Mistress Firebrand (31 page)

“If you stay, you will likely hang, even if Lieutenant Jones has not rendezvoused with Burgoyne. I do not doubt that André has written Jack Brag about you and told him of my ploy to save you. Burgoyne is unlikely to hang
me
unless Jones turns up, but he will string you up without hesitation. I fear we both know the measure of the man.”

“What you are proposing is suicide,” she said, blinking back the beginning of tears. “I have not endured all this to lose you.”

“Never fear, my Mistress Firebrand,” he said. “We are not writing a tragedy, you and I, and I am not the type to contemplate self-slaughter. It puts me quite out of countenance.
That
is why I want you to go with St. Clair. We are not very far from the Indian village where I lived as a child. I want you to go there, and find a man for me.”

“Who?”

“My father.”

*   *   *

Devere did not like the idea of Jenny striking off through the wilderness on her own, but at least this
way they both had a fighting chance. If she stayed with him, they had little to none.

“How do I find him?” she asked. He was proud, but by now unsurprised, to see how quickly she turned from anxiety and grief to purpose and practicalities.

He gave her instructions, as precise as he could remember, though much might have changed in twenty years.

“How can you be sure that he—this man who kidnapped your mother—will come for you?” she asked.

“Because, Jenny, my mother was not kidnapped at all. She ran away with Ashur Rice—Kanonsase, as he is sometimes known. They loved each other.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They met at Wheelock’s Indian School in Connecticut, though my father was not truly there to learn how to be a Christian missionary. He was there to study the English, the better to devise how to push them out of the borderlands. My mother was a local girl from a good family. When her parents discovered the affair, they put an end to it and convinced her to marry their choice. A young man who had also come to the school for his own purposes: to study the natives, the better to acquire their land.”

“Thomas Devere,” guessed Jenny.

“Devere,” agreed Severin, who had learned to use the name of the man who had ruined his mother’s life. “The other side to my father’s coin, with his own ‘unchristian’ motives—and greater ruthlessness, perhaps, in pursuit of his goals. Thomas Devere paid to have my father beaten—almost to death—and driven out of town. But he didn’t know my mother was already pregnant. He
married my mother, and when she bore Kanonsase’s son believed it his own.”

“Julian is your true brother, then,” said Jenny.

Severin shrugged. “What makes a man a brother? Fairchild was a better brother to me, in England, than Julian ever was. If Thomas Devere had just married my mother and gone home to England, had been content to inherit his earldom, all would probably have been well—or at least if not well, then tolerable—but he didn’t. He took his young family north, intent on carving out an American ‘domain’ that would put his English patrimony to shame. And there my mother saw her Kanonsase again. She thought he had abandoned her. When she learned that Devere had forced him off, she regretted her own lack of constancy, of fortitude. She again became his lover, and finally she ran away with him. Devere was too humiliated to tell anyone that his pretty young wife preferred a Mohawk to an English lord.”

“He tried to get her declared dead,” Jenny said.

“And failed, because everyone living in the borderlands knew she was alive and had borne another son. Me. My parents were happy together for ten years. But perhaps it could not last. When the last war broke out, Devere used it as an excuse to retrieve his wife and the child he presumed, wrongly, to be flesh and blood, his heir, Julian. He got me into the bargain as well.”

“Your mother should have ignored her parents, listened to her heart,” said Jenny.

The sympathy in her eyes, the sense and sensibility of this woman—whom he loved—left him breathless for a moment. “She did not have an example like your
aunt Frances to follow,” he said at last. “And she was not as brave as you are.”

“I do not feel so very brave now. In fact, I am terrified that I will never see you again.”

“And I have no such fear.” He made himself believe it.

He taught her a phrase to say in Mohawk. “But only to Ashur Rice. It will not be well received by anyone else.”

“What does it mean?”

He told her. Despite the horror of their situation, she laughed aloud, and cried a little too, but he was grateful to hear her laughter, wanted to remember her exactly this way if it was the last time he saw her.

“My father taught my uncle Solomon to say that to woo my aunt. He will remember that and know that no one but a member of the family would have repeated such a thing. Say that and give him this.”

He handed her the little knife, its quillwork burnished by long use, the one that his father had given him so long ago.

“I cannot take this,” she said. “You will be defenseless.”

“A blade will do me little good in a cell, and Ashur Rice will recognize it. He gave it to me when I was a boy.”

She nodded and accepted the knife. Severin taught her to say his name—his Mohawk name—as well, and he kissed her before the guard took her away to join the women and children. A long kiss, yet far, far too short.

They moved him to a cell within the walls, apart from the other British prisoners, in deference to his presumed rank. The sounds of constant activity went on through the night until finally, in the morning, all was silence. Then there was the bark of orders being given above, and the prisoners took up shouting until someone
came to rescue them. The Americans had not left keys to the cells, which caused some delay, as no doubt they had intended. Once Severin and the others were released, they were herded into the yard so that a harried-looking young British captain could decide who among them were genuine prisoners of war, and who were likely deserters, and to which regiments they all belonged.

They hanged four men before the afternoon was over, but no one knew what to do with Severin, who was obviously an officer and a gentleman and also, confusingly, an Indian, but had no one who could vouch for him and so might also be an American spy.

The British officers did not yet believe their good fortune. Somehow, they had taken the mighty Fort Ticonderoga without a shot fired. They were wary, and with good reason, but soon they would relax their guard. Then Severin would volunteer for some odious duty, and they would accept his labor gratefully. And he would be able to make his escape.

It was not to be. Lieutenant Jones and his motley, much reduced party rolled through the gates while Devere was under guard. The wounded officer spotted him and exchanged a word with the colonel in charge of the captured Americans they had rounded up: St. Clair’s pathetic excuse for a rearguard, who had been left behind to spike the guns but instead had broached a cask of Madeira and had drunk themselves insensible.

The colonel ordered Devere arrested and put back in a cell. That night, Jones—wheezing through his crushed windpipe, his voice a ghastly husk—came to confirm his identity. Jones urged the matter brought to Burgoyne’s immediate attention, but the busy colonel did not oblige him.

Over the next week the other cells filled with American prisoners of war, some of whom had been with St. Clair’s rear echelons on the initial retreat. Severin learned that there had been a sharpish fight at Hubbardton, but that the main van of the American general’s army had slipped away toward the Hudson River. And, he hoped, Jenny with them.

Severin passed two weeks in his cell before he was marched to what remained of Fort Ann, which the Rebels had burned on their retreat and was now a charred ruin surrounded by the turned earth of fresh graves.

Severin and his captors arrived at dusk. In the very center of the blackened fortification—beneath a silk tent with red-tasseled hangings, the ground spread with Turkey carpets—was a long banquet table covered in damask linen and set with china and glittering crystal, lit by spermaceti tapers in silver holders. It was a scene straight from Jenny’s
Braggart Soldier
.

Devere had been eating cold porridge with the other prisoners for a fortnight. How unreal now to smell the roasted game and the buttered onions, the pungent, vinegary sauces and the wine perfuming the warm July night, mingling with the rosewater and sandalwood worn by John Burgoyne and the officers and their ladies who dined with him. Though one of the “ladies,” Devere knew from the talk in the camp, was no lady at all but the general’s latest mistress: a commissary’s wife with dyed blond hair and a button nose.

The party beneath the silk awning went on while Severin was chained to a post in the middle of the ruined yard, like an animal. He listened to the tinkle of glasses and the trilling of laughter and heard, distinct amidst the revelry, a voice he knew too well.

An hour passed before Burgoyne stirred himself to rise, wineglass in hand, and stroll over to where Severin was chained.

“I could have overlooked your mischief on the
Boyne
,” said Jack Brag, standing over Severin, “but telling Howe that the Leighton slut was my mistress? That is too much even for you, Devere. I’ll see you both hang. Her first, so you can watch.”

It had been more than a year since Severin had seen John Burgoyne, but the general was little changed. Despite the rigors of the trail, he was flawlessly turned out in a silk waistcoat dripping with gold braid and lace.

Severin hated him.

“That may prove difficult,” said Devere, “as Jenny has decamped with St. Clair and his army.
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new
.”

“St. Clair’s ‘army’ is a shambles.” Burgoyne sneered. “Scattered to the four winds. And Miss Leighton is most conspicuous by her hair. My Indian scouts will find her. It’s in their blood—as you should know. I have five hundred warriors from the Six Nations out chastising the Rebels . . . and looking for the girl.”

Severin could have told Burgoyne that the Indians were not
his
, that they were here for their own interests, as his father had been at Wheelock’s school. Their ultimate aim was to drive the outland settlers from their territories, their homes—and they would not trouble overmuch to distinguish Tory from Rebel. Burgoyne had ignored his advisers on this point and he would certainly never listen to Severin now, but it was true all the same. He only hoped Jenny had found his father, before someone
like
his father found her.

Jenny left the fort ahead of the main retreat with the women and children. There were perhaps a hundred stragglers in all and they had no carts or horses. There was a civilian blacksmith with a portable forge who traveled with them for a few miles and allowed one of the nursing mothers and a pregnant woman to sit on the back of his vehicle, but everyone else, even the smallest children, were weighed down by the pots and pans and blankets and necessities of life they had been forced to carry into the wilderness.

They walked for a solid day, pressing on through the dusk. When night fell, they laid down to camp at the side of the road. Jenny curled herself into a blanket and realized that it was the first time she had slept apart from Severin in more than a month. She thought about the life he had promised they would build together, and the fantasy kept her warm in the scratchy and threadbare wool.

St. Clair’s army passed them on the road the next morning. Hundreds of men, most of them on foot, only a few of the officers mounted. They did have carts, but they weren’t carrying away guns. They had sacks of flour and barrels of apples and wheels of cheese. Jenny cut some of the scrip from her jacket with Severin’s knife and bargained with a young quartermaster for a sack of apples, some dried beef, and a wedge of cheese. She shared a little of her bounty with the nine-year-old boy who had attached himself to her as pint-sized protector, and saved the rest for when she must strike out on her own.

One of the young officers who had visited her in the barracks rode by on a horse and Jenny knew real covetousness, the kind that preachers warned about, for the first time. She wanted that horse. A mount. A donkey, even. Anything that would carry her faster to find Severin’s father.

An hour later a party of redcoats thundered past them, fast in pursuit of the retreating Americans. The women and children watched them disappear up the road with trepidation. When they reached a turning in the road, Jenny announced that she would be taking it, reasoning that there would be only fighting ahead of them and that the road had to lead somewhere. If she could find a farmer like the one who had sheltered her and Severin on their flight, she might be able to get directions and even buy a mount.

The women were determined to follow the army. Jenny gave a wedge of the cheese and an apple to the little boy, who did not think that she should go. She traded some of the beef to keep one of the blankets, and then she started walking.

The road narrowed and became a path, barely wide enough for two to walk abreast. The solitariness of it struck her all at once. She had not been truly alone for months, and never this alone in her whole life. Panic gripped her when she looked up the long trail and it appeared to be without end, but she remembered Severin’s words and tried to think of the forest as a resource, alive with possibilities. Many of which probably wanted to kill and eat her.

Not a helpful thought. She wondered if there were bears. Another less than helpful thought. She could not afford unhelpful thoughts. She had to save Severin. The path had to lead somewhere.

That became her mantra. Sleeping was the true challenge, alone in the empty wild with only a blanket for protection. She lay on the ground the first night, her heart racing, starting at every sound, until an owl began to hoot somewhere nearby and the sound, somehow, comforted her. She woke groggily from a dreamless sleep the next morning and plodded on, almost missing the farmhouse in the field of corn in her daze.

The farmer was warier than the family that had succored Jenny and Severin after their escape from Jones, but he listened to Jenny’s story and noted her mention of Ashur Rice, and took an age-darkened framed map down from the wall. He knew, he thought, the village she was searching for. He would not sell her a mount but he would walk her to the crossroads and from there, if she followed his directions, she should be able to reach Rice’s farm by the end of the week.

The farmer was as good as his word. He sold Jenny a sack of biscuits and led her to the crossroads and from there she began walking once more.

The feeling crept up on her gradually, just as it had in the streets of New York when she and Severin had been trying to reach the King’s Arms. She was being followed. She could see no one in the trees on either side of the road, but she knew they were there all the same. Jenny did her best to emulate Severin’s behavior that night and give no indication that she knew she was being followed. But there were no alley mouths or doorways to shelter in here, and nothing to do when the warriors emerged from the tree line, heads shaved, faces painted, gruesome trophies and sharp axes hanging from their waists. There was not a chicken feather in sight as they descended upon the road with their fierce cries and their raised blades.

*   *   *

Devere spent the night in the open, chained to the post where Burgoyne had left him. Burgoyne’s mistress, who appeared to be a sly piece of trouble, snuck him water in the morning. By afternoon Burgoyne’s supposed Indian allies began to come in with their prisoners.

The warriors wanted, naturally, to be paid ransoms for every captive they brought. Burgoyne had asked for an Englishwoman, and they had brought him Englishwomen. Dozens of them, young and old, some of them badly beaten, all of them dirty and terrified. A few even had red, or reddish, hair, but most of them did not.

A party of Wyandot, in breechcloths and leggings, arrived in the late afternoon. They had a howling old woman in tow who claimed to be a relation of General Fraser. From one of the warriors’ belts hung a fresh
scalp. He brandished it in the air, demanding payment. The grisly trophy was distinctive, most definitely taken from a woman—with long copper hair.

Jenny.

The bloody tresses danced in the breeze and Severin could smell their metallic tang on the wind. His gorge rose. The sounds around him dwindled. He watched as Burgoyne was summoned to inspect his grim prize, and could not contain his disgust. He ordered one of his officers to pay “the fellow” and dispose of it, but no one stepped forward.

The Wyandot brave, who called himself Panther, began shouting his outrage. He demanded his bounty. The yard was filling now, the spectacle attracting ever more attention, and still no one stepped forward to claim the scalp or pay the scout.

Panther began to pace in an ever widening circle, laying out, in his own language, his case for payment, logical as any barrister before the bench. When he passed close to Severin, he was holding the grim trophy at his side, copper locks dangling to the ground and trailing through the ashes and dirt.

No. Not copper. Red. Redder than Jenny’s hair, and longer. He could see that now, up close. Almost too much to dare to hope. The hair was not hers.

Panther was still circling the yard when Lieutenant Jones entered the fort.

It took him a moment to make sense of the bizarre scene: the outraged warrior, the silent onlookers, the bedraggled and bloody scalp with the long red hair.

Her hair is redder than Miss Leighton’s, but they are of an age and in all other respects might be taken for sisters.

Jones fell to his knees when he recognized the
scalp and his wails of grief drowned out even the monologue of the outraged Panther.

A company of loyalists from Pennsylvania decamped that night. By the time the girl’s body was found in the woods and brought into camp the next day, several hundred more American loyalists had deserted. Severin, still chained to his post, did not doubt that a good number of them had gone over to the Continentals. It was the sort of story that did not need an engraving by Revere or a pamphlet by Paine to carry it, and it would attract more Rebel enlistments than any recruiting broadside.

Severin felt a little relief to know that Jenny was still free somewhere, and more when he overheard Burgoyne’s junior officers insisting that he recall his Indian scouts and put an end to the search for the girl. His advisers urged him, in hushed, worried voices, to hang Panther, swiftly, or risk further desertions.

It was good advice, all of it, but Burgoyne refused to punish one of his “children” who had simply misunderstood his instructions. Severin could have told them that it didn’t matter anyway. The real damage was already done. The discontent and disillusionment percolating through the camp would travel, along with the story of the murder of Jane McCrea.

*   *   *

Jenny did not know whether she was a prisoner or a guest of the party of Mohawks who had captured her until they reached the village where Severin had grown up, where she was given food and water and was fussed over as though she were in her mother’s parlor in New Brunswick.

The neatly tended fields and imposing longhouses were filled entirely with women and children and the very elderly, who wanted her to eat and drink and were happy to give her Kanonsase’s direction if she was really going to bring him news of Kanonsase’s son.

The man sometimes called Ashur Rice, who had lived among the English and adopted some of their ways—indeed, as had the village women who cooked in English pots and wore English cloth and sewed English beads onto their hides—lived in an English-style house of two stories with glass windows just beyond the village.

Jenny walked a last mile on shoes Severin had filled with leaves for her when the soles began to wear through, trailed by smiling Mohawk children who dropped back when she reached the very English picket fence. She felt a sense of unreality when she saw the neat little house—in its sun-dappled glade, like something from a fairy tale, where a witch or an ogre might live—but she lifted her hand to knock upon the batten door and her heart rose into her throat when it was opened.

The man was the very picture of Severin, as he might look in twenty years. He was dressed much as her lover had been when last she saw him—in buckskin breeches and a simple cotton shirt—but most of his scalp had been plucked clean and only a single hank of glossy black hair, woven with beads, remained. No one would mistake Ashur Rice for an Englishman.

He looked at her curiously and she had not seen a mirror in weeks but she could guess at her appearance. His eyes were as dark, as magnetic as those of his offspring.

“Karekohe,”
she said. “Your son. Severin Devere. I have a message from him.”

The man waited expressionlessly for her to go on, and suddenly she wondered if he remembered his English from his time at the Indian School—but that was nonsense because half the village had been able to speak her language well enough to be understood while she had none of theirs.

“He told me to repeat this phrase, that you would know it came from your sister and your brother-in-law.” As she spoke the words, the man’s dark brows rose, and then his lips pursed, and then he burst out laughing.

“And where is this son of mine, that has come back to his father, after all this time?” asked Ashur Rice, in accents every bit as cultivated as Severin’s and entirely at odds with his appearance.

“He was imprisoned by the Americans at Ticonderoga before the fort fell, and I believe that he is now being held by the British and that they are going to hang him.”

The man’s smile faded, like the sun behind a storm cloud.

He nodded and held the door wide for her to enter. And she stood for the first time in weeks in something like the home she had known in New York, comfortably appointed and furnished by someone, at some time in the past, who had cared about it, though the curtains were faded and the cushions had long since lost their plumpness.

“Tell me what has befallen my son,” said this man, after putting food and water in front of Jenny, rummaging through a trunk, and returning with a soft bundle of moose hide that turned out to be a pair of
moccasins—brightly sewn with beads and trimmed in velvet and silk—to replace her ruined shoes.

And so she told him. He listened patiently and asked only a few questions. Then he rose and reached for his long rifle. “I will be back,” he said.

“With Severin?”

“With my son,” he agreed.

There was no place for her where he was going. She saw that. She was the reason Severin was in British hands to begin with, and her presence would only jeopardize his safety further. She knew that. But she could not resist a question that had been on her mind since Fort Ti, that she had dared not ask Severin when they were about to be separated, possibly forever.

“Why did you let Thomas Devere take them? Why did you let him take your wife and your sons?”

For a moment, Ashur Rice made no answer. “Perhaps because she was his wife, under English law,” he said at last, “and that he had the disposal of a troop of dragoons to enforce that foreign authority.”

So had John André when he had taken Jenny, but Severin had not let that stand. He had followed her into the wilderness to win her freedom.

“Why didn’t you go after them?”

“Thomas Devere wanted Julian, my eldest boy, because he thought that Julian was his, but he took Severin too, as
leverage
. Understand, he did not
want
him. But he took him, and promised to kill him if I followed. There was much killing then, as now, on the border. The death of one little half-Indian boy would have gone unremarked among all the butchery. To Thomas Devere, Severin was nothing. To the English, he was nothing. But that boy
was
my
son. Better that he should live among the English than die among the Mohawk.”

Ashur Rice had given up his son so that Severin would have a chance, at least, to live. Sent him away as Severin had sent Jenny away from Ticonderoga. “It has to be different this time,” she said.

Ashur Rice flashed her a sly smile, much like his son’s. “The thing about leverage in the borderlands is that it is always changing hands. That day, it belonged to Thomas Devere and the English. Today, at least, it belongs to Burgoyne’s Indian allies, including the Mohawk. I will bring my son home.”

She did not doubt him. The American prodigal indeed.

*   *   *

They returned the next morning: in a large party of men of fierce appearance with paint on their faces, armed for war. A small child came to fetch Jenny to the village to see this wonder, the return of Kanonsase’s son.