Mistress Firebrand (20 page)

They drove on for hours, Severin lapsing in and out of consciousness, and then stopped. Light splashed across Devere’s face.
A door opening.
That was what it was. They had doors in the world aboveground. He had almost forgotten about those. From his rough bed in the cart, Severin heard the cries of a woman, some sobbing. Then his companion the doctor was bending over him, and there was arguing.

The doctor wanted to bring Severin inside. Severin was probably dying. That was good to know. The doctor wanted him to die comfortably. That seemed very considerate of him. A woman climbed onto the cart and tipped something fiery down his throat. Very raw, very homemade whiskey.
Ambrosia
. She mopped
his brow with a cool cloth and he tried to thank her but his tongue felt thick and heavy.

The boys consulted together in Mohawk and came to a decision, one of which Severin approved. They were taking him the rest of the way home to their mother. He liked that idea. It meant he did not have to move from the cart.

The doctor said something to Severin. Most likely thanking him. That was gracious. Severin would have liked to say something in reply. Perhaps he had. It was all so very jumbled. The cart jerked forward. The light dwindled. And the night swallowed him whole.

April 1776

Jenny woke to shouts in the street. When she looked out the window, she saw Continental dragoons in bright blue coats below, hammering on the doors to the theater, their leader demanding entry.

Appearing as if on cue, Robert Hallam came running from the opposite direction—his cravat loose about his neck, shirt untied, hair falling free over his shoulders—and a fierce argument ensued. Bobby demanded the dragoons leave. Their major slid from his horse with an economical movement and presented an order from the Committee of Safety decreeing that John Street was to be commandeered as a hospital for American soldiers, several thousand of whom had been struck down by typhus.

Bobby tore up the decree. The officer of dragoons watched impassively as the pieces fluttered to the
ground, then ordered his men to take up axes and break down the doors.

A crowd gathered, then parted, as Frances Leighton emerged running from their robin’s egg blue house: skirts caught up in her hands, dressed from head to toe in gray silk, with her hair piled on top of her head and an ostrich feather adding height to her petite frame. She stopped in front of the theater doors, looked breathlessly at the armed men intent on gaining access to the playhouse, put a pale, beautiful hand to her pale, beautiful forehead, and swooned—directly into the arms of the dragoon major.

All work stopped while the Divine Fanny was carried back across the street to the house. Jenny donned her robe and played her part with burnt feathers and smelling salts. And a strong drink for the major, who had laid Fanny tenderly on the daybed in the upstairs parlor and promptly subsided into a parlor chair himself, entirely overwhelmed by this display of feminine sensitivity.

Bobby took the opportunity to saddle his horse and ride hard for Black Sam Fraunces’ tavern, where the Committee of Safety was supposed to be meeting.

They would not admit him. He returned to John Street to discover that Fanny’s performance had bought him a day’s reprieve, and spent the afternoon calling on favors and promising all manner of future largesse if only the theater might be spared.

It was not. The major did not return the next day, but another officer, less impressionable and more hard-hearted, did—with a train of thirty wagons and six hundred patients for the newly christened John Street Hospital.

Bobby penned a strongly worded letter to the
Committee, full of high-minded rhetoric about liberty and the sanctity of private property, and of thinly veiled threats to savage and ridicule them in his next production. For his pains, he received only a summons in reply, from a different committee, the one Washington had asked the Provincial Congress to form in order to try suspected Tories.

“I have been an ardent, if covert, Son of Liberty for years,” fumed Bobby, pacing the little upstairs parlor.

I have not,
thought Jenny. But so many things had changed since her night with Burgoyne. Before that, she had identified with the loyalists whose patronage had kept John Street open. She had mimicked their scorn for all things provincial. On the
Boyne
she had experienced just what that scorn led to. Her loyalties were no longer fixed.

An identical summons from this new “Committee of Seven” arrived an hour later addressed to Jenny. And she too was ordered to present herself at Black Sam’s tavern at eleven o’clock the following morning.

“Shall I faint, as you did?” Jenny asked her aunt.

“Only if you are reasonably certain a gentleman stands ready to catch you, dear,” replied Aunt Frances.

Bobby made a show of harnessing the matched bays to the coach that had sat little used in the shed next to John Street since Lewis Hallam’s departure, and Mr. Dearborn drove them the half mile to Mr. Fraunces’ tavern.

The four-story brick mansion that housed Black Sam’s premises, where Jenny liked to drink her chocolate and read her mother’s letters, had been built for the DeLancy family fifty years earlier, on a scale and with an elegance that fitted it for use as a public building
even five decades after its completion. The place had long been the haunt of the Sons of Liberty and the Committee of Safety, and more lately of General Washington, who was said to be so partial to Mr. Fraunces’ cooking that he’d begun ordering his meals sent from the tavern all the way to his headquarters at Richmond Hill, two miles north of the city.

Bobby had dressed in republican homespun and sober leather kneebands.

“I did not know we were staging
The Siege of Boston
,” said Jenny, surveying his costume. “Who are you playing? Sam Adams?”

“I would go in sackcloth if I thought it would save John Street,” replied Bobby.

Jenny would not. If she was going to be accused of grand intrigue, she was going to face such accusations as Aunt Frances or Angela Ferrers might: in silk and lace and with a feather in her hair. The latter detail gave her pause to think of Severin’s meager chicken feather “headdress,” and that bittersweet, eventful night they’d shared, an age ago, it seemed.

The tavern was already bustling when they drew up. A servant greeted them at the door and Bobby was shown at once into a ground-floor receiving room, leaving Jenny adrift and stranded in the hall.

She retreated to a bench beside the door. Aunt Frances would not have done so. Aunt Frances would have struck an attitude on the first riser of the grand staircase, leaning gracefully upon the newel post. Improvisation, though, was not one of Jenny’s gifts, and she realized sitting here that she had no desire to be the center of attention.

What she wanted was to observe, and there was
probably no better place for that in all of New York right now. The sheer number of people coming and going, some elated, some dejected, and some playing their cards very close to their vests, was staggering, and she realized that the city had not felt so alive in months.

There were patterns in the chaos too. Men came and went from the door Bobby had disappeared through; some of them were trailed by families and not a few wives carrying babes, intended no doubt to incline the Committee toward mercy.

On the landing above was a door just to the left of the stairs with two remarkably tall Continentals stationed to either side, looking smart in dark blue wool, their bayonets polished to an extraordinary shine. Only a single servant came and went through that door, ferrying silver and fine china and sparkling crystal inside.

At last the parade of tableware stopped and the landing door opened wide. A young man in Continental blue emerged and came down the stairs, descending the risers two at a time and scanning the hall until his eyes lighted on Jenny. He was dark haired and compactly built, and he took Jenny utterly by surprise when he stopped in front of her and bowed deeply.

“Miss Leighton,” he said, with an Irish lilt that charmed her utterly. He offered her his hand. “I am Captain Moylan, the general’s secretary. Please forgive the delay. The kitchens are overtaxed, but lunch is served at last, and His Excellency is delighted to have your company.”

She had absolutely no idea what to say, but she accepted the hand offered, and he placed hers over his arm and led her up the stairs to the guarded portal at the top.

The room beyond was neither large nor grand, but
it was carpeted and there was a good fire. The chimney drew well and the windows were large, so it had that seasonally rare advantage of being warm and bright
without
being clouded with smoke.

There were two tables: one covered with green baize and papers and inkwells and ledgers and maps, where two men sat scrutinizing a broadside; the other laid for a meal for four with white linen and china plates and silver dishes.

The taller of the two men stood and Jenny was forced, as so often happened, to gaze up at her host. Captain Moylan conducted her into the room and said, “Miss Jennifer Leighton, may I present His Excellency, General Washington.”

Washington himself was an imposing figure, and not entirely because of his height. He was neatly dressed in a blue uniform and his hair was carefully tied back and powdered. He had a sober air about his person, but something about his mouth suggested that he had once been quick to smile.

The other, unnamed gentleman rose also. He was several inches shorter than the general, with a long, dour face at odds with his smiling eyes, and wore a very fine white wig with the curls pinned just behind his ears to soften his features. His suit was sober black silk, but his waistcoat was sumptuous red velvet with gold wire embroidery, and a gold watch chain peaked from one embellished pocket.

“This,” said Captain Moylan, indicating the man in the red waistcoat, “is—”

“A most ardent supporter of the cause,” supplied the man.

“I am so very sorry about your theater, Miss
Leighton,” said Washington, cutting off further discussion of his companion’s identity. He led Jenny, Moylan, and his nameless friend to the table laid for their meal. The general took up a seat opposite Jenny, while the Irish captain sat down beside her, and the unidentified dandy flanked His Excellency. “But I must bow to civil authority in this. Congress has decreed that the playhouses be closed.”

“Even if Mr. Hallam promises to perform nothing but
Cato
three nights a week?”

“Even so.”

“And yet you allow your officers to stage productions in camp, I am told.”

The Irishman beside her paused in buttering his roll.

Washington pursed his lips. “My officers are
my
responsibility, and under my command. Civilians are not. That is the distinction. If I overreach in this, Congress will say, ‘He was very loath to lay his fingers off it.’”

“You mean they will accuse you of playing Caesar.”

“The parallels will be impossible for those learned gentlemen to resist.”

She had not considered that, but his troubles were not hers. “Your officers are paid. If the John Street closes, I will lose my livelihood.”

“For that, I am also very sorry, but there may be a remedy. Someone has recently pressed into my hand a most excellent composition. It purports to be a new translation of the
Miles Gloriosus
for American audiences, and it is anything but. Do you read Latin, Miss Leighton?”

She did not. The title and the frontispiece of the play were a conceit. She had added them as an afterthought, before posting it via Mr. Fraunces to a false
address maintained by Angela Ferrers. And now she knew where it had traveled since.

“No.”

“Neither do I,” he said, perhaps a little wistfully. “I was educated for a career as a surveyor, where Latin is deemed of little use, and later I went into His Majesty’s army, where French would have served me better. But in truth nothing would have served me well at all there, except had I been born someplace
else
. Had I stayed in royal service, I would always have been passed over, time and again, because I am a colonial. Your ‘translation’ of
The Braggart Soldier
leads me to believe you understand something of this.”

“Yes.” She had been so glib with Burgoyne, and now she found herself monosyllabic in the presence of a man who had actually read her work.

And for Jenny, like the “learned gentlemen” in Congress, certain parallels were impossible to resist. Once again she was being entertained by a general, a man she hoped might become her patron, supping off china dishes and silver plates and being offered good Madeira wine.

In all other ways the circumstances could not be more different. This was no uncomfortable tête-à-tête: her play was not a pretext or a prelude to seduction. Washington made no effort to impress her with his person, or with the difference in their stations. He did not flatter and he did not ply her with drink—and he did not, during the meal, manufacture any excuse to touch her at all.

And yet he was no plaster saint. He was a slaveholder, like Bobby.

“My friend here,” and now Washington indicated the dour-faced man in red and black, presently engaged
in chasing peas across his plate, “has also read your play.”

“Witty and spirited,” said the man, spearing a last runaway sphere.

Washington smiled. It confirmed her suspicion. This had once been a man with a wry sense of humor. She could see it now as he struggled to hide his amusement over his companion’s resolute pursuit of his vegetables.

Then he turned to Jenny, all mirth banished again, and nodded at her plate. “You have barely eaten. If it is feminine delicacy that restrains you, abandon it. Men who admire such coquetries are seldom worth sitting down with at table. If it is the meal that is at fault, though, let us ask the steward to bring you something else.”

Jenny had no doubt the food was very good, and she was in fact partial to roast chicken, but she had been too focused on their conversation to eat any of it. “I breakfasted before coming and did not anticipate being given lunch,” she said. “I had in fact anticipated being given a trial and possibly a sentence.”

Even now Bobby might be receiving such, at less than impartial hands. Of course, Severin never even had that privilege before his abduction and imprisonment at Simsbury.

“I apologize for the deception, but it seemed a sensible precaution. The Committee of Seven exists precisely because there
are
Tory plotters in the city, some of whom would rather see New York burned to the ground than in Rebel hands. Desperate men, who are loath to surrender the privileges they have ‘earned’ from a lifetime of toadeating. The fortunes of war being as they are, better that you remain unknown and insignificant to such men.”

When the luncheon dishes were cleared and the
steward had retreated, the general’s friend produced her manuscript, a little dog-eared, and placed it on the table. The cover page with her title and name was slightly water-stained. “It will sell well in the city, on cheap paper, with no binding, to keep the price down. I suggest you publish anonymously, of course.”

“Anonymously?” Her heart sank.

“To avoid . . .
difficulties
,” said the Irishman, the way the pastor back in New Brunswick used to say “sin.”