The Blacksmith's Daughter: A Mystery of the American Revolution (10 page)

Almost afraid to confirm her
suspicions, she waved the letter above the heat.
 
A shiver scurried down her backbone, and she whispered,
"Gods."
 
The familiar, bluish
cipher-scribble appeared between the lines of Arriaga's script, too.

What she knew of Clark barely
brushed the surface of the life he led.
 
Even worse than her confirmation that he concealed so much was her
certainty that he was in the thick of a multinational plot.
 
She clamped down on her fear.
 
Without a level head, she wouldn't be able
to help her husband.

The Portuguese were supposedly
neutral in the war.
 
Sheffield had
suggested the Portuguese captain's letter might have been intercepted before it
left Havana.
 
After exhaling a deep
breath, she passed the letter over the heat again.
 
The cipher portion was, indeed, written by a hand other than
Arriaga's.

Without knowing the key to the
cipher, trying to decode it was almost impossible.
 
She studied the cipher on the letter, set it aside, and reheated
the message from the boot, searching for something in common between the two.
 
402.
 
Say, hadn't that been a number from the letter, too?
 
After she'd refreshed the letter's cipher,
she saw the number 402 written there twice.
 
What was the significance of 402?

Clark must have kept everything
from her thus far to protect her, but she was through carrying the burden of
what she'd discovered alone.
 
She
doubted he'd confess if she confronted him directly.
 
No, she'd have to trick him or convince him he could trust
her.
 
402.
 
She'd wait up for her husband, and perhaps she could find out
what it meant.

To pass the time, she copied
Arriaga's letter with the stationery, quill, and ink on her mother's desk.
 
By the time she sprinkled fine sand over the
finished forgery to help dry the ink, she'd grown so sleepy she had difficulty
holding her head up.
 
She nodded several
times, folded the cipher and both letters, slid them into her pockets, and
extinguished the lantern.
 
She'd stretch
out on the bed for a few minutes and wake up when Clark came in.

She never remembered falling
asleep, but early Thursday, a thunderstorm trundled over Alton and awakened
her.
 
Oblivious to the tempest, Clark
snored beside her.
 
When had he
returned?

Rain spattered the floor beneath
the window.
 
Fuzzy-headed, she rolled
from bed and shoved the window shut, and after using the chamberpot, lay abed
listening to the assault of rain on roof and pane.
 
Alton needed the rain.
 
So
did Augusta to the north.

Clark's snores deepened.
 
Intermittent lightning flashes cast his skin
blue, almost the same hue as the cipher message.
 
When the storm abated, she reopened the window and crouched in the
cool moisture, reveling in raw scents of predawn, her hand stroking her
belly.
 
Several roosters crowed.
 
In the east, the sky had blanched.

Clark coughed, and his murmur
sounded groggy.
 
"Betsy?"

Glad for the cover of darkness, she
slid back in bed and began stroking his chest.
 
Sweat dampened the sheet beneath him.
 
"Hush.
 
Go back to
sleep."

He yawned.
 
"Too much on my mind."

No doubt.
 
She whispered, "Then let's play our game.
 
Tree."

He sighed in deep contentment, eyes
closed.
 
"Sunshine."

"Wine."

"Purple."
 
He yawned again.

"Bucket."

He nodded at the edge of
sleep.
 
"Mmm.
 
Water."

"Four hundred two."

"Cornwallis."

She didn't miss a stroke, despite
the fear that rammed her gut.
 
Charles
Lord Cornwallis ran the Crown's show in South Carolina.
 
What business did a shoemaker from Augusta
and residents of Spanish Havana have with a British general?

Clark stiffened, and she saw him
stare at the ceiling, trying to decide whether he'd dreamed spilling the
information.
 
Then he pushed away and
stood.
 
"Damnation."
 
He stumped to the desk, lit the lantern, and
turned on her, his glare demanding an explanation.

She rolled up and sat.
 
"Monday I received that box from a sea
captain named Arriaga.
 
His letter said
he gave the enclosed parasol and veil to my mother while she was on his ship,
and she lost them when the redcoats captured her in Havana.
 
So he sent them to me.
 
You and I didn't have time to discuss it
Monday.

"Tuesday morning in the shop,
I saw a piece of paper in the heel of a cowhide boot.
 
When I held it close to the lamp, blue letters and numbers
appeared all over it."

"Christ Jesus."

"And again I didn't have time
to ask you about it because we had to clean 'Tory Scum' off our house.
 
I woke in the middle of the night and
overheard you talking with two Spaniards who were taking away the cowhide
boots.
 
Basilio, you named one of
them.
 
The dogs never barked at
them.
 
They knew them from previous
visits, same way they know Sooty Johns."

"Ah."
 
Clark rubbed his eyelids.

Betsy scrubbed her hands together,
the rasp of nervous energy amplified in the quiet house.
 
"Yesterday afternoon, Lieutenant
Fairfax came here to the shop to post a letter.
 
He recognized the parasol and veil from when he was in Havana and
concluded that my aunt and I were spies.
 
I denied involvement, but I'd swear he
knew
I had Arriaga's
letter and your message."

Clark paced the length of the room
in his shirt.
 
Panic thrashed his
expression.

"Husband, rebels write between
the lines of letters with invisible ink that turns blue when heated, the way
letters and numbers appeared on your message from the boot heel."
 
She kept her voice low, conscious of the
servant in the bedroom across the stairway.
 
"The same way letters and numbers appeared on Arriaga's letter last
night when I exposed it to heat.
 
Between the two, I noticed the number 402 several times, so I knew it
had to be significant.

"How many times have Basilio
and his partner visited you in the middle of the night?
 
Did they supply you with the Cordovan
leather?
 
What's a Loyalist doing in
secret meetings with men from a country at war with Britain?
 
To whom are you sending secret
messages?
 
Did Sooty paint the slur on
our house, and if so, why?
 
What has all
this to do with Lord Cornwallis?"
 
She drew a deep, shaky breath.
 
"Are you spying on the redcoats for the rebels?"

He kept pacing.
 
"I cannot tell you."

"Or you
will
not?"
 
At his silence, she
intercepted him, planted her feet, and braced her fists on her hips, her body
quivering with betrayal.
 
"How dare
you conceal all this from me?
 
Does this
baby mean nothing to you?
 
Think
, man!
 
Do you want me widowed, or —"
 
She cringed, recalling Fairfax's threat to loosen her
tongue.
 
"Do you want all this half-knowledge
tortured out of me?
 
Tell me enough to
protect myself and not betray you.
 
Let
me be your comrade and help you out of this."
 
She hugged him.
 
"I
cannot raise this child alone.
 
Stop
what you're doing!"

"I tried to leave," he
muttered, "when I found out you were carrying the baby.
 
They won't let me go until it's over."
 
He wrapped his arms around her.
 
"It's gigantic, Betsy.
 
It reaches the entire length of the
Colonies, across the water, into Cuba, the Caribbean, France, Spain, and
Holland."

"Rebels."
 
Her voice emerged choked, the way hope felt
in her chest.
 
"A spy ring.
 
Dear gods, you're spying for the
rebels."

"If I walk away, I'll be
executed within days.
 
After my attempt
at backing out two months ago, I was marked as suspect."

She clung to him, her head spinning
with horror and indignation.
 
"What
is your mission?"

"I swore on my sacred honor
not to tell you or anyone else."

What did fanatics who raided farms
and ravished women and girls know of sacred honor?
 
"When will it be over?"

"Another six weeks.
 
And then I'm out, I promise."

"Six weeks is a long
time.
 
The redcoats aren't stupid."

"Yes, I know."
 
He disentangled himself and headed for the
desk.
 
"And we've a seven-hour ride
today in the company of one with a fiend's love of interrogation."
 
He laughed without mirth.
 
"I'd the good fortune to meet Mr. Fairfax
last night in the Red Rock."
 
He
ran his hand over his face, as if to banish memory of the encounter.
 
"Where are the letter and note?
 
I must destroy both."

Relieved that she'd had the
prudence to forge Arriaga's letter, she withdrew the original and the boot
message from her pocket and handed them to him.
 
While she crawled back into bed, the quilt of despondency
settling over her, Clark ignited the note and dropped it into a metal dish on
the desk.
 
Arriaga's missive he first
warmed to expose the cipher and silently translate.
 
Then it, too, was fed to the flames.

The bitter stink of evidence
permeated the room and shivered premonition through Betsy.
 
Fire, the beginning and the end.
 
Clark blew out the lantern, crawled into
bed, and took her in his arms.
 
"I'll be out by September, I promise.
 
Trust me."

Did she have a choice?
 
Her soul writhed with foreboding over the
chasm her husband straddled between two battling Olympians: punitive parent and
recalcitrant child.
 
To them, the life
of one mortal named John Clark Sheridan was of no consequence.

Chapter Eight

NEITHER BETSY NOR Clark slept while
dawn brightened the sky.
 
She withheld
knowledge of the Givens murders from her husband, uncertain how to tell
him.
 
Perhaps he'd heard the news in the
Red Rock before coming home and hadn't mentioned it to her because he didn't
want to alarm her further.
 
The
possibility that he already knew of it from plans made with Spaniards made her
want to shrink from his touch.
 
Was
Clark capable of plotting murder?
 
On Monday,
she'd have scoffed at the suggestion.
 
But with each passing day, she'd gained greater discernment that she
didn't know the man in bed beside her at all.

Mary rose at five-thirty and
thumped downstairs to revive the cooking fire.
 
When Susana arrived half an hour later, Betsy pulled from Clark's
embrace without a word and dressed.
 
He
did the same.
 
Then they descended the
stairs together to the aroma of coffee and cornbread and met Susana's grim
visage in the shop.

The older woman thrust mugs of coffee
at them.
 
"I hate bearing ill news
first thing, but the Givenses have been murdered."

Clark coughed coffee, so Betsy
surmised it was news to him.
 
"How
dreadful, Aunt.
 
When?
 
How?"

"Last night about nine-thirty
or ten.
 
Lieutenant Stoddard saw a Spaniard
on horseback gallop away from the house, and so he investigated."

Clark coughed again.
 
"A
Spaniard
?"

From the magnitude of his gape,
either he was an excellent liar, or knowledge of the murderer's nationality had
unsettled him as much as news of the crime.
 
Susana sighed.
 
"Yes, a
Spaniard.
 
Another Spaniard.
 
Unfortunately this rascal wasn't caught,
either.
 
After the horrific murder of
that Spaniard here last month, I hoped we'd seen the last of Spaniards.
 
It's just as well that you're headed back to
Augusta today.
 
I fear Alton is no
longer a safe place to live.
 
Now, let
me see whether that lazy servant has finished preparing your breakfast."