Mistress Firebrand (22 page)

With the theater closed, they decided that Jenny ought to make a visit to her parents in New Brunswick. She was writing a new work, a one-act pamphlet piece for Washington, and she reasoned that she should be able to write as well at home as in New York.

In this she was proved wrong. After three weeks in the little brick house where she had grown up, Jenny managed to write a grand total of two pages. At home there was no escaping the domestic duty Aunt Frances despaired of. It took all morning, starting before dawn, to keep a household even of that modest size fed, swept, and laundered. In the afternoons there was a parade of suitors arranged by her mother.

The house, Jenny discovered, was smaller and more crowded than she remembered. Two of her four brothers had recently married and brought their new wives to live with them. Jenny’s father had added a wing—in brick, naturally—to the back of the house for the new couples, but her sisters-in-law, Ida and Letty, were obliged to make do sharing the old summer kitchen, and their arguments could be heard throughout the house.

When Jenny finally returned to John Street, she had a new appreciation for the working conditions Aunt Frances provided. In three days she managed to finish the play and work in two characters inspired by Ida and Letty and their epic dispute over the bread oven.

While Jenny had been away, Aunt Frances had put her knowledge of medicines to use nursing the sick Continentals at John Street. Jenny soon joined her, measuring out tinctures from Aunt Frances’ collection of blue glass bottles. In the evenings they took up their pens and wrote, and by some unspoken but mutual agreement they avoided talk of Courtney Fairchild and Severin Devere.

When the letter arrived, Jenny did not share it with anyone. It was unsigned, but she had no doubt from whom it had come.

My dr Jenny

I hope that I do not give offense by using your Christian name on such familiar terms. It is a liberty I granted myself in the privacy of my imagination, and I hope you will grant it me in truth when next we meet. I wish you to know that I am grateful for the sacrifice you made on my behalf and only sorry that I did not comprehend at the time how very right you were, and how very wrong I was, about the business I was engaged in.

I cannot come to you at present, and the knowledge that others will doubtless read this letter before it reaches you constrains me, but I wish you to know that I am free and resolved to quit my former life and give up the business that separated us. I promise that you and the people you care for, and even the person whose machinations parted us, are all safe from me.

It is possible that you will wish nothing more to do with me. I have undertaken to see that you are repaid for the kindness you did me, and I wish you to know that I expect no consideration in return for that aid. If, however, I remain in your thoughts as you have remained in mine, then I hope we might meet again and take up the matter that lies unresolved between us. A reply to
a gentleman
by way of the usual channels will reach me. If not, I only ask that you do not share this missive with a certain mutual acquaintance. An able intelligencer could with a little effort trace me by it, and the people who delivered me out of Egypt should not be made to suffer in the desert for their pains.

I do not wish to put you in any further danger by this correspondence, but I am, and have been since that night, and would be in future if you permit it, yours.

As love letters went, it would not make the poets weep, but it did move Jenny. She read it alone in her bedroom beneath the stuffy eaves, and let the longing and the loneliness she had known since her encounter with Devere consume her. What she felt for him was undoubtedly physical. She ached whenever she thought of what had almost happened in the slot at John Street and then again in the kitchens at Vauxhall. But it was more than that. Much more. It was the way she had come alive running beside him through the darkness, and then later wandering the garden, and even closing up the shutters at John Street. She had felt light and free and believed when she was with him that she was capable of
anything
—even as her dreams had been crumbling all around her.

Men—husbands and marriage—had always represented obligations and burdens to Jenny. That had been an unavoidable conclusion growing up in New Brunswick. The wives and mothers she had known acted as servants or, if they were wealthy enough, managed complicated households, directing the activities of servants. They did not write books or plays or paint portraits or any of the thrilling things that Jenny had heard women could aspire to in London and Paris.

That a man might ever be a source of delight, or partnership and pleasure, had never truly occurred to her. Before now. Aunt Frances had represented her
affair with Harry in that way, but it had come at a terrible cost. Devere, though, had described how they might have passion and pleasure without risk, and if he had truly given up his ambition to eliminate Angela Ferrers and any designs upon Aunt Frances, Jenny could see no reason why she
shouldn’t
share those things with him.

She composed, in her mind, while at work in the hospital the next morning, a reply that
would
make the poets weep. An outpouring of feeling and a confession of physical longing, but when she sat down to put pen to paper the result sounded rather like a prologue for the stage, and she remembered too that anything she wrote in these difficult times was likely to pass through many hands and be scanned by many eyes. So, in the end, she trusted in Devere to anticipate her as he had in the street by the docks and replied with a single word.

Yes.

*   *   *

Devere tried not to be impatient, but when a month had passed he asked his uncle directly for news of Jennifer Leighton.

“There are difficulties,” his uncle said.

“What kind of ‘difficulties’?”

“Trumbull put his request to remove the girl from the city directly to General Washington, and it was refused.”

Angela Ferrers.
He knew it had to be her thwarting him. “I shall go myself, then,” said Severin.

“You can scarcely walk more than a few yards unaided and you’re in no condition to sit a horse.”

Solomon Harkness was right, but it galled Severin.

“As soon as I am able, then.”

Had he not been worried about Jennifer Leighton, it would have been an almost Arcadian convalescence. The Harknesses were like so many American smallholders. They did a little farming, a little dairying, and their days were ruled by the progress of the sun and rhythm of the seasons. There were blackberries and peaches and fresh corn and there was very good meat. It was like a second childhood for Severin—enfeebled as he was by starvation and sickness and injury—the boyhood he might have had if things had gone differently for his parents, if they had been left to carve out a life for themselves as Harkness had.

By August he was out of bed and making slow circuits of his room, but Howe was also in Long Island and Jenny was not yet out of New York. Severin’s letter to her, which had traveled by private channels, was finally answered. Jacob brought it with him on his return from a trip to Long Island, the purpose of which neither Severin’s cousin nor his uncle would divulge. They had saved him and they cared for him but they did not yet trust him, and this filled him with a great sense of relief. These were perilous times, and he was glad that the Harknesses were so cautious. Severin would not see this island of familial happiness destroyed.

He opened the letter in private in the best room, where his aunt Molly had put on display all of the homemaking skills she had learned at the Reverend Wheelock’s Indian School—the ones that were supposed to fit her for a life as a missionary’s wife. There were swag curtains here, neatly sewn from bright red worsted, and an embroidered chair back with a classic English scene, a man and woman fishing by a lake
beneath a willow. It was not a room much used except by Harkness himself, but it was exceedingly comfortable, and his aunt had set a table and chair by the window for Severin’s use.

It was impossible to sit in this room and anticipate opening a letter from Jennifer Leighton without thinking on his parents. Molly and the other girls at the Indian School had been educated to be helpmeets for ministers. Eleazar Wheelock’s vision had been a peculiar marriage of New England thrift and New Awakening devotion. Sending missionaries into Indian country was costly and dangerous. Training Indians themselves to spread the Word could be done at half the price with—to a European way of thinking at least—none of the risk.

Molly had not married an Indian missionary. Instead she had married one of the teachers, Harkness, which had raised few eyebrows. On the frontier it was not unheard of for Englishmen to take Indian wives. It was when her brother—Severin’s father—who was also studying at the school, proposed to an English girl that all the trouble started.

So much trouble.

If Severin was honest with himself, he would admit that he had avoided falling in love with Phippa after that summer at Courtney Fairchild’s home, when his heart was still an unruly thing, because he had seen grand passion—that of his parents—up close, and it had blighted all their lives. He had never dared to imagine that he could shape a different fate for himself.

Jenny had sent him permission to try:
Yes.

Elation gripped him. A sense of promise, the kind Englishmen felt when they looked at the wilderness,
the kind that Severin had learned to reject in the forests of New York, but that could be true for him with Jenny:
I can build something here.
A life.

By September he could get about the house himself ably enough, but he was still too weak to wield a blade or sit a horse or jolting cart, and New York was once more in British hands, and
then
she was in flames. They learned of the fire in October; nearly a quarter of the city had burned and accusations were flying over who had done it: the fleeing Americans, the arriving British, a cabal of real estate speculators, or perhaps the slaves again.

Harkness could get no word at all of Jennifer Leighton, and Severin determined that if his uncle could not spirit her out of New York, then he would have to do it himself, under the nose of the army he had lately betrayed. For that, he would
need
to be his old self.

His early attempts to ride were slow and clumsy, but his uncle Solomon was generous with his time. One day, when Severin was mounted on an elderly pony that was more used to drawing carts than carrying people, his uncle said, “We never blamed her. Your mother. For marrying Devere. She didn’t know what he’d done to Ashur. She thought your father had abandoned her.”

“You didn’t have to blame her,” said Severin. “She blamed herself.” He blamed her too, for lacking faith in his father, for lacking the courage to find out what had happened to Ashur Rice, for making choices she couldn’t live with, that he’d had to live with.

The early frost made Severin’s first game efforts to spar with his cousins more difficult, but he was determined to sit a horse properly by the new year.

He managed the feat by Christmas: a modest
celebration by English standards, marked with a dinner and prayers. They cooked and ate as a family, with Uncle Solomon winding the clock jack that Molly considered to be an English idiocy, but that gave her mechanically minded husband enormous pleasure. They argued—no, they bantered—about it in Mohawk, and Severin felt something tighten in his chest to be around such easy companionship.

When the clock jack was finally wound and the meat rotating on the spit, his aunt turned from the fire and said, “Your father taught Solomon to speak my language, to woo me.”

“The bastard,” said Harkness with fondness, “sabotaged me. The first set of phrases he taught me would like as not have gotten me scalped if Molly did not already like me.”

“What did he teach you to say?”

Harkness repeated it—verbatim, Severin could tell, because Molly mouthed the words as well—and when he was done Severin burst out laughing, and it occurred to him that it was the first time he had really laughed since he had spent the night with Jennifer Leighton. And thankfully, his ribs no longer ached.

That was when he realized how much he wanted a life like this, with someone like Jenny. Someone he could laugh with. Someone who would tolerate his foibles and have ones of her own.

His strength returned slowly. His speed and swordplay were not yet what they ought to be—not for a trip into a city occupied by an army he had so lately deserted—but he was a veteran of many such dangerous undertakings, and never before had he been better motivated: by
his own desires. He kept Jenny’s precious, laconic letter in his waistcoat pocket.

The raid on the Harkness farm occurred in the dead of night, when everyone was sleeping. At first he thought the dull roar was thunder in the distance, but when it grew steadily louder he knew it had to be cavalry. Muffled spurs, he realized, with a sinking heart, but at least thirty horse. Severin knew better than to reach for his pistols. He could not risk an armed confrontation with his aunt in the house.
That
was how civilians got killed.

He tied his shirt closed and went into the darkened hall. It was a moonless night, but he could see the riders, splashes of red in the night, from the window over the stair. His uncle was up too now and carrying a musket, but Severin took it from his hands and shook his head.

“There are too many of them, and your resistance will only provide them an excuse for brutality.”

Joshua and Jacob emerged from their rooms, knives in hand.

“Put them away,” said Harkness, who had fought in the last war and knew Severin was right.

His aunt, for her part, was steely eyed, pinning her bed jacket closed and putting her hand in her husband’s with absolute trust.

Everything happened quickly after that, and Severin had to admit that it was very well done. The door crashed open. Harkness led the way down the stairs, Molly’s hand still in his, Severin and the two boys following. The dragoons at the bottom herded them into the kitchen at the points of their bayonets, and Severin made sure to put himself between his family and the
steel blade of the wild-eyed young cornet barking the orders.