Mistress Firebrand (9 page)

She took a step back from the edge of the dock.

The dour lieutenant sighed and put out a hand. “Come now,” he said in clipped, impatient tones, “or we will lose the tide.”

Her stomach churned. Just the ipecac, she told herself, gathering her petticoats. She placed one foot gingerly in the boat. It rolled and bilge sloshed over her embroidered-silk toe.

She imagined Drury Lane as she had seen it in engravings, thronged with eager theatergoers, not a Mohawk in sight. And she thought of the riot at John Street, and how she had gasped for breath after the vandal had struck her. She must go forward with this, she told herself, settling on the cold, hard bench.

It was colder out on the water. Spray from the oars stippled her gown. She watched the thick forest of masts dwindle behind her and the
Boyne
grow larger as they drew near, the harbor stretching empty all around the warship.

Jenny had never seen a ship of the line up so close. The
Boyne
was massive, with two tall decks bristling with guns. She would not put on a brave appearance during the day. Her paint was too chipped and her sails too stained, but she radiated menace and power tonight, rising tall out of the water, and Jenny wished very much that she had Aunt Frances with her now, because this was part of Fanny’s world. London actresses walked the corridors of power shoulder to shoulder with men like Burgoyne. They knew how to resist creatures like Severin Devere. They
belonged.

Bricklayers’ daughters from New Brunswick, no matter how clever their plays, did not.

Some of Jenny’s confidence returned when she was hoisted aboard in the little swing—like something from a pastoral engraving—and a young sailor helped her, with detached courtesy, to the deck. The roll of the ship at first threw her gait off, but by the time she had descended the ladder to the deck below she was walking steadily enough.

There was no sign of Devere.

She ought to feel relieved about that, but she did not. A familiar face, even one that belonged to a spy and an assassin whose kiss and caresses had unnerved her, would have been comforting.

There were none such here. If she had been Aunt Frances, she would have been greeted and escorted by the captain, or at the very least some junior officer. She would have been
acknowledged
. Jenny did not even rate a spotty midshipman. Instead she was hurried along by a servant—a surly New Englander in curiously theatrical blue and silver livery—past sailors who schooled
their faces not to sneer, but she heard the catcalls, and the barked orders that cut them short.

They passed three closed doors on a short corridor. Then they reached the end and the servant who escorted her scratched once at a handsome panel, waited a breath, and then opened it.

On a pasha’s splendor.

Jenny had accompanied her aunt to the great homes of New York, to the mansions of the DeLanceys, the Van Cortlands, the Phillipses, and others. Luxury abounded in Manhattan, but it was a bourgeois sort of opulence, the tasteful paintings, the gleaming silver, the restrained classical ornament all chosen to impress.

Not so Burgoyne’s quarters, which were shockingly large after traveling tight passages, and brimming with sensuality. The floor had been painted in a tiled pattern, but little of it was visible. Turkey carpets in a profusion of rich colors were scattered from the door to the wide expanse of sash windows. These were open to the night air and faced out to sea, the breeze fresh and crisp and untainted by the city air. There were furs draped over damask chairs and heaped on guns, and paintings crowded together on the walls. A polished mahogany table was set with china and silver plate and crystal glasses that sparkled in profligate candlelight—more tapers than Jenny allowed herself for a week of writing. Beside the board stood a marble pillar topped with a plaster bust of a Muse.

The richness of textures was almost overwhelming, and such was the jumble of art and furnishings that Jenny almost missed the curtained bed built into the wall behind the table. It was the only practical fixture
in the entire cabin, simple carpentry in fresh white paint, but the silk bed hangings were tied open to display plump cushions and a damask coverlet on an overstuffed feather mattress.

The sight stirred butterflies in her stomach. She forced herself to look away from the bed. There was no one waiting for her in the cabin, and the dyspeptic servant departed without a word.

Jenny wasn’t certain what to do, whether to sit or stand. Again, Aunt Frances would have known. Jenny felt keenly her lack of sophistication. In the end she crossed to the window to look out because it was the point in the room farthest from the bed and the view was spectacular. Somewhere across that sparkling ocean, under the same moon, was London with her painted theaters and her audiences of thousands.

The door opened and Jenny understood at once why she had been left to wait. Burgoyne had set the stage and now he wished to make an entrance.

It was a good one. He did not strike her as handsome as Severin Devere had done. And he was not young. His eyes were perhaps too closely set, his face a trifle too long, his jaw a bit too heavy for real beauty, but he did project a certain martial splendor and an undeniable vigor. He wore a fine red coat with gold lace trim over a white silk waistcoat with gold embroidery. His hair was black, neatly curled at the sides, and tied in a silk faille ribbon.

With casual elegance, Burgoyne bowed, his gold braid winking in the candlelight. He crossed the room and kissed her hand. She caught a glimpse of Severin Devere scowling in the corridor before the door closed.

“Miss Leighton,” the general said, with unfeigned pleasure. “I knew your aunt in London. How is she?”

Going mad.
“Very well, thank you. We both read your play
Maid of the Oaks
, and have been petitioning our company’s manager to stage it.”

She did not add Bobby’s remarks on the quality of the play or its likelihood to please an American audience that knew Burgoyne first and foremost for his fatuous and patronizing proclamation of amnesty to Rebels who laid down their arms, which he had authored in General Gage’s name.

“The Divine Fanny would make an excellent Bab Lardoon,” said Burgoyne graciously. “Better even, perhaps, than Mrs. Abington,” he added, naming Fanny’s greatest rival, and the actress who had originated the role.

“Were she here, Aunt Frances would express
unqualified
agreement,” said Jenny drily.

Burgoyne’s heavy-lidded eyes widened and his full lips pursed. She had surprised him. “You take your wit from your aunt, I see. And your ambition, also.”

Jenny did not think she took her ambition from anyone but herself, but it was flattering to be compared to the Divine Fanny. “If only success were heritable,” she said, “I would follow close in her footsteps.”

“Who is to say you won’t?” asked Burgoyne.

They dined—or at least he dined—at the polished mahogany table with the plaster Muse looking over their shoulders. Jenny did not eat. She moved her food around on her plate so that Burgoyne would not notice.

It was not the cuisine that put her off, the beef in pastry or the cherries in souse or the fresh green peas with ham. Burgoyne’s cook was obviously skilled. It was her stomach that was at fault, still churning from the ipecac, hungry and at the same time completely repulsed
by food. The brandy, though, was smooth and went down easily, and kindled a soothing warmth in her belly. She drank rather more of it than she should.

They talked about the state of the theater in America—dismal—and he charmed her with a recitation from the prologue he had written for a performance of
Zara
in Boston.

“‘Then sunk the stage quelled by the bigots roar, truth fled with sense, and Shakespeare charmed no more,’” he said, pouring her another glass of brandy. “‘Amidst the groans sunk every liberal art that polished life, or humanized the heart.’ The Rebels,” he added after he had declaimed the whole thing for her from memory, “outlaw theater because it has the power to move hearts and minds. Because they rightly fear that art and finer sentiment might sway a crowd—the
people
—more powerfully than their own ugly brand of demagoguery.”

“Then they are fools twice over not to use the theater to their advantage and write their own plays brimming with republican virtue,” said Jenny.

“They lack the native wit to compose such, though they churn out sermons at an astonishing rate. Boston is steeped in a particularly Calvinist form of prudery. Silver plate on their tables is all well and good, but they suspect, and suppress, any sort of art or beauty that can be enjoyed by the masses.”

“‘Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?’” Jenny recited.

“Sir Toby!” said Burgoyne, recognizing the line from
Twelfth Night
—a rebuttal of Malvolio’s Puritanism—with obvious pleasure. “I confess that I knew you would be
pretty—Devere’s kind has an eye for a
fair
beauty—but diverting conversation is seldom found among American women. Your wit is wasted in New York. Pearls before swine. London is the place for an
ambitious
actress.”

He was saying things she had longed to hear, and yet she found his praise oddly slighting, and the news that Devere thought her pretty altogether too gratifying. Flattery was
not
what she had come for.

“It is not ambition, but introductions I lack.”

“Has your aunt no connections she might call upon, no interest she might bring to bear?”

“My aunt,” she confessed, “has burnt her bridges, professional
and
social.” Jenny had never gotten the whole story, but it had something to do with the Divine Fanny’s defection from her royal lover to her common swain.

“That is unfortunate. I’ll warrant you have the looks to make it on the London stage, but your origins
will
count against you. The assumption that an American actress is little better than a barnyard player would be very hard to overcome.”

She
had
played barnyards. It was their only recourse when the city fathers closed the theaters, which was all too often. Though she had lamented the provincial circuit herself, Burgoyne’s scorn made her feel surprisingly defensive. And it made her recall, with sudden fondness, a barnyard they had played in the Jerseys, where the locals had paid in pies and produce, and the blueberries and peaches had been the very best she had ever tasted. There had been nothing but a painted cloth for scenery and their costumes had been too drenched from a recent rain to wear, but the audience had been rapt. “John Street is not Drury Lane,”
Jenny conceded, “but I have studied closely with my aunt for two years.”

“So much is evident from your grace and manner,” he said smoothly, picking her hand out of her lap and lifting it to his lips. The gesture brought him to the edge of his chair, his knees sliding between hers and rustling her petticoats. “One might scarcely guess you were a colonial.”

His pronouncement flattered and irked her at the same time.

“But—for good or ill—there is more to success in that crowning glory of England, the theater,” he added, “than thespian skill.”

“I am aware of that.” She was aware, mostly, of how his right knee was pressing hers apart and the artfully casual way in which his elbow was balanced on the arm of her chair. How the movement of his hands to illustrate his point brushed his knuckles over the tops of her breasts.

“Mr. Garrick,” Burgoyne said, leaning closer, “is not only the finest actor of his generation. He is a demanding—and discerning—manager. It would be my pleasure to introduce you, but I fear that anything less than a detailed tally of your virtues would fail to move the great man, and if I am to deliver such, then we must come to know each other better.”

He meant intimately, and there was no way now, with his knees between hers, his arm resting in her lap, his touch grazing her breasts, to refuse gracefully; no way that would not paint her as an unsophisticated rustic.

“‘Say then, ye Boston prudes,’” he prompted,
speaking a little more of his prologue to
Zara
and giving voice to her fears of inadequacy, “‘if prudes there are, is this a task unworthy of the fair? Shall form, decorum, piety, refuse a call on beauty to conduct the muse?’”

She could find no words to reply, so she forced herself to use his, the next stanza from his prologue: “‘Perish the narrow thought. The slanderous tongue. Where the heart’s right, the action can’t be wrong.’”

She hoped it was true.

He took her hand and placed it, palm down, over his fall front. All at once she understood how theory and practice differed. She had heard all about intercourse from her aunt and other sources, but describing copulation was about as useful as describing acting. It was the doing that mattered, and she had absolutely no idea how to go about it.

But this was not a monologue—it was a scene played between two people—and Burgoyne proved more than happy to cue her. When she remained awkwardly in her pose, he unbuttoned his flap and drew her hand down and into his breeches.

Somehow she had not anticipated meeting warm, bare skin. He wrapped her fingers around his hardening shaft, and demonstrated how he wanted to be stroked.

It was far too intimate, far too
personal
, and it was only the beginning. The next step, of course, was putting that—him—into her, and the thought suddenly panicked her. Her hand stilled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think I can do this.”

Burgoyne’s eyes filled with impatience. “Even the
orange sellers
on Drury Lane can do this.”

What a fool she had been, to see herself as men
like this saw her. “Then I fear I am too provincial even for that humble role.”

She tried to draw her hand back, but he kept it firmly in his grasp.

“Don’t be silly. You do not apprehend all the little traditions of the English stage. I understand that,” he said with a horrible condescension that stripped her soul bare. He took her wrist in a firm grip and guided her. “There is nothing so provincial about you that a little practical instruction cannot mend.”