“That is no small feat.”
“I did not say it was easy. Or that you would necessarily succeed if you tried. Many writers have talent, but most are paralyzed by a fear of failure.”
“It is not courage I lack. It is opportunity. I would write a response to The American Prodigal, this one unrepentant, but I have lost my patron. Bobby Hallam promised to expel me from the company if I went to Burgoyne. I shall be lucky to have a roof over my head tomorrow.”
“Hallam may be swayed by an apology, particularly if you play the wounded dove for him. But you do not need a theater to find an audience. The stage, the curtain, the backdrop are all extraneous refinements. Once, we made do with the ground, the sky, and the nearest tree. The only absolute requirement is words. Wield them skillfully and others will lay the boards and hang the curtains and imagine the backdrop, in a hundred college refectories, in a thousand parlors, genteel and rustic, from Albany to Charleston. And they will never suspect that the words they speak were penned by the Tory author of The American Prodigal—an actress and undoubtedly a loyalist who engaged in all manner of British frivolity and dissipation.”
Jenny could imagine it. This was not the dream that had been born in her heart in the wings at John Street, the false idol of Drury Lane. It was not Bobby’s dream of profit and prestige—British respect—for the American stage. It allowed her to stop looking for someone to smooth her path. It required her to make her own.
“Is this Virginian who commands the Continentals really a lover of the theater?”
“An ardent one. In Williamsburg he was known to spend as much time in the playhouse as in the House of Burgesses. But he does not court actresses or keep a mistress of any kind. He encourages his officers to stage cabinet productions, just as Howe does in Boston. He is interested in the play, not the players; he understands the power of the theater. And he has access to the only thing you need to reach the multitude: a press.”
“I think,” said Jenny, “that I should like to meet this Washington.”
Fourteen
Severin watched Jenny leave the cellar at John Street, taking the scent of oranges with her. Then Hallam shut the door and said, “I would not have her distressed, but I believe we both know what we are about here.”
“It is hardly gentlemanly to beat an unarmed man who is tied to a chair,” said Severin.
“I am a provincial player, Mr. Devere, just like Jenny. If she cannot expect to be treated like a lady by a British major general, then why should I be held to the standards of a gentleman when I entertain one of that man’s officers? Particularly one who thought nothing of pimping her to an untalented hack whose scribbling saw the light of day only because he married the daughter of a lord.”
“I got Jenny off the Boyne unmolested.”
Hallam was no fool. He knew Devere’s hands were unbound. Warily he circled Devere’s chair. “She did not look unmolested when she arrived at John Street.”
“That is Frances Leighton’s fault. She is the one who told the Widow that I was in New York and set Angela Ferrers’ assassins on us.”
“Was it Angela Ferrers who tore off her gown, or was that the assassins?” asked Hallam from somewhere in the darkness behind Devere.
Marvelous. “No. That was me.”
Hallam kicked Devere’s chair over from behind, cracking Severin’s slowly healing ribs once more and knocking the air from his lungs. He coughed, mouth agape and flooded with bile, tried desperately to take in breath.
Severin lay helpless, back and ankles tied to the chair, one arm pinned beneath him and the other useless to fend off the blows, which soon came hard and fast. Hallam kicked him viciously, over and over, until there was no fight left in Devere and the actor could approach without hazard. Then he used his fists.
The black man—Mr. Dearborn—returned a little while later. He collected the broken bits of the shattered chair and they tied Severin again, less expertly than Angela Ferrers had, but it didn’t matter because he did not have the strength to free himself a second time. He lay on the floor with the cold and the damp seeping into his bones, a taste of what lay ahead for him as a prisoner in the mine.
He had no intention of remaining one for long. Guards could be bribed. The seams of his coat were intact. He had enough hard cash to get messages out. He was the acknowledged—however grudgingly—son of an earl and a favorite of Lord Germain, and even if Governor Tryon was in no position to ransom him from New York, General Howe would surely do so from Boston. Severin had surveyed the Rebel lines for him at Cambridge, brought back desperately needed intelligence that no other officer was willing to risk hanging to obtain.
Devere passed several hours in the darkness, curled on his side, shivering, trying to conserve body heat, before the door opened again and Angela Ferrers appeared once more, this time in a gray wool riding habit. She was accompanied by Frances Leighton, who blanched when she saw him. A weak reed, as the Widow had said. The Divine Fanny did not have the stomach for their work.
“It hardly seems necessary to drug him,” said the former sweetheart of Drury Lane.
“He is as skilled in escape as I am. There is no way to get him securely to Connecticut, Fanny, if he is conscious. And if he breaks free, he will be obliged to tell his masters that you are acquainted with me. You know what will happen then.”
“This is poor payment for the service he did my Jenny,” said Frances Leighton.
Severin agreed.
“With the beating Hallam gave him, opium will doubtless come as a balm,” replied Angela Ferrers, shining the lantern in Severin’s face and surveying him. “Won’t it, Devere?”
His reply was ungentlemanly.
Hers was dry. “No, thank you. Once was enough. Take that, as you like. Now, open your mouth, please, or we shall be forced to dose you like a child.”
His pride would not permit him to submit, so Angela Ferrers pinched his nose and Frances Leighton poured her vile draft down his throat. Then both women stood back, looking down at him.
“I won’t take the buttons and whatever is sewn into your coat, Devere, because some coins aren’t enough for you to bribe your way out,” said the woman he should have killed in Boston. “The guards at Simsbury are amenable to inducements, but many of the inmates are rich and the going rates are accordingly steep. If you are wise, you will use what you have to stay alive. Conditions in the mine are not known for their salutary effect, and the prison itself provides only the barest sustenance. But you are a fool and believe yourself important to Lord Germain. Waste your gold writing to your superiors, and you’ll earn nothing but silence and an empty belly. They will not acknowledge you, and they will not trade you back.”
“Of course they will,” said Devere through a split lip. “Otherwise they would have to do their dirty work themselves.”
She looked almost wistful, not an emotion he associated with the Widow. “They’ll simply find someone else, Devere. They always do.”
* * *
Frances had told her not to watch them carry Severin Devere up from the basement, but Jenny found she could not stay away. She’d almost dropped the lantern when she saw him. He was out cold and his face was purple with bruises. The lips she had kissed the night before were split and bloodied. Bobby and Mr. Dearborn heaved him into a cart behind the theater and pulled a tarp over him.
“He did not deserve to be beaten,” she said to Bobby, who was dressed in a brown wool traveling cloak and shabby work clothes. Mr. Dearborn waited for him atop the box.
“That is a matter of opinion,” said Bobby. He bent to buss her cheek. She stepped back. She could not bear the idea of him touching her. Not after what he had done to Severin.
Bobby cocked his head. “Just remember, Jenny,” he said, “none of this would have happened had you not gone to Burgoyne.”
He climbed up onto the seat beside Mr. Dearborn. While his b
ack was turned, she raised the tarp and slipped Devere’s knife out of her jacket and into his pocket.
It was a pathetic gesture, really. He’d saved her life and she was repaying him with imprisonment. She had turned it over and over in her mind, but Angela Ferrers was right. They could not allow him to go free. Not when he knew about Aunt Frances.
Bobby flicked the reins and the horses started forward. Jenny winced as Severin’s unconscious body thumped against the backboard. She forced herself to remain there, standing in the alley behind the theater, until the cart rumbled out of sight.
* * *
Severin had no way of measuring time, but his journey had to have been carried out in stages over several days because he had been forced to drink Frances Leighton’s vile tonic at least twice more that he could remember. In between all were blackness and cold and pain and ceaseless jostling, of a carriage, of a cart, of a horse, of a boat, of another, meaner cart.
When he finally struggled to full consciousness, it was to choking smoke from a charcoal brazier that could not banish the fetid odors of men in close confinement with no recourse to washing water, and of an open latrine.
Lying on his back on a floor slippery with waste, he came to full awareness, and wished he hadn’t. Three pinpricks of light from rush lamps pierced the gloom of a chamber perhaps forty feet in diameter, hewn of rock and buttressed by balks of timber. The wretches confined there—fifty at least, how many more he could not tell—huddled around tin stoves that failed to banish the chill.
It was not unusual to make prisons of surplus buildings, to convert warehouses or hospitals or mills into houses of detention. Any great barracks of a place would do as long as it could be secured. Most of the vileness in such an institution came not from the structure or even the guards, but from the inmates themselves: the cutthroats and swindlers and opportunists who traded, even behind bars, in human misery.
The Simsbury Copper Mine prison was different.
It had clearly been conceived to discourage, to intimidate, to kill. There was no means of removing waste, so it pooled and overran the shallow depression built for it and fouled the air, which barely reached them down the shaft that led to the head house. There was another vertical shaft, he later learned, fifty feet or so down a narrow lightless tunnel, but it had no windlass, no ladder, provided no means at all of escape.
Someone had dragged him into a corner and left him, probably for dead, but no one had taken his coat or his boots, and all of his buttons were still there, which meant there was some order at least in the place. He shifted and felt something hard against his thigh. His quilled knife. In his coat pocket. The one he had given Jenny. He remembered it tucked into the waist of her petticoats in the basement at John Street. Somehow she had given it back to him.
He ran his fingers over it in his pocket, bumping over the smooth quills worked into the hilt and over the sheath. A comforting feeling.
He was weak from the beating and from hunger, and it was probably some days since he had eaten. When the bucket of porridge was lowered down and passed through the bars and the bowls were handed round, he got stiffly to his feet and waited his turn. The scanty portions were doled out by the prison’s resident bully, a hulking brute who kept the lion’s share for himself.
The stuff was rank, but Severin ate it because he knew he must. He was not really feeling the cold, as the others did, had no desire to press close to the tepid stoves, and that was a bad sign. He asked the guard in his most cultivated London accent, one that caused not a few of the other inmates to turn and stare, to buy him paper and a pen, and he provided a coin in payment.
When he turned back from the bars, his way was blocked by the bully, a giant of a man in poorly tanned leather who smelled like a sewer and snarled when he spoke. “You from the injun school?” he asked.
The man meant Wheelock’s in Lebanon. “No,” said Devere politely. He was in no shape to fight anyone. Not now. And very soon he would be worse. He could feel the fever coming on, the kind that came from bad water and damp conditions and a sound beating and that could, if he was unlucky and without friends, be the end of him. “London, by way of New York.”
“You look to me like an injun. One of the kind who eyes our women.”
No, that was my father.
“My name is Severin Devere and I am an officer of the King, being held here illegally.”
He said it loud enough to be overheard by the knot of sometime gentry, in once-fine wool and tattered silk, clustered round the brazier to his left—because discretion bought him nothing in such a place.
“Sounds French,” said the big man, who Severin began to doubt was here for his political beliefs. Housebreaking or throat cutting seemed likelier.
“It’s not. Or at least it hasn’t been for a very long time. My father is an earl. That makes me Colonel the Honorable Severin Devere, and not a man to cross.”
The brute shrugged his great shoulders and swung; Severin gripped the quilled knife in his pocket and jabbed the bastard in the stomach. He felt the blade go in and warm blood spurt out—and in a place like this with filth and an open latrine a belly wound would almost certainly prove mortal—but Severin twisted the hilt just to be sure, because he would not get another chance. With a fever-fogged head and cracked ribs, Devere could not afford a real fight.
The huge man fell back, mewling and yammering, and no one rushed to his aid. Severin had guessed correctly. The bully had no friends among the political prisoners being held here. That was good, because he was dizzy and he very much needed to sit down; moments later, an Anglican reverend with a lisp was guiding him to their brazier and offering him a drink from his flask, and Severin very much needed that as well.
The fever took him that night. The paper and pencil he’d bargained for came, but he was in no state to use them, could only hope that in his ravings he did not disclose any sensitive information. His illness lasted a week and left him enervated, and he lived only because one of the inmates was a doctor. Of the rare, practical kind that actually knew something of the healing arts.
He wrote to Howe as soon as he was lucid, and awaited a reply for more than a month before sending another letter. When another month passed, he tried Tryon, and then the next month Howe once again. This time he wrote in code, on the presumption that the Widow had been right but for the wrong reasons, and it was simply not politic at present for the government to acknowledge Severin.
His employers might not be able to ransom him, but there was no reason they could not break him out.
In his letter to Howe, he coded a list of the inmates whose presence here warranted government action, men of wealth and position whose unlawful incarceration could serve as a pretext for a general rescue. He coded a description of the mine, its layout, the number of guards and sequences of the watch and most likely candidates for bribery. He went further and tendered his assessment that the mine could be taken, and all of the prisoners liberated, in a well-planned strike by a single company of dragoons.
And at the end of the missive he coded what should be an irresistible incentive: he knew now how to get to the Widow.
He prayed his letter reached someone who could decipher it and act with speed. It was impossible in the mine to recover fully, from either the beating or the fever, and with such meager rations he felt himself grow weaker by the day. He used a little of his precious coin to bribe the guards to buy him fresh meat and fruit—and by sharing some of it, he was able to keep most of it—but the reality was that if he did not escape, the next time dysentery or small pox ravaged the prison population, he would surely be among the first to die.
At the end of another month without reply he wrote a final letter to Howe, his funds running short, and prayed his coin was sufficient to carry it all the way to Boston. He learned a week later that Howe was not in Boston at all, that the Americans—that Washington—had mounted cannon on Dorches
ter Heights and driven the British from the city. Some of his fellow prisoners wept.
Severin did not have enough money left to get a message to Halifax, where Howe was said to be sailing with his army and baggage, as well as large numbers of camp followers, hangers-on, and loyalists. Nor did he have enough to buy decent food and clean water for another month. He did have enough to get a letter to Lebanon, forty miles southeast, where there had once been a school and might still be a teacher who had known his parents.
He did not compose this appeal in code, but he wrote it in a language spoken by few and written by still fewer. He included all of the information he had gathered for Howe, with the exception of the intelligence about the Widow, because it would be of no interest to this man. If Harkness still lived, if he had remained in Lebanon or nearby, if he was at all the man Severin’s mother had described, he would be capable of reading the letter, using the information contained therein, and engineering an escape. And if not, Severin would very soon be dead.
* * *
The Rebels, under the command of the slovenly and eccentric Charles Lee, took control of New York in January. They sent a company of dour New England militia to close John Street, but by then it hardly mattered—most of the theater’s wealthy loyalist patrons had fled the city for their estates on the Hudson anyway. Jenny and Frances had no such luxury.
The last remaining officers of the British garrison staying at the King’s Arms packed to go aboard the Asia, and Courtney Fairchild made his final visit to the robin’s egg blue house beside the theater.
Jenny had not meant to intrude. Just as she preferred no one inquire too deeply into the matters of her own heart, which were in turmoil, she certainly didn’t mean to pry into anyone else’s. But the door to the parlor was open and she could not help but look inside.
Lord Fairchild was kneeling in his scarlet regimentals, his broad back to Jenny, his turned-back wool tails kissing the rug, sword scraping the floor, before Frances Leighton’s chair. He held Fanny’s hands, which had been painted by Romney and engraved by myriad nameless others in her most famous attitude as Ophelia. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me.
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