Mistress Firebrand (12 page)

And he listened. To booted feet on cobblestone, to the men who had been following them, drawing closer.

He pulled his coat open, exposing the hilt of his foil. From behind it would look as though he was dallying
with the girl and vulnerable to attack. “Take the sword,” he said quietly to Jenny.

She complied at once, wrapping her hand around its hilt in a practiced grip and drawing the blade silently from its scabbard.

“When I turn and step away,” he instructed, “lunge at the man nearest you as you might at Mr. Hallam in a duel onstage, but do
not
—on your life—cheat your blade to the side. Drive it home beneath his ribs. Do not flinch at the consequences—make to drive it
through
his body and clean out the other side.”

She nodded wordlessly. He said a silent prayer that he was not about to get her killed, and then the men were upon them and he could not spare her another thought.

Jenny grasped the foil. Devere’s weapon had a comfortably worn leather-wrapped hilt that seemed to mold to her hand. It was a light blade, not unlike the kind she was used to practicing with onstage, and she knew that if she wished to live to see the morning, she must throw herself entirely into the moment—the scene—and think of it as a role. To think of it as murder would stay her hand, and she did not want to die.

Devere moved with elegance and economy, pivoting out of her way to confront one of their attackers.

Which left her facing a tall, sallow man with a long face and cold, glittery eyes. He brandished a heavy cudgel in his hand and wore a stained leather vest that smelled of the slaughterhouse and a knitted cap pulled down to cover his ears. Those cold eyes turned—for an instant—to follow Severin.

She did not think. She lunged. She was aware of
the hard silvery light of the moon on her blade and the round shapes of the cobbles beneath her slippers and the object in front of her that had to be dealt with, and nothing else.

It was like skewering meat, only meat did not howl. Her blade pierced the leather doublet and the man’s stomach and kept going. He crumpled with her sword in his belly and his weight pulled her blade—and her—down with it. His cry—ragged, almost plaintive—was loud in her ears.

She flung herself back and her blade slid free with a wet pop. Her shoulders hit the brick wall behind her. The man kneeling on the cobbles continued to whine, his hands clutching his stomach and blood pouring out between his fingers, turning the alley’s cool air harsh and metallic. She knew she must do something to quiet him or risk bringing more assassins down upon them, but she could not.

Devere stepped in front of her, blocking her view of the sobbing man. There was a sound like a turkey’s wishbone being cracked. Then Devere stepped away, and where once a man had been, there was now only a twitching corpse. And another—she saw now—on the ground, a few feet away, its limbs bent at unnatural angles.

Her blade glistened in the moonlight, slick with blood. Devere took the foil from her hand, wiped the steel clean on the dead man’s shirt, and gave it back to her. “You did well.”

His praise filled her with unexpected pleasure. It was like receiving applause from the gallery, always the hardest audience to please.

She knew she ought to feel remorse, not satisfaction.
She had taken a life. Or at least she had dealt a man a mortal blow. But the two dead men had been rogues—more, paid killers. Devere had been certain. And innocent men did not fall upon you silently on a dark street.

That wasn’t why she felt so sanguine, though.

Then it came to her, why she had been able to do as she had done, why she had not frozen in terror. “Only because I have rehearsed the part,” she replied.

Devere nodded, seeming to understand, and then said, “One killing, in self-defense, does not a callous murderer make.”

He had protected her from harm, in the theater, on the
Boyne
, and just now, and the two bodies in the street told her she had nothing to fear from him tonight. But his words raised the question: how many killings did it take to become as coldly effective as Severin Devere?

“We should alert the watch,” Jenny said, turning away from the bodies.

“Unfortunately, the watch is unlikely to rush to our aid. I’m a British officer, of a sort anyway, and out of uniform—which, in the eyes of the Liberty Boys who control the city, may suggest under the circumstances that I am a spy. And an
actress
will be presumed to be my ardent Tory accomplice.”

He was right, though she’d felt her loyalties shifting like sand beneath her feet since she had left Burgoyne’s cabin on the
Boyne
.

“It seems I am destined to end this night in shackles,” she said.

A whistle sounded behind them and was answered by another from the west, in the direction of the fort. Devere surprised her utterly by smiling—as sly and
winning an expression now as before—and putting out his hand. “I promise you that together we are equal to the obstacles in our path and that no one else”—his eyes moved to the bruises on her wrists and she knew that he alluded to what had happened earlier with Burgoyne—“will hurt you tonight.”

She believed him. She had lived in New York long enough to know the danger they were in, had seen bodies pulled out of the river and men stabbed in brawls, but she had just seen him deal with two armed men, and because he had made room for her on the stage, she herself had taken no small part in that victory.

She took his hand, and he tugged her gently forward, and they ran.

Their pursuers kept to the south and west of them, cutting off any possible retreat to the boat and the waterfront. The villains were clever about it too, staying between Jenny and Devere and the main thoroughfares, where lights blazed in the houses of the rich. She knew better than to fly to that false safety. The noise she would make pounding on Van Dam’s or Van Cortland’s door would bring their pursuers down on them before it would bring the Dutchmen’s dozing servants.

Instead they were forced up the narrow lanes of the working poor where no one would be foolish enough to open their home to a man and woman fleeing armed attackers in the middle of the night.

Devere led them from stygian archways to darkened alley mouths, testing doors and garden gates, until finally he found one that was unsecured. It was a great batten affair, all broad planks and iron bands, and that must have been why it had survived the fire
that had gutted the house. Devere opened it carefully, beckoned Jenny inside, and closed the door as quietly as possible.

The bar on the inside was missing, but the brackets on either side of the door were still there, and Jenny watched as Devere fitted a length of charred timber in its place. It would not hold anyone for long, but it might buy them some time.

They felt their way through the dark house, the charcoal tang of the fire still heavy in the air, to a courtyard littered with household debris, bordered on three sides by a soot-stained brick wall and dominated by a reeking cesspit whose extraordinary breadth suggested equally remarkable depth.

The whistle sounded once more, this time from the street they had just left behind. If their pursuers were clever, they might guess that Devere had gone to ground in the burnt-out structure.

“I’m afraid that your gown must be sacrificed,” said Devere, taking hold of the neck of her polonaise and ripping it neatly down the middle so the pins bent, then tore through the fragile dimity.

She was well used to the casual dishabille of the theater, to scampering around backstage between costume changes, but that was at John Street. It surprised her that she felt almost equally unconcerned here and now, but then she realized that it was Devere who made her so. He was brisk and businesslike about the disrobing, the destruction of her gown. Neither his hands nor his eyes lingered. There was nothing salacious about it. In one economical gesture he ruined fifteen yards of very dear sewing and stripped her down to her chemise and petticoat, leaving only a few
colorful shreds of the striped fabric pinned down the center of her stays.

The polonaise looked a sad and mangled rag in his hands, but she found she could not mourn a gown she had worn to impress Burgoyne. “It does not exactly hold happy memories,” she said.

“Yet I promise you it will shortly fix itself forever in the memory of our pursuers,” said Devere, with that sly smile she was coming to recognize.

Jenny had no idea what he planned to do with her gown, but she suspected it involved the foul pit they were so carefully skirting, and she doubted any memories Devere intended to bestow on their pursuers would be pleasant.

She watched him disguise the nauseating pool, working quickly and quietly, listening for any sign of their pursuers from the street. Devere chose purposefully, a board here, a beam there, until the pit looked just like the rest of the yard, strewn with debris, and the shortest distance between the house and the south wall at the back of the garden, where he draped her poor striped polonaise to look as though it had been caught and abandoned during the climb over.

“A dunk in that pit, awful as it might be, probably won’t kill anyone,” she said.

“Have a few hours in my company turned you so bloodthirsty?”

“Not in
your
company, no.”

That was when Jenny heard it, the sound of the batten door being forced.

“Quickly,” said Devere. He led her to the west side of the garden and helped her over that wall and into the neighboring yard. She landed in an herb garden, the
parsley and basil still struggling on under the frost and giving up their cleansing scent as her slippers crushed their tender leaves. Devere followed a moment later, landing less luckily in the woody rosemary; branches and boughs broke noisily beneath him.

It was no matter. The clamor from the yard they had just left drowned out his arrival. There were shouts when the men spied her gown and the clatter of booted feet over rotted boards. And a snap, a yowl, a squelching, liquid sound—such as the whale might have made when it swallowed Jonah—that made Jenny cringe and forced Devere to bite his fist to hold back laughter.

The cursing that followed was not inventive but it was heartfelt, and Jenny could still hear it faintly when she and Devere emerged into a ramshackle street she recognized.

“‘And the children of Israel,’” said Devere, “‘even the whole congregation, journeyed from Kadesh, and came unto Mount Hor.’”

“We’re in the Holy Ground,” she said. They had run farther than she realized. The slum between Saint Peter’s and the college was north of John Street, and unlike the quiet streets near the Battery, it was teeming with people at all hours. She had only ever seen it by day, but night did not improve the prospect. The lots were narrow, the wooden houses dilapidated, the streets rutted, and the gutters half choked with rotting food.

“At least you are dressed for it,” said Devere drily.

“I fear I am
under
dressed for it,” she said.

The women who strolled the disreputable tract and lounged in its narrow doorways were not the stylish, sportive demimondaines who frequented Bobby
Hallam’s greenroom. They did not dress to seduce in silk or lace, because everyone knew what wares they peddled, and on what economies of scale.
Practicality
was the watchword here. They dispensed with confining stays and wore loose jackets pinned over petticoats. There was passing little flesh on display. Most, in fact, were wrapped up tightly in warm woolen shawls or long enveloping cloaks, their clothing beneath loose and easy to remove.

The whores, though, didn’t frighten her. They were only doing what Burgoyne had expected of Jenny, without the blandishments of French brandy and a feather mattress. Tempting as it might have been to look down on them for it, she knew better now.

It was the men—the men who leaned against the tumbledown buildings, chewing tobacco and drinking from green glass bottles—it was they who made her nervous.

“Are you cold?” asked Devere.

“A little,” she admitted.

His leather coat was draped about her shoulders before she could protest.

“You’re sensible to be frightened here,” he said, putting an arm too over her shoulders and leading her down the center of the street. “We’re only a little safer in the middle of this crowd than we were in the empty lanes near the Battery. A stabbing in a press like this is very easy to carry off.”

“More government work?” she asked.

“I have never stabbed anyone in a crowd, but I once took a blade for a man I was protecting, and it was a near-run thing.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Bristol.”

“I meant in what part of your anatomy were you stabbed.”

“I know what you meant. Ask me someplace warmer and perhaps I’ll show you.”

They were moving briskly down the center of the street, hip to hip, like a trollop and her customer on their way to someplace discreet and private.

She did not mind the contact. It was light and impersonal. He rested no weight across her back. To the contrary. His hand hovered over her shoulder. It was rather like the way the reverend used to lead her grandmother into church, two old cronies with a platonic acquaintance of some seventy years. There was a kind of intimacy of spirit in that, but to her surprise Jenny would have welcomed more. She wanted to lean into him, snuggle into the crook of his arm, feel his hip press hers.

It was the stress and danger of the situation, that was all. After an interlude like the one she’d had with Burgoyne, no sane woman would be angling for
that
kind of attention. Certainly not in a place like this, a warren of sorry sporting houses, gambling dens, and unlicensed drinking establishments. But she knew what Aunt Frances would say, because she had asked her, once, why she had left the security of her aristocratic lover’s protection for the uncertainty of a future with a man of no fortune. Aunt Frances’ response had been pure Fanny: “Because sometimes good sense is overrated.”

Fanny’s words had closely echoed Jenny’s reply to her mother’s pleas to stay home in New Brunswick. Her parents had outlined all the reasons that she should
not
go to New York with Fanny: that there was no security in acting, that she would be subject to vile importunities, that no respectable man would marry her after her time on the stage.

She had gone anyway, and her life would not have been worth living if she had stayed home. But the same logic had driven her to Burgoyne’s cabin aboard the
Boyne
.

“Where are we going now?” she asked.

“Gethsemane,” he said, unhelpfully.

“How appropriate.”

They traversed the Holy Ground unmolested and crossed a scrubby open lot, then began to stroll beside a tall hedge that stretched off into the darkness ahead of them—shielding what grand residence from its blighted neighbors, Jenny knew not. Devere kept her on his right and the hedge on his left, which would have been rude in ordinary circumstances, but these were not ordinary circumstances, and in their brief acquaintance she had seen him do nothing without a purpose.