Mistress Firebrand (19 page)

Severin did not have enough money left to get a message to Halifax, where Howe was said to be sailing with his army and baggage, as well as large numbers of camp followers, hangers-on, and loyalists. Nor did he have enough to buy decent food and clean water for another month. He
did
have enough to get a letter to Lebanon, forty miles southeast, where there had once been a school and might still be a teacher who had known his parents.

He did not compose this appeal in code, but he wrote it in a language spoken by few and written by still fewer. He included all of the information he had gathered for Howe, with the exception of the intelligence about the Widow, because it would be of no interest to this man. If Harkness still lived, if he had remained in Lebanon or nearby, if he was at all the man Severin’s mother had described, he would be capable of reading the letter, using the information contained
therein, and engineering an escape. And if not, Severin would very soon be dead.

*   *   *

The Rebels, under the command of the slovenly and eccentric Charles Lee, took control of New York in January. They sent a company of dour New England militia to close John Street, but by then it hardly mattered—most of the theater’s wealthy loyalist patrons had fled the city for their estates on the Hudson anyway. Jenny and Frances had no such luxury.

The last remaining officers of the British garrison staying at the King’s Arms packed to go aboard the
Asia
, and Courtney Fairchild made his final visit to the robin’s egg blue house beside the theater.

Jenny had not meant to intrude. Just as she preferred no one inquire too deeply into the matters of her own heart, which were in turmoil, she certainly didn’t mean to pry into anyone else’s. But the door to the parlor was open and she could not help but look inside.

Lord Fairchild was kneeling in his scarlet regimentals, his broad back to Jenny, his turned-back wool tails kissing the rug, sword scraping the floor, before Frances Leighton’s chair. He held Fanny’s hands, which had been painted by Romney and engraved by myriad nameless others in her most famous attitude as Ophelia.
There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me.

“We can bring Jenny too. I can take care of you both,” Fairchild was saying.

They were so absorbed in each other that neither had noticed Jenny in the door.

“And destroy your own future in the process,” said Fanny. “Billy Howe can get away with cosseting
Elizabeth Loring, and lavishing preferments on her cuckold husband, because he has won honors enough on the battlefield to be forgiven little indulgences like a flamboyant mistress. And the Sultana, as the papers like to call her, is a society beauty from a fine family.
I
am not.”

“I don’t care a damn for that,” said Fairchild.

“But you will, Courtney. You will someday. Onboard ship or in a small garrison, my condition will be discovered. There will be someone who knew or suspected about Harry, and they will reach all the right conclusions about me. And jump to all of the
wrong
ones about us. Who will believe we have not been intimate?”

“I don’t care what anyone believes.”

“Not now, perhaps, but you will want to marry someday.”

“There can be no one else.”

He did not say
after you
, but it hovered unspoken in the air.

“I never thought there could be anyone else after Harry,” said Frances Leighton gently. “Then I met you.”

The sound that Jenny made was involuntary, a little sob at the back of her throat that was half for Frances and Fairchild, and half for herself and the sick longing she felt for Severin Devere.

“My apologies,” Jenny said, swallowing the lump in her throat and backing into the hall.

Fairchild turned to her, his pose now like Atlas holding up the world, and there were open tears on his face. “Tell her,” he implored Jenny. “Please tell her she must come with me.”

Jenny did not know what to say.

“Tell her,” insisted Fairchild. “If we part now, we might never meet again.”

“Courtney,” said the Divine Fanny softly. “She doesn’t know.”

But she did. Jenny had kept the secret of Aunt Frances’ illness to herself, just as Angela Ferrers had advised her, because she did not want it to color the time they had left, but that was selfishness now.

“I do know,” said Jenny.

The Divine Fanny looked up and her gray eyes met Jenny’s. A little smile played across the actress’s perfectly formed lips. Then she said, “Courtney, might Jenny and I have a moment alone?”

Fairchild made a visible effort to compose himself and rose. “Of course, Fanny.” He kissed her hair, this man who was not Frances Leighton’s lover and who never could be, and smiled bravely at Jenny as he passed her on the threshold.

When they were alone, Jenny stepped gingerly through the door.

“I take it Angela told you,” said Aunt Frances, patting the chair beside her.

Jenny crossed the room and settled on the threadbare cushion. “It was Severin Devere, actually. He also said there were rumors that you murdered your lover.”

Fanny sighed. “Severin Devere is the last man on earth who should credit the sort of rumors that swirl around love affairs. Some things, Jenny, are too private, too painful even now to share, but I can tell you this: I did not murder Harry. I loved him. You can ask Angela Ferrers. She was there.”

“I did,” admitted Jenny. “It was Mrs. Ferrers who told me not to dredge it all up with you, that it would color the time we had left and steal all your happiness.”

“Angela has always been the most practical of
women,” said Frances Leighton drily. “She has many admirable qualities and a dazzling array of skills. The one thing she is not, Jenny, is an expert on happiness. I didn’t keep my illness from you, Jenny, just to preserve our domestic tranquility. I kept it from you because I wanted you to be free to make your own choices. To go to London, if the opportunity presented itself, to go home to New Brunswick if ever this life did not suit you.”

Her aunt had given her all that and more, but they had still not said it plainly. “You’re right. I would never have considered going to London if I had known you were”—she forced herself to say it—“that you were dying. You have given me opportunities, shown me a life I could not have dreamt of in New Brunswick, and I am grateful for it. But I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me before I went to John Burgoyne. If I had lain with him, the same thing might have happened to me.”

Frances Leighton looked Jenny squarely in the eye. “Just because a thing is dangerous doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the risk. Sons follow their fathers into the army every day. If you had known that I had syphilis, it would have distorted the danger in your mind, from a very remote possibility to a very immediate reality. We discussed the precautions you could take, and I knew that Johnny had always been . . . fastidious in his choices. Rich men can afford to be.”

“But we poor players cannot,” said Jenny. The injustice of it stung.

“I have no regrets, Jenny. I played the hand that was dealt to me and I have had more than my fair share of joy and triumph.”

“And what about Major Fairchild? Has he had his share?”

Fanny smiled and glanced away a moment before answering. “Courtney Fairchild is the very best of men, and he deserves the full measure of love, which is something I cannot give him.”

“I do not think he minds.”

“No. He doesn’t. Except on occasion. But there are things he would mind. He has a very personal sense of honor, and discovering that his beloved is an associate of Angela Ferrers would likely tax his finer sentiments. Not to mention the fact that we handed his childhood best friend over to the Rebels.”

A fact that was never far from Jenny’s mind. “Now that we are safely behind the American lines, why can’t Devere be freed?”

“I know that you regret the part you played in his capture, Jenny, but you must take solace in this: Devere is alive only because of you. Angela Ferrers is nothing if not thorough.”

It was cold comfort for Jenny. “And what about us? Was she right? Should I have kept my knowledge about your illness to myself?”

“No. Not unless you plan to go weeping wanly about the place like some Restoration Tragedy heroine.”

Jenny wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to cry. “I don’t even know how long you have left,” she said, trying very hard not to be weepy.

“Neither do any of us, my dear. If there is any lesson to be found in my life, it is that one: make the most of the time that we have.”

*   *   *

Rescue for Devere did not come in the form of a company of dragoons storming the mine. The prisoners
could not tell day from night in their airless vault below the ground. The building at the top cut off all light from the laddered shaft down which their food and jailors came. Only a faint glow sometimes at the end of the tunnel, beyond the bars that sealed them off from the rest of the works, told of the rising and setting of the sun.

Severin had already picked the lock and ventured beyond that gate, quietly when most of his fellow prisoners were sleeping, while the doctor who had nursed him through his recurrent fevers kept watch. He discovered that there was no way to stage a mass escape by that route. The walls of the shaft were sheer. A rope, secured from above, would be required to scale them. Severin was strong enough, just, to make the climb unaided, but few of his fellow prisoners were in any shape to do so. They would have to be hauled up by strong men. If the shaft had been farther away, out of sight of the guardhouse’s walls or hidden by trees, it might have been possible, but it wasn’t.

According to the bespectacled doctor, the opening was on a flat plain with no cover. Any escape by that route would have to be accomplished with speed, in the darkness, which was no one’s favorite way of making a fifty-foot climb up a sheer rock face.

“Karekohe!”

A name out of memory, one he had not been called by in twenty years. He heard it whispered through the bars and thought for a moment that he was in the grip of another fever. Then, when it was followed by a second word in Mohawk, this one not at all polite, he knew he was not.

“Here,” Severin replied in the same language. His
fellow prisoners were sleeping, including the Tory doctor. It would be safer not to wake any of them, but Severin’s conscience would not allow that. He would have died if not for the physician’s care. He placed a hand over the doctor’s mouth and gingerly squeezed the man’s shoulder until his eyes opened, then motioned for silence.

Although far from a man of action, the doctor, at least, should be up to making the climb. Severin was not certain that he could do it himself. The cold and the damp, and the subsistence diet of gruel, had done their work on a body already taxed by Hallam’s beating. The bruises and small fractures along his arms and legs, and, most important, the cracks in his ribs, had still not healed—and never would without light and air and proper nourishment. If he did not make the climb, he would die down here, but better to die from the fall than from shivering in a pool of filth.

He crossed as quietly as possible to the iron bars, the doctor following him without question. In the gloom he could make out two faces on the other sides of the bars, both familiar, though he had never laid eyes on them before. The boys were young, barely out of their teens. They were dressed like Englishmen. Indeed, despite their dark complexions, they could probably
pass
for English the way Severin could, but their features bore the unmistakable stamp of their common Mohawk ancestor.

He picked the lock, the metal scraping on metal sounding loud as church bells in the silence of the echoing vault, but no one stirred. The gate swung open. Devere and the doctor passed through, and then he locked it again behind him. Cruel perhaps, but necessary,
because if he allowed it to remain open, as soon as the other prisoners woke there would be a stampede to the shaft and the guards would take notice. Locking the gate bought the doctor and himself, and their rescuers, time to make good their escape, and he owed as much to those who were risking their lives to save him.

It was dark in the tunnel, and they moved cautiously, hands in front of them and feeling above their heads for low-hanging rock and beams. Then finally there was no more ceiling and they were standing in an open space. It was a thing they could not at first see, but only sense. The moonless canopy of night overhead was important for making their escape from an open field. It was not ideal for climbing.

There were two ropes, dimly visible, hanging just short of the floor.

“The boys first,” said Severin, this time in English and for the doctor’s benefit, as he examined the walls of the shaft as best he could. At the top was a circle of paler black.

“If you are seen,” he told the boys, “run, and forget about us. We will take our chances.”

“Mother says we’re to bring you back with us,” said the taller of the two.

“Then go first,” said Devere, “in case I can’t make the climb and you have to haul my sorry carcass up.”

The boy shrugged and nodded at the same time, a gesture Severin recognized: a family tic, he supposed. The familiarity of it made his eyes water for a moment, but sentiment would not get him to the surface.

He watched the dark shapes of the boys scurry up the rope, seeming light as birds, fast as squirrels, and wondered if his own body would ever answer that way
again. Already chills were racking him, the tunnel here colder even than their prison had been, his clothing rags, and his constitution spent.

The ropes stopped dancing. Their rescuers were aboveground. Severin and the doctor began their ascent.

It was the stuff of nightmares, to be dangling in the dark over a fifty-foot drop, struggling ever upward, inch by inch, and when he reached the top Severin knew he had come to the very end of his endurance. The boys had to take his arms and haul him onto the stiff dead grass. They half carried, half dragged him over the scrubby plain to the sheltering line of trees.

After that there was a path through the wood, then a road, and then a cart. And air. Fresh, clean air. He drank it in like liquor, like there would never be enough. He lay in the plank bed of the cart, too exhausted and fevered to move, and content just to feel the emptiness of the moonless sky above him.