Mistress Firebrand (7 page)

“If it is any consolation,” she said, feeling a flush rise up her neck to heat her face, “I am dressed in my bumpkin’s costume, though I would not be caught dead in it even in New Brunswick.”

“But it is what the audience expects,” he said.

“Yes.”

She did not mean for it to come out quite so breathless.

His lips, unexpectedly soft, covered hers. It was the lightest of touches—a question, not an answer—but when his mouth urged hers open, she responded. The wetness of it startled her. The slick penetration of his tongue suggested another kind of joining.

Her hips tilted to meet his. She grasped his shoulders for balance. He placed his palm at the small of her back and pressed her closer still, where she needed him. Her chest ached from the blow earlier, but she didn’t care because this was too good to stop.

Her fingers met the silk rope of his braided hair at the back of his neck, thick and heavy atop the collar of his coat. She wanted more. She tugged at the ribbon until the bow opened and she could comb through his hair in greedy handfuls.

He groaned, and shocked her by gathering her petticoats, the rough linen and old threadbare cotton
rustling in the dark. Surprise gave way to delight as she felt his knuckles dance over her calves, her knees, the ribbons that tied her stockings, her bare thighs, and then—

The startled cry that bubbled up to her lips was muffled by his mouth, but he stopped just then, fingers stroking slick fire between her legs, to whisper in her ear, “Let me do this for you.”

She had been doing
this
for herself for so long that the idea of having someone else do it to her had become a remote fantasy. When she opened her mouth the word that tumbled out was, “Yes.” And,
Yes
. And,
Yes
. Over and over again.

It was building, spiraling, climbing, the thing she had decided she could live without if she had to, or at least abide without sharing with someone else. How wrong she had been. She wanted to be open, wider, for him, but there was no room in the close confines of the slot so she lifted her knee and placed her foot on his lean hip, and he licked her ear and whispered, “Good girl,” into the shell of it.

A tentative invasion followed, the tip of his finger, hovering at her entrance, until her throaty groan encouraged him onward.

“Jenny!”

She heard Bobby’s voice calling for her and realized that the shouting, the sounds of destruction, had at some point stopped.

Devere froze, one hand pressed to the small of her back, the other between her legs. “Stay with me, Jenny,” he said. His finger slid home.

She felt like crying. And screaming. And dying, preferably to Devere’s tender ministrations, but the
desperation in Robert Hallam’s voice recalled her to reason and she thrust Devere’s hand away and smoothed her petticoats down and tried to get her breathing under control.

“I must go,” she said.

“Is he your lover?”

“No, but he is my employer and my landlord and, until I can find another, my patron.” That was the reality. She was not free to explore passion with men like Severin Devere. “He won’t come now, to John Street, will he?”

She meant Burgoyne, of course.

“No,” said Devere. “I could not allow him.”

“Then tell him,” she said, accepting that one path was now closed to her, “tell him that I shall be delighted to dine with him, Friday, on the
Boyne
.”

Severin had forgotten how much rejection hurt. The frustration of thwarted desire—which he was certain had been mutual—didn’t help either.

He knew better than to blame Jennifer Leighton, though. He waited in the darkened slot listening to her and Hallam talking. She might not be the theater manager’s lover, but she was right about her predicament. The man was her patron. Her plays were performed only through his good graces.

That did not change how Devere felt. He was a professional eavesdropper. It was a skill, as mechanical, usually, as picking a lock or deciphering a code. Not so now. Instead of fixing on key words or promising leads in their conversation—and there were many—he was consumed by irrational jealousy. Of course, Jennifer Leighton and Robert Hallam spoke in a shorthand that
told of long acquaintance. They had worked closely together for years.

One frenzied, delicious moment in a closet did not change that. Nor would it sidetrack Jennifer Leighton’s ambition. And yet Severin could not help but feel, based on the tone of Hallam’s voice and his choice of words, that he did not really see Jennifer Leighton clearly as a playwright, because he saw her first as a woman. One with skills he could make use of, to be sure, but defined and limited by her sex.

Hallam’s estimate might be true of Jennifer Leighton’s body, although Devere’s experience with the Merry Widow had taught him that not all women were limited by that—his ribs still ached dully as a reminder—but it was most assuredly not true of the girl’s mind.

Severin listened as she suggested clever ideas, dismissed one by one by Hallam, for luring their loyalist audience back to the John Street while keeping the Liberty Boys at bay. Reduced ticket prices, a benefit night for beleaguered Boston, a banquet catered by Mr. Fraunces . . . until finally Jenny gave up and receded into the role Hallam expected of her. He did not want a partner in management for the John Street. He wanted to play Garrick to her Divine Fanny, and he would not—could not—see how ill-suited clever Jennifer Leighton was for the part.

When their voices at last became quieter, then dwindled, and Severin was certain they had left the stage, he slipped out through the door to the boxes and picked his way carefully through the wreckage.

It could have been worse. The chairs were smashed, but these could be replaced. The curtain appeared to
be in tatters, but he had seen sailors repair such in a day’s time. The Hallams had learned from the riots in ’66. The John Street was an altogether more substantial building than the earlier theater on Chapel had been, much harder for a mob to destroy, and from all appearances it had weathered the attack relatively unscathed.

Like Jennifer Leighton.

She had obviously known about his parentage—known, and expressed no distaste, or any distasteful fascination. Not that he wouldn’t have taken advantage of that. He’d come to think of it as his due, as recompense for a host of other prejudices and slights.

The aunt, no doubt, must have told her. A part of him had hoped that Jennifer Leighton would reject him for his Indian blood, that he could dismiss her as no better than Burgoyne, and deliver her to him without overmuch regret. Or that she would be entirely drawn to him for the novelty, the spice of exoticism and danger that Englishwomen sought him out for. But instead she had plucked the chicken feathers out of his hair with touching practicality and commiserated with him over the absurd roles they were each forced to play, parodies of their true selves.

He’d acted on impulse, kissing her, and
that
irony was also not lost on him. When they had come back to New York after those years in the wild, he had understood at last the mocking smile that had always stolen over Ashur Rice’s face when he talked about the English.

It was the way the English had looked at Severin, and his mother, but not—he’d noted immediately—at his brother. Julian was the eldest and the heir, and advertised to be wholly English, unlike Severin.

The women in particular regarded his mother with a mix of scorn and pity.

For an eleven-year-old boy ripped from his home, the results had been predictable. He’d endured, for weeks, their quiet suspicion and open mistrust, and when his polite, dulcet behavior did nothing to change theirs, he’d lost his patience and taken the license they had granted him to act the savage.

Only Courtney Fairchild—a gangly, direct boy with long arms and a quick smile—had seen through him. It had been Fairchild who had said plainly, and with no intention to wound, “They will change how they look at you when you grow up, because you will be a man, and your brother will have a title. But if you go on like this, they will
never
change how they look at your mother.”

It had cut Severin to the bone. Courtney had been right, of course, and on his next visit home from school he had dropped the act and been everything quiet, pleasant, and
English
. They had interpreted that as just another variety of savage, of course—the “noble” sort—but over time he had learned to be more English than the English. This had eased, somewhat, his mother’s difficult path, and later paved Severin’s.

They had become fast friends at school after that, Severin and the openhearted Fairchild. That tie had been strengthened by a halcyon English summer spent at Fairchild’s family home, where Severin had fallen hopelessly in love with the man’s sister.

Phippa had cared for him too, in the puppyish way that teenagers did, though it had seemed like so much more at the time. After three weeks of shy glances and afternoons spent riding and fishing, all three of them together, she had arranged to meet him at the garden
folly, a ludicrous two-story crenellated Gothic flight of fancy, in the middle of the night. They had shared something awkward and tender and precious there. She had sighed his name as he entered her and clung to him tenderly afterward, but in the morning she had laughed off his proposal of marriage as an impossibility.

Severin’s friendship with her brother had endured that turn of events because Fairchild had shrugged his bony shoulders and declared girls inscrutable. They both knew the real reason, and Fairchild had alluded to it once, years later, when he’d said simply, “Phippa always cared too much what others think.” She was married now with children, three living, two dead, and a fat roaring country squire of a husband who drank.

When Severin presented himself at the King’s Arms and asked to see Fairchild, it took him a moment to apprehend why the publican was giving him queer looks. Then Fairchild came rumbling down the stairs and his eyes widened, and Severin realized he was still wearing the grease paint and feathers. A lapse testifying—to his chagrin—more to how much this business with Jennifer Leighton had distracted him than to the quantity of liquor he’d consumed throughout the day.

“What the devil happened to you?” asked Fairchild. “Family reunion?”

“Most amusing.”

“What
did
happen?”

“I went out for a nice little riot. Apparently it’s what you do in New York when Vauxhall is closed.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Too much and not enough.”

“That is the effect New York has on everyone these
days, my dear Severin. The only solution is to have another drink and hope matters improve,” said Fairchild, leading the way up to his rooms. “How does one get that off?” he asked, in reference to the face paint.

“Bear grease works.”

“I doubt the publican has any,” Courtney said with an air of apology.

“Butter will do.”

Devere washed his face and plucked the remaining few chicken feathers out of his hair in the small closet adjoining Fairchild’s comfortably appointed room.

He could see why so many of the garrison’s exiled officers chose to risk staying discreetly in town rather than retreating with their men to the safety of the
Asia
—especially those officers with staff positions, like Courtney, who were not responsible for discipline or a body of troops. The King’s Arms had modern chimneys, large windows, and fully curtained beds. It was warm and dry and did not move underfoot. Severin had never enjoyed sea voyages, but this one, with Burgoyne, promised to be particularly unpleasant, and the King’s Arms made him wish he did not have to make it.

Courtney pulled two chairs up to the fire and poured Severin a glass of sweet, dark rum, which he accepted gratefully.

“Tell me, then,” said Courtney, “how you came to be in a riot.”

Severin told his tale. Or at least he told the part about his dealings in the city, the telltale signs of quiet preparation he had observed along the docks, the gathering at Jasper Drake’s, and the attack on the theater. He left out his interlude in the slots with Jennifer
Leighton, because he had not as yet decided what he was going to do about it.

“And Frances?” asked Courtney sharply. “Is she all right? Was she hurt?”

Severin did not miss the familiar usage of her name. “She was not onstage during the riot.”

Courtney set down his drink. “I’ll just send a message around to John Street,” he said, “asking if there is anything they need. On behalf of the garrison in exile,” he finished, making light of his obvious concern.

It confirmed suspicions that had been forming in Severin’s mind as he collected bits and pieces of gossip during the day. Combined with the rumors that had swirled around the Divine Fanny’s departure from the stage and the death of her lover in London, it forced Severin’s hand. He watched Courtney write the letter and ring for the publican and pay for the messenger; then he waited until they were both comfortably seated like civilized Englishmen before the hearth with firing glasses in hand and a full bottle on the table before broaching the subject. He only prayed he was wrong.

“Frances Leighton,” Severin said softly. “You told me she was too expensive for your purse.”

“And so she is,” said Fairchild, smiling faintly into his glass. Severin hoped he had not arrived too late.

“We have always been honest with each other, Courtney,” prodded Devere.

“But discreet,” replied his old friend. “Especially with secrets that are not ours to share.”

“It is not such a secret in some circles in London, Courtney. The price for that particular lady’s favors is too high, even if she offers them for free.”

Fairchild drank his rum off and set the glass on the table. “Have you been following me, Severin?”

“No. I made inquiries.”

Fairchild swore.

“It is what I do.”

“Not to friends.”

“If you were my enemy, I would encourage you to bed her.”

“It isn’t like that, Severin. I
know
. I know about Harry. Frances and I aren’t lovers. She won’t take one. Not after Harry. And not with the episodes of confusion she suffers. She knows what is coming.”

He moved his empty glass on the table. “We dine and we talk and we read to each other—out of the public eye, lest it hurt her career to be known to be unavailable—and it is . . . enough.”

Severin could tell that it wasn’t, but it was all they could ever have, unless Fairchild wanted to share her fate.

“You know how it must end,” said Severin.

“It will end the way all affairs end, just sooner,” Fairchild said quietly. “And I think I should rather have a few happy years than the lifetime of quiet dissatisfaction to which Phippa has consigned herself.”

Devere decided against further argument. That such a liaison could result in scandal, and destroy his future marriage prospects if the whole truth were widely known, went without saying. Fairchild might be throwing away the unquestioned social acceptance he had been born into—the security that Severin had never enjoyed because of the rumors clouding his childhood—but it was his friend’s decision to make. Courtney Fairchild was not by nature a man who kept secrets. That he had kept his
affair with the Divine Fanny secret even from Severin spoke to the strength of the attachment.

He had pried into Fairchild’s business, and even if it was for his own good, Courtney was owed a confidence in return. And Severin did not think he could take his dilemma in regards to Jennifer Leighton silently back to the
Boyne
with him. When he closed his eyes he was back in the dark with her, caught up in an attraction he was now certain was mutual.

“Frances Leighton’s niece,” Severin said. “I promised to arrange a meeting for her with Burgoyne.”

“Frances tried to talk her out of it, but she is determined,” said Fairchild. “And really, what is there for her here? Riots and theater closings. The girl is willing, and Frances thinks she can fix it so Hallam won’t interfere.”

“That isn’t the problem.” It was difficult to articulate. “I made a gentleman’s agreement with Burgoyne. He has remained safely aboard the
Boyne
all week in expectation of being brought a night’s entertainment.”

“I still fail to see the issue.”

“She doesn’t belong in his bed.”

Fairchild pursed his lips. “You don’t have what Jennifer Leighton is after, Severin.”

He didn’t. Not if she planned to use Burgoyne just as he planned to use her, each to their own ends. It still didn’t sit right with him.

“But you might be able to get what she wants for her
and
spare her a night with Jack Brag,” said Fairchild, with unexpected calculation. “If you had something over Burgoyne, you might be able to convince him to forgo the pleasure of her body, and still obtain
for her the introductions she desires. And no doubt the fair Jenny would be suitably grateful to you.”

“I had no idea you could be so devious, Courtney.”

“I suppose that is Frances brushing off on me,” said Fairchild. “She is one of life’s natural strategists. And a keen observer of people. She saw how
you
looked at the girl.”

It shocked him to think he had been so transparent. “Jennifer Leighton was . . . not what I was expecting.”

“I’d no idea she had such a fine figure myself until the other night. It’s not what you expect a clever woman to look like under her clothes, exceptions like the Divine Fanny notwithstanding.”

“That is not exactly what I meant,” said Severin.