Mistress Firebrand (2 page)

The missive opened with effusive praise for Burgoyne’s skills as a playwright and closed with an invitation to occupy the royal box at the John Street Theater. This was accompanied by a printed pamphlet-bound play,
The American Prodigal
, by Miss Jennifer Leighton.

Burgoyne shed his banyan and reached for his coat.

“You are not going to accept her invitation,” said Severin.

“Of course I am. It’s the last opportunity I’ll have for a gallop until we reach Portsmouth.”

“Possibly at the cost of your life.”

“Not unless the little rustic is well and truly poxed.”

That was the far more common contradiction of their age. That an English gentleman could be as devoted to his wife as Burgoyne was to Lady Charlotte, but cavalierly betray her when opportunity presented. Fidelity, for men like Burgoyne, meant not
keeping
a mistress. It did not mean forgoing convenient “gallops.”

That still didn’t make it safe. “New York is not
London, General, and the John Street Theater is not Drury Lane. In ’sixty-six, after the business with the stamps, a mob of Liberty Boys tore down the theater on Chapel Street and whipped the players from the Battery to the palisade. This could be an innocent”—if somewhat gauche, he thought to himself—“invitation, or it might be a plot to lure you into the city and capture or kill you under the cover of a riot. I cannot allow you to go.”

Burgoyne tied his neck cloth and rummaged through a jewel case. “I genuinely don’t see how you can prevent me.”

“I can take measures.”

Burgoyne stiffened. For a moment all was stillness in the cabin and the cries of the sailors at work above could clearly be heard. Then Burgoyne set the diamond pin he had just selected on the table with a click and looked Severin over. “That,” he said coldly, “is why your kind make such good informers and spies. Honor offers you no impediment.”

“So I have been given to understand,” said Severin smoothly. That, he knew, was how the government saw him: as a ruthless savage who made a useful tool. It was not how he saw himself. Until recently he had not cared much what others thought of him. Lately, since Boston, that had begun to change.

He pocketed Jennifer Leighton’s orange-scented letter.

“Very well,” said Burgoyne. “We are both men of the world. You desire that I should stay aboard the
Boyne
, and I desire to bed a pretty actress before we sail.”

“You don’t even know that she’s pretty. Or that she exists at all.” The oranges, though, were real enough.

“Then find out for me,” said Burgoyne, retaking his seat. “And if she’s pretty, bundle her back to the
Boyne
.”

“I am not a procurer.”

“Of course not.”

Burgoyne left the words unspoken.
What you are is scarcely more honorable.

And he was right, because men like Severin gave him the luxury of being right, of being
honorable
. Severin did what was necessary, and carried it on his conscience, so that others did not have to.

“Give me your word, as a gentleman,” said Severin, “that you will remain aboard the
Boyne
and write no more letters to shore, and I will go fetch you your actress.”

Jenny stood in the wings waiting for her cue. She could feel the tidelike pull of the stage, the lure of the flickering footlights. She played only the small roles, the maids and messengers and next-door neighbors with few lines. Acting was not her talent, but that did not diminish the thrill of being part of the performance.

Aunt Frances, of course, was the real star. The sweetheart of Drury Lane. A name that sold tickets, even if sometimes she was not entirely herself.

Like tonight. The Divine Fanny was wandering. Jenny knew the signs, could read volumes in the dreamy look on her aunt’s lovely, distracted face. Frances might be standing at the center of the raked stage, framed by pastoral scenery meant to evoke Arcadia, but her usually sharp mind was somewhere else.

The audience had not yet noticed, but Bobby Hallam,
John Street’s manager and leading man, had. He put himself right in her line of sight to deliver his speech, demanding her attention.

“My greatest fear, madam,” he declaimed in a rich tenor that carried to the back of the house, “is not that I should lose this duel, but that I should acquit myself in such a manner as to disgrace my ancestors.”

Jenny mouthed the words along with him. She knew every line, because she had written them. She waited for Aunt Frances’ response, but the silence lengthened, and the audience grew restless.

Far, far too late, she replied: “I cannot speak to
disgrace
, sir, but I fancy they might find your intemperate haste to join them a little . . .
disappointing
.”

Her delivery saved the joke. Almost. The audience, catching the conceit like a bouquet, tittered. Not the gale of laughter that usually swept the gallery, but it was something.

That made twice this week. Frances’ spells were getting more frequent, harder to hide from Bobby Hallam and the ticket-buying public.

Jenny couldn’t help but look up at the royal box where she hoped Burgoyne sat. Her heart sank when she heard it. The beginnings of the speech that had made Aunt Frances’ career. The lines that had brought her to the attention of David Garrick, the role that had caught the eye of her first titled lover.

She had gone off book entirely.

“How hard is the condition of our sex?” asked Frances Leighton, turning to the audience. “Through every stage of life the slave of man?”

“How now?” asked Bobby Hallam, who didn’t know
Nicholas Rowe’s play at all, because it wasn’t in the company’s repertoire. “It’s to be pistols at dawn,” Bobby asserted, trying to draw Aunt Frances back into the scene. “Will you pray for me?”

Apparently she would not. Aunt Frances ignored Bobby completely. She was no longer playing Mistress Spartan in Jenny’s
American Prodigal
, but was reciting Calista’s speech from
The Fair Penitent.

“In all the dear delightful days of youth, a rigid father dictates to our wills—”

“Surely not so rigid,” Bobby coaxed, taking her arm.

Frances shook him off and walked downstage to the footlights, her leonine grace and bold striped polonaise drawing every eye in the house. “And deals out pleasure with a scanty hand.”

The stage manager, Mr. Dearborn, touched Jenny’s shoulder and spoke in her ear. “It’s a fine speech. But it’s not in the play. Shall I lower the curtain?”

It was how Bobby had dealt with Frances’ little spells in the past. If the Divine Fanny couldn’t be coaxed back to book, Bobby ordered the curtain lowered and rushed Miss Richards, who sang prettily, out onto the apron.

It would save the show and safeguard their box office, but the humiliation would crush Aunt Frances. Jenny had seen it happen, and she could not do that to Fanny again.

She had to get her aunt off the apron, gently, so she could come back to herself in private. Jenny doubted any of this would impress John Burgoyne, but she couldn’t worry about that right now.

Upstage, Bobby Hallam nodded his powdered head,
an unmistakable signal for the curtain to close—unless Jenny could stop it.

*   *   *

Devere made his way on foot north from the Battery. New York was a tiny city, barely a mile from Fort George to the palisade. The town resembled less an English port and more a Garden of Eden. Every lane was shaded by towering elms and beeches: a verdant roof in summer, now an autumn canopy of fiery gold.

Severin followed Broad Street, lined with the painted-brick mansions of the rich, to the intersection of Nassau and Wall streets, where a subtle change took place. The paint on the houses was not as bright here, the pigments cheaper, the coats thinner. The dwellings grew smaller, then began to jostle with shops and taverns. One thing remained constant, though: the presence of slaves. New York was the Sparta of the new world, a quarter of her population in chains, all of them obliged to carry a lantern after dark, a legacy of the slave plot to burn New York in ’41.

Slavery gave the lie to all the Liberty Boys’ cries for freedom, but that didn’t make the rabble any less dangerous, so Severin wore a more than ornamental sword at his hip and kept a close eye on the alleys that opened between houses.

He turned left onto John Street and found the theater on his right. It looked like most provincial British playhouses—long, narrow, and featureless—but at home it would have been constructed of brick or local stone. Here it was clapboard painted a deep, dark red that appeared almost black in the failing light, save where lanterns brought the color to life.

Severin would not have paused in the bare, cold lobby save for the playbill pinned to the chipped white paneling. It was the name, printed in bold capitals above the list of comedies, that caught his eye: Frances Leighton.

The sweetheart of Drury Lane, who had spurned a titled lover for a merely rich and talented one. An accomplished woman, to be sure. Severin recalled she had a volume of well-received poems and a novel to her name, but scandal, in the form of a dead lover and the man’s vengeful wife, dogged her.

“I didn’t know you were in New York, Devere.”

The voice was familiar to Severin. Though it had been many years since he had heard it, the effect was like listening to an orchestra strike up a favorite air. It filled him with sudden nostalgia and threw his isolation and loneliness into high relief.

“And I thought the garrison had withdrawn to the safety of the
Asia
after the Liberty Boys stormed the Battery,” Severin replied, turning to face Courtney Fairchild. His old classmate was not wearing his usual red army regimentals but a suit of fine worsted like Severin.

“Just so,” agreed Courtney, “but the officers are tolerated in the town so long as we dress in mufti.”

Severin was glad to hear it. After two weeks of Burgoyne’s company, seeing Fairchild, who had been more brotherly to him than his own brother when they were at school, was a balm for the soul. “I have tickets for the royal box,” said Severin. “Would you care to join me? Unless you have other plans.”

“I’d like that very much.” Courtney beamed and projected the same manly bonhomie that had seemed
oversized for his scrawny frame at school but suited the bluff soldier he had become. “The Divine Fanny is performing tonight and everything but the gallery is sold out.”

Inside, the actual theater was warm and surprisingly pretty in a provincial way. The galleries were painted in a classical scheme of swags and garlands, all pale green and rosy pink, with the names of the great English dramatists—Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dryden, Rowe—inscribed in cartouches above the stage. Including the pit and the gallery, the theater probably seated seven or eight hundred, though barely half that number were in attendance. The “royal” box was just a small enclosure overhanging the apron above the proscenium doors.

The play was surprisingly enjoyable. Severin forgot entirely about spotting Burgoyne’s harlot and became caught up in the drama. The characters might have been stock, but they were well drawn and had been cleverly tweaked for an American setting. The country bumpkin in homespun was fresh from a Massachusetts farm, the charming rake in silk was a Dutch patroon, and the Divine Fanny played an aristocratic Philadelphia lady of fashion and prodigious carnal appetite. It was a knowing slant on Frances Leighton’s offstage persona, an inside joke for the sophisticated theatergoer.

“They say she has no protector in New York, though Van Dam has offered a fortune and Stanwyck is known to be paying her bills in hopes of future gratitude,” whispered Courtney.

“Are you in the running?” Severin asked with amusement. Frances Leighton was slender, graceful,
and impossible to look away from. Only her leading man was able to hold his own onstage with her. The other players came and went leaving little impression—save for the somewhat mousy girl acting the part of the maid, the younger brother, and the gossipy neighbor, in a series of equally unattractive costume changes. Severin noticed her only because of the distinctive way she darted on and offstage.

Yet for all of the Divine Fanny’s obvious appeal, Severin did not find her greatly attractive. She was a little too like a certain lady he had met in Boston, a very dangerous lady. His ribs still ached from that encounter.

“I don’t have the depth of pocket,” said Courtney Fairchild, with a sigh, “to support the Divine Fanny. She is a damnably expensive trollop. But I attend her salon, and I plan on visiting the greenroom after the play to see if anything else tempts my eye. Will you be joining me?”

Severin hadn’t spotted Burgoyne’s harlot yet, so he would be obliged to attend. He was about to say so when Frances Leighton cocked her head and began to declaim a speech utterly at odds with the action of the scene. Severin could not place it, though he was certain he had heard it before.

“In all the dear delightful days of youth,” spoke Frances Leighton, as though from heart and not from memory, “a rigid father dictates to our wills, and deals out pleasure with a scanty hand.”

Whatever Frances Leighton was doing, it was not part of the planned entertainment. A frisson of real tension, not playacted, electrified the stage and Severin
found himself sitting forward in his chair, knees pressed to the kicking board.

“To his, the tyrant husband’s reign succeeds, proud with opinion of superior reason. He holds domestic business and devotion all we are capable to know, and shuts us, like cloistered idiots, from the world’s acquaintance, and all the joys of freedom. Wherefore are we born with high souls, but to assert our selves, shake off this vile obedience they exact, and claim an equal empire over the world?”

She froze there in front of the footlights, her lithe body outlined by the bold lavender stripes of her polonaise, and waited for someone—the audience, her leading man, the voice of God perhaps—to answer.

Wherefore indeed,
Severin thought, his mind teasing potential meanings and messages out of the appeal.

There came a groan and then a catcall from the gallery. Severin reached for the sword at his hip and glanced quickly over at Courtney Fairchild, who was also readying his weapon. If this was the prelude to a plot, a planned incitement intended to start a riot, then Severin was lucky to have encountered this stalwart friend of his youth. Say what you like about Courtney—he’d always had a cool head.

An apple core landed on the stage at Frances Leighton’s feet, and beside him Fairchild made a noise that sounded awfully like a snarl. An empty bottle struck one of the flats beside the Divine Fanny’s head and clattered to the ground. Nothing broke in upon her perfect composure.

The mood of the crowd was balanced on a knife’s edge. Their attention was focused on Frances Leighton, but it would be easy—all too easy—to turn it
elsewhere, to focus it on the royal box and the representatives of the Crown within. Severin readied for an attack.

It didn’t come.

Instead, a girl entered stage right. She was barefoot and her slender curves were outlined in buff breeches and silk stays. Her copper hair tumbled free over her back. Severin judged her to be in her middle twenties. Her body was so graceful that she appeared to glide to Frances Leighton.

With a start Severin realized that she was the same actress who had played the mousy maid and the younger son and the trilling neighbor, transformed—or, more accurately, revealed.

“Forgive me, fair Calista,” she said, dropping to one knee, “if I presume, on privilege of friendship, to join my grief to yours, and mourn the evils that hurt your peace, and quench those eyes in tears.”

She went on in her low, mellow voice, entreating Frances Leighton to share her burdens. The rabble in the gallery quieted, and listened, rapt, to this girl.

Severin watched her coax the Divine Fanny off the stage. A lump rose in his throat. His world had been sharp edges and hard corners for too long. He wished he had been in Frances Leighton’s place, wished that the girl had been addressing him. Stripped bare by catharsis, Severin could not deny what he felt. He craved that kind of understanding and solicitude.

Especially since Boston.

The play resumed, without the Divine Fanny. Another actress of similar height appeared in her striped gown, or one very like it, and assumed the role.

As for the fascinating girl: she returned to the
stage three more times. Before, she had been unremarkable, almost invisible. Now Severin couldn’t help but notice her.

And want to meet her.

He was not the sort of man to court actresses. He knew fantasy from reality. It didn’t matter. He was tired of sparring verbally with Burgoyne and his ribs still ached from sparring physically with the Widow in Boston and he wanted, just once, something for himself, even if it was an illusion.

The players lined up for their curtain call, and the object of his desire stepped forward, hand in hand with the leading man, to curtsy, her long copper hair almost kissing the boards. He wanted to feel it against his bare skin. Severin had come on an errand for Burgoyne, of course, but there was no reason he shouldn’t find some entertainment for himself.

“Who is she?” asked Severin.

“Jenny? She’s the Divine Fanny’s niece and dresser. Bit of a scribbler. Writes the comedies. Never made much of an impression before. I’d no idea she was so pretty.”