The Turncoat

by Donna Thorland

  “Then why didn’t you press the general to trade him back?” She was courting danger by asking, and she knew it.

  “Can’t you guess? Surely you noticed Peter watching you at the concert. My dear cousin wants you. And he’s had everything that should have been mine, including Sancreed. He won’t have you. Don’t pity him, Lydia. He is a viscount. He’ll be well treated. And by the spring, when he’s traded back, you and I will be married and he’ll see that you are the one thing he can’t take from me. Besides, if he’d had his way this past summer he’d be with Burgoyne now, and no better off.”

  “In New York?” She knew of General Burgoyne’s plan to attack Albany from Quebec, and his strategy to separate New England from the southern Colonies. She knew also that Howe liked neither the plan nor its author. She did not know why they were talking of Burgoyne.

  “You’ll hear soon enough. It can’t be kept secret. We didn’t just lose a battalion strength of Hessians at Mercer. We lost the entire northern army. Burgoyne surrendered to Gates and the Rebels at Saratoga six days ago.”

  An army of eight thousand, defeated. Kate could not take it in. There was nothing to compare with it. Up to now, the Continentals had won only skirmishes like Trenton. It had been a war of retreat and survival, not battles and victories.

  “What will happen now?”

  “Burgoyne’s entire force will be sent home to England. Under the terms of surrender, they can’t fight again in this conflict. It was Burgoyne’s plan, and Burgoyne’s fiasco, but Howe will be blamed because he didn’t throw his army away supporting Burgoyne’s madness. Howe will resign, naturally.”

  It had not occurred to her that a general could resign. Her father couldn’t. If Arthur Grey left the army, if he returned home, he’d hang as a traitor. Resignation was a British luxury.

  “Howe hasn’t any choice now,” Caide was saying. “He can’t go on coddling Washington, or he’ll face an inquiry, maybe even a trial, back home. He’ll have to take Mercer and Mifflin no matter what it costs, or we’ll be starved out of Philadelphia. It would be best if we married now, in case the city must be evacuated.”

  She’d never thought of the engagement as real. It had always been a ploy, an achievement that elated her when she told Angela Ferrers. The marriage was an eventuality that would not, could not come to pass. “But my father is not yet returned,” she said carefully.

  “But you are of age, and of an independent turn of mind,” Bayard Caide observed, his blue eyes hungry—and startlingly vulnerable.

  “What if you married me and then my father turned up and you discovered him to be a hopeless rustic?”

  He shifted his gaze for a moment, checking distances and proximities like a soldier. “Lydia, your father is long overdue. Howe issued a landing pass more than a month ago. Nothing can get near the coast without encountering a navy ship, so he must know he has permission to land. And that prices are sky-high in the city. There are only two kinds of merchants who would not land their cargo under such circumstances. A dead man, or a Rebel.”

  She didn’t bother to deny it. “What will you do?”

  “I don’t care a fig for your father’s politics. Or yours, for that matter. Though I must insist you keep your views private. I’m not unambitious. I’ve never hidden that from you. My family is only a few generations removed from the taint of treason. I cannot dabble in it here. You understand?”

  “Yes.” She understood perfectly. She had been risking her life to safeguard Mifflin and Mercer for weeks. She’d sacrificed Peter to the cause. Now, when it seemed she might have succeeded, she would have to sacrifice herself to Bayard Caide.

  * * *

  They buried Donop, as he had asked, in the mass grave with his countrymen. The Americans rendered him full honors. Colonel Greene was in grudging attendance, but Du Plessis-Mauduit traded his homespun for a suit of white satin with blue facings. He was the picture of Gallic military splendor. Donop would have been pleased.

  After the service was concluded, Greene took Peter Tremayne aside to ask a series of gruff questions about his family and military connections. Tremayne answered those few he felt did not violate his trust as an officer, and Greene left, more quizzical than satisfied.

  That afternoon, Ann Whitall removed the stitches in Tremayne’s face. She grasped his chin in her bony hand and turned his head this way and that, then declared, in her outmoded Quaker patois, “Thou’ll do.” Later, he inspected himself in the shaving mirror over the basin. The scar was ugly, bisecting his cheek and pulling up the corner of his mouth. Yes, he would do. His expression seemed frozen in wry amusement. He supposed it was better than a perpetual scowl.

  Colonel Greene summoned him to the fort the next day. The Hessian sergeant Bachmann was not allowed to accompany him, and he was advised against wearing his red tunic. Greene, he surmised, did not have total control of his men, could not ensure Tremayne’s safety if the Rebel infantrymen felt inclined to mischief. A month ago Tremayne would have insisted that the Americans could not triumph without adopting British discipline. Elected officers and volunteer soldiers did not, in his experience, win battles. At Mercer he had been proved wrong.

  Tremayne had thought the squalid guardroom in Mercer insultingly poor accommodation, but Greene’s own quarters were no better. His desk was pulled up in front of a camp bed. He offered Tremayne the only other seat in the room, a chest riddled with bullet holes.

  “I have a letter here,” Greene began with no preamble, “from my cousin, begging me to release you. I should like to know how you are acquainted with him.”

  “Who, sir, is your cousin?” Tremayne had few American friends. He wondered if Kate would consider herself among them.

  “Major General Nathanael Greene.”

  Tremayne did not know the general, and said as much.

  “I thought you might be one of his Masonic connections,” Greene said. “A widow’s son in need of aid. I can conceive of no other reason why he might ask me to let you go. You appear to be a capable and experienced officer. You have seen how things stand with us here. You know the strength of our garrison. Your release could do us a great deal of harm, so I must ask you: why does the Fighting Quaker want you freed?”

  Like many of his brother officers, Tremayne was a Freemason, but was not acquainted with Greene, did not even know to which lodge the man belonged. The Fighting Quaker. There were only so many involved in the American cause—these men disowned by their faith—and most of them surely knew one another. If Greene was known to Arthur Grey…“Might I ask what your cousin has to say in his letter?”

  Greene passed Tremayne the missive, but he must already have known its contents by heart. “My cousin begs, for the sake of a personal matter of the most delicate nature and involving an old and valued friend of his, that I provide you a horse, a servant, coin—which he encloses—and a pass to see you safely to your own lines.”

  Tremayne handed the letter back.

  “An extraordinary request. He leaves the decision up to me, as the safety of my garrison is at stake.”

  “Would it make a difference to you if I assured you that I am pursuing no military purpose by returning to Philadelphia? That I intend to put right a personal matter involving an American lady whose welfare has been endangered by my absence?”

  “No, Major. It would not. In any case I would be extremely unlikely to believe you, save that today I received another letter, from a lady who is herself a particular friend of Washington, and who desires me to keep you here at all costs. She also cites the welfare of an unnamed lady, though she avers that this woman would be put at hazard by your return to Philadelphia.”

  The lady who had written could only be Angela Ferrers. She would not give up such a well-placed spy as Kate so easily. Grey must have discovered his daughter missing and Tremayne captured. Perhaps he had approached Angela Ferrers first. He was a direct man. Unfortunately, Angela Ferrers was a subtle and devious woman, and Arthur Grey could not possibly know how
valuable his daughter had become to the Merry Widow. And forewarned, Angela Ferrers must have made a countermove. Tremayne’s only hope was that she could not be everywhere at once, that he could reach Grey without her interference. “Might I be permitted to write a letter myself?”

  “I’ve already informed your commanding officer of your presence here,” Greene replied curtly. “I’ve received no offers for a trade.”

  And none would be forthcoming if André had anything to do with it. “The letter I would like to write is to one of your own commanders. Colonel Arthur Grey.”

  Greene raised a single querulous eyebrow. “What a lot of American friends you have made in your short time in our country, Major.” He gave him paper and ink, but no privacy, and Tremayne was not fool enough to think the letter would reach Grey without passing through many hands. He must be discreet.

  Later the guard came to remove him. He was not surprised when they turned away from the open gates of the fort. He knew where they were going. They marched him into the dank brick walls of the fort, along a corridor lit only by the fractured beams of the gun slits, to the black depths of the powder magazine.

  * * *

  They had given him back his coat, and for that he was grateful.

  Tremayne knew as soon as the door shut behind him that the chill, dark powder magazine was meant to be his tomb, a convenient solution to Colonel Greene’s problem. He did not intend to die in the cold and darkness, so he set about the business of survival as soon as his eyes adjusted to the dark.

  Only the barest sliver of light entered beneath the batten door, which was reinforced on both sides with iron plates. He took care not to look directly at it; in this blackness it would blind him like the sun. He stood soaking up the darkness, breathing in the chemical smells of old powder and fresh mold, and reining in the panic that threatened to overwhelm him. It was like being underground, being buried. The unseen vault must be at least three stories above him, and the emptiness held all the childhood terrors of the night, and the decidedly adult terror that came with the knowledge of all the ways a man might die in such a place.

  He wanted to sink to the paving where he stood, wrap his arms around himself and withdraw into his own mind. But he was determined to live, to inconvenience the coldly practical Colonel Greene, to get back to Philadelphia and Kate.

  He forced himself to pace the outer wall of his prison, running his hands along the masonry. When he had gone thirty paces, he felt the liquid splash of water beneath his boots, and discovered the jagged run of brickwork where the magazine was broken. This, then, was why it was empty. The foundation must have cracked during the brief bombardment from Donop’s guns, and let the river in. When the water became ankle-deep Tremayne retraced his steps and retreated toward the door. Cold and damp were his enemies, and there was a putrid smell to the water that indicated it might filter through a rubbish tip—or worse—before reaching here. He felt along the shattered wall for loose bricks and rubble, anything that might be of use if he were to attempt an escape.

  He searched the rest of the magazine thoroughly, but found nothing else. Then he withdrew to the corner farthest from the water.

  He had no way of marking the time, but he judged that a day passed before the door opened. He was blinded, as he knew he would be, by the lantern, and by the time he was able to see clearly, his guards were gone. He’d seen enough, though. They were smart enough to open the door and shine the light in first, then one man entered and covered him with a rifle while the other set something down on the ground.

  They’d brought him a tin bowl of some kind of gruel. He ate it, licking the bowl clean like an animal because he knew that water was vital and he must not drink the stuff pooling in the darkness unless it was his only choice. On a single ration of gruel, he would grow weaker every day. If he were to escape, it must be now, before the cold and hunger sapped his strength.

  When they returned the next day he was waiting behind the door. He had spent the past twenty-four hours learning every inch of the space just inside the entrance, and now he made good use of his knowledge. He hammered his fist into the kidney of the man with the lantern, and brained the rifleman with a broken brick. He made it as far as the guardhouse, where the shift was changing. There were six men on duty, and they took their time beating him. When they dragged him back to the magazine they took his boots, his shirt, and his coat.

  After that he lost track of the days, slipping in and out of consciousness, trying to keep as much of his bruised body off the cold stone floor as possible. When he was lucid once more, he began to hear the shelling. It was like a distant thunder that rose and fell in volume, but never stopped. Not an attack on Mercer, then. It had to be Howe bombarding Mifflin, across the Delaware, on the Philadelphia side. And for the sound of it to reach him here, on the other side of the water, behind such thick walls, Howe must be blasting the fort from all sides.

  Listening to the roll and report of the ordnance, Tremayne knew it would be only a matter of time before Mifflin fell. Nothing could hold up under that kind of fire. And then Howe would turn his full attention on this garrison and it would fall as well. Colonel Greene was a competent commander and a realist, and must know by now that the fort’s days were numbered, so Tremayne was not surprised when the door opened, three days after the bombardment started, and he was dragged from his cell. It only remained to be seen whether Greene was going to release him or shoot him.

  Twelve

  Philadelphia, November 26, 1777

  “Where do you go to do it?” Peggy Shippen sat in front of her dressing table, admiring her freshly coiffed hair. It was teased up and plumped with wool padding, and framed by golden ringlets that perfectly matched Peggy’s own. The style towered atop her head like an over-risen loaf.

  “Do what?” Kate asked, stifling her impulse to tell Peggy what she thought of her hair. Elaborate, chandelier-scraping styles were all the rage in London, of course, and Philadelphia’s Tory daughters strove to outdo one another in their Englishness.

  “It,” Peggy Shippen hissed, her coiffure wobbling dangerously. “John André says you and Bayard Caide can’t be going to the theater anymore because the players rehearse there during the day.”

  Sometimes Kate forgot how young Peggy was, but in the sunlight streaming in the window, without cosmetics, it was plain that she was still a child, barely eighteen, and trapped in a prolonged adolescence by wealth and comfort. The reminder of her connection to the calculating Captain André was more poignant still.

  “We don’t do it, Peggy, and even if we did I’d hardly go advertising the address for our trysts in the Gazette.”

  “No one believes that,” insisted Peggy. “Everyone says Sir Bayard is debauched and that you must be as well, no matter how demure you act in public.”

  Kate decided it was fruitless to argue. Better that the world thought she was already sleeping with her fiancé. No one would believe the truth: that since his initial seduction at the playhouse, he had not touched her. He treated her with an uncharacteristic delicacy, a reserve that spoke of passion under heavy rein.

  Bay’s urgent desire to marry her, thankfully, had passed with the fall of Forts Mifflin and Mercer. After Donop’s failed attack in late October, Howe had concentrated all his guns on nearby Mifflin. The bombardment lasted nearly a month and reduced Mifflin to a heap of indefensible rubble. But the Rebel garrison still did not surrender. The wily Americans had infuriated Howe by abandoning the fort in the dead of night and slipping away across the river to Mercer. When Howe turned his attention there, the Rebels spiked the guns and blew up the magazine, leaving Howe nothing but a wrecked shell.

  And control of the river. With the Rebel guns at Mercer and Mifflin silenced, there was nothing to stop Howe’s brother, the admiral, from clearing the chevaux-de-frise from the river and warping his frigates through. With the city firmly in British hands for the winter, no doubt Caide felt more certain of her.

  Peter Tremayne had been right.
Her espionage had not prevented the taking of the forts and the river—it had only delayed it. She should have prayed for Mercer to hold out. She’d sacrificed her safe, respectable future in Orchard Valley to keep the river American and drive the British out. But when the navy guns announced their presence in the river, when the Cerberus and the Roebuck fired their salute, rattling her windows and waking her from an uneasy sleep, she’d wept with relief. She would not have to marry Caide. And Peter Tremayne would be free. She only hoped he would go home to England, away from her and all the trouble she had brought him.

  “And no one imagines,” Peggy prompted, “that Sir Bayard is a man who would long be content with kisses.”

  Of course they didn’t. Few people understood Bayard Caide. And just as well, Kate thought. Admitting to corruption was clearly the only way to end this conversation. “Then thank goodness I’m engaged. Otherwise I would be quite ruined.”

  “Not if you took precautions,” Peggy suggested carefully.

  Kate suppressed a sigh. “What are you planning, Peggy?”

  “Captain André and I have an understanding,” she said, blushing.

  No doubt André wished her to think so. If only Kate knew what purpose the spymaster had in mind for Peggy. If only she could keep the girl away from him. It occurred to her that André was handling Peggy the way the Widow handled Kate. The only difference was in their respective levels of awareness. Kate understood the danger she was in.

  “Is this an understanding you would be willing to tell your father about?”

  “Yes, of course, but John and I agree it’s best to wait until after his promotion to tell my father. Only I’m tired of waiting. Tell me what to do so I won’t get pregnant.”

  Kate did not, herself, have any practical experience in the matter. What she did have was a small wooden box with an assortment of sea sponges, left for her by Angela Ferrers in their agreed-upon drop spot, since they no longer dared meet in person. She could not possibly give one to Peggy. André would know where they had come from.