Mistress Firebrand (15 page)

Both parlors were littered with empty plates and glasses. The card tables stood open, their green baize surfaces seeming to stare up, exhausted, at the ceiling. Gleaming mother-of-pearl counters, carved like flowers and fishes, along with a square set bearing a very exalted monogram—a trophy, no doubt, of the Divine Fanny’s—were heaped in piles at the corners. The bones of a whole salmon hung from the chandelier, and beneath it sat a patient gray cat with a put-upon expression; fortunately, there were no unconscious partygoers amongst the litter, and there was no sign of Robert Hallam.

A door opened on the landing above and light spilled out. Frances Leighton descended the stairs in a
blue silk night robe with her fair hair unbound. She stopped when her eyes lighted on Devere.

She had not expected to see him, which raised the question of who she
had
expected. Burgoyne, no doubt, come to whisk Jenny off to London, playing Caesar to her Cleopatra.

The Divine Fanny surveyed her niece, half dressed in her soot-stained stays with her petticoats frosted in castor sugar. Finally she said, “Comedy or tragedy?”

“A little of both,” replied Jennifer Leighton.

Frances nodded at the open shutters in the parlors. “Close them,” she said, “and then come up and tell me the whole story.”

Devere helped Jenny shutter the windows and followed her up the stairs to a snug little parlor that was a study in contrast with the dissipation on the ground floor. It reminded him of the best room in his childhood home, the furniture worn but comfortable, the painted floors bare but clean. There was an old-fashioned daybed with a yellow silk cushion pulled up to the fire, and opposite that, a set of wing chairs in the same frayed damask and a little tilt-top table where Frances Leighton was pouring two glasses of brandy with her elegant ringed hands.

Jenny kicked off her silk shoes and flung herself on the daybed, petticoats streaked with sugar and soot, and accepted a glass of brandy from her aunt. Devere took the fireside chair opposite Frances, and a noticeably fuller glass of brandy, with gratitude.

Seeing the homey little parlor, he could understand how Jenny might live above the greenroom of a theater but remain, to a remarkable age for a woman of her
profession, a virgin. The cozy space more resembled the salon of a Boston or London bluestocking than the private precinct of an expensive courtesan. The scene also lent credence to Fairchild’s insistence that his romance with the Divine Fanny abided in chastity.

There were closets on both sides of the fireplace, their lower cabinets fitted with paneled doors, the tops with clear glass to show off the household’s treasures, which in this case were not china plates or sparkling crystal but books. There were bound collections of plays and works in Latin and French, and a small selection of novels from the city’s most popular circulating library.

Jennifer Leighton proceeded to tell their tale. She turned out to be not only a talented playwright and promising actress, but also a skilled raconteuse. The events of the night were only a few hours old, but she had already begun shaping them into a coherent narrative, shaving off the rougher edges, summarizing the duller passages, and burnishing the hero of the piece.

Severin doubted that he had ever been the hero of anyone’s story before. The fact that he had arranged the disastrous assignation to start with was glossed over. Miss Leighton omitted the detail that together they had killed two men in the street, revealing only that he had fought off a pair of footpads. But her description of that action was both evocative and flattering.

She gave no specifics of her encounter with Burgoyne, but said only: “I changed my mind about the value of the general’s patronage. He strove manfully to persuade me that it was necessary to my career and future happiness. At some point I brained him with a bust of one of the Muses.”

Frances Leighton’s plucked brows rose at this, but she made no comment.

There was no mention of moonlit gardens, scented bakeries, trestle tables, or the regrettable want of French letters. When she was done with her recitation, Jennifer Leighton drew her feet up onto the chaise and rested her head against the cushioned arm.

Severin tried not to stare. There was something sensual and uninhibited about her posture that called to him, something decidedly erotic about the sight of his quilled knife hilt peaking above her stays. He had always enjoyed a healthy appetite when it came to the fair sex, but he could not recall a time when it had ever seemed so acutely focused on one girl.

And he had lately surrendered his only real chance to have her. The irony of the situation was not lost on him. He had worked tirelessly for a week to make the
Boyne
ready to sail, partly out of duty and partly out of a well-developed instinct for self-preservation, but also, it had to be admitted, to prevent Jennifer Leighton from meeting with John Burgoyne. And now it was he who was out of time.

The object of his desire stretched and then curled like a cat on the frayed silk cushion and favored Severin with a sleepy smile. He fancied it was the same expression she would have bestowed on him if he’d found them a sturdy bed, initiated her with care, and then when she was awake to the business, tupped her silly, showing her just how much fun a man and a woman could have when they came together as equals.

He discovered, sitting there watching her, that he did not want to leave New York just yet.

His efforts
had
saved the
Boyne
a week’s delay. His
powers as outlined in Lord Germain’s orders were broad enough that he could forestall Hartwell from sailing for a day. And a night. And under the guise of intelligence gathering he could find a bed and a fire, and perhaps teach Jennifer Leighton how to tie a French letter on him with a firm knot and a jaunty bow.

“It seems we owe Mr. Devere a debt,” said Frances Leighton, interrupting Severin’s erotic idyll.

“I would never have gotten off the
Boyne
without him,” said Jennifer Leighton, capped by a yawn.

She would not have been on the
Boyne
at all without him—or her aunt’s connivance—thought Severin, but he was drinking the woman’s excellent brandy and enjoying her fire and it would be churlish to remark upon such a thing, so he kept silent. Frances Leighton was probably no one’s idea of an ideal chaperone, but she was the girl’s aunt, and in any case his mind was running in a different direction entirely, imagining just what forms Jennifer Leighton’s touching appreciation might take in bed.

“The difficulty with debts,” said Frances Leighton, recalling him once more to the present and the prosaic, “is that a woman who makes her own way in the world accumulates a number of them, and sometimes they conflict. You saved my niece, and for that you have my gratitude, but you also tried to kill a woman who was, at one time, like a sister to me—and she very much wants you
dead
.”

It took a minute for her meaning to penetrate. For a fact, his mind was
not
working fast, fuddled with exhaustion and blunted with frustrated desire and set free to wander by good brandy.

She meant the Widow. Also known as Angela Ferrers.

The bits and pieces began to fit themselves together
in a pattern he should have discerned earlier. It was unusual to keep ipecac in a personal medicine chest. And somewhere in Angela Ferrers’ obscure past had to be an acquaintance with the theater, with wigs and costumes and paints and disguises, with accents and voices and distinctive manners of walking and speaking.

“You work for the Widow, then,” said Severin.

“I did once,” replied Frances Leighton. “I don’t work for Angela anymore, but she helped me on an occasion when I very much needed her, and I still count her among my close friends.”

Jenny’s copper eyebrows knitted. “Your friend in Boston,” she said, and tried to rise. She fell back upon the chaise, swaying. “You never write letters,” she said, with a puzzled look on her face. The brandy glass fell from her boneless fingers and her eyes fluttered closed. She teetered there, clutching the cushion and trying to stay upright.

Severin’s capacity for underestimating women, apparently, was without limits.

“I had a very particular set of talents, you see,” said Frances Leighton. Her face had begun to blur in the candlelight.

“Poisons,” guessed Severin, though the word was thick in his mouth. Memory teased at him, something to do with Frances Leighton, a piece of information he had picked up somewhere, but he could not seize hold of it in his disordered mind.

“Drugs,” she corrected. “My father was an apothecary and he trained me to mix his compounds. I see you are familiar enough with the workings of toxins to know better than to get up.”

He did know better. Movement would only speed
whatever bane—nonfatal, he hoped—had been in the brandy that was now coursing through his veins and had already begun to steal his wits. He knew from experience—because he’d had occasion to employ potions himself—that he would just lose consciousness faster that way, and the distance to the floor, when he fell, would only be farther.

Jennifer Leighton lost her struggle with the drugged brandy and slid from the chaise to the ground, quite insensible.

Reflex trumped good sense and training and Devere started toward her. The ceiling lurched and the walls spun. He managed to stand upright, but either the room swayed or he did, and his first step was also his last. The polished surface of the table rushed to meet him. He clutched at it for support. His numb hand knocked the crystal decanter to the floor, where it shattered. He grasped the heavy mahogany pedestal, and knocked it over as he fell.

His shoulder smacked the painted floor. He rolled his head to see Jenny lying beside him, facedown, only inches—that might as well be miles—away. A rivulet of spilled brandy snaked between them and disappeared between the wide pine planks.

He was too deep in the drug’s clutches to move now, but with his ear pressed to the floor he could hear Frances Leighton push back her chair and cross the room, her small feet light on the boards, her steps quick and close together. He heard the latch rise, the door swing open, and the threshold creak. Then a different set of feet entered and walked with a more measured pace to within a few inches of his motionless head.

The important thing was to use what little time he
had wisely, to try to gain some control over the situation, to threaten, to bribe, to bargain, with whoever held him in their power. To save himself.

But the words that tumbled from his mouth were
not
for him.

“What did you give her?” he asked thickly. An associate of the Widow might be capable of anything, and he was unable to tell from the floor if Jennifer Leighton was still breathing.

A shadow fell over him. The wooden heel of a shoe bit into his shoulder and pushed him onto his back, and he was staring up not at the Divine Fanny, but at a far more dangerous woman.

“Juice of poppy,” said Angela Ferrers smoothly. “It was only opium.”

She was as beautiful—in face and form—as he remembered. But her eyes were far, far colder.

“Don’t hurt her,” he tried to say, but his tongue felt furred, would not wrap itself around the words.

The sense must have been plain enough, though, because Angela Ferrers placed one delicate slippered foot upon his chest, leaned over him, and said, “
Jenny
will wake up in the morning, Mr. Devere. The question is, will you?”

Jenny could feel the ropes beneath the mattress digging into her back. It took her a moment to remember why that might be; then she recalled borrowing feathers from her bed to stuff the cushions in the royal box. She had done that for Burgoyne, but Severin Devere had come instead.

Her head ached. She was not prone to migraines like Aunt Frances and she did not usually wake so muddled. She could not immediately recall what day it was, or what play she had acted the night before. There had been the performance on Wednesday . . . that had ended with John Street sacked. And then last night she had gone to Burgoyne.

The events aboard the
Boyne
came back to her in a rush and she did not know how she could have forgotten them even for a few fleeting moments upon waking, but then she recalled a similar morning, long before, at
home in New Brunswick. Her hale and hearty Grandmother Ackerman had dropped dead crossing the street, to the shock and surprise of the whole community and to Jenny, her constant companion, most of all. The Ackermans were venerable Dutch stock, absurdly long-lived, pickled in spirits and thorny as the symbol of their tenacious old church.

Jenny had come home from the funeral and discovered that the house sounded different without Grandmother in it. The rhythm of roof and beam had altered irrevocably and would never be the same again. She had served out the funeral breakfast, the pies that Grandmother had been alive just days before to make, and went to bed that night feeling the hollowness and lack to the marrow of her bones.

She had woken up the next morning without a care in the world and thrown off the covers and then she had
remembered
. Grandmother was gone. Everything was different.

This morning felt the same. Only it was her dream that had died.

She opened her eyes on the familiar pale ceiling of her room. In lieu of a tester, she and Aunt Frances had pushed the low bed to one wall and strung blue wool curtains across the side. They were closed now. Jenny reached to part them and let the world in.

The sun was midday bright and the window was open and the bustle and noise of John Street floated in through the casement, reminding Jenny that she was not the only person in New York whose fate had hung in the balance last night.

Severin Devere.

He’d gotten her off the
Boyne
and saved her from
likely imprisonment and hanging. And they’d
almost
 . . . and then it had come to an abrupt end, all for want of French letters, which Aunt Frances had said were scorned by the kind of men whose patronage she sought.

She hadn’t wanted patronage from Severin. She’d wanted . . . his hands, his mouth, his hard, trained body, his wicked invention, and his dangerous smile,
for herself
. Something pure and untainted by barter or ambition. She’d enjoyed playing opposite him in the street, evading their pursuers, and sparring with him verbally in the empty pleasure garden. After the interlude in the kitchen, though, her memory of the evening was murkier. She could recall passing familiar landmarks on the walk home, the firing glasses lined up on the granite steps, the cold brass heft of the door key in her hand, Severin taking it from her gently and then . . .

The parlor. Aunt Frances.
You saved my niece, and for that you have my gratitude, but you also tried to kill a woman who was, at one time, like a sister to me—and she very much wants you dead.

Jenny sat up and pulled the bed curtains wide and looked out. The shutters were open and the room was light, but it was not the brightness of midday; it was the wan sun of a December afternoon.

Frances Leighton sat in the chair beside the window looking down into the street. She was rubbing her temples, as she did sometimes during one of her headaches when she thought Jenny wasn’t looking.

“Are you all right, Aunt Frances?”

The Divine Fanny dropped her hand and looked up, plastering a serene smile across her face. “Of course, dear. Just tired. We had rather a late night, if you recall.”

She did. All too well. “What did you do to Severin?” Jenny asked.

“I drugged his brandy.”

“Why?”

“Because I owed a debt to Angela Ferrers.”

“The woman he calls the Widow?”

“The same,” said Frances Leighton.

“And you wrote to her in Boston. You told her Severin was here in New York. And she sent the killers who attacked us in the street.”

Aunt Frances looked away. “I could not have foreseen that you would be in his company.”

“But you knew she wanted to kill him.”

Aunt Frances looked her direct in the eye. “That is the business they are in.”

“That you were in too,” said Jenny.

“Not really,” said Frances. “Never like that.”

“Like what?”

“With such conviction. That is what makes them dangerous, people like Devere, people like Angela. They entertain no doubts. They never hesitate. They just act. And people get killed. Sometimes at their hands, and sometimes at the hands of others, but such distinctions make little difference to those bereft, and none at all to the dead.”

Jenny had seen it firsthand. She had helped Severin dispatch two men in the street. He
was
a killer. She could not deny that. But he was also something more. He could have arranged a far nastier accident for their pursuers in the burnt house, or sprung back over the wall to take them unawares after they blundered into the pit. He could have left the mob to its own devices and Jenny to her fate in the riot, because Burgoyne had
been safely aboard the
Boyne
at the time. He could have turned her over to Hartwell aboard the ship, or left her to find her own way home at the dock, especially when he must have suspected the danger to himself.

“You are wrong about Devere,” said Jenny. “He saved my life.”

“Because he wanted you.”

Jenny flushed.

“That much,” said her aunt with asperity, “was obvious in the greenroom. Men will sometimes act foolishly over a woman they desire, but they rarely make real sacrifices for women like us. Honor is reserved for their wellborn wives and sisters.”

“He made Burgoyne look like a fool in order to spirit me off the
Boyne
.”

“Yet he did not challenge him to a duel or bring him before a court of law.”

“To be fair, Burgoyne was unconscious and there is no court of law in New York at the moment.”

“So Devere did what was expedient,” said Frances Leighton. “He smoothed over a potentially embarrassing episode with a highly ranked officer and an actress who would have been presumed a whore, and if I did not mistake the way you were mooning at each other last night, he took the opportunity to exploit your gratitude.”

“He didn’t, actually,” said Jenny, “because we had no French letters.”

The Divine Fanny’s face betrayed her surprise. “Well, there is a point in his favor, but it does not change
what
he is.”

“And what is that?” Jenny asked.

“A wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Aunt Frances. “He may dress and speak like a gentleman, but he is not.”

“This is America, Aunt Frances. Indian blood is not so very uncommon here. And he makes no secret of his origins. He told me he was born on the frontier.”

“But not how, or to whom. It is an old scandal, but it was fresh enough still in London when I made my debut on the stage. Devere
was
born on the frontier. His noble father was a second son with an appetite for land and he dragged his wife and their firstborn, Severin’s older brother, into the borderlands to get it. Unfortunately the man lacked the temperament for taming a wilderness. He abandoned his family to the care of servants in favor of the lure of town life.”

A fair number of the men who frequented the greenroom kept their wives and children on estates in the Hudson Highlands or in the Jerseys. “Husbands like that are not so very uncommon,” said Jenny.

Aunt Frances shrugged. “Men are what they are. The Deveres had, I heard, a fine house and many servants and hired men, but no contacts or goodwill among the Indians, something essential to living in their domains. Servants and hired men look to their own when trouble threatens. Accounts vary, probably because they are to no one’s credit, but this much is certain. There was a raid on the house. Devere’s mother and her son were taken by Indians, and by the time his father came back it was too late to track them. Elizabeth Devere disappeared into the wilderness with one child. Ten years later, with a war brewing, she returned from that wilderness with two. It has always been assumed that Severin Devere is the get of the savage who raped her.”

“But he calls himself Devere,” said Jenny. And a bastard surely could not.

“His mother claimed, and her husband did not
dispute, that she was pregnant when she disappeared. By the time she came back, the elder Devere had inherited an earldom and wanted an heir. He had been trying for years to get his wife declared dead so he could remarry, but reports of her survival continued to reach Albany, so the courts refused to grant his suit. And indeed, she was very much alive, and she had brought his firstborn back to him. No doubt when husband and wife were reunited they struck some mutually agreeable bargain about her bastard.”

“What will happen to him now?” asked Jenny.

“I would worry more about what will happen to you,” said a cool voice from the doorway.

The woman on the threshold gave the appearance of being tall, but Jenny knew that height could be an illusion, increased by pattens and heels and enhanced by the color, shape, and cut of an ensemble. The lady—her confidence marked her as such—wore head-to-toe deep blue worsted with a subtle sheen, the gown plain in front, the petticoat sewn from the same fabric. It emphasized her slenderness, the length of her neck, the elegance of her simply dressed hair. This was free of powder, but Jenny could not tell if the color was the woman’s own or altered with dyes.

“You’re Angela Ferrers,” said Jenny.

“That is one of the names I use,” said the lady, with a nod of her head.

“You tried to kill Severin.”

“He tried to kill me first.”

“That is a child’s response.”

“And you are not playing a children’s game,” said the lady softly. “
You
are bargaining for the life of a man whom you have just learned is a savage.”

Jenny snorted. It was not a pretty sound. “Severin Devere did not kill your assassins with a war whoop and a tomahawk. He skewered one neatly with a sword and broke the other’s neck with a very modern wrestler’s maneuver, in perfect silence. He refrained from killing the others, even when opportunity presented itself. His job was to protect Burgoyne, as Aunt Frances said, but the general was safely aboard the
Boyne
, and he risked himself to save me from the mob during the riot anyway. An aberration for a spy, but hardly a savage one. Apart from an unfortunate susceptibility to dangerous women, he does what is expected of him. I cannot imagine a man more
English
.”

“You are perceptive, Miss Leighton, but you have missed a crucial fact about Severin Devere, the very root of the matter. Grasp that, and you grasp everything. He
is
more English than the English because he
has
to be. When Earl Devere went into the borderlands to retrieve his wife ten years after he misplaced her, he wanted the eldest son, Julian, who he was certain was his heir. The Mohawk Ashur Rice who held Elizabeth Devere handed her and
both
boys over, without a fight. Severin Devere is a man without a country. Neither his Indian nor his English father wanted him. His own half brother barely acknowledges him. Only by acting where others hesitate in the service of the British government has Devere made a life for himself. A man like him will not give up such hard-earned status lightly. He saved you last night, but he would be obliged to throw your aunt to the wolves tomorrow if we freed him—because he knows that through Frances he can get to
me
.”

“What do you intend to do with him?” Jenny asked.

“Devere’s fate, until I have determined how best to protect you and your aunt, will remain an open question. Let us speak of yours, now that Hallam knows you defied him, and both London and John Street are lost to you.”

“Bobby knows?”

“When one wishes to hold an unconscious man prisoner in another’s cellar, some explanation is usually required. As you see, everything has its price. Devere is still alive, but it has cost you something. What will you give so that he might keep on breathing?”

*   *   *

Devere woke in total darkness. He was lashed upright to a chair, and the ropes circling his chest made his bruised ribs ache and his breath come short. His hands were bound behind him and his feet together in front of him, and he could not, at first, feel either. When circulation returned to his fingers, he discovered that the knots had been tied expertly. When the blood returned to his feet, he could feel that his shoes and stockings had been taken. The bare skin of his heels rested on cold, damp stone. Not surprising, if the Widow was involved, because she was a professional, and the woman never left anything to chance.

He was not gagged, which indicated he was someplace that no one would hear his shouts . . . or screams.
Never a good sign.

And even more worrying, he could hear no other breathing, detect no other warmth in the darkness. Jennifer Leighton was not with him. He ought not to find that perversely satisfying withal, but he did. A wave of schoolboy giddiness washed over him. The
aunt had drugged her too, which meant the girl was not in sympathy with their plans for Severin.

Which told him that, unlike all of his other affairs since adulthood, everything that had happened between them last night was real and meaningful. And that he had to get out of here.

He tested the ropes first. The ones around his wrists had indeed been tied well. Extricating himself would cost him skin and blood, possibly even a few small broken bones.

It would have to be his left hand, then. He would need his right to pick the lock of whatever door separated him from freedom. And to deal with whoever might be guarding him beyond it. That was provided that his lock picks were still in his pocket. If they had been taken, there was another, smaller set, sewn into the seams of his coat, along with ten gold sovereigns and ten silver shillings, concealed inside the leather-covered buttons.