Mistress Firebrand (16 page)

He was not given enough time. He was still bound helpless to the chair, blood running down his hands from his efforts, when the world erupted into noise and light. A door opened, scraping loudly across the floor, and a lantern blinded him. Too late to shut his eyes against it, he looked away to give his vision a precious moment to adjust. A gust of warm, dry air hit him, and he realized how very cold his prison had been.

He turned back to the light. The nimbus resolved into the graceful shape of a woman carrying a lantern.

“I shan’t apologize to you for the quality of the hospitality,” said Angela Ferrers, “as it is still better than a coffin.”

“To what do I owe your forbearance?” he asked.
Her perfume was different. It had been neroli in Boston. It was gardenias now. He thought neroli might have suited better, but then, he was not certain he really knew her at all.

She smiled. It was an unusual smile, slightly crooked and full of delight—a glimpse, perhaps, of the real woman behind the nested masks. He felt, even now, the pull of her. Like attracts like.

She set the lantern atop a crate so that light shone down on him, and she took his chin in her slender, agile hands and tilted it so that he was forced to look up at her. “Are you vain, Devere? Would you like me to say it is your pretty . . .
face
?”

“You liked it well enough in Boston.”

She shrugged. “That was a game we both played.”

“You seemed to enjoy it at the time.”

“And
that
is a game all women are obliged to play, on occasion. Did you really hope to turn me in your bed?”

He tasted bile. He felt, no doubt, somewhat as Jennifer Leighton had in the hands of John Burgoyne.

She laughed and her hand left his chin. “The noble savage act, I am sorry to inform you, did not entirely move me. Better had you shown me the real Severin Devere, as you did Jennifer Leighton. She
was
moved.”

There was a crate opposite his chair. The Widow pushed it, wisely, several feet back before lowering herself onto it, so that if he took the desperate chance of heaving himself, chair and all, at her, his effort would fall short.

She sat, arranging her blue wool skirts, which were every bit as sensual as the cool touch of silk, on a woman
who knew how to use them. From her pocket she drew a folded sheaf of papers, written in a familiar hand.

“Where did you get those?” he asked.

“From Jennifer Leighton, as it happens. In exchange for your life.”

Burgoyne’s plans, which Severin had locked in his cabin for safekeeping. Where he had also put Jennifer Leighton—for safekeeping—while he called the steward and fabricated his tale and left instructions that the
Boyne
was to sail without him if he did not return.

Jenny had stolen them.

Burgoyne’s manuscript was a rough outline of the plan he would present to the King in London. King George, of course, knew little of military strategy and had no firsthand experience of America. Severin understood both. The plans were daring—possibly even a work of genius. The colonies were vast, their peoples spread over varied terrain, their cities and towns—the traditional objectives of European wars—unimportant. It was controlling travel, the waterways, the corridors of trade—north to south and east to west—that truly mattered.

Burgoyne’s strategy, if successful, would cut New England off from the rest of the colonies and secure Britain’s hold on America. Jennifer Leighton was unlikely to grasp all of that, but she was not stupid, and she must have understood the value of the papers she held in her hands. Must have known they could be traded for a measure of security from the Liberty Boys, for herself or for her beloved theater.

She had instead traded them for Severin Devere, to this very dangerous woman.

Foolish, lovely Jenny. He had saved her from
Burgoyne, but that had just been out of the frying pan and into the fire, because the Widow was in many ways a far greater threat.

“Jennifer Leighton is nothing to do with you and me,” he said.

“What a very ungracious thing to say. I will admit she surprised me,” said Angela Ferrers, to whom he had made vigorous love in a
performance
, he now realized, worthy of the stage, but to whom he had shown nothing of his real self.

“Frances proved a weak reed, but
Jenny
 . . . now, Jenny is promising.”

He remembered Frances Leighton’s admission about Angela Ferrers last night.
She helped me once, when I very much needed her.
That, along with the rumors he had pieced together about the Divine Fanny’s former, very dead lover. “Harry’s wife accused Frances Leighton of murder,” he guessed.

“It was never brought to trial,” replied Angela Ferrers.

“But it’s true, isn’t it? She killed Harry. And you supplied her with the poison.”

“I helped her when she needed me. As friends are wont to do.”

“I didn’t know you had any.”

“They are, admittedly, most often a liability in our line of work. An indulgence we can ill afford. They may even lead to rambling conversations in damp basements.”

“Harry wasn’t political. That makes Frances Leighton a murderess. And poison is a coward’s weapon.”

“Poison is a
woman’s
weapon, you mean. Yet one you and I both use. What a lovely English fiction, to
pretend that it is only employed by the fair sex. Frances is not lacking in intelligence or courage. Only in ruthlessness.”

“I beg to differ. She sent Jenny into Burgoyne’s hands unprotected, exposing her to the same fate.”

“Don’t be so quick to judge the Divine Fanny. She is what the whims of powerful men have made of her. And she only came to America to see for one last time the lovely Jenny. And Jenny—well, Jenny has proven far more interesting than I anticipated.”

“Your quarrel is with me,” said Devere. “Leave her out of this.”

“You would be dead now if it was not for her,” said Angela Ferrers bluntly.

He had not wanted Jennifer Leighton ruined by John Burgoyne, but the Widow posed a threat to more than her virtue and self-regard. “You have embroiled her in treason.”

“And
you
, dear sir, offered her up on a platter to John Burgoyne. Who, after all, would care about the honor of an obscure provincial girl of undistinguished birth and no fortune, who fancies herself a playwright and an actress?”

He didn’t answer.

“
You
again, Devere. When push came to shove. And
that
is why you are still alive. Because I think it is just possible that you may remember that you are an American yourself.”

“Being born in a manger does not make a man an animal.”

“Ah, if only your masters were so enlightened. But they are not, are they? You have worked to be more English than the English, these past twenty years, and
they barely tolerate you. It soothes their consciences to send a man like you to carry out their injustices, grand and petty, because they can blame the butcher’s bill—blame
their
savageries—on
your
heritage.”

“Are
you
trying to turn
me
now?” he asked. “Because this chair is considerably less comfortable than the bed I found for us. Though I am sure we could improvise nicely on the crate. Untie me, and I will demonstrate.”

“No, thank you,” she replied, meeting his eye. “A command performance will not be necessary. I somehow doubt you would show me the genuine passion you demonstrated for Jennifer Leighton, and outside professional demands, I have no tolerance anymore for the counterfeit kind. I cannot, of course, release you. Nor can I keep you tied up in Hallam’s basement forever.”

Here was the crux of the matter. She could slit his throat now and he would be able to do nothing to stop her. He’d try, of course. His body was already tensed to upset the chair if she approached.

She did not approach. “I have promised the Leightons that I will spare your life, but I must have a care for their safety. You know, or have guessed, too much about Frances. For that sin, I am sending you to the Simsbury Copper Mine.”

The prison Fairchild had described in Connecticut, where Isaac Sears and the Liberty Boys and the Committee of One Hundred and Congress and Washington all sent their political prisoners.

“I am not officially in America. If you send me to Simsbury, it will be difficult or impossible for Howe to trade me back,” said Severin.

“That,” said the Widow, “is rather the point.” She
departed in a swirl of soft wool skirts. The scent of gardenias lingered after her for a moment, and was then replaced with the smell of damp and mold.

He had blamed his failure on a weakness for strong, ambitious women, on his attraction to the Widow, and his tenderness for Jennifer Leighton, but his interview with Angela Ferrers had shown him the truth. She was
better
than he was. More ruthless. Less sentimental. He had thought he could go through with it in Boston, garrote her in the very bed they had shared.

He had been making excuses for his failure ever since. That she had felt the cord in his pocket, or under the pillow. That she had felt his body tense before he made his move. All of these things might very well be true—but the real reason he had failed to kill her was because he had hesitated. Because she was a woman, and he had been intimate with her.

She
had not hesitated. She had not been sentimental. She had moved like an eel, had snatched the cord and flung it from the window, and in the series of maneuvers that had followed, had bested him, because he had been unwilling to truly hurt her while she had felt no such constraint.

He could not afford such weakness again. He had learned that much at least from her. He was going to get out of this basement, and he was going to get Jennifer Leighton away from Aunt Lucrezia and her chest of poisons—and back to boring New Brunswick, where she could not get herself into any more trouble. And this time he would not forgo the pleasure of bedding her.

He began to work at the ropes once more. It hurt rather a lot, the raw rasp of hemp cutting into his flesh. A final, desperate wrench and he was able to pull his
left hand free, leaving strips of skin and a little blood behind in the coarse fiber of the rope.

Rolling his shoulder forward was pure agony. Two fingers were crooked and useless and these he had to bend back into place, quickly so they would not swell and freeze. He was glad no one was there to hear him cry out in the dark.

They had done a very good job of trussing him. His hands were free, but the ropes that crossed his chest and circled the back of the chair made it impossible to bend forward and reach the knots that bound his ankles. And the knots that held him lashed to the chair were, very wisely, also out of reach.

The chair, unfortunately, was sturdy, and would be difficult to break. The back splat was probably the weakest link, and he went to work on this first.

It was not easy. He had to focus all of his strength and concentration on straining against the ropes, first forward, and then back, the coils biting wickedly into muscle and bruising bone. The wood was creaking, very near to giving way, when the door opened.

He thrust his hands behind his back, because he did not want to give away the tiny advantage he had gained.

Oranges.

He breathed in their freshly peeled scent. It registered on his brain before light, before sound, cutting through the dark and his pain.

He was saved.

Devere drank in her scent. “Jenny,” he said. “Untie me.”

“I am so very sorry,” said Jennifer Leighton, who did not rush to his aid. “I didn’t know about my aunt.”

She closed the door quietly behind her and stood there with her back to the panels. She had only a small candle to pierce the gloom, but it sparkled off her dark, perceptive eyes and illuminated the blush on her fine, pale skin like a Dutch painting.

Jennifer Leighton was not costumed for seduction as she had been the night before, nor was she wearing a shroud like that awful linen gown, which had looked and felt like sacking. She was dressed in a little velvet jacket of coral pink, laced in front with a green ribbon over a matching stomacher. Her petticoat was white silk, embroidered with sprigs of flowers, and her copper hair was pinned loosely back from her face to fall in long waves over her shoulders. She still had his
knife, tucked into the waist of her petticoat, the quilled hilt glossy in the lantern light.

He was cold and his hands and shoulders ached, and there was something nearly irresistible about the textures of her velvet jacket and silk petticoats that made him desperately want to touch her. That, and the scent of oranges. But the way she hung back at the door urged caution, and he kept his bloody hands hidden behind the chair.

“Jenny, untie me, and I promise, whatever your aunt is mixed up in, I’ll see that you aren’t hurt. And that no one ever knows you took Burgoyne’s plans.” He should not promise it. He should not
do
it. But he knew he would. He had a certain measure of discretion in his work, required it in order to cultivate his sources. He could justify shielding her if he so chose. He was very good at justifying things to himself.

She remained standing near the door. “But you can’t say the same for my aunt, can you?”

He ought to lie to her. His business was lies. He traded in secrets. His value to the men who paid him lay in his willingness to do unpleasant things, like deceive innocent young women whose lips tasted like brandy and sugar. His job was concealing the weaknesses of powerful men, and he had been doing it for so long that he would surely be able to indulge and conceal his own.

He would have to. Because he found he could not lie to
this
girl. “If you let me go, I promise that I will undertake no initiative against Frances myself. But if I was asked to by the government, I would have little choice.”

“Then that is no promise at all.”

“Your aunt,” he said carefully, “was once part of Angela Ferrers’ network. She likely has information material to our success in this war.”

“And you would hurt her to get it.”

“My superiors could not rely on information she gave up freely.”

“You mean you would torture her. I had convinced myself that you wouldn’t. That my aunt and her unsettling friend were wrong. I came down here to free you, Severin.
That
does make me naive, doesn’t it?”

“I won’t apologize to you for what I am,” he said. “Were I anything other, I could not have gotten you off the
Boyne
, or past those cutthroats in the street last night.”

“That isn’t who you are,” she said. “It’s who you choose to be.”

She was right, after a fashion, and wrong, because she had not walked a mile in his shoes. “Not all of us have so very many choices.”

“But you chose to save me last night, and that is why I am here now. I want to help you as you helped me, but I cannot do it at the price of my aunt’s safety.”

“She sent you to Burgoyne like a babe to the slaughter and then drugged you to ensure that you did not interfere with her friend’s plans last night. Your aunt keeps ipecac and opium in her medicine chest and uses them with the casualness of a Borgia. Are you certain your loyalty is so well placed?”

“I am certain of far fewer things today than I was yesterday, but my aunt is not one of them. And an evening with Burgoyne has given me a new sympathy for poor Lucrezia. The wants of women are so easily swept aside by the whims of men. You sit here tied hand and foot and still, in so many ways, the advantages remain yours.”

He could not deny that. It was truer than she knew. If she came close enough, he would be able to overpower her, even with his ankles and chest still bound to the
chair. He did not want to do that. “The world was made unequal, Jenny. That is why most women dare not face it alone. I can’t do anything about that, but I am not working against your best interests. Quite the contrary.”

“That is what Burgoyne imagined, that he was helping me.”

“And that is the line Angela Ferrers will take when she tries to recruit you. That she is acting in your best interest. But in truth she intrigues for the same people who would close the playhouses and banish you and yours to the road. The Rebels have no love of the theater. If they had their way, you and your aunt would starve.”

“If the choice was scraps from Burgoyne’s table or starving, I think I would choose the latter.”

“Then I think that you have never known real hunger.” He could recall it even now, the gnawing, agonizing pain. The consuming desperation of it.

“I am not asking you to hand America to the Rebels,” said Jenny, “though the governor seems to have done his level best on that score these past months. I am asking you to forget what you know about
one
woman, who is no threat to anyone. Yesterday you did not know she had any connection to Angela Ferrers. You would have sailed home to England none the wiser. Can you not pretend this is yesterday?”

“Can you?”

*   *   *

Jenny did not want things to be this way. She had glimpsed something with Severin Devere last night that made her understand how Aunt Frances could throw away her career. Not for a man, as Jenny had always thought, but for the thrill she had experienced running
beside Severin Devere in the streets of New York, for the laughter they had stifled together crouched in the rosemary, for the sheer joy of partnership.

She wanted very much to untie him. And to touch him. To push his hair back from his face and straighten his collar and stroke his cheek. She wanted to recover the intimacy that had grown between them in the garden, and bloomed in the banquet hall kitchen, and somehow survived their frustrated desire to persist on that sleepy walk home, so that when he had taken the brass key from her fingers on the doorstep it had felt like they were lovers, even though they were not. Afterward, he had looked so very right sitting in her aunt’s parlor, as though he belonged there with their little family.

Of course, that was before her aunt had drugged him. What he looked at this moment was dangerous, like the brown dog that the brewer kept tied up at the end of the block. Sweet natured when he was free and fed and lying in the shade, but snarling and slavering when tied up without food or water and set to guard the empty premises for hours at a time.

Devere was like the dog now, parched and pent, and she could not release him, but she was running out of options and out of time. Devere had been so practical last night. If only he would be so today. She had to persuade him to see reason.

“In Burgoyne’s cabin,” she said, “you advised me to embrace a lie and forgo justice. I am asking you to do the same, and the stakes are no less dire. If you give me your word that you will leave my aunt out of your business with the Widow, that you will forget what you have learned about her, I will get you out of here, and Angela Ferrers be damned.”

He shook his head and looked at her with those intent, magnetic black eyes. “In the slot during the riot, I advised you to go home to your parents. Why didn’t you?”

“Because there is nothing for me in New Brunswick.”

“And because at John Street your gifts are recognized. As mine are by our government, by the King and men like Lord Germain and General Howe. No one
wants
to do the kind of things I do, but someone must. And I am valued for it.”

“I was wrong,” she said. “About the theater. And a lot of other things. You are wrong about this. Promise me you will not tell anyone about my aunt’s connection to the Widow. If you don’t, I cannot free you, and they are going to send you to a loyalist prison.”

“I was educated at an English public school. After Harrow, prison holds no fears for me,” he said.

He is more English than the English because he has to be.
“This one should. The greenroom is a fine place for ghoulish gossip. It is in a worked-out copper mine in Connecticut. The Rebels have been using it to hold
inconvenient
Tories. They lower the unlucky wretches down to the bottom, more than a hundred feet below the ground, by a windlass. There is no light and there is no air, and it will make this cellar look like the royal box. Most of those immured die within a few months.”

“I know of the mine, Jenny. And I know how to survive in such a place. But that your aunt would banish anyone to that kind of hell just to save herself ought to make you question what kind of woman she is.”

“My
aunt
begged for your life, Severin, and secured it. It was not Fanny but Angela Ferrers who has proposed this unhappy compromise. You cannot turn me against
Aunt Frances. If it wasn’t for her, I would be living a very different life. I would never have seen New York or set foot on a stage, or had my words brought to life there.”

“And you wouldn’t have ended up on the
Boyne
with your life in peril,” replied Devere. “People like the Widow, people like your aunt, people like
me
—we sacrifice lovely young things like you all the time. Angela Ferrers does it for a cause; Frances Leighton out of self-preservation.
I
was prepared to hand you over to Burgoyne to keep the wretch aboard the
Boyne
and out of trouble. For England, you might say. The reasoning makes no difference—none at all—to the victims of our agendas.”

“You don’t know my aunt. She tried to discourage me from going to Burgoyne. There was nothing she could say to dissuade me.”

“That isn’t true,” said Devere. “She could have told you the truth about her illness.”

His words struck her deaf and dumb like a thunderclap, and she was alone in the silence. Devere, the walls, the door—all seemed miles and miles away. Then the world rushed back to her. She could hear a faint dripping somewhere in the distance, feel the chill of the basement through the soles of her shoes, smell the damp, crumbling stone.

At last she found her voice. It sounded small and frightened. “What do you know about my aunt’s illness?” she asked.

“Jenny,” he said in a gentle voice that made her light-headed with foreboding, “your aunt is dying.”

“No.”

“You live with her. You know it is not drink,” said Devere. “Or late nights, or the natural progress of age.”

“You cannot know what is wrong with her,” insisted
Jenny. “
She
does not know what is wrong with her. She has not seen a doctor.”

“She has no need of one,” said Devere. “Neither for diagnosis nor for what passes as ‘treatment.’ Her father was an apothecary. She would have recognized the
signs
in her lover early on. She must have long known what is coming. She may have thought, at one time, she had been spared, but she must know by now that she has not. The disease is like that. It disfigures some but spares others. It can hide undetected for years. But you have seen the symptoms. The forgetfulness, the headaches, the stiff and sore muscles, the numb fingers and toes.”

Jenny shook her head and felt for the latch on the door. Devere was wrong. He knew nothing. She could not go on without Aunt Frances. “That is just age. She can’t be dying. I need her,” said Jenny baldly.

“Untie me, Jenny, and send for Major Fairchild at the King’s Arms. Frances Leighton has abused your trust. She will not be able to keep her secret much longer. Think of how it will tarnish you when it is known. There are those who will say you are her daughter. It will make you a pariah, to be the child of a syphilitic.”

It fit. It fit the facts she knew and the rumors she had heard and it answered the questions that Frances Leighton had so deftly sidestepped. “How do you know this?” Jenny asked.

“It’s my business to know things. I collect and sift information. I look for patterns, and this one is all too clear, even if the general public has not yet guessed it. She withdrew from the stage and public life to nurse her dying lover, and then fled to America once he was no more. It is a
terrible
way to die, Jenny, and she put you
into the very same peril when she told you to accommodate Burgoyne without protection. And when she is found out—when her condition is known—it will forever change how people think of you. And it will give credence to the even uglier rumors about her lover’s death that were circulating when Fanny left London.”

“What rumors?” Fanny only ever spoke of Harry in wistful terms.

“That Fanny was not a dutiful nurse. That she murdered him. Those, at least, were the accusations that Harry’s wife made against Frances. No charges were ever brought, and it was widely agreed that Harry and Fanny were devoted to each other—he’d been separated from his shrew of a wife for years—but if Frances learned that Harry had given her the disease, that she was going to share the same ugly fate, then she might have a powerful motive for murder indeed.”

It was all too much. Jenny did not know if Severin’s narrative was entirely accurate, but she feared that the terrible burden of it was on the mark. She had not really felt the effects of her brush with danger the night before, neither John Burgoyne’s assault nor their encounter with the footpads—because Devere’s companionship had shielded her and his strength had buoyed her—but she felt it now.

The impulse to throw herself at him for comfort was strong, and utterly useless.

She did not feel betrayed, as Devere plainly wished her to. She felt bereft. Aunt Frances had almost led her down the selfsame path to destruction the great actress herself had walked, but Jenny could not fault her for it. She had not
made
the road.

Her lip was quivering. Grief fused with anger. The one was weak, the other strong. She bit down, hard, until the trembling stopped.