Mistress Firebrand (10 page)

She had thought that the patronage of a powerful man would open avenues and expand her opportunities, but now she realized that she was staring down the narrowest path of all. She did not know what to do. He had placed one knee upon the seat of her chair and his body caged her within the confines of the damask-covered wings. It was a silken prison and he loomed over her, now strumming himself with her captured hand.

She could not go through with it, but neither could she bring herself to say the words that would destroy her future. She tried to rise, but he brought his other knee to bear, pinning her skirts to the cushion.

“I ought to be getting home,” she said. “My aunt will worry.”

“A few moments more, girl,” he said, eyes closed, breathing fast.

In a flash he released her hand and grasped handfuls of her petticoats.

She tried to scramble out of the chair but she had nowhere to go, and he would not budge. She reached wildly for some source of leverage, and her knuckles smacked the marble pillar beside the table. Her fingers
scraped the plaster bust atop it, scrabbling over the serene face of the resident daughter of Zeus.

If Burgoyne could call upon the Muses, so too could she.

Jenny wrapped her free hand around Melpomene’s slender neck and swung.

She aimed for his shoulder, but the plaster was heavier than she expected. The Muse connected with Burgoyne’s head with a crack.

Melpomene’s tender cheek fractured, powdering Burgoyne’s black hair gray. He grunted, stilled for the moment, and slumped atop her, a dead weight. The bust fell from her fingers and landed on the carpet with a dull thud, then rolled sonorously to the other side of the cabin, leaving a trail of white gypsum.

Jenny tried to move, but Burgoyne’s weight pinned her, his head atop her collarbone, his shoulders digging into her stays. She braced her hands against his chest and shoved and twisted until she was able to squirm out from under him and climb over his back to exit the chair. She lost her shoes in the process, the paste buckles snagging on the cushion, and emerged to stand in her stocking feet on the Turkey carpet.

Burgoyne remained slumped over the damask arms, a profane
Pietà
.

He looked dead. She did not want him to be dead. She would have to touch him to find out, and she did not want to touch him.

She forced herself to do it, feeling for a pulse at his neck. His starched collar was rough to the touch, the edge crisp like paper, his cravat tightly knotted. She could not find his pulse, but she could detect his breath, warm and moist, against her fingers.

He was not dead, but he
was
a British general. And she was an American actress and presumably a whore, and she might well swing for striking him. No jury would be sympathetic, not when she had come to meet him like this. Not considering her profession and her aunt’s scandalous past.

Her only chance was to run. Or rather walk. Serenely, from the cabin, as though she had come from his bed. If she demanded a boat to return her to shore, she would most likely get one. That was one of the first lessons of the theater: if you carried the stage with you into the street and strutted as though you were part of the scene, most people would go along with the program. If she demanded a boat quickly enough, before Burgoyne was discovered, she might get clean away, and once she was home, Aunt Frances would know what to do.

It would be the most important performance of her life.

It was, fortunately, a part she had studied. She must, for a space,
be
Frances Leighton, regal, witty, wielding her powerful charms to weather the gauntlet of sly looks and catcalls on the way to the rail. She took a breath, as Aunt Frances had taught her, as Bobby
always did before beginning a scene, and let the role settle over her like a mantle.

Jenny risked one last look back at Burgoyne. She would not touch him again. She snatched her shoes out from under the chair and backed to the other side of the cabin to shove them onto her feet as best she could, tightening the crumpled lappets. She fluffed her hood around her face and tucked her copper hair—now she regretted the lack of anonymous powder—into the striped folds. Her steps were muffled by the Turkey carpet as she crossed the room, hastily fastened paste buckles sparkling lopsided in the moonlight streaming through the windows.

She opened the door and peered out into the hall.

Severin Devere stood in the second door on the left. He was leaning against the jamb, in shirtsleeves and fawn breeches, his pose deceptively casual, his black eyes anything but.

“Is he dead?” Devere asked. His voice was without inflection. She could not read his expression, but then it occurred to her that she had not seen his face in the darkness of the slot.

He was blocking her only path of escape. She had no choice but to answer.

“He doesn’t seem to be.”

Devere straightened and prowled toward her. His feet were silent on the deck, a nearly impossible trick on such a creaky tub. He came to stand within inches of her, and she was conscious, more than ever, of their difference in size and stature. He was taller and broader than she, and he moved with a feline grace that suggested coiled strength and dangerous speed.

He was here to protect Burgoyne, the man’s body
and reputation. No matter what they had shared in the darkness at John Street, she had injured one and posed a not insignificant threat to the other. They were in the middle of New York Harbor, in December, the waters a frigid waste. Her aunt’s warnings were suddenly no longer theoretical. This man could break her neck and tip her body over the side, and no one would ever know what had become of her.

Severin Devere scrutinized her from head to toe, and she was certain his dark eyes missed nothing even in the dim corridor. He would see through her masquerade. He would know the gown had been bought used and remade, suspect the watch belonged to Frances Leighton and the tortoise combs had come from one of her long-ago admirers. He would be able to read the guilt written across Jenny’s face, because this was a man who also wore masks and played roles. And because she was not the Divine Fanny, and she was not adequate to this part.

She flinched when he took her hands in his, expecting to be manacled. Instead, he gently lifted her wrists to the lantern and turned them over.

She followed his gaze and noticed for the first time the purple bruises. They circled her wrist like a bracelet of rough-cut amethysts. When she looked up she saw a muscle in Devere’s jaw twitch, and she could feel the restrained violence vibrating through his body.

“What happened?” he asked, his face still unreadable.

“We had a misunderstanding,” she said.

“That is one way of characterizing it.”

Devere lowered her hands deliberately and stepped past her in the hall.

Relief washed over her. Whatever he intended, her immediate demise wasn’t part of it. Running, now that
he was aware of the situation, would be futile. There was no way she would get off the
Boyne
without his knowledge and permission, so she trailed him into Burgoyne’s cabin.

“Shut the door,” he said, stalking to the table.

Devere turned Burgoyne over ungently and thrust his body upright in the chair. The general groaned and his head lolled. Devere peeled back one eyelid and checked his pulse. There was something brisk and businesslike about his manner that made Jenny wonder just how often he made such assessments, separating the incapacitated from the dead.

Devere turned from the unconscious man and surveyed the room, his eyes taking in the toppled pillar, the chipped bust, the half-eaten meal on the table, the nearly empty decanter of brandy.

At last he said, “I can fix this, if you will allow me, but we have very little time, so you must choose, quickly.”

She didn’t see how anyone could
fix
this. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means that I can arrange the scene to suit the lies that must be told—if you will embrace a fiction that the relevant parties will find more palatable than fact. It means subverting—and breaking—the law, and giving up all hope of any measure of justice for the indignity and injury you’ve suffered”—his eyes lighted briefly on her bruised wrists—“but it also means that you will sleep in your own bed tonight.”

“And my other choice?”

“I call for Captain Hartwell, and you may relate your version of events. The general, of course, will certainly have his own.”

He did not elaborate on what would happen to her if Burgoyne’s version of events was believed. He did not have to.

“The fiction, if you please,” she said.

Devere looked relieved. He nodded, took up the brandy decanter, and upended it over Burgoyne, the tawny spirits soaking into the scarlet of his coat and infusing the cabin with the atmosphere of a pothouse. He uncorked two more bottles of brandy and poured them out the window. He set one beside Burgoyne on the table and left the other to roll around on the floor. Something about the care with which he set it rolling reminded Jenny of Mr. Dearborn’s methodical preparation of the stage, of the thoughtful precision with which he placed the props.

Devere surveyed the room one last time, then turned to Jenny. “Go to my cabin. It is the second door on the left. Bar the door and do not answer or open it to anyone but me, no matter what you hear. Can you do that?”

She wanted to ask him what he was going to do, what would become of her, whether Burgoyne would recover—but more than that she wanted to live, and she recognized that she had slim chance of that without this man for an ally.

“Yes.”

“Go now.”

It was said quietly with no hint of threat or force, but with the assumption that she would trust him in this.

She went.

The hall was dark and quiet, and she dashed from
Burgoyne’s cabin to Devere’s and shut the door behind her in a single breath. The bolt was a fragile defense. If Devere did not champion her, the
Boyne
’s captain would have the door down in a trice. She had to trust him.

She did not know him.

She would trust him only so far.

There was barely room to stand beside the bed. A locked chest was tucked in the narrow space between a cannon and the berth. A folding desk built into the wall lay open atop the gun, covered with papers. Some looked like ordinary letters; others were clearly written in a code of some kind.

Of course they were. He was a spy, as Aunt Frances had told her. And neatly stacked on a carefully penciled map was a manuscript in a different hand, one replete with ornate flourishes and peppered with drawings and small, carefully penned diagrams. There was an inkwell lying unstopped on the desk and a half-finished missive spoilt now by a spreading stain where the discarded quill lay.

The scene spoke of an evening’s work interrupted. Jenny wondered just when Severin Devere had dropped his pen and decided that his coded letter was less important than the muffled sounds coming from Burgoyne’s cabin.

And whether he cared at all, really, about what had happened there, or only about which story was most convenient to tell.
That
was sentiment and foolishness, like her dreams of Drury Lane, and she was never going to be so foolish again.

She had nothing to bargain with and she could not be certain of his intentions, so she did her best to think like Aunt Frances, who kept her love letters and her
memoirs in a locked chest because the secrets of powerful men could be wielded like a sword—or a shield.

Jenny took the florid manuscript. She removed the top page, folded the rest of it in thirds, and slipped the liberated pages inside her stays. Then she replaced the absent pages on the desk with her now worthless play and topped it with the original manuscript’s ink-stained cover page. No one on Drury Lane would ever read anything she wrote now if Burgoyne had anything to say about it, and her work was just so much paper.

A moment later she heard footsteps and voices in the hall, but they continued past her cabin. Distantly she heard the clank of plate and the ring of crystal, and then, a few minutes after that, she heard a scratch on the panel and Devere’s voice saying, “It is Severin.”

She lifted the latch and opened the door. Devere filled it. He had donned a leather coat with wide skirts that concealed two pistols, a saber, and a foil with a well-worn handle.

He looked, in a word,
dangerous
.

“Come quickly, now, and do your best to look irritated.”

“That should not be too difficult.”

He flashed her a brilliant smile then, full of sly joy, and it transformed his face from merely handsome to truly breathtaking.

“I do believe we shall get away with this,” he said. Then his smile vanished and was replaced by the same focused intent he had shown in Burgoyne’s cabin. Blessedly, he did not glance at his desk before drawing her out into the corridor and locking the cabin door.

She was grateful to have a role to play, even if she did not know her motivation. It was enough to know
she must adopt Lady Highstep’s offended hauteur, heels clicking deliberately over the deck, shoulders thrown back, arms swinging at her sides.

They were up the ladder before she had a chance to lose her nerve. The moon had risen and it silvered the deck and sails and lit her way to the rail. This time there were no catcalls but there were a few indrawn breaths, and as she waited for the crane and the swing—it would not do to show haste—a little eddy of laughter, discreetly enjoyed behind cupped hands and upturned collars, rippled through the watch.

Then she was in the swing and Devere was climbing down into the boat beside her, and she was surprised to find that it was only her and her unlikely savior alone in the small craft. No sailors, no crew. Devere wordlessly took up the oars and began to row.

She had been right about the body concealed beneath the fine tailoring. He rowed with powerful, even strokes, and neither strained nor slowed. Her fingertips had traced those muscles in the dark, but to see that strength in action was to understand its power. The boat shot smoothly through the choppy water of the harbor, and Devere’s broad shoulders shielded Jenny from the better part of the chill spray.

Neither of them spoke until they were out of earshot of the
Boyne
. When there was no sound but the water lapping at their hull and the steady beat of Severin’s oars, she broke the quiet.

“What did you tell the steward?”

“I told him that the general had rather too much to drink, and was unable to rise to the occasion for which he had invited you.”

“Oh.”

Now Devere’s actions in the cabin made sense. He had been setting the scene for his story, sousing Burgoyne in his own brandy and emptying those telltale bottles into the sea.

“And the knot on Burgoyne’s head?”

“Acquired when he passed out from a surfeit of brandy.”

“Will the steward believe it?”

“Of course he will. It confirms all his prejudices about the man. And he will spread the parable amongst the crew, where repetition will polish it to the luster of gospel. What sailor or young officer would
not
want to believe that the rich general—who dines nightly on fresh beef and French brandy in his warm cabin while they freeze on deck and subsist on salt beef and peas porridge and grog—has disgraced himself with a beautiful lady? Particularly when the lieutenants have had to give up their wardroom to enlarge his quarters, and the crew suspect the sabotage that killed two of their number was aimed at Burgoyne.”