Mistress Firebrand (8 page)

“Of course not,” agreed Fairchild. “She’s pretty enough, but you can find that anywhere. The girl is an original, like her aunt. Frances would see Jenny have her chance in London, but it seems a pity to waste all that . . .
cleverness
 . . . on Jack Brag.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Severin, who did. The idea filled him with pleasurable anticipation. He was already considering what strategy he might use to persuade Burgoyne to forgo the charms of the fair Jenny.

Courtney laughed. “Just so. And naturally I won’t wish you success in your endeavor, but I will offer a word of caution. I was going to send a warning to the
Boyne
. My informants in town say that two decided villains have been asking after a man meeting your description. Whatever you did for Howe in Boston—and I really don’t want to know—has caught up to you here.
You’d be unwise to walk the streets of the city after nightfall. I would offer to act as bodyguard, but I have obligations to a certain lady.”

Severin did not expect Fairchild to play nursemaid. His present quarrel with the Widow was of his own making, and evading her chastisement was entirely his own responsibility. Such enmities were an inevitable product of his calling.

“We hope to sail Saturday,” said Severin. “I’ve bargained for all the supplies the
Boyne
requires. So as long as the merchants deliver, I won’t need to be back in town again and you’re unlikely to have my untimely death on your conscience, but I thank you for the warning all the same.”

Severin accepted responsibility for his predicament, but he was not a fool. He had no further obligations in New York and he was not in any haste to meet his ancestors, so he returned to the
Boyne
directly. He was grateful for the warning and was satisfied—as far as possible—that Courtney knew the perils of becoming too deeply involved with Frances Leighton.

And he had business with John Burgoyne.

*   *   *

Jenny had emerged from the darkness of the slot—and the intense intimacy of Severin Devere’s embrace—into the aftermath of a battle. The curtain lay across the stage like a fallen tree, hundreds of yards of dusty velvet in a tangled, immovable heap. The little table they used onstage and two chairs were smashed to flinders, and the Arcadian backdrop that had been Jenny’s closest brush with the wilderness was slashed with a dozen cuts from top to bottom.

Bobby looked as though he had put up more of a fight than the scenery. The silver lace was ripped off one side of his blue suit and he had the beginnings of a black eye. The relief on his face when Jenny emerged unhurt was not feigned. She was an actress. She could tell. But when he opened his arms she did not fly into them, and not because of what had just happened with Devere.

“They were shouting Burgoyne’s name,” she said. “The mob. When they first stormed the pit, they were looking for him.”

“His presence in New York is an open secret,” replied the man who had nurtured her talent these past two years.

“But his invitation to occupy the royal box was not. Our greenroom is hardly a hotbed of radicalism. Someone tipped off the Liberty Boys.”

Bobby sketched a little bow. “I won’t deny it, then,” he said. “It was supposed to be only a dozen Mohawks or thereabouts. They were going to carry him out of the theater and take him to Connecticut.”

“Why?”
She couldn’t believe he would endanger John Street like that.

“To keep the theater open,” he said. “The Tories are the ones buying tickets, but the Committee of One Hundred is under pressure from Congress to shut us down.”

“Better to be shut down than burned down,” she said. “And to reopen when the Liberty Boys have been dealt with.”

“Jenny, who do you think is going to
deal
with them? Howe cannot break out of Boston. Parliament is disinclined to spend the money to raise more troops.
And if the Rebels manage to defeat Howe’s army at Boston, where do you think Washington will go next?”

Here.

Where at best he would close the playhouse, and at worst he would throw the players—Jenny, Bobby, and Aunt Frances included—in jail.

*   *   *

When Severin reached the
Boyne
, her august passenger was once more working on his plans, a map of New York spread over the table.

“The Leighton girl,” Severin said, “is after your patronage.”

“Of course she is,” replied Burgoyne evenly. “It is one of the not inconsiderable perquisites of writing for the theater: ambitious actresses.”

“Your wife might feel differently.”

Burgoyne put down his pen. Severin felt the thrill of incipient victory. He had chosen the right tack.

“My wife,” said Burgoyne, “is not a well woman, and I would not want her unduly distressed.”

“Then perhaps you might offer Jennifer Leighton an introduction to Garrick, but forgo the pleasure of bedding her.”

Burgoyne laughed. “Is the girl such a fair flower that your savage heart is stirred, Devere?”

Devere felt his hackles rise. “A Mohawk warrior,” he said, “would have little use for a pretty playwright.” It was Severin Devere, Englishman and spy, who was beguiled by Jennifer Leighton. “And this one is, if not innocent, then far too inexperienced for this kind of game.”

“You don’t know actresses, Devere. She needs a
patron, not a white knight. And you’re hardly the right color to play that role for her.”

“Is that what passes for wit in Drury Lane these days?”

“It is how business is done between gentlemen and actresses in the theater, Devere. We can’t all rut our way through the virgins of the minor gentry playing Squanto for them. Or do you woo them as Oroonoko, the noble savage?”

“It would be a pity for you,” said Severin, gathering Burgoyne’s papers and thrusting them into his pocket to lock away in his cabin, where at least they would be secure, “if the role I play most naturally is Iago.”

Jenny understood why Bobby had gambled with the safety of the playhouse to secure the protection of the Committee. She did not know why
she
had jeopardized her opportunity to meet Burgoyne by kissing—no, it was more than kissing—Severin Devere.

And she did not care to imagine what Devere might think of her. It was what most men thought about actresses—that they were promiscuous. Only she wasn’t. And yet she planned to be, although that wasn’t really true either. One man would not make her promiscuous. She had avoided entanglements in New Brunswick because she had hoped there was something more for her than a life of domestic duty. At John Street she had found that something, though only through Bobby’s patronage. If there was a way for a woman to have a voice—and Jenny knew she would be mute if she could not get her
plays performed—without going through a man, no woman to her knowledge had yet discovered it.

She must forget about her folly with Devere. Aunt Frances had lost her head over a man and been cast out of the London theater for it. Jenny would not be so foolish.

The plan was simple enough. They must wait until Friday night. There was no sooner opportunity. If Jenny tried to go during the day, when the wharves were bustling, she would be seen, and the same tradesmen who supplied the docks also provisioned the John Street Theater. Bobby Hallam would be sure to hear that one of his actresses had been rowed out to a naval vessel.

It had to be night.

The company was working around the clock to put the theater to rights, and Bobby had announced the Scottish Play for Friday in the hopes that the radicals would find the murderous king more to their liking than Jenny’s
American Prodigal
. This, fortunately, meant that Bobby Hallam and Frances Leighton were indispensible, but Jenny was not. If Jenny took ill, someone could replace her in the minor parts she played, but Bobby’s responsibilities and role would not permit him the opportunity to check on her.

Frances had thought it all out: “You must go home after you are seen to be ill and remain there until the play has started, then get to the docks and meet the boat Devere will send for you. Do not return home until the greenroom has emptied and I have placed the lantern in the upstairs parlor window to indicate that Bobby has left for the night.”

It was a very sound plan, and it made Jenny wonder
exactly how Aunt Frances had come to be so good at devising such a plot.

Jenny downed the little blue glass vial of ipecac her aunt had given her in the darkness of the wings while Mr. Dearborn was running his rehearsal. Its effect was startling and immediate. She was very,
very
sick, on her hands and knees on the apron staring down at the boards, in unhappy intimacy with every knot in the grain, with Mr. Dearborn bringing her water and Bobby holding her shoulders while she retched.

She had not expected him to want to cancel the night’s performance over it.

It was more than that. Bobby was genuinely worried about her. He
carried
her all the way across the street and up the three flights of stairs to her room. She could hear him outside her door pacing on the small landing, insisting that Aunt Frances call the doctor and send for Margaret to act as a nurse—and generally stop the world—so that Jenny Leighton might be cosseted like a princess.

And she had done all this to deceive him.

Her ribs ached from retching. She hadn’t expected the ipecac to affect her so powerfully. When she’d asked Fanny why exactly she had a bottle of the stuff, her aunt had said, “In case someone is poisoned.” Then she’d added, “Accidentally, of course.”

Jenny
did
feel as though she’d been poisoned. Her throat burned and her head ached, and when Aunt Frances brought her a cup of tea thick with honey she drank it gratefully.

Bobby put his head in the door and asked once more if he couldn’t call the doctor. Jenny insisted that it was
probably something she had eaten, and finally he relented, but not before he’d gone to his lodgings to fetch her a convalescent’s bolster for the bed and a lap desk and extra candles—the good spermaceti kind—and ink and paper and a stack of new plays just delivered from London and the latest novel from the circulating library.

“Shall I read to you?” he asked, sitting in the chair by the window and picking up the book.

His concern, his tenderness, the way he set aside his business—all for her—made Jenny worry that she was making a mistake, throwing away the reality of John Street and Bobby’s undeniable affection for the possibility of Drury Lane and Burgoyne’s theoretical patronage.

There was a scratch at the door and Mr. Dearborn put his head in to ask if Jenny would be performing that night.

“Absolutely not,” said Bobby. “Put Miss Richards in for Jenny, Matthew, and continue with the rehearsal.”

Mr. Dearborn’s interruption reminded Jenny of one of the more persistent reasons she had always hesitated to hitch her future to Robert Hallam’s. The stage manager had long since earned enough money to buy his freedom, banked with Quakers who had pressed time and again for his release, but Bobby would not sell.

Aunt Frances had always said that a man who thought he could own another man would be certain he owned any woman foolish enough to call herself his wife. No, Jenny could not stomach the idea of being any man’s
master
, as she would be Mr. Dearborn’s—a man whose skill and experience in the theater exceeded her own—if she became Bobby’s wife.

“If I said I would marry you,” she said impulsively, “would you sell Mr. Dearborn his freedom?”
And relieve me of so many difficult choices,
she added to herself.

Bobby looked as surprised as she felt.

“Now you’ve really worried me, Jenny. Are you so near death’s door?” he asked, half in jest and half in genuine concern.

“I feel awful,” she confessed. “But I’m certain I’ll live. Would you do it?”

They had discussed it once before, when he had casually proposed marriage, sitting in Frances’ second-floor parlor after a long night in the greenroom. She had not attended the party. He had been flushed with drink. He had confessed that the patrons had repeated lines from her prologue and her one-act play over and over, to raucous laughter, all night long. That had pleased him. He had proposed, not down on one knee, but sprawled in Frances’ comfortable wing chair, saying simply, “We should get married.”

She had told him she did not want to become a slave owner. He had waved away her objections, saying that it was really his elder brother, Lewis, who owned Mr. Dearborn, and Bobby was just a steward for the property. But Lewis had been gone two years now, decamped with the rest of the company to the more welcoming shores of Jamaica, and there was no sign they would return anytime soon.

Bobby’s objections were much the same now.

“Jenny, if there was another stage manager in America his equal, I would free him, and gladly. But there isn’t. And without him, we could not run the John Street. It is not just the bookkeeping and house managing, and his way with the patrons. It is Lewis’ infernally
complicated stage machinery as well. We could not find a man with the skills to run and maintain it.”

“Matthew could manage John Street as an employee, rather than as a piece of the property, like one of the flats.”

“He could, but he wouldn’t,” said Bobby Hallam. “I know
I
wouldn’t stay in New York either were I a black man with skills, money, and options. The people here look at a black face and they see a plotter. They remember the fires. If I free Mr. Dearborn, he will take the next ship for London.”

“That is not the answer I hoped for,” she said. And yet it was what Jenny herself wanted to do.

“It is an honest one. I could have lied. Another truth is that Mr. Dearborn is only mine in name. If I freed him, I’d have to answer to Lewis for it when he returns. If I’m successful enough, it won’t matter, but times are just too uncertain right now, Jenny. I’m not saying I won’t ever free him, but I can’t do it now.”

“And how does that square with your republican ideals? When you meet in secret with the printers and the mechanics, do they toast liberty while you stage-whisper an aside excusing slavery?”

“I know you think I am playing the tyrant, but it is not an arbitrary exercise of authority. I am trying to
build
something here, and to do that I must be a realist. A generation ago players could not get a license at all. Now we have permanent theaters in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York. If I can keep the John Street open—if I can keep
you
, and Mr. Dearborn—we might in time have a theater to rival any in London, and you would not have to look across an ocean for an audience worthy of your talents.”

“It is a grandiose ambition,” she said.

“Pot, kettle, my love,” he said, and kissed her forehead, and adjusted her bolster and lit an extra taper before he left.

She listened to him descend the stairs and take leave of her aunt. Jenny heard the familiar whine and click of the door to the street swinging shut, the latch falling into place, and by then she felt well enough to get up and begin to wash and dress and prepare to meet Burgoyne.

She had decided to embrace the part of the actress this time, because one did not go to meet a successful London playwright dressed as a frump. If her person did not follow fashion, Burgoyne might assume that her plays didn’t either.

When they had first arrived in New York, Jenny had possessed a wardrobe more suitable for a New Brunswick burgher’s daughter than a famous actress’s companion. Jenny had not been able to fit into any of the willowy Fanny’s castoffs, so Aunt Frances had used her excellent eye for color, cut, and cloth to buy her a selection of used garments that could be remodeled. It had been an education in taste and style for Jenny, who had been used to the practical garments of the housewife: loose cotton jackets and plain linen petticoats topped with well-washed aprons. She had never before given any thought to how color and proportion might alter her shape or frame her features, but Fanny was expert in all of this.

The Divine Fanny knew that vertical stripes emphasized curves like Jenny’s without adding weight, that a girl of five foot and two pence ought not to wear large patterns unless they were simple damasks of a
single color. But that she oughtn’t to wear those at all because they were a decade out-of-date in London and, though they could be had cheaply secondhand, they were not a good investment. Aunt Frances knew that an older gown could be brought up-to-date by narrowing the pleats at the waist, lengthening the sleeves, and concealing any little defects with accessories.

The gown Jenny chose to impress Burgoyne was the most striking of Fanny’s selections, a polonaise in lilac and gray that alternated narrow stripes with slender trellised flowers. It had a petticoat and stomacher in the same fabric, expertly matched to emphasize Jenny’s full, round breasts and defined waist. Aunt Frances had bought a white work apron for it so fine that you could see the stripes straight through the gossamer cloth, and there were matching ribbons for hanging a watch—Frances’, naturally—from the waist, along with another set to tie around her neck. The cleverly extended sleeves were trimmed with box pleating, and there was a generous hood attached at the back, large enough to be worn over an elegantly piled coiffure, an embellishment that was both stylish and practical, because Jenny did not wish to be recognized.

The hem was short enough to show her ankle, so she chose a pair of clocked stockings and her best black silk shoes with the paste buckles. Her hair she gathered loosely at the back of her head and secured with a comb. Then she used hot tongs to curl the pieces that framed her face and rested on her shoulders, just as she did for Aunt Frances, though with—in her own eyes—noticeably less impressive effect. The color, a coppery brown, had never taken well to powdering. Her first experiment with the stuff had ended with her brothers
rolling on the floor in laughter. They had said it looked like a corroded gutter, and she had been forced to agree. Now she wore it plain and hoped it did not make her appear rustic.

When at last she stopped to survey herself in the glass, she was satisfied with the result. Burgoyne would not be disappointed. She was more interested, though, in what Severin Devere would make of the ensemble. He had seemed to like her well enough in her ugly maid’s gown. Though the linen shroud had been made for the stage, it was her fashionable polonaise that felt like a costume, her role tonight a character to be acted for another’s entertainment.

That, she told herself, was the ipecac talking. Aunt Frances had instructed her to eat something to settle her stomach after the noxious draft, but Jenny wasn’t sure she wanted to eat ever again. She left the buttered toast and raspberry jam Margaret had brought her untouched on the plate.

Burgoyne had already read her
American Prodigal
—she had replayed the compliments Devere had relayed over and over in her mind, basking in his praise—but the new play she was working on now would be even better. At least she hoped so. The manuscript was held together in places by pins and was stiff with ink where she had struck out whole passages. A work in progress, to be sure, but she tucked it into her pocket anyway. If she could share some of it with Burgoyne, it might persuade him that she was both talented and prolific.

Jenny watched from the parlor window until she saw the doors of the John Street close to signal that the play had started, and then she slipped out of the house. It was still light enough—just—that she felt safe walking down
to the waterfront on her own, the streets still teeming with commerce and the docks bustling with trade.

It was when she reached the end of the wharf where the little boat was waiting, just as Devere’s reply had promised, that she hesitated. Devere was not there. The lieutenant in charge of the six-man crew did not smile or bow or greet her. He did not offer her his hand or make any effort to help her into the boat.

She had never felt so small or insignificant, so scorned. It was a taste of the way she would be treated in future, the way Aunt Frances was sometimes treated, by those who thought of actresses as well-dressed whores. It was the very opposite of how she had felt talking with Severin Devere in the greenroom.