Mistress Firebrand

by Donna Thorland

  The cursing that followed was not inventive but it was heartfelt, and Jenny could still hear it faintly when she and Devere emerged into a ramshackle street she recognized.

  “‘And the children of Israel,’” said Devere, “‘even the whole congregation, journeyed from Kadesh, and came unto Mount Hor.’”

  “We’re in the Holy Ground,” she said. They had run farther than she realized. The slum between Saint Peter’s and the college was north of John Street, and unlike the quiet streets near the Battery, it was teeming with people at all hours. She had only ever seen it by day, but night did not improve the prospect. The lots were narrow, the wooden houses dilapidated, the streets rutted, and the gutters half choked with rotting food.

  “At least you are dressed for it,” said Devere drily.

  “I fear I am underdressed for it,” she said.

  The women who strolled the disreputable tract and lounged in its narrow doorways were not the stylish, sportive demimondaines who frequented Bobby Hallam’s greenroom. They did not dress to seduce in silk or lace, because everyone knew what wares they peddled, and on what economies of scale. Practicality was the watchword here. They dispensed with confining stays and wore loose jackets pinned over petticoats. There was passing little flesh on display. Most, in fact, were wrapped up tightly in warm woolen shawls or long enveloping cloaks, their clothing beneath loose and easy to remove.

  The whores, though, didn’t frighten her. They were only doing what Burgoyne had expected of Jenny, without the blandishments of French brandy and a feather mattress. Tempting as it might have been to look down on them for it, she knew better now.

  It was the men—the men who leaned against the tumbledown buildings, chewing tobacco and drinking from green glass bottles—it was they who made her nervous.

  “Are you cold?” asked Devere.

  “A little,” she admitted.

  His leather coat was draped about her shoulders before she could protest.

  “You’re sensible to be frightened here,” he said, putting an arm too over her shoulders and leading her down the center of the street. “We’re only a little safer in the middle of this crowd than we were in the empty lanes near the Battery. A stabbing in a press like this is very easy to carry off.”

  “More government work?” she asked.

  “I have never stabbed anyone in a crowd, but I once took a blade for a man I was protecting, and it was a near-run thing.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Bristol.”

  “I meant in what part of your anatomy were you stabbed.”

  “I know what you meant. Ask me someplace warmer and perhaps I’ll show you.”

  They were moving briskly down the center of the street, hip to hip, like a trollop and her customer on their way to someplace discreet and private.

  She did not mind the contact. It was light and impersonal. He rested no weight across her back. To the contrary. His hand hovered over her shoulder. It was rather like the way the reverend used to lead her grandmother into church, two old cronies with a platonic acquaintance of some seventy years. There was a kind of intimacy of spirit in that, but to her surprise Jenny would have welcomed more. She wanted to lean into him, snuggle into the crook of his arm, feel his hip press hers.

  It was the stress and danger of the situation, that was all. After an interlude like the one she’d had with Burgoyne, no sane woman would be angling for that kind of attention. Certainly not in a place like this, a warren of sorry sporting houses, gambling dens, and unlicensed drinking establishments. But she knew what Aunt Frances would say, because she had asked her, once, why she had left the security of her aristocratic lover’s protection for the uncertainty of a future with a man of no fortune. Aunt Frances’ response had been pure Fanny: “Because sometimes good sense is overrated.”

  Fanny’s words had closely echoed Jenny’s reply to her mother’s pleas to stay home in New Brunswick. Her parents had outlined all the reasons that she should not go to New York with Fanny: that there was no security in acting, that she would be subject to vile importunities, that no respectable man would marry her after her time on the stage.

  She had gone anyway, and her life would not have been worth living if she had stayed home. But the same logic had driven her to Burgoyne’s cabin aboard the Boyne.

  “Where are we going now?” she asked.

  “Gethsemane,” he said, unhelpfully.

  “How appropriate.”

  They traversed the Holy Ground unmolested and crossed a scrubby open lot, then began to stroll beside a tall hedge that stretched off into the darkness ahead of them—shielding what grand residence from its blighted neighbors, Jenny knew not. Devere kept her on his right and the hedge on his left, which would have been rude in ordinary circumstances, but these were not ordinary circumstances, and in their brief acquaintance she had seen him do nothing without a purpose.

  When he paused and released her to examine the hedge more closely, she found she missed his warmth. After a moment he dropped to his knees, thrust his arms into the foliage, and she heard the sound of metal scraping against metal. She bit her tongue. Then he stood and parted the greenery and she saw a batten door in a brick wall hidden behind the yew. Devere pulled hard on a ring handle. The door resisted a moment, then swung open on oiled hinges.

  The vista beyond was enchanting. A familiar landscape viewed from a new angle. It took her a moment to place it. Then the raked gravel paths, manicured lawns, and cunningly clipped topiary triggered memory. “Shouldn’t that be locked?”

  “It was.”

  “Ah.”

  Beyond the hedge door lay the pleasance of Vauxhall. She recognized the garden folly in the distance, a two-story crenellated structure that flew silk pennants and sold raspberry shrubs in summer, and the rippling box hedges that bordered the rose garden, and the brick stairs that led down to the leveled enclosure where lawn games were offered.

  “For an Englishman, you know New York passing well,” she observed.

  “My family took me back to England for school, but I was born in America, on the frontier, north of Albany.”

  “Vauxhall is hardly the frontier. How did you know about this door?” she asked, stepping through and watching Devere lock it behind them.

  “Because I collect useful information.”

  So, of course, did old women and the baker down the street and Aunt Frances—but it was what Severin Devere did with useful information that worried her. Especially after an evening spent in his company, during which she might have been able to resist his physical appeal but could not help coming to like him. Not because he had rescued her, and not because she thought him handsome, but because he had treated her as an equal from the start, the only possible balm for her humiliation with Burgoyne.

  Except perhaps for a stroll in a moonlit pleasure garden. Jenny had heard that you could pay to have Vauxhall all to yourself, that rich men rented it to impress their mistresses or fete their business partners or celebrate the weddings of their children. She could see why. She had always found the gardens pleasant. They were probably more impressive in the full bloom of summer, but tonight, deserted like this, the gravel paths carpeted with fallen leaves, the faint scent of wood smoke in the air, they were positively enchanted.

  “The kitchens will likely still be warm,” said Devere, leading them past the boxes of the open-air theater where Mr. Fraunces offered concerts and lantern shows. The petite enclosures looked naked without their curtains, but the gilded chairs left behind bestowed on them an air of almost theatrical anticipation.

  “We played Midsummer Night’s Dream here in June.”

  “It must have been magical. I would have liked to see you as Titania.”

  “Aunt Frances played Titania, of course. I wore breeches and played the little Indian boy.”

  His eyes slid down her body, hidden f
or the most part by his soft leather coat. “I might have enjoyed that even more.”

  “How is it,” she said, ignoring the inconvenient flush suffusing her face, “that a frontier-born Mohawk knows so much about the theater?”

  “Traveling players?”

  “The American Company has never ventured north of Albany.”

  “Creative missionaries, staging passion plays to convert the heathen tribes?”

  “Even more difficult to imagine than Robert Hallam dragging his wardrobe past Albany.”

  Devere smiled. “But very amusing to picture. The truth is that I have little claim on the role of the noble savage. I was raised from the age of ten in England, at English schools, and developed a typically English passion for plays and playhouses.”

  “And lady players?” Like Burgoyne. She did not want him to be like Burgoyne.

  “It is the plays themselves I come for, the opportunity to visit other times and other places, and to release the emotions in catharsis. I do not mistake playbills for Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies.”

  Perhaps he had been visited by missionaries.

  Beyond the main entertainment space there was a counterfeit wilderness dotted with private dining rooms heated with portable stoves, where one could arrange meals prepared by Mr. Fraunces. The decorative little clapboard houses with their rusticated masonry corners nestled among the trees were cold and shuttered at this time of year, but a misspent youth reading novels from the circulating library imbued them in Jenny’s imagination with sublime mystery.

  Devere stopped short when they came to the centerpiece of the garden: the grotto. Normally the waxwork tableau of Dido and Aeneas was hidden behind a screen of potted beeches and required adults to pay an extra fee. Someone had removed the togas along with the potted beeches and the scene had lost much of its subtlety.

  “She looks quite cold like that, in this weather,” observed Jenny.

  Severin laughed. “He, on the other hand, appears to be suffering no ill effects.”

  Jenny blushed. “No. Evidently not.”

  Beyond the grotto was Scipio’s tent. This amused Devere even more. “What,” he asked, “has happened to poor Africanus?”

  Scipio had been on display in one form or another since before Jenny had arrived in New York. Originally the lifelike figures in wax had portrayed Africanus, the Roman general who defeated Carthage, in his tent after the Battle of Zama with the spoils of war heaped at his feet. The tableau had opened to great fanfare and had been an instant sensation, but after two seasons ticket sales fell off and the scene was changed.

  The diorama had evolved to show the Roman general surrounded by his family, most notably his beautiful daughters, and later the old man had been relegated to a supporting role and his most famous offspring had taken center stage.

  “Cornelia Showing Off Her Jewels has proved more palatable in the current climate,” said Jenny, “than the conquering and magnanimous general of an empire.” The poses had been borrowed from a popular engraving sold in coffee shops. Cornelia was draped in silks as many aristocratic women liked to be painted, à la turque, and she entered stage left with her jewels—her children, who would grow up to be crusading land reformers—preceding her into a lush atrium of potted plants.

  It was a thoroughly republican scene and sentiment.

  “Mr. Fraunces would seem intent on cultivating a Whiggish clientele,” observed Devere.

  “The Tories will come anyway,” she said. “For the pastry.”

  “So Mr. Fraunces has found a way to have his cake and eat his cake.”

  Her stomach grumbled at the mention of cake. She hoped Devere did not hear it over the rustling leaves and wind.

  “More successfully than Bobby, anyway,” Jenny agreed.

  They pressed on through the grounds, skirted the maze, and came out in front of the pretty brick banqueting house, dentil entablature and sash windows picked out in rich cream paint. Devere didn’t stop at the fashionable grain-painted double doors with their glistening coat of fresh varnish. These, Jenny knew, opened on a broad staircase that led to the great hall, more than fifty feet long and lavishly appointed in gold-worsted draperies trimmed with a fortune in green fringe. She had been to a party there once, and the memory of the roasted meats and delicate pastries made her light-headed with hunger.

  Instead, they hugged the shadows of the building until they came to a two-story service ell projecting from the back, where the windows were smaller but still exceedingly grand for kitchens. Devere knelt beside a batten door at the end, and now she saw what he had been doing in the hedge earlier: picking the lock. He had a steel ring with several small wicked-looking instruments attached, and it took him less than a minute to select the correct tool and ply his suspect skill.

  The batten door swung open, revealing an unlocked paneled door. Devere lifted the latch and opened it, and Jenny walked through.

  She almost swooned. She had not eaten since morning, and their ruse with the ipecac had stolen even that small breakfast from her. She had traveled to the Boyne and back on an empty stomach across rough water with the temperature dropping and then run nearly a mile with Devere through the chilly streets.

  The kitchen was warm and scented with nutmeg and mace and caraway and brandy and citron, and the yeasty, sweet aroma of freshly baked bread. A trestle stretched from the door to the end of the long, narrow wing, more than thirty feet, with towering pyramids of macaroons and pastry covering the entire length.

  Devere shut the door and the sudden stillness was profound. Outside the wind had whispered through the trees and rustled through the leaves, and weather vanes had sung as they turned and turned in their iron sockets. Inside was perfect, sugared peace.

  Her stomach broke the silence with another awful growl.

  Devere raised one well-formed eyebrow and allowed his wicked smile to surface.

  “I see we’ve come to the right place,” he said.

  “I am not normally a woman of ravenous appetites.”

  “A pity.”

  He was trying to flirt with her again. She fought an impulse to flirt back, because she knew she would make a botch of it. No matter how she studied Frances Leighton, she would always be Jenny from New Brunswick, and after her experience with Burgoyne, she was no longer certain that was such a bad thing. “Aunt Frances gave me ipecac so we could convince Bobby that I was truly ill.”

  Devere’s smile faded. “What was Frances Leighton doing with ipecac?”

  “She said that she keeps it in case anyone is poisoned.”

  “With something worse than ipecac, you mean.”

  “Are there things worse than ipecac?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She doubted she wanted to know what those things were.

  “Why,” asked Devere, “was Robert Hallam so adamant that you not meet with Burgoyne?”

  “Because Bobby wants me to go into partnership with him.”

  “The business or the marital sort?”

  “Both.”

  “One would assume,” said Severin Devere, “that marriage to the manager of the company would guarantee you the choicest roles.”

  “It would,” agreed Jenny. “But it would also mean that I could never work for anyone else. Marriage offers actresses security, but security that comes at a price. I wouldn’t be able to sign my own contracts with another theater, and Bobby certainly wouldn’t allow me to perform or write for anyone else. It is the female thespian’s great dilemma. Mrs. Cibber would have owned a part share in Drury Lane, but she could not, as a married woman, act for herself—and Garrick did not want to do business with her husband.”

  “And Mr. Hallam does not share your ambition to appear on the London stage,” guessed Devere.

  “Bobby’s family is the theater in America, Mr. Devere.”

  “Se
verin.”

  “Severin, then.” She had not realized until then how much she desired the intimacy of his first name. “The Hallams,” she explained, “have been playing the colonies for a generation. Here, while his brother is in Jamaica, Bobby is the most important theatrical man on this side of the Atlantic. In London he would be just another provincial actor.”

  As she would be just another provincial actress. She had learned that much from Burgoyne tonight.

  Devere sighed. “You really are altogether too good for Jack Brag. After speaking with you in the greenroom, I had hoped you would not accept his invitation.”

  “He never read my play, did he?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “So the compliments you paid The American Prodigal were not Burgoyne’s.”

  “No. They were mine.”

  “Were they true?”

  “Yes. It is a very good play. Witty and intelligent and well observed. Although the end is perhaps a little too neat, a little too sentimental. The American prodigal returned to the forgiving parental fold strains credulity at present.”

  “I am not certain I would write it the same way now,” she admitted. Her play was suddenly the same contested ground as Caesar, and she found herself on the other side, sympathizing with the prodigal, and unrepentant.

  “Not that it matters. I doubt I will have much opportunity to write anything at all for the stage in future. I have just brained one of David Garrick’s personal friends. Your general did not strike me as a particularly forgiving man.”

  “Proclamations of amnesty for the Rebels notwithstanding, no,” agreed Devere.

  “I suspect I would end up on the short list of exceptions, alongside Mr. Hancock and Mr. Adams.”

  “And perhaps a few of the general’s creditors for good measure,” said Devere. “Burgoyne would find it difficult to prosecute you for assault now,” he continued thoughtfully, “with no witnesses and a very different story already circulating aboard the Boyne. But I cannot think of a way to shield you from his petty malice, from whatever stories he might choose to tell his cronies in the theater.”