monumental canvas.

  He took the change of subject with good grace. “André’s work. Not mine. I’m painting it in for him. In exchange for the use of the theater.”

  She noticed his easel then, dwarfed by the giant backdrop. She crossed to the painting, and examined it critically. It was Icarus, naked, silhouetted by a blazing sun, dripping wax and blood. The carmine had run down the canvas, pooling on the lip of the easel. Kate felt an overwhelming desire to dip her finger in it.

  “Most people think the Greeks were the great artists,” he said.

  “They understood proportion. They sculpted ideals,” she replied.

  “They understood nothing. They created soulless mannequins. The Romans were the true artists. They believed in gravitas. They saw the beauty in every line on a senator’s face. They were unafraid of experience, unafraid to paint the truth.”

  “But you never paint what you see in front of you.”

  “I paint the truth. The truth and what I see in front of me are two different things.”

  “What kind of drug have you been taking? You’re not drunk. Or belligerent.”

  “Opium. Would you like to try it?”

  “No, thank you. One form of ruin is all I can tolerate in a single day.”

  She was reaching out, unconsciously, to touch the pooled vermilion. He caught her hand. Their eyes met, and he studied her face with an artist’s discernment. “Does that mean you consent to the more conventional kind of ruin? I can’t decide if you’re endearingly trusting, or just deliciously reckless.” He led her by the hand to the chaise he had only recently vacated.

  Her heart pounded and her breath grew short but she had determined before coming not to flinch beneath his touch. “A little of both, I should expect.”

  His arm circled her waist, and he lifted her and set her to lie lightly on the frayed damask.

  It still held his warmth, and with it, the promise of intimacy. Desire slid through her, fast and sweet, like sap down a maple, but her courage failed her. “Colonel, please don’t.”

  “Don’t what? And you may call me Bay.” He hadn’t touched her since setting her down, but his posture on the edge of the chaise foretold mischief. Now he traced the line of her cheek, her jaw, her neck, with his delicate artist’s hands.

  His finger outlined her mouth and she parted her lips, tasted his fingertip with her tongue. His other hand traveled south to draw lazy patterns over her décolletage. His touch was intoxicating. When he slung a leg on the chaise to part hers, her hips rose to meet him.

  “Good girl,” he coax
ed. “Do you trust me?”

  “No,” she said, but made no move to stop him.

  “That’s because you aren’t stupid.” His lips nudged hers apart, his tongue darted in to lick hers, and the teasing hand at her breast slipped beneath the fabric of her gown, her stays, and her chemise. She groaned into his mouth when his thumb circled her stiff nipple.

  He lifted his head. “Look at me, Lydia,” he commanded, in the voice that she dimly recognized he must use with his men.

  Her eyes snapped open. He was smirking in satisfaction. “You’re like me, Lydia,” he said, releasing her breast to pull her skirts up around her waist. He drew her knees up until her heels were flat on the chaise. “There’s something broken in you. Something that doesn’t care what Peggy Shippen and the wagging tongues say. A reckless thing that will risk pain to snatch pleasure.”

  “I think I’d prefer you to enthuse about my eyelashes now,” she replied, though she could barely hear her own words for the thrumming of her heart. She wanted his touch desperately, and knew now that this fervent need had nothing to do with Mrs. Ferrers, Washington, or her father’s safety. She was lying on her back, skirts pulled up, legs spread, for the pleasure of Bayard Caide, her enemy. And she wanted it all the same. Mrs. Ferrers had known.

  She cried out when his hand covered her sex, the palm pressed firmly to her sensitive flesh. She writhed, unable to resist the friction.

  Then he withdrew his hands to capture both of hers and pin them above her head. With his left hand he held her prone, while his right hand returned to worry her softening nipple.

  “Lie still, Lydia, and I’ll give you what you want.”

  “But I don’t know what I want,” she gasped. He could not possibly know the depth of her confusion. But he seemed to know the depth of her need.

  His fingers returned to the entrance to her body and circled, making a slick inspection of her contours. She gave herself up to it entirely. Then without warning, he slid two fingers inside and turned, with a small motion of his wrist, her world upside down.

  He stroked his fingers in and out, curling and uncurling them until she could no longer stay still, but thrust her hips up and down in time with his ministrations. He chuckled low in his throat and she opened her eyes once more. “My love, my joy, my Lydia, you’re doing all the work.”

  Her body tensed like a bowstring. The next calculated swipe of his thumb released her. She subsided into his arms, wrung out and replete. He reclined beside her, and twined damp fingers in hers. Kate realized that this was the sort of lust, the sort of inappropriate desire, that had ruined the Hessian Colonel Donop.

  She became aware of his erection, pressed against her thigh, and shifted to bring herself flush with it. She knew what she wanted now, and it had nothing to do with love.

  She shifted again, and he groaned. “Stop that, Lydia. I’m not made of stone. And I’m not foolish enough to go further without some kind of assurance I won’t be court-martialed for it.”

  He released her hands and laid his fair head on her breast, like a child seeking comfort.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, stroking his hair, unnerved by his sudden tenderness.

  “What are your parents like?” He sounded tentative, boyish. He was a baffling contradiction, this man.

  She realized there was no reason to lie. “My mother died when I was twelve. She was witty and sensible in equal measure.”

  “Like her daughter.”

  “I suppose so,” she said, finding more irony in the context.

  “And what of your father?”

  Her father, her sources told her, was with Washington, and playing merry hell with Howe’s supply lines. She could picture him, ambushing Regulars in the backwoods of Pennsylvania in his fringed buckskins and beaver hat. “You might find him…rustic. He doesn’t tolerate fools.”

  “Do you think he would like me?”

  “Not a bit. Why do you ask?”

  He lifted his head from her chest and tugged her chemise and gown into place. “Because I intend to present myself and declare my honorable intentions, so next time I have your skirts up I can have you without fear of hanging for it. There is only one thing you must know first. I’m a bastard.”

  She laughed. “So I have been told.”

  He sat up. “The truth is rather more literal than that. My mother became pregnant with me when she was fifteen. She would not name her seducer. Her family bought her a dupe of a husband, so I am, in the strictest sense of the law, legitimate, because I was born in wedlock. But my mother’s husband did not take kindly to the deception. He beat her, so she ran away from him. ‘Caide’ is my mother’s surname. I have no desire to use his. My mother’s cousins took us in, or we’d have starved. My great-grandfather was drawn and quartered for treason, and I myself am not exactly beloved in the country hereabouts.” His clever hands moved on her again. “But I think you want me anyway,” he said, then went about proving it once more with ruthless skill.

  That day at the playhouse was the first and last time he made any mention of his family, and never did he speak of a connection with Peter Tremayne.

  Their engagement, tentatively approved by the Valbys, waiting a letter of confirmation from Lydia’s supposed ship’s captain father, followed a week later.

  With it came entrée to Howe’s inner circle. And everything Kate heard, Washington heard. He used her intelligence to tighten his grip on the rivers and roads, and within a month the occupation was a siege. A month more, and the river would freeze. Howe would be starved out of Philadelphia, Lydia Dare would disappear forever, and Kate could go home to Orchard Valley.

  And not a moment too soon. She feared she did not have the heart for espionage. She’d lived in a state of fear for weeks. Of exposure, which would be deadly. And of her physical attraction to Caide, only barely held in check. Which could prove ruinous. She’d had enough of jewels and silks and fine entertainments, and she wanted to go home to pots and pans and the siren song of drafty, well-loved rooms and bristly groaning chairs. Her goal had been within reach just a few short hours ago.

  Until Peter Tremayne came back.

  Seven

  Philadelphia, October 20, 1777

  Peter Tremayne was not insensitive to the pleasures of music. Under other circumstances, he might have enjoyed a concert. As it was, he was acutely aware that less than thirty miles from where the musicians sat tuning, Washington’s army lay hungry, cold, and vulnerable.

  “How can you stand it?” he asked Bayard Caide, who was scraping his boots meticulously free of mud on the porch outside Howe’s High Street mansion. The grand residence that Mary Lawrence Masters had built for her daughter not ten years before had stood empty since Congress dispatched her son-in-law to London with the luckless Olive Branch Petition. It was the largest house in Philadelphia, and when General Howe finally entered the City of Brotherly Love, after nearly a month spent delaying at Germantown, he had immediately commandeered it for himself.

  “I have other consolations than war, cousin.” Caide sidestepped the water running freely from the roof of the portico, the gutters choked with decaying autumn leaves. “Howe should see to the damned gutters,” he added under his breath. “The rain stopped half an hour ago. Half the city’s been sacked already and the rest of it is falling to pieces.”

  It was true. In the week that Tremayne had spent there, he’d fended off two attacks by Regulars attempting to pillage the small clapboard house where he’d found quarters. Caide had offered him digs with three other officers, but the atmosphere had felt more like a brothel than a barracks, and Tremayne chose instead the establishment of a bachelor reverend and his spinster sister. The pair had held out against quartering soldiers early in the occupation, and with good reason. The Regulars occupying the Old Barracks shat in the stairwells. But by the time Tremayne arrived, and real privation was being felt in the city, the reverend and his sister welcomed him, and his access to military stores and protection from uniformed looters
, with open arms. The cleric was not associated with any of the more radical churches in town, though Tremayne suspected he was a deist. The house was small but warm and tidy.

  Howe’s residence, on the other hand, was spacious enough to accommodate his personal household, and those officers on his staff he felt closest to. This did not include the charming Captain André, the author of the evening’s entertainment, whom Tremayne spied through the crowd, ushering guests to the neat rows of chairs in the front parlor. André had taken up residence in the abandoned home of Benjamin Franklin. Revolutionary or no, Franklin was a much-loved figure on both sides of the Atlantic. To occupy Franklin’s house was a show of cheek typical of André.

  “It’s maddening,” Tremayne said. “Howe has the advantage and he will not press it. He could march on Washington’s forces and put an end to the war tomorrow.”

  “He marched on Breed’s Hill and lost a thousand men,” Caide said. “He won’t risk it again. And the entertainments aren’t all frivolity. It keeps the officers out of trouble, for the most part. Although I’ll grant you, it takes its toll. Some poor sot passed out in Howe’s icehouse and froze to death last week. Go on inside. I should wait for Lydia, make sure she isn’t doused by water from these gutters.”

  “What do you want a wife for anyway?” Tremayne asked, sounding, he realized, altogether too testy on the subject.

  Caide laughed at him. “You don’t like her, cousin? What does any man need a wife for?”

  And that, Tremayne decided, didn’t bear thinking about.

  “I’m going home.” Tremayne turned on his heel. He would have taken a swing at any other man attempting to stop him, but when his cousin clapped a hand on his shoulder he checked his temper.

  “You’re going inside. You’re going to flirt and make small talk and toady to André because he toadies to Howe. And you’re going to find that blasted bitch who unmanned you on the road to New York and get your command back.”

  Caide was right, and Tremayne said as much. “But this is no way to win a war.”

  “Have patience, cousin. And be sure to flatter the little Huguenot. He has Howe’s ear.”