Mistress Firebrand

by Donna Thorland

  Jenny risked one last look back at Burgoyne. She would not touch him again. She snatched her shoes out from under the chair and backed to the other side of the cabin to shove them onto her feet as best she could, tightening the crumpled lappets. She fluffed her hood around her face and tucked her copper hair—now she regretted the lack of anonymous powder—into the striped folds. Her steps were muffled by the Turkey carpet as she crossed the room, hastily fastened paste buckles sparkling lopsided in the moonlight streaming through the windows.

  She opened the door and peered out into the hall.

  Severin Devere stood in the second door on the left. He was leaning against the jamb, in shirtsleeves and fawn breeches, his pose deceptively casual, his black eyes anything but.

  “Is he dead?” Devere asked. His voice was without inflection. She could not read his expression, but then it occurred to her that she had not seen his face in the darkness of the slot.

  He was blocking her only path of escape. She had no choice but to answer.

  “He doesn’t seem to be.”

  Devere straightened and prowled toward her. His feet were silent on the deck, a nearly impossible trick on such a creaky tub. He came to stand within inches of her, and she was conscious, more than ever, of their difference in size and stature. He was taller and broader than she, and he moved with a feline grace that suggested coiled strength and dangerous speed.

  He was here to protect Burgoyne, the man’s body and reputation. No matter what they had shared in the darkness at John Street, she had injured one and posed a not insignificant threat to the other. They were in the middle of New York Harbor, in December, the waters a frigid waste. Her aunt’s warnings were suddenly no longer theoretical. This man could break her neck and tip her body over the side, and no one would ever know what had become of her.

  Severin Devere scrutinized her from head to toe, and she was certain his dark eyes missed nothing even in the dim corridor. He would see through her masquerade. He would know the gown had been bought used and remade, suspect the watch belonged to Frances Leighton and the tortoise combs had come from one of her long-ago admirers. He would be able to read the guilt written across Jenny’s face, because this was a man who also wore masks and played roles. And because she was not the Divine Fanny, and she was not adequate to this part.

  She flinched when he took her hands in his, expecting to be manacled. Instead, he gently lifted her wrists to the lantern and turned them over.

  She followed his gaze and noticed for the first time the purple bruises. They circled her wrist like a bracelet of rough-cut amethysts. When she looked up she saw a muscle in Devere’s jaw twitch, and she could feel the restrained violence vibrating through his body.

  “What happened?” he asked, his face still unreadable.

  “We had a misunderstanding,” she said.

  “That is one way of characterizing it.”

  Devere lowered her hands deliberately and stepped past her in the hall.

  Relief washed over her. Whatever he intended, her immediate demise wasn’t part of it. Running, now that he was aware of the situation, would be futile. There was no way she would get off the Boyne without his knowledge and permission, so she trailed him into Burgoyne’s cabin.

  “Shut the door,” he said, stalking to the table.

  Devere turned Burgoyne over ungently and thrust his body upright in the chair. The general groaned and his head lolled. Devere peeled back one eyelid and checked his pulse. There was something brisk and businesslike about his manner that made Jenny wonder just how often he made such assessments, separating the incapacitated from the dead.

  Devere turned from the unconscious man and surveyed the room, his eyes taking in the toppled pillar, the chipped bust, the half-eaten meal on the table, the nearly empty decanter of brandy.

  At last he said, “I can fix this, if you will allow me, but we have very little time, so you must choose, quickly.”

  She didn’t see how anyone could fix this. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means that I can arrange the scene to suit the lies that must be told—if you will embrace a fiction that the relevant parties will find more palatable than fact. It means subverting—and breaking—the law, and giving up all hope of any measure of justice for the indignity and injury you’ve suffered”—his eyes lighted briefly on her bruised wrists—“but it also means that you will sleep in your own bed tonight.”

  “And my other choice?”

  “I call for Captain Hartwell, and you may relate your version of events. The general, of course, will certainly have his own.”

  He did not elaborate on what would happen to her if Burgoyne’s version of events was believed. He did not have to.

  “The fiction, if you please,” she said.

  Devere looked relieved. He nodded, took up the brandy decanter, and upended it over Burgoyne, the tawny spirits soaking into the scarlet of his coat and infusing the cabin with the atmosphere of a pothouse. He uncorked two more bottles of brandy and poured them out the window. He set one beside Burgoyne on the table and left the other to roll around on the floor. Something about the care with which he set it rolling reminded Jenny of Mr. Dearborn’s methodical preparation of the stage, of the thoughtful precision with which he placed the props.

  Devere surveyed the room one last time, then turned to Jenny. “Go to my cabin. It is the second door on the left. Bar the door and do not answer or open it to anyone but me, no matter what you hear. Can you do that?”

  She wanted to ask him what he was going to do, what would become of her, whether Burgoyne would recover—but more than that she wanted to live, and she recognized that she had slim chance of that without this man for an ally.

  “Yes.”

  “Go now.”

  It was said quietly with no hint of threat or force, but with the assumption that she would trust him in this.

  She went.

  The hall was dark and quiet, and she dashed from Burgoyne’s cabin to Devere’s and shut the door behind her in a single breath. The bolt was a fragile defense. If Devere did not champion her, the Boyne’s captain would have the door down in a trice. She had to trust him.

  She did not know him.

  She would trust him only so far.

  There was barely room to stand beside the bed. A locked chest was tucked in the narrow space between a cannon and the berth. A folding desk built into the wall lay open atop the gun, covered with papers. Some looked like ordinary letters; others were clearly written in a code of some kind.

  Of course they were. He was a spy, as Aunt Frances had told her. And neatly stacked on a carefully penciled map was a manuscript in a different hand, one replete with ornate flourishes and peppered with drawings and small, carefully penned diagrams. There was an inkwell lying unstopped on the desk and a half-finished missive spoilt now by a spreading stain where the discarded quill lay.

  The scene spoke of an evening’s work interrupted. Jenny wondered just when Severin Devere had dropped his pen and decided that his coded letter was less important than the muffled sounds coming from Burgoyne’s cabin.

  And whether he cared at all, really, about what had happened there, or only about which story was most convenient to tell. That was sentiment and foolishness, like her dreams of Drury Lane, and she was never going to be so foolish again.

  She had nothing to bargain with and she could not be certain of his intentions, so she did her best to think like Aunt Frances, who kept her love letters and her memoirs in a locked chest because the secrets of powerful men could be wielded like a sword—or a shield.

  Jenny took the florid manuscript. She removed the top page, folded the rest of it in thirds, and slipped the liberated pages inside her stays. Then she replaced the absent pages on the desk with her now worthless play and topped it with the original manuscript’s ink-stained cover page. No one on Drury
Lane would ever read anything she wrote now if Burgoyne had anything to say about it, and her work was just so much paper.

  A moment later she heard footsteps and voices in the hall, but they continued past her cabin. Distantly she heard the clank of plate and the ring of crystal, and then, a few minutes after that, she heard a scratch on the panel and Devere’s voice saying, “It is Severin.”

  She lifted the latch and opened the door. Devere filled it. He had donned a leather coat with wide skirts that concealed two pistols, a saber, and a foil with a well-worn handle.

  He looked, in a word, dangerous.

  “Come quickly, now, and do your best to look irritated.”

  “That should not be too difficult.”

  He flashed her a brilliant smile then, full of sly joy, and it transformed his face from merely handsome to truly breathtaking.

  “I do believe we shall get away with this,” he said. Then his smile vanished and was replaced by the same focused intent he had shown in Burgoyne’s cabin. Blessedly, he did not glance at his desk before drawing her out into the corridor and locking the cabin door.

  She was grateful to have a role to play, even if she did not know her motivation. It was enough to know she must adopt Lady Highstep’s offended hauteur, heels clicking deliberately over the deck, shoulders thrown back, arms swinging at her sides.

  They were up the ladder before she had a chance to lose her nerve. The moon had risen and it silvered the deck and sails and lit her way to the rail. This time there were no catcalls but there were a few indrawn breaths, and as she waited for the crane and the swing—it would not do to show haste—a little eddy of laughter, discreetly enjoyed behind cupped hands and upturned collars, rippled through the watch.

  Then she was in the swing and Devere was climbing down into the boat beside her, and she was surprised to find that it was only her and her unlikely savior alone in the small craft. No sailors, no crew. Devere wordlessly took up the oars and began to row.

  She had been right about the body concealed beneath the fine tailoring. He rowed with powerful, even strokes, and neither strained nor slowed. Her fingertips had traced those muscles in the dark, but to see that strength in action was to understand its power. The boat shot smoothly through the choppy water of the harbor, and Devere’s broad shoulders shielded Jenny from the better part of the chill spray.

  Neither of them spoke until they were out of earshot of the Boyne. When there was no sound but the water lapping at their hull and the steady beat of Severin’s oars, she broke the quiet.

  “What did you tell the steward?”

  “I told him that the general had rather too much to drink, and was unable to rise to the occasion for which he had invited you.”

  “Oh.”

  Now Devere’s actions in the cabin made sense. He had been setting the scene for his story, sousing Burgoyne in his own brandy and emptying those telltale bottles into the sea.

  “And the knot on Burgoyne’s head?”

  “Acquired when he passed out from a surfeit of brandy.”

  “Will the steward believe it?”

  “Of course he will. It confirms all his prejudices about the man. And he will spread the parable amongst the crew, where repetition will polish it to the luster of gospel. What sailor or young officer would not want to believe that the rich general—who dines nightly on fresh beef and French brandy in his warm cabin while they freeze on deck and subsist on salt beef and peas porridge and grog—has disgraced himself with a beautiful lady? Particularly when the lieutenants have had to give up their wardroom to enlarge his quarters, and the crew suspect the sabotage that killed two of their number was aimed at Burgoyne.”

  She’d heard no word of sabotage aboard the Boyne in New York, but it explained the ship’s sudden arrival and odd behavior. “And was it?” she asked. “Directed at Burgoyne?”

  “I believe so. I thought your invitation to the theater might be part of another plot. The second one certainly was.”

  “I did not send a second invitation.” Bobby had, but she would not tell Devere that.

  “I knew you were no plotter from our first meeting, but you have proved far more dangerous to Burgoyne than the Rebels.”

  If all his aid had been a ploy to get her away from the Boyne and prying eyes, if he meant to do away with her here on the open water, there was little enough to stop him. Aunt Frances always carried a small knife and she owned a muff pistol. Jenny had thought these charming eccentricities. Now she realized they might be sensible precautions for a woman who thought to make her own way in the world. Tomorrow, she would buy a pistol. If she had a tomorrow.

  “Are you really going to take me home?”

  He stopped rowing. Waves buffeted the still boat. The hair on the back of her neck rose and her heart raced.

  “What exactly did your aunt tell you about me?”

  Her mouth felt dry. The chill of the night penetrated her thin gown. She must tread carefully here. “That you were here to protect Burgoyne.”

  “I am. We both know that isn’t why you’re so afraid.”

  “She said you are a spy.”

  “Half of New York is selling information about the Rebels to the officers who are living—not particularly secretly—at the King’s Arms. Half of those supposed loyalists are also reporting the movements of those officers to the Rebels. And many of the transactions are taking place in your greenroom. You cannot be oblivious to it all, and so I beg leave to doubt my intelligence work worries you much either.”

  She wasn’t oblivious to it, and he was right. “Aunt Frances said you kill people.”

  He didn’t answer all at once. Then he said, “Is that all that is frightening you right now, about being alone with me in the middle of the harbor? That I . . . work for the government?”

  “The customs man works for the government. What you do is something else.”

  For some reason this amused him, and he smiled. “Would it help to know that I don’t go around indiscriminately slaughtering innocents?”

  “In the present circumstances, I’m not certain that I should feel any safer with a discriminating murderer.”

  “And yet you felt safe with me in the slot.”

  “‘Safe’ is not the word I would use to describe how I felt.”

  His gaze raked her and she wondered for a moment if he had felt it too. Caught up in something irresistible. Then finally he said, “There is hardly time—if there should ever be a time—for a résumé of my career. But any killing I’ve done has involved direct threats to the safety and security of His Majesty’s subjects.”

  “I thought the law was supposed to deal with those who threatened public safety, and—come to that—I brained one of His Majesty’s major generals in his private apartments.”

  “I act when the law cannot work swiftly enough, or when public opinion or misplaced delicacy might prevent justice from taking its course.” His voice was measured. “As for Burgoyne—well, he got exactly what he deserved. But we both know how difficult that would be to prove in court.”

  Because juries thought just like the general. “That still doesn’t explain why you are helping me.”

  “I am helping you,” he said, taking up the oars once more, “because I try to take some responsibility for my mistakes. This was my fault. I knew you weren’t as worldly as your aunt.”

  “I understood what Burgoyne wanted,” she said quietly.

  “The bruises on your wrist argue otherwise.”

  “I thought I could go through with it, but I couldn’t. But it was too late by then. You must think me very naive.” She certainly felt so. The footlights at Drury Lane did not burn so bright in her imagination now, and she marveled at how easily she had mistaken the provincial insecurities of New York’s merchant elite for sophistication.

  “For the most part, there is no such thing
as ‘too late.’ That is an excuse men use for behaving like animals, or as cowards. I think you simply discovered there are limits to your ambition. Better to understand them now than when it may be truly too late, and you can no longer change your path.”

  Like Aunt Frances. “Rousseau would tell you it was inevitable. That a woman who will sell herself in performance to an audience of hundreds must do the same for an audience of one. That she cannot resist the impulse to satisfy the passions she stirs.”

  “That,” said Devere, “suggests a sadly narrow understanding, of both women and passion.”

  When they reached the dock, he helped her from the boat. It was a marked contrast from her embarkation with the dispassionate lieutenant. For a moment she could still feel the roll and pitch of the water, and Devere grasped her waist to steady her. It was far less intimate than his touch had been in the slots, and yet somehow more so. The gesture was so unexpected that she looked up into his eyes, and found them full of concern—and remorse.

  That was when she knew she was safe with him. Or at least safe from him.

  The city at night could be treacherous. Devere understood that. He had come armed. For her part, she had never been to the docks this late, never seen them so deserted. The moon was up but the tall warehouses, dark and shuttered, cast deep shadows over the quay and the daytime smells of hemp and tar and hot pitch had given way to that of rancid cooking oil and rotted fish and brine.

  Devere released her as soon as she stopped swaying. She opened her mouth to thank him, but he motioned for silence and scanned the wharf, listening intently. She checked the timepiece hanging from the ribbon at her waist. Incredibly, it was not yet nine.

  “Where do you live?” he asked softly.

  “With Aunt Frances. Above the greenroom at the John Street,” she said. “But I can’t go home yet.”