Mistress Firebrand (14 page)

Her heart skipped a beat at the admission, but Devere made no move to touch her as he had in the slots. “He almost got all of us killed,” she said. “The theater might have burned.”

“That is the difficulty with mobs,” said Devere evenly. “They are nearly impossible to control. You cannot bargain with a rabble.”

“Is the Rebel Washington truly fond of the theater?” she asked.

“Are you thinking of changing sides?”

“I doubt we shall be given the choice. The Calvinists of Boston have no love for the theater.”

“I did omit some facts, but Washington is no Boston Puritan. He is a Virginian. He enjoys dancing, and music, and all manner of pastimes that scandalize the doughty New Englanders he must answer to in Congress.”

“But he is an aficionado of
Cato
, you said, and a leveler.”

“He does have a weakness for Addison. But he is also—I failed to mention—a devotee of
The Rivals
, so the man must possess some sense of humor. And he is no leveler. He owns a sizable plantation worked by slaves. This war has done something that the late conflict with France could not. It has compelled colonies—and men—with absolutely nothing in common to work together.”

And it had thrown her together with Devere, who, by her aunt’s account, was a spy and an assassin and, by Jenny’s own experience, a killer, but one who was hiding
in a bakery in the middle of the night so that
she
should not lose her position with the New American Company. He was a puzzle, one she suddenly wanted very much to solve.

“Why did those men wish to kill you?”

“Because they were being paid.”

“By whom?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he strolled the table, examining the dizzying array of sweets that must be intended for a wedding or some grand celebration. In the moonlight streaming through the window they were a fantasy city of pastel towers and pyramids.

“So what takes your fancy?” he asked. “Fruit jellies?”

They were lined up on a porcelain platter in a rainbow of delicate tints.

“We’ll ruin the display if we take one,” she replied.

“Pastry hearts?” he asked.

“The pyramid will crumble,” she pointed out. “And I am not interested in sweets.” Her stomach grumbled again, making a liar out of her.

“Cake, then,” he said, stopping in front of the great iced tower. There were tiny sugar figures dancing around the top. Beneath the hard white icing shell would be a layer of almond paste, and then beneath that the brandy and currants and citron that had met her in a cloud of luxury at the threshold. She could almost taste it.

She had been silent too long. A look of mischief—so youthful and altogether at odds with Devere’s cultivated sophistication, the citified elegance of his dress, and the nature of his calling—suffused his face and he appeared positively boyish. A knife, the handle elaborately worked with glossy porcupine quills, materialized in his hand,
winking in the moonlight slanting through the windows, and before she could object—or perhaps she never meant to—he sliced through the cake.

He made neat work of it, fast and deft, like the backwoods hunters who had peddled meat at her father’s door, carving off choice cuts at her mother’s direction. Two strokes, and then Devere was offering her a wedge of the heady stuff, balanced on his blade.

“You are trying to avoid answering my question by distracting me from the subject at hand,” she said.

“The
subject
is cake. You want some. I have provided it.”

She did want some. The aroma was so potent she could almost taste it.

She took the slice, velvet against her fingertips, and bit into it. The sugar icing melted on her tongue, the thick layer of marchpane, rich with almonds, exploded in her mouth, and the brandy-soaked currants burst between her teeth. She chewed and swallowed, and the candied citron tasted like the last breath of summer and the first chill of autumn, all come to blazing warmth in her tender affronted belly.

She devoured the slice with Devere watching and no shame whatsoever, and she didn’t protest when he cut another and handed it over wordlessly. She ate, and truly hunger did make the best sauce because it was the finest cake she had ever tasted, and she didn’t care that her lips were sticky with sugar and her petticoat covered in crumbs. It was the purest physical pleasure she could imagine, and she wanted to share it with her unlikely rescuer.

“Here,” she said, holding out the last bite. “Have some.”

That was when she became aware of how still he was standing, how taut his body had grown while watching her devour the cake, how carefully he had kept a distance between them, cutting and serving her pieces at arm’s length.

“You finish it,” he said quietly.

She brought the morsel to her lips, aware of his intent gaze. The last bite was as good as the first. Without thinking, she licked her sticky fingers and lips.

“I’ll have my taste now,” he said, and closed the distance between them.

All at once his hands were at the small of her back and on the nape of her neck and his palm was cupping her head, and his mouth was on hers. His tongue swiped the fullness of her bottom lip, licked her cupid’s bow, then slipped inside her mouth.

It was like being struck by lightning. Just like in the darkness of the slot. She was caught fast by a force she didn’t fully understand and she could not let go. Jenny was engulfed by the warmth and scent of him, which was not of kitchens and baking, as heady as those distillations had been, but of crisp autumn night and spiky rosemary and bay rum cologne.

Her hands, trapped between their bodies, came to rest against fine cool cotton over firm heated flesh, his stomach and chest thick with the muscle that had rowed them back from the
Boyne
and made short work of their attackers in the street. When he pressed closer,
her hips met the hilt of his saber, the buckle on his sword belt, the smooth wooden stock of his pistol.

It was deliriously wonderful, this fusing of mouths and bodies, richer than the buttery cake, sweeter than the marchpane, more luscious than the candied citron. She wanted it to go on forever, and she wanted more.

He released her and stepped back, and she looked up into his nearly black eyes, which were fixed on her. “I’m not Burgoyne,” he said. “You can say no with me, Jenny.”

“I know that.”

He smiled, an expression of pure delight and so different from the mischievous smirk she had been coming to know. Then his face turned intent once more, and he swept the fruit jellies and the tower of macaroons and the little marchpane flowers from the table to fall to the floor with a crash and lifted her to sit on the trestle.

There was no question in her mind that she wanted this with him. Nothing about it was wrong. This man had no desire to control or contain her. They were not
using
each other. She was not trading herself for influence or security. There was nothing awkward about the way their bodies fit together and he made no demands on her, only offered persuasions.

Here, at last, was the temptation Aunt Frances had spoken of.

He kissed her again, openmouthed and slowly, and then his lips made a trail down her throat and his tongue painted the tops of her breasts and his fingers dipped inside her stays. His hands pushed the leather coat he had lent her off her shoulders and the warmth of the garment was replaced by the warmth of his
body. He nipped at her earlobes, stroked up her thighs through the silk of her petticoats, pressed himself hard and ready against her belly.

Her body remembered his coaxing fingers in the darkness of the theater and anticipated his touch, then started at the cold kiss of his blade’s hilt.

“Apologies,” he said, unbuckling the sword belt and laying his pistol and saber down on the table. Then there was nothing poking or prodding her and only a thin layer of clothing separating them.

She was panting and ready for whatever came next when he stepped back from the table, began untying his neck cloth, and said, “What kind of protection did you bring?”

She was flummoxed that he should ask such a question in the midst of disrobing, but she answered honestly. “Aunt Frances always carries a knife and a muff pistol, but I don’t have either.”

He bent to nip her ear and laughed, a joyous sound she wanted to hear again. And again. “My company
has
made you bloodthirsty. I meant sheaths.”

He meant
that
kind of protection. “Oh.” She felt her face flush, knew her skin had turned beet red.

“Please tell me you didn’t intend to bed Jack Brag without taking precautions.”

“Aunt Frances said Burgoyne would balk at using anything himself, and be put off if I mentioned it. She advised me to wash afterward, in private, so as not to offend him.”

“Your aunt seems an admirable woman . . . but that is possibly the
worst
advice I have ever heard. There are men, it is true, who don’t like to use French letters if they think the woman is clean and they’re
paying for her time, whether in coin or favors, but they are taking a stupid risk. And so were you. You could have ended up poxed or pregnant. I hope, for your sake, that you have been more careful in the past.”

“There hasn’t been a past.”

He paused in his disrobing and stood still a moment just looking at her. Then he bent to kiss her, but this time it was a chaste buss on the lips and he was already knotting back up his cravat. “You should have said.”

He stepped back and reached for his sword belt.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking you home,” he said, buckling the well-worn leather around his narrow waist.

“Because I’m a virgin?” she asked, incredulous.

“Don’t sound so aggrieved. I’m doing you a favor.”

“There are men who will pay two hundred pounds to bed a virgin,” she said.

“How on earth do you know that?” He sounded amused. That made her irrationally angry. He had treated her as an equal up until now, but suddenly he was patronizing her.

“I overheard it in the greenroom.” That was not exactly a lie. She had heard the number from Bobby, during one of his more prosaic marriage proposals. He had wanted to save her from all that, he said, the insulting offers she would receive in the greenrooms of London and New York if she took leading roles and was not married to a man of stature. Instead she had wondered how long she could live in London on two hundred pounds and whether it would be long enough to connive an introduction to Garrick.

“Then it is probably true,” said Devere. “But at that
price, the man isn’t using French letters, and he’s very likely paying for a virgin because he has already caught at least one of Venus’ curses.”

“I wasn’t proposing to sell myself to a roué,” she said.

“No. You were going to let me have my wicked way with you on a bakery table in a cloud of double refined sugar and orange water.”

“Better that than soaked in Burgoyne’s brandy,” she said, and suddenly she felt the prickle of tears. But there was no catharsis here, only farce. She fought them back.

Devere bent and kissed her again. He licked the tear track from her cheek and said, “Don’t cry, Jenny.” He lifted her hand and turned it over and kissed the tender bruised underside of her wrist. “I was a fool to touch you after what you experienced earlier. If I had another night in New York, I would
swim
back to the
Boyne
for my French letters and make all of this up to you, and there would be sugar and orange water and marchpane—and a fire and a bed and a feather mattress—but I have only tonight, and a girl as clever and remarkable as you deserves better than that.”

*   *   *

Severin Devere surveyed Jennifer Leighton’s delicious dishabille and wished he had fewer scruples. Or that he had never promised to fetch her for Burgoyne. Or that he had lied to Jack Brag about her and seduced her himself in front of a warm fire where he could show her the joys of congress—with precautions—between two willing partners. Or that she was less tempting. Jennifer Leighton was more enticing than the cake or the
macaroons or the pastry hearts that surrounded her, though the sugar and brandy had tasted truly delicious on her lips.

It wasn’t her beauty that beguiled him—though he’d been struck by her artful appearance when she opened Burgoyne’s door on the
Boyne
, he’d wanted her just as much in the horrible linen gown. It was her spirit that appealed to him. Jennifer Leighton would never be the diamond her famous aunt had been, but pluck and wit lent her a charm—a surpassing charm—all her own.

She was sitting on the trestle in nothing but her chemise and stays, surrounded by a forest of pastry towers, her remaining petticoat rucked over her knees, clocked stockings tied with black silk ribbons just above her firm calves. He had tried to blackmail Burgoyne to get her for himself and now here she was, sweetly willing, served up, quite literally, on a banquet; and here he was, forgoing the pleasure of having her. If she’d been experienced, he might have done it, tried to erase the memory of Burgoyne’s boorish transgressions from her body with his own, but he didn’t like to think of himself as the kind of man who would save a virgin from ravishment at the hands of one rake only to debauch her himself.

It was a fine distinction for a spy of dubious heritage who traded in secrets and carried a loaded pistol and a set of lock picks, but it was vital to his amour propre, and he could not do what he did without that.

And he didn’t engage with women without French letters. The risks were too great, on
both
sides.

“You’re not quite the villain Aunt Frances painted you,” she said, almost as though she resented it. And
well she might. Thwarted desire was a prickly, restless thing and he felt it just as keenly as she did.

“I am,” he said. “That and more. But not in this.”

“Why did those men want you dead?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“You said that you were in the same trade as they were. I killed one of them. I’d like to think he was a greater villain than you.”

Because she had her own amour propre. Just so. And if together they encountered those men again between Vauxhall and John Street, she might need to kill once more. “Fair enough,” he said. “It is because of something I did in Boston.”

“What?”

“I attempted to recruit a woman to the government’s cause.”

“And her husband is trying to kill you?”

“Her husband, if she ever had one, is dead. At least she styles herself a widow. And she is a dangerous provocateur. She stirs up trouble in Ireland and Scotland and on the Continent, and anywhere that Britain has enemies.”

“So she’s a Rebel.”

“She is working for them. Her exact origins have proved difficult to ascertain. Irish, it is suspected, but not sure. There are all kinds of mountebanks flocking to the American cause these days—some from far afield indeed—but she is the prime article. A spy, an assassin, a strategist of the first caliber, adept in the art of disguise, and she cannot be suborned. My orders were to win her to our side, or kill her.”

“Surely a
woman
couldn’t be as dangerous as all that.”

“
This
woman has been funneling French and Spanish gold to the Rebels for over a year. She worked with Adams to stir up the mob in Boston. She made certain that the American side of the story from Concord and Lexington reached London first. She understands the usefulness of propaganda and is as dangerous, capable, and ruthless as any man. I should have remembered that when dealing with her, but I didn’t. The Widow cracked my ribs and threw me out a second-story window.”

“You sound,” said Jennifer Leighton, “as though you admire her.”

“I suppose I do.” He had, in fact, been attracted to her. That had caused him to think of her first as a woman and second as an adversary, and that had been his greatest mistake. She used her sex to her advantage, and had clearly learned all the ways in which a smaller, lighter opponent might turn the tables on a larger, stronger one. “It would seem that I have a weakness for dangerous women.”

Jennifer Leighton smiled and smoothed her petticoats over her knees. “Apparently not a debilitating one.” She slid off the table and picked up the salver that had held the fruit jellies, which were now stuck to the floor. “Some poor bride or hostess is going to be affronted tomorrow when she discovers that her buffet is missing several dishes.”

“Leave it,” said Devere. “It is Mr. Fraunces who will discover the damage, and take fair warning.”

“Because Mr. Fraunces courts Whigs with his wax displays as well as Tories with his cakes?” asked Jenny, incredulous.

“Because Black Sam Fraunces has been spying for both sides and must decide, soon, where his loyalties lie.”

“Loyalty,” said Jennifer Leighton, in wisdom largely acquired, Severin feared, in the last few hours, “is a luxury that not all in New York can afford—and it is fragile as spun sugar.”

In the end they did nothing to put Mr. Fraunces’ kitchen to rights, though Jenny obviously felt guilty leaving it in such a state. Devere convinced her that there was no point in letting the cake go to waste, and he cut several more slices from the top layer and wrapped them in the banquet hall’s best linen napkins for her to tuck in her pockets. She insisted that he take one as well, and he did not tell her the truth: that he had no appetite for cake if it wasn’t tasted from her lips.

He made her tuck his knife, the one his father had given him the day they parted, snug in its quilled sheath, into her stays, in case they met with further trouble on the way. By the time he closed the batten door to the kitchen behind them, dawn was not far off, and when they slipped out through the hidden opening in the hedge, it was light enough that the whores had gone to bed. The first fires of the morning were smoking from the chimneys on Nassau Street and servants were stirring, and the water sellers were pushing their laden carts through the tree-shaded lanes.

They were safe enough now. Too many eyes, too many witnesses for murder at such an hour. This was all to the good, because Jennifer Leighton was dozing on her feet and Severin himself was beginning to feel the lack of sleep as they turned onto John Street.

The little blue house next door to the theater had also been awake all night. There were empty firing glasses, their bowls sticky with the last drops of punch,
lined up on the granite porch, and someone’s neck cloth was tied around one of the railings, ends waving like a pennant in the breeze.

The sight cheered Severin. It was his first signal of victory in America. He had failed with the Widow, and it would be a stretch to call his current errand with Burgoyne a success, but he had determined to get Jennifer Leighton home safe, and short of encountering Robert Hallam on the stairs, he was bidding fair to do so.

On the porch Jenny produced a shiny brass key from her pocket, streaming with lilac ribbons that had once matched her unmourned gown. She aimed it at the lock but she was clumsy with exhaustion and missed. Severin took the brass from her cold fingers and let them into the house. There was an unexpected intimacy to it that made him wish that this was her home alone, that he had a pocketbook full of French letters, and that he was staying for the next several hours.