The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles (64 page)

“I don’t
care
what they think, Phillipe! That’s what I keep trying to make you understand!”

“But I care. Because eventually, the poverty would destroy everything between us. Suppose I were to become a reasonably successful printer. That would still be meaningless compared to the station of the men who’ve surrounded you all your life.”

She dismissed him with a wave. But her strained smile was clearly visible against other lamps passing outside the oblong of the window.

“England’s changing,” she said. “My father detests the idea—refuses to admit it’s happening—but it is. It’s the mercantile class that’s coming to power, because they control more and more of the money. Marriages between prosperous businessmen and daughters of peers are becoming commonplace—oh, you don’t seem to see it at all! We needn’t
go
to England! I’ll bury Roger and come back to you here. Nothing is of any importance save one fact—I
love
you!”

She threw her arms around his neck, kissed him—and he felt himself begin to surrender, his arguments melted by the warmth of her body, the touch of her hands and her hungry mouth. He forgot his suspicion that somewhere, somewhere in this patchwork-puzzle of frenzied emotion, there was an explanation she had not made clear. He forgot—and kissed her again, with passion, while the coach creaked on through the dim Philadelphia streets.

When they separated, she dabbed her eyes. Her laugh sounded both gay and sad.

“How amused they’d be at home. Parkhurst’s daughter weeping like some ribbon girl over her swain. I could almost hate you for that, Phillipe—if I didn’t love you so much.”

Another long, deep kiss. Then, tear-traces gone, she said:

“I do see there’s still a battle to be fought.”

“With me?”

“Yes! To batter through all those defenses you’ve raised. Well, I warn you, Phillipe, you’ll find me a fierce combatant. Because you and I are going to be husband and wife.”

Her directness left him startled and silent. She reached up, rapped the roof twice. The coach began to pick up speed, the heavy iron tires clanking noisily over the bricks.

“However, there are a few proprieties to be observed,” she told him. “Can you stay in Philadelphia a few days?”

He came close to saying no. There remained some element that troubled him deeply—and eluded his understanding. Was it Anne? Or feeling like a kept creature at the City Tavern? Damned if he knew—

She touched him. “Phillipe?”

“Yes,” he said, “I can stay.”

“I’ll come to your rooms next time. I can’t do it immediately. But I’m sure it can be arranged before too long. Since the burial services must be held in England, I can move about the city making arrangements to transport the body. Aunt Sue’s husband feels a new widow should remain indoors, grieving. I shall convince him he’s wrong. At least in my case.”

She sounds supremely confident,
he thought, marveling. It reminded him of the first day he saw her, fresh from the sunshine at Kentland, accompanying the man she was to marry and he was to kill. In his mind he’d called her an elegant whore. A woman who manipulated men to her own ends—

Her remark of a moment ago showed she hadn’t entirely changed.

Why, knowing that, had he agreed to stay? He couldn’t fully explain it. She had a power to weave spells—wake emotions—that overcame all reason—

She was whispering again:

“I want to be alone with you, Phillipe. I want us to be alone the way we were before. There are years to be wiped out. And more things I want to ask about you than I can begin to think of now.”

Her blue eyes picked up the gleam from the leaded windows of the City Tavern. The coach swung past the front of the building, on the way to the alley. She laid a gloved palm on his cheek.

“I’ll marry you, Phillipe Charboneau, and God damn what any of the rest of them say.”

She brought her face close. The moist tip of her tongue crept into his mouth for one last caress. The coach stopped, swaying. He heard the tall servant grumble something to the driver. Boots crunched on the ground. The door was levered open.

The tall man’s eyes, lewdly amused, slid to Philip’s face. Philip climbed out. Had the man said a word, Philip would have hit him.

But the servant knew the limits. He mounted to his place on the box and signed the driver forward.

Philip stood under the April stars, his clubbed hair blowing in the wind. As the coach vanished around a corner, he thought he heard a low, lilting laugh—

A laugh of pleasure. Certainly—

Victory.

God, how easily she manipulated him too!
And yet you don’t put a stop to it, do you, my friend?

Nor could he put a stop to his uneasiness. Its source remained hard to define. Perhaps it
was
Anne—and the vivid image of the liberty medal cast aside. Or the shameful fact that Alicia’s husband was not yet even in his grave—

He knew one thing. Only three or four years ago, he would never have raised a quibble about the future Alicia wanted. To have married an earl’s daughter would have fulfilled his ambitions completely—

Then.

It was a mark of all the change that time and circumstances had wrought that at this moment, he hesitated—

Remember what she stands for. The same kind of power the Amberlys used against you. How can she give that up?

Of all the questions, that one troubled him most. He knew Alicia too well to believe in miracles of love. Either she had given way completely to passion, and didn’t honestly realize the implications of all she’d said tonight—

Or—a return of his earlier suspicion—there was something else he didn’t understand.

Instead of going upstairs, he walked around to the main entrance of the City Tavern. At a table in the public room, he drank three tankards of flip, trying to solve the enigma of the night’s developments. Failing, he drank one more to get rid of the nagging question-marks.

He staggered up to his room half-drunk and vaguely ashamed. The landlord had refused money for the drinks. The sum would be added to his bill.

In the darkness, he flung the warming pan out of bed and sprawled, trying to think it through.

Instead, he slipped into sleep—dreaming not of Alicia but of Anne Ware.

A week in Philadelphia’s balmy April weather brought him a sense of the pace and mood of the prosperous Quaker city.

On Tuesday evening, the sonorous “butter bells” of Christ Church tolled for the coming of market day on Wednesday. But everywhere, talk concerned itself less with commerce than with the trouble in Massachusetts.

Taking a meal in the tavern’s main room of an evening, he found that careful listening provided bits of news that were apparently being relayed by mounted courier to Philadelphia’s patriot faction.

Companies of British soldiers, he heard, had once more marched from Boston, this time toward the village of Brookline. Philip assumed the force had numbered fewer than five hundred men. There was no word of hostilities.

But the well-dressed gentlemen who dined and drank and cursed the North ministry under the blackened beams seemed to share the opinion of most everyone Philip talked to: hostilities were now inevitable.

He listened to men at the City Tavern laud some Virginia orator named Henry. In late March, the man had addressed the House of Burgesses and declared that, with war a virtual certainty, he saw only two choices for men of conscience—liberty or death.

The ruffled and powdered gentlemen of the City Tavern also seemed to be among the first to receive overseas news from arriving ships. Yes, the King was determined to force a showdown. The gentlemen banged their sticks on the pegged floor and shouted, “Fie, oh fie!” until the smoky room fairly thundered with the racket of the ferrules.

And when some slightly tipsy patriot rose to quote excerpts of the Henry speech, the sticks thundered with equal ferocity. This time in approval.

Six days passed. Philip was continually worried about Anne Ware and her father. Once he saddled Nell, intending to ride to Arch Street, bid Alicia goodbye and return north.

But with the saddle in place, he unstrapped it again. As he laid it aside, he cursed his own indecision—and Alicia’s hypnotic influence on his feelings.

I will see her one more time,
he thought.
That will be the end.

Yet he wasn’t sure.

What if, through some strange chemistry of the emotions, she truly
had
decided Roger Amberly’s world was not all she had once thought it to be? What if she really did want to be his wife, regardless of his prospects for the future? Time and events had changed him; why couldn’t the same thing have happened to her?

As a result of this kind of self-questioning, he remained in Philadelphia—in limbo.

The tavern conversation was full of references to the Second Continental Congress, due to open in early May now that George III refused to give ground. On his seventh afternoon in the city, Philip asked directions to the site of the forthcoming assembly. He strolled through the mild April twilight under the elm trees beginning to show their buds, and reached the imposing brick State House.

In the yard, boots tramped in rhythm. He looked in to watch a local militia unit drilling. Near them, half a dozen splendid saddle horses were tied.

As the militiamen executed a smart countermarch, Philip was troubled by a memory of Colonel Barrett and the Concord companies—as well as by thoughts of all those who had befriended him, adopted him to their cause—

Ben Edes.

Lawyer Ware.

Anne—

God!
he swore silently.
That man was ever born to be torn and troubled by women!

He absolutely could not stand to wait any longer. He resolved to get a message to Arch Street. Face Alicia, and see whether the encounter would lead to a resolution of the turmoil within him. One moment, he wanted her desperately. The next, he suspected her motives—

Yes, let it be a message to Arch Street! He’d hire another tavern boy and damn the furor it might cause among her relatives.

Vaguely aware of the
clip-clop
of hoofs behind him, he started away from the gate of the yard, determined to force the confrontation before the day was over—

“Sir—a moment. Aren’t we acquainted?”

The voice broke Philip’s concentration. He turned to see a man on horseback outside the State House gate. A stout, elderly man with spectacles and an all-but-bald pate—

It was Franklin.

The doctor had evidently come out of the State House and mounted one of the horses tied to the ring blocks in the yard. He was gorgeously clad in a suit of deep emerald velvet. White ruffles at the throat matched his white hose. Silver buckles decorated his shoes. Franklin nudged his horse with his knees and rode forward.

The sight of him carried Philip back instantly to Sweet’s Lane and Craven Street. Dr. Franklin still wore those glasses with differing thicknesses in the same lens. But the jowly, keen-eyed face appeared to have aged a good deal. The lines were deeper. Franklin’s smile as his horse trotted up seemed less natural than before, tinged with a puzzling melancholy—

“Warmest greetings to you, Dr. Franklin,” Philip said.

“Mr. Charboneau, isn’t it? I remember you distinctly from London.”

Philip smiled. “That’s mutual, sir. I remember you—and with much appreciation. Your loan of five pounds helped me reach Bristol and the colonies.”

“That’s splendid, splendid.”

“But I’ve taken an American name here. Philip Kent.”

“Capital! I was informed you were forced to leave London in some haste. I trust the list and letter were of assistance in establishing you in the printing trade?” Franklin pushed his spectacles down and peered over the top of the frames. “I mean, sir, I expect the loan to be repaid when your industry makes you rich.”

Preferring not to tell Franklin how he’d lost both documents, Philip simply said, “It’ll be repaid, you can count on it. I found a very good location with a Mr. Edes in Boston.”

“Ben Edes of the
Gazette?
Then you’re not set up here in Philadelphia?”

“No, I’m only in the city on—on business.”

Gazing down from the expensive saddle of polished leather, Franklin gestured. “Sir, come along! You must let me buy you a mug of coffee or chocolate while you bring me up to date on news from our beleaguered sister city. How recently did you come from there?”

“Close to three weeks ago. I’m afraid any news I have is badly dated.”

“Mmm, quite so. However, working with Ben Edes puts you on the proper side, doesn’t it, Mr.—Kent, isn’t that what you said?”

“Right.”

“Good and proper American name. This way—there’s a very excellent and popular place just a few steps from here. I insist you let me buy you a refreshment. I want to hear how you’ve gotten on. After all,” Franklin added, still smiling that strangely forced smile, “I had something to do with persuading you to sail to this side of the ocean, I believe.”

“You certainly did, sir.”

“Perhaps now, with everything in such a catastrophic muddle, you’ve begun to regret heeding my advice!”

P
HILIP WALKED BESIDE FRANKLIN’S
horse to their destination, The Sovereign Coffee-House, less than a block distant. The doctor frowned at the sight of several other horses tied up in front. Young black grooms held the reins of two more.

As Franklin swung down with a grace surprising for a man of his years, Philip glanced at the faded sign above the doorway. It bore yet another of those ubiquitous likenesses of the Hanoverian king. But some zealous individual had managed to stain the plump, painted face with what appeared to be dung. The Sovereign’s proprietor hadn’t bothered to remove it.

“Place looks more crowded than usual,” Franklin muttered as he and Philip pushed through the door. “Hope my favorite spot’s not taken—damme, it is.”

He indicated a deacon’s bench under the swirled bottle glass of a window to their left. Franklin scratched his chin while heads turned. There were whispers, pointing fingers. Philip realized he was in the company of a celebrity.