Mistress Firebrand (21 page)

She ought to be flattered by their concern for her reputation, but it seemed absurd. “I am an actress, sir, not a lady. If I cared for my good name, I would have chosen another profession, one that would not cause so many gentlemen to mistake me for a whore.”

The room was utterly silent for a moment. Ladies did not utter such words in polite company. Jenny knew it sounded coarse to this audience coming from her mouth, but she no longer wanted to trade in fantasy offstage.

“The assumptions of such gentlemen,” said Washington, breaking the quiet, “are much like the assumptions Parliament has made about Americans: in greater part based on wishful thinking and self-interest. I aim to change them. I would have you join me, but in the event that I fail, I would not see a woman hang for it.”

“They are but plays, sir, not a hanging matter.”

Washington would have answered, but there was a scratch at the door. The steward entered carrying a silver tray and bringing with it the rich scent of almonds, the perfume of citron, the essence of brandy. Longing swept her. There was a small pyramid of macaroons at the center, flanked by a row of pastry hearts and an iced cake, white and glistening.

“The power of words,” said the general, when the servant had gone and left this poignant reminder of her night with Devere upon the table, “of drama, can beggar the force of powder.”

“Which is a fine thing,” said the young officer in his Irish lilt, “because we’re damnably short of the latter commodity.”

“So we are,” agreed Washington, reaching for a macaroon. “And while we have men aplenty for the moment, they are summer soldiers, and their enlistments will shortly expire. An apt phrase, though, a stirring scene or a cutting satire, can fire the passions. Disseminated, it can turn and resolve a thousand minds. Words and ideas, Miss Leighton, may well decide this present conflict.”

And, apparently, could get her hanged. She ought to be frightened by the prospect, but then again she ought to have stayed home in New Brunswick. “The theater has never been a safe occupation in America,” she said.

“It is your background as an actress that I fear puts you at particular risk,” said Washington. “There is a writer in Boston who dared to put pen to paper in a farce mocking the blockade. The author had never trod the boards and, as a consequence, the play lacks a certain dramatic force. It was never, to my knowledge, performed, but the pamphlet came to the attention of John Burgoyne, and he vows to see this patriot hang from the Liberty Tree. The play was published anonymously, yet Howe’s spies were able to trace the author through an opportunistic printer, forcing the writer to flee. A more effective piece of satire, we must assume, could elicit an even more intemperate response.”

“You need have no fear of discovery through me,
however,” interjected the dour man in red and black. “I am discretion itself.”

That, as far as she could tell, rang true, considering she did not even know his name. Now at least she knew he was a printer.

He plucked a pastry heart off the top of the platter.

“Would you like one, Miss Leighton?” asked His Excellency, observing her.

“No, thank you.” They had not eaten the macaroons or the pastry hearts that night, she and Devere. “I would have a piece of cake,” she said.

The general sliced. He did it very neatly, but he did not do it with a quilled knife from his pocket, and he did not offer it to her point first balanced on his blade. When the little plate was set before her, she breathed in the perfume of the almonds and the brandy and the currants and the citron, and knew she could not eat it. Not when Devere was suffering at the bottom of a mine because he had risked himself to save her.

“Surely,” she reasoned, “a British hanging list”—and a free Severin Devere—“is only a danger if they take Manhattan, yet you hold Boston and New York both.”

“For the moment,” said Washington, looking her in the eye.

The intensity of his gaze unnerved her. “You have twenty thousand men,” she said quietly, feeling the measure of security that she had known since General Lee had entered the city slipping away.

“I have twenty thousand men. Some of them are militia, well armed and disciplined. Most of them are not. Fully a quarter of them are suffering like those in the John Street Theater, from typhus and dysentery, and it will be a miracle if it isn’t smallpox too by the end of the
month. Twenty thousand men, raised to answer an emergency in Boston, who have now marched to New York, leaving their farms and businesses and families to fend for themselves. When their enlistments expire at the end of this year, I may well have nothing, while Howe will still have twenty-five thousand professional soldiers with a fleet to take them wherever he chooses to strike.”

“That,” said the printer, “is why you must publish anonymously, my dear, with a
reliable
printer. If you choose to publish at all.”

“I wish,” said Washington, “that I was offering you the opportunity to be the dramatist of a nation, but the truth is that I am asking you to put your life in danger for a precarious endeavor. Anonymity may at least shield you, and those you care for, if it comes to the worst.”

She had desired the opportunities and freedoms so often denied her sex. If she was to seize them, she must also accept the risks.

“I will do it.”

He nodded but did not smile, because it was no small thing she had decided. He lifted the cover page from her manuscript and passed it to the young Irish officer, who stood, walked to the hearth, and fed it with care to the fire.

“History will remember us, Miss Leighton,” said Washington, “if we carry the day.”

“I understand, and agree with, the need for discretion,” she said, watching her name burn away to ash. “But I would ask two things in return.”

Washington nodded, listening.

“There is a man being held at Simsbury. His name is Severin Devere. I want him released and returned to his people.”

Washington looked to the Irishman, who said, “Simsbury is under the authority of the Connecticut General Assembly and the Committee of Safety. We can’t order this man’s release, but we can
request
it. They are unlikely to refuse.”

“Then do so today, Captain Moylan,” said Washington. He turned to Jenny. “And your second condition?”

“I will not write entirely anonymously. I wish to be known, as a distinct voice at least, beyond the confines of this room. I will use a pen name.”

“An excellent idea,” said the printer. “Particularly if you mean to write a number of works. They will sell better. May I suggest something patriotic, such as Columbia?”

“No.”

“Cincinnatus?” asked Washington.

“No,” said Jenny, pushing aside the plate of cake. For a moment, with the scent of almonds and brandy and citron she was in Vauxhall Gardens and it was night and she was with Devere in front of the grotto, and she knew a heartsick hunger that food would never satisfy.

“I would be known as Cornelia.”

It was a very pleasant place to die. The house was old. Devere could tell that from the small batten doors and wide yawning fireplaces, but someone had cased the beams in paneling, and painted them in gay colors, and papered the walls in the sort of cheery English florals his mother had favored. They spun when he looked too hard at them, so he gave up trying. Fever was like that.

Someone was cutting his hair. He could hear the blades chirping like crickets on his pillow. He opened his eyes again and a face swam into focus—like his father’s, but decidedly prettier. She was wielding a pair of iron scissors with care, and it was like looking into a mirror because her features were also so like his own.

She continued to shear him, carefully, and he tried to make sense of what was happening in his disordered
mind. “Are we going to war?” he asked, the only explanation he could think of.

“Yes. A war on lice.”

“But what if I lose all my strength, like Samson?”

Then she was lost to the darkness again and it occurred to him only as he was slipping into blackness that she had been speaking Mohawk.

He woke again sometime later—hours or days he could not tell—and felt nearly lucid. He was lying in a great tester bed on a feather mattress, surrounded by wool curtains pulled closed on all sides but the one open to the window. There were flowers blooming outside the casement, and the sun was bright in the sky. May, at the very least. Possibly June.

Severin felt weak and wasted, but he was clean and warm and he was alive.

No thanks to General Howe or Lord Germain, who had left him to rot at the bottom of the mine. Who would have expressed mild distaste if he had handed Frances Leighton over to them, then clapped her in irons and made such use of her as they had always intended.

He had dirtied his hands, time and again, so they could keep theirs clean, and they had not come for him. He recalled, with a sense of shame, how he had so often acted on all that they left unsaid, done the unpleasant things no gentleman could put into words but that were
necessary
.

How he had forfeited his opportunity to remain with Jennifer Leighton out of misplaced loyalty.

The door opened and a man entered. He was tall and lean and graying, but he walked with an easy stride
and bowed his head beneath the lintel and the center beam as if from long habit.

Severin struggled to sit up. Good God, he was weak as a newborn kitten. “I owe you a debt, sir,” he said, trying to find some dignity while swaddled in blankets and wearing someone else’s nightshirt.

“There is no debt where family is concerned.” The man offered him a pained half smile and pulled a chair up to sit beside the bed.

“Your sons could have been captured, or shot.”
Coward.
He ought to own them, after what they had done for him. It occurred to him now that he had not really believed they would come. “It was a risky undertaking, for you and yours.”

“Your cousins knew what they were about,” said the man, who was his uncle by marriage and whom Severin had never laid eyes on before today, but who had risked his all to save him. He had the patient air of a schoolmaster—a profession he had once followed—with bad news to impart.

“But I won’t lie to you about your situation. We brought you here at night, in the dark, but you’ve been at death’s door for eight weeks now, and it was impossible to keep your presence a secret from the Committee of Safety. They have their headquarters here in Lebanon, not six miles from this house, and they meet every day, sometimes more than once. Their business is requisitioning supplies for Washington’s army and ferreting out and trying suspected Tories. They know they have an invalided British officer on their very doorstep. The only real question before them is what use they can make of him.”

July.
He could remember only bits and pieces of the last eight weeks. No wonder he felt so enervated, and his mind was working so slowly. But not
that
slowly. “You know a great deal about the workings of this committee.”

“That is because I am a member.”

So his uncle was a Rebel. It should not have surprised him. The Indian School that had educated Severin’s father had been a place of advanced, if often misguided, ideas. That Solomon Harkness—who had defied the school’s founder to marry one of the Mohawk students, and set up his own rival institution—should have caught republican fever was of a piece with the little Severin had heard about the man.

“Yet you still came for me,” said Severin.

“You’re Molly’s brother’s boy, and the son of the best friend I ever had.”

The son he so blithely gave away,
Severin thought, but did not say.

“We would have walked through hell to get you out of that place,” continued Harkness, “but with the condition you were in when the boys brought you out, we didn’t have a whole lot of choices. You have even fewer now.”

“Are you advising me to switch sides?”

“You don’t
have
a side. Not anymore. The men who left you to die in that hole made you a free agent. I can’t judge you for whatever you’ve done to get where you are, Severin, because you and your mother weren’t given any choices, but you have some today. This is your opportunity to decide what kind of man you want to be.”

I think it is just possible that you may remember that you are an American yourself.

“You must know your side employs people like me, every bit as ruthless,” said Severin.

That isn’t who you are. It’s who you choose to be.

“I know it,” said Solomon Harkness. “Doesn’t mean
you
have to be one of them.”

It didn’t. But he had obligations, debts from that life, and they had to be paid before he could build a new one.

“I am prepared to give them everything they want,” said Severin. “I’m even prepared to put myself at their disposal, though it’s high time to draw some lines. I’ll gather intelligence and write reports, but I will not start riots or blackmail or kill for them.” He would leave that to Angela Ferrers. “And there is something I want in return.”

“I can put your condition before the Committee, if it’s within reason.”

“There was a girl, in New York. She risked a great deal to save my life. A very great deal. The British could hang her, twice over, for the things she has done, and I believe that one of your side’s less scrupulous agents is trying to get hooks into her. I want her out of New York. I want her back with her family in New Jersey, where she’ll be safe.” And where perhaps, when he was recovered, he might see her again. His mind kept returning, over and over, to the sense of promise he had experienced standing beside her on the steps of the little blue house beside the theater, fitting the key to the lock.

“You could ask for more,” said Harkness.

“I expect so. But that’s all I want.”

The Committee visited the next day. Eight men, including the governor, who Severin knew had refused
General Gage’s call for aid after the debacle at Lexington, siding early and decisively with the Rebels. That had been one of the many tasks Severin had carried out for his government: compiling dossiers on the royal governors and tendering his opinion as to which would remain loyal to the Crown, for how long, and with what provisos. He had been right about John Trumbull, and his close study of the man allowed Severin to put all of his considerable gifts on display.

The committeemen took up chairs around the bed and listened to what Severin had to tell them. He did not give them everything, but he gave them enough to buy his life and Jennifer Leighton’s safety and whet their appetites for more. He had been with Sir William Howe in Boston sufficiently long to provide them a very detailed assessment of the Crown’s forces there, and he had studied the general carefully enough to offer them a finely limned portrait of their adversary. “He will not press his advantage in any fight that he stands even the slightest chance of losing. Bunker Hill was too bloody for his liking, and he still believes some form of reconciliation—that
peace
—is possible.”

“He and his brother,” said Trumbull, meaning Billy Howe and Black Dick, the admiral who had been angling for months to be part of the peace commission, “wish to negotiate, but they are not empowered to treat with an independent America. What are the terms they have been instructed to offer?”

Severin had been in the meeting with Lord Germain where the terms were discussed. “Entirely one-sided,” said Devere, frankly. “You will lay down your arms in exchange for not having your cities burned, and sixty of you will hang, publicly, in each colony, as a
lesson to future generations and a demonstration of imperial power.” He had attempted to explain, patiently and more than once, the stupidity of this to superiors who had never set foot in America, who believed that mass executions would cow the populace.

These men were not cowed.

“General Howe is not your true enemy,” Severin continued. “John Burgoyne is the real danger. He is anything but sentimental about America. He is not obsessed with capturing her cities. He is pleasure-loving and self-indulgent, but it is London that calls to him—not Philadelphia or New York—and he will not go to winter quarters or set up court like the provincial administrators you are used to. He is a hard campaigner. He knows that the best way to break the rebellion is to control the Hudson and cut New England off from the rest of the colonies.”

It went on like that for some time. They asked astute questions and Severin gave them frank answers, and at length they thanked him and took their leave, all save Severin’s uncle, who remained behind after the door closed.

“Are you sure that’s all you want? This girl out of New York?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“What about money?”

“I have money.”

“If you mean Devere money, you must know that’s lost to you.”

“I have my own money.” He had funds in good hands in Boston and New York. And in France and Portugal and Italy. It was a sensible precaution for a man in his line of work. “And I’m not without skills.”

“No. That much was obvious today. You’ve got your father’s head for politics and strategy. It can’t have been easy for you, rising through the army with Ashur causing trouble on the frontier these past twenty years.”

“It is surprising what powerful men will overlook when it is convenient for them,” said Severin. “And what infamies they will claim as their prerogatives. I want Jenny safe.”

“What do you intend to do about the girl, once she is out of New York?”

“I’m in no position to do anything at all about
any
girl until I can get myself out of this bed.” That was something he was determined to do. He had seen prisoners in France who had been broken by their confinement, their health never recovered. He had been injured often enough in the past to know that it was possible to claw his way back from this, but it would not be quick or easy.

“When you’re mended, then,” said Harkness, doggedly.

“She may have no desire to see me. Or she may be attached to another.” Or she too might want to take up where they left off in the kitchens at Vauxhall, once he procured some French letters. The stirring he felt at the thought did a good deal to reassure him that he would indeed recover.

“Washington holds New York,” Harkness said. “It should be an easy enough thing to get her out. I’ll make enquiries. In the meantime, write to her. I’ll see that the letter goes by private channels and that prying eyes don’t intrude on your sentiments. If she’ll see you, I’ll take you to New Jersey myself, when you’re well
enough. If not, think about what else you might ask from the Committee. If you break ties with England, you’ll have to make a new life for yourself here. There are great opportunities for men with ambition and vision.”

Severin believed that, and he tried to take his uncle’s advice to heart. He considered his options as he began his slow recovery, using two chairs at first to cross small distances in the room, from the bed to the bureau, from the bureau to the washstand. Even sitting upright in a chair was exhausting in those first few weeks, but he persisted. He wrote to Jenny, and he made his first foray outside his room, and after a month he managed to get down the stairs, and finally to move from the kitchen to the keeping room to the best room with the assistance of his young cousins—who, it turned out, were part of the local militia protecting the stores gathered by the war office.

No matter how far his mind ranged, though, it always returned, a bird to the nest, to Jennifer Leighton.

*   *   *

Jenny did not tell Bobby about her interview with Washington. The fewer people who knew what she was doing, the better, or so the young Irish officer—Moylan by name, a former neighbor of Washington’s in Virginia—had told her after their lunch as he counted gold coins into a purse for her.

“I did not think Congress had coin to spare,” she said, watching the gold glimmer in the sunlight of a little office adjacent to the room where she had met the general.

“It doesn’t come from Congress,” said Moylan. “His Excellency serves without pay. He asks Congress to reimburse his expenses, but he takes a Roman view of patronage of the arts. This gold, and the coin to buy paper and ink to print your play, comes from his own purse. It is his hope that you will send him more of your work in future, and that he may continue to support your endeavors.”

The gesture struck her dumb for a moment, but then she recovered her wits and said, “Then I will do my best to see that it is not all bread and circuses.”

Bobby’s interview with the Committee had been less to his profit. They had threatened him. He could volunteer the use of the John Street for the good of his country and to alleviate the sufferings of his fellow Americans, or his property would be forfeit, and he himself would be sent to Simsbury.

Jenny lied and said her interview had been much the same, and Bobby did not question her. She decided, with as much regret as satisfaction, that she was
indeed
developing as an actress.

She did tell Aunt Frances, because she trusted her, and it was necessary to speak of money, and she did not want to lie about where her funds had come from. They agreed to tell Bobby that their support came from Courtney Fairchild, even though Frances had refused his money.