Mistress Firebrand

by Donna Thorland

  “We can bring Jenny too. I can take care of you both,” Fairchild was saying.

  They were so absorbed in each other that neither had noticed Jenny in the door.

  “And destroy your own future in the process,” said Fanny. “Billy Howe can get away with cosseting Elizabeth Loring, and lavishing preferments on her cuckold husband, because he has won honors enough on the battlefield to be forgiven little indulgences like a flamboyant mistress. And the Sultana, as the papers like to call her, is a society beauty from a fine family. I am not.”

  “I don’t care a damn for that,” said Fairchild.

  “But you will, Courtney. You will someday. Onboard ship or in a small garrison, my condition will be discovered. There will be someone who knew or suspected about Harry, and they will reach all the right conclusions about me. And jump to all of the wrong ones about us. Who will believe we have not been intimate?”

  “I don’t care what anyone believes.”

  “Not now, perhaps, but you will want to marry someday.”

  “There can be no one else.”

  He did not say after you, but it hovered unspoken in the air.

  “I never thought there could be anyone else after Harry,” said Frances Leighton gently. “Then I met you.”

  The sound that Jenny made was involuntary, a little sob at the back of her throat that was half for Frances and Fairchild, and half for herself and the sick longing she felt for Severin Devere.

  “My apologies,” Jenny said, swallowing the lump in her throat and backing into the hall.

  Fairchild turned to her, his pose now like Atlas holding up the world, and there were open tears on his face. “Tell her,” he implored Jenny. “Please tell her she must come with me.”

  Jenny did not know what to say.

  “Tell her,” insisted Fairchild. “If we part now, we might never meet again.”

  “Courtney,” said the Divine Fanny softly. “She doesn’t know.”

  But she did. Jenny had kept the secret of Aunt Frances’ illness to herself, just as Angela Ferrers had advised her, because she did not want it to color the time they had left, but that was selfishness now.

  “I do know,” said Jenny.

  The Divine Fanny looked up and her gray eyes met Jenny’s. A little smile played across the actress’s perfectly formed lips. Then she said, “Courtney, might Jenny and I have a moment alone?”

  Fairchild made a visible effort to compose himself and rose. “Of course, Fanny.” He kissed her hair, this man who was not Frances Leighton’s lover and who never could be, and smiled bravely at Jenny as he passed her on the threshold.

  When they were alone, Jenny stepped gingerly through the door.

  “I take it Angela told you,” said Aunt Frances, patting the chair beside her.

  Jenny crossed the room and settled on the threadbare cushion. “It was Severin Devere, actually. He also said there were rumors that you murdered your lover.”

  Fanny sighed. “Severin Devere is the last man on earth who should credit the sort of rumors that swirl around love affairs. Some things, Jenny, are too private, too painful even now to share, but I can tell you this: I did not murder Harry. I loved him. You can ask Angela Ferrers. She was there.”

  “I did,” admitted Jenny. “It was Mrs. Ferrers who told me not to dredge it all up with you, that it would color the time we had left and steal all your happiness.”

  “Angela has always been the most practical of women,” said Frances Leighton drily. “She has many admirable qualities and a dazzling array of skills. The one thing she is not, Jenny, is an expert on happiness. I didn’t keep my illness from you, Jenny, just to preserve our domestic tranquility. I kept it from you because I wanted you to be free to make your own choices. To go to London, if the opportunity presented itself, to go home to New Brunswick if ever this life did not suit you.”

  Her aunt had given her all that and more, but they had still not said it plainly. “You’re right. I would never have considered going to London if I had known you were”—she forced herself to say it—“that you were dying. You have given me opportunities, shown me a life I could not have dreamt of in New Brunswick, and I am grateful for it. But I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me before I went to John Burgoyne. If I had lain with him, the same thing might have happened to me.”

  Frances Leighton looked Jenny squarely in the eye. “Just because a thing is dangerous doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the risk. Sons follow their fathers into the army every day. If you had known that I had syphilis, it would have distorted the danger in your mind, from a very remote possibility to a very immediate reality. We discussed the precautions you could take, and I knew that Johnny had always been . . . fastidious in his choices. Rich men can afford to be.”

  “But we poor players cannot,” said Jenny. The injustice of it stung.

  “I have no regrets, Jenny. I played the hand that was dealt to me and I have had more than my fair share of joy and triumph.”

  “And what about Major Fairchild? Has he had his share?”

  Fanny smiled and glanced away a moment before answering. “Courtney Fairchild is the very best of men, and he deserves the full measure of love, which is something I cannot give him.”

  “I do not think he minds.”

  “No. He doesn’t. Except on occasion. But there are things he would mind. He has a very personal sense of honor, and discovering that his beloved is an associate of Angela Ferrers would likely tax his finer sentiments. Not to mention the fact that we handed his childhood best friend over to the Rebels.”

  A fact that was never far from Jenny’s mind. “Now that we are safely behind the American lines, why can’t Devere be freed?”

  “I know that you regret the part you played in his capture, Jenny, but you must take solace in this: Devere is alive only because of you. Angela Ferrers is nothing if not thorough.”

  It was cold comfort for Jenny. “And what about us? Was she right? Should I have kept my knowledge about your illness to myself?”

  “No. Not unless you plan to go weeping wanly about the place like some Restoration Tragedy heroine.”

  Jenny wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to cry. “I don’t even know how long you have left,” she said, trying very hard not to be weepy.

  “Neither do any of us, my dear. If there is any lesson to be found in my life, it is that one: make the most of the time that we have.”

  * * *

  Rescue for Devere did not come in the form of a company of dragoons storming the mine. The prisoners could not tell day from night in their airless vault below the ground. The building at the top cut off all light from the laddered shaft down which their food and jailors came. Only a faint glow sometimes at the end of the tunnel, beyond the bars that sealed them off from the rest of the works, told of the rising and setting of the sun.

  Severin had already picked the lock and ventured beyond that gate, quietly when most of his fellow prisoners were sleeping, while the doctor who had nursed him through his recurrent fevers kept watch. He discovered that there was no way to stage a mass escape by that route. The walls of the shaft were sheer. A rope, secured from above, would be required to scale them. Severin was strong enough, just, to make the climb unaided, but few of his fellow prisoners were in any shape to do so. They would have to be hauled up by strong men. If the shaft had been farther away, out of sight of the guardhouse’s walls or hidden by trees, it might have been possible, but it wasn’t.

  According to the bespectacled doctor, the opening was on a flat plain with no cover. Any escape by that route would have to be accomplished with speed, in the darkness, which was no one’s favorite way of making a fifty-foot climb up a sheer rock face.

  “Karekohe!”

  A name out of memory, one he had not been called by in twenty years. He heard it whispered through the bars and thought for a momen
t that he was in the grip of another fever. Then, when it was followed by a second word in Mohawk, this one not at all polite, he knew he was not.

  “Here,” Severin replied in the same language. His fellow prisoners were sleeping, including the Tory doctor. It would be safer not to wake any of them, but Severin’s conscience would not allow that. He would have died if not for the physician’s care. He placed a hand over the doctor’s mouth and gingerly squeezed the man’s shoulder until his eyes opened, then motioned for silence.

  Although far from a man of action, the doctor, at least, should be up to making the climb. Severin was not certain that he could do it himself. The cold and the damp, and the subsistence diet of gruel, had done their work on a body already taxed by Hallam’s beating. The bruises and small fractures along his arms and legs, and, most important, the cracks in his ribs, had still not healed—and never would without light and air and proper nourishment. If he did not make the climb, he would die down here, but better to die from the fall than from shivering in a pool of filth.

  He crossed as quietly as possible to the iron bars, the doctor following him without question. In the gloom he could make out two faces on the other sides of the bars, both familiar, though he had never laid eyes on them before. The boys were young, barely out of their teens. They were dressed like Englishmen. Indeed, despite their dark complexions, they could probably pass for English the way Severin could, but their features bore the unmistakable stamp of their common Mohawk ancestor.

  He picked the lock, the metal scraping on metal sounding loud as church bells in the silence of the echoing vault, but no one stirred. The gate swung open. Devere and the doctor passed through, and then he locked it again behind him. Cruel perhaps, but necessary, because if he allowed it to remain open, as soon as the other prisoners woke there would be a stampede to the shaft and the guards would take notice. Locking the gate bought the doctor and himself, and their rescuers, time to make good their escape, and he owed as much to those who were risking their lives to save him.

  It was dark in the tunnel, and they moved cautiously, hands in front of them and feeling above their heads for low-hanging rock and beams. Then finally there was no more ceiling and they were standing in an open space. It was a thing they could not at first see, but only sense. The moonless canopy of night overhead was important for making their escape from an open field. It was not ideal for climbing.

  There were two ropes, dimly visible, hanging just short of the floor.

  “The boys first,” said Severin, this time in English and for the doctor’s benefit, as he examined the walls of the shaft as best he could. At the top was a circle of paler black.

  “If you are seen,” he told the boys, “run, and forget about us. We will take our chances.”

  “Mother says we’re to bring you back with us,” said the taller of the two.

  “Then go first,” said Devere, “in case I can’t make the climb and you have to haul my sorry carcass up.”

  The boy shrugged and nodded at the same time, a gesture Severin recognized: a family tic, he supposed. The familiarity of it made his eyes water for a moment, but sentiment would not get him to the surface.

  He watched the dark shapes of the boys scurry up the rope, seeming light as birds, fast as squirrels, and wondered if his own body would ever answer that way again. Already chills were racking him, the tunnel here colder even than their prison had been, his clothing rags, and his constitution spent.

  The ropes stopped dancing. Their rescuers were aboveground. Severin and the doctor began their ascent.

  It was the stuff of nightmares, to be dangling in the dark over a fifty-foot drop, struggling ever upward, inch by inch, and when he reached the top Severin knew he had come to the very end of his endurance. The boys had to take his arms and haul him onto the stiff dead grass. They half carried, half dragged him over the scrubby plain to the sheltering line of trees.

  After that there was a path through the wood, then a road, and then a cart. And air. Fresh, clean air. He drank it in like liquor, like there would never be enough. He lay in the plank bed of the cart, too exhausted and fevered to move, and content just to feel the emptiness of the moonless sky above him.

  They drove on for hours, Severin lapsing in and out of consciousness, and then stopped. Light splashed across Devere’s face. A door opening. That was what it was. They had doors in the world aboveground. He had almost forgotten about those. From his rough bed in the cart, Severin heard the cries of a woman, some sobbing. Then his companion the doctor was bending over him, and there was arguing.

  The doctor wanted to bring Severin inside. Severin was probably dying. That was good to know. The doctor wanted him to die comfortably. That seemed very considerate of him. A woman climbed onto the cart and tipped something fiery down his throat. Very raw, very homemade whiskey. Ambrosia. She mopped his brow with a cool cloth and he tried to thank her but his tongue felt thick and heavy.

  The boys consulted together in Mohawk and came to a decision, one of which Severin approved. They were taking him the rest of the way home to their mother. He liked that idea. It meant he did not have to move from the cart.

  The doctor said something to Severin. Most likely thanking him. That was gracious. Severin would have liked to say something in reply. Perhaps he had. It was all so very jumbled. The cart jerked forward. The light dwindled. And the night swallowed him whole.

  Fifteen

  April 1776

  Jenny woke to shouts in the street. When she looked out the window, she saw Continental dragoons in bright blue coats below, hammering on the doors to the theater, their leader demanding entry.

  Appearing as if on cue, Robert Hallam came running from the opposite direction—his cravat loose about his neck, shirt untied, hair falling free over his shoulders—and a fierce argument ensued. Bobby demanded the dragoons leave. Their major slid from his horse with an economical movement and presented an order from the Committee of Safety decreeing that John Street was to be commandeered as a hospital for American soldiers, several thousand of whom had been struck down by typhus.

  Bobby tore up the decree. The officer of dragoons watched impassively as the pieces fluttered to the ground, then ordered his men to take up axes and break down the doors.

  A crowd gathered, then parted, as Frances Leighton emerged running from their robin’s egg blue house: skirts caught up in her hands, dressed from head to toe in gray silk, with her hair piled on top of her head and an ostrich feather adding height to her petite frame. She stopped in front of the theater doors, looked breathlessly at the armed men intent on gaining access to the playhouse, put a pale, beautiful hand to her pale, beautiful forehead, and swooned—directly into the arms of the dragoon major.

  All work stopped while the Divine Fanny was carried back across the street to the house. Jenny donned her robe and played her part with burnt feathers and smelling salts. And a strong drink for the major, who had laid Fanny tenderly on the daybed in the upstairs parlor and promptly subsided into a parlor chair himself, entirely overwhelmed by this display of feminine sensitivity.

  Bobby took the opportunity to saddle his horse and ride hard for Black Sam Fraunces’ tavern, where the Committee of Safety was supposed to be meeting.

  They would not admit him. He returned to John Street to discover that Fanny’s performance had bought him a day’s reprieve, and spent the afternoon calling on favors and promising all manner of future largesse if only the theater might be spared.

  It was not. The major did not return the next day, but another officer, less impressionable and more hard-hearted, did—with a train of thirty wagons and six hundred patients for the newly christened John Street Hospital.

  Bobby penned a strongly worded letter to the Committee, full of high-minded rhetoric about liberty and the sanctity of private property, and of thinly veiled threats to savage and ridicule them in his next production. For his pai
ns, he received only a summons in reply, from a different committee, the one Washington had asked the Provincial Congress to form in order to try suspected Tories.

  “I have been an ardent, if covert, Son of Liberty for years,” fumed Bobby, pacing the little upstairs parlor.

  I have not, thought Jenny. But so many things had changed since her night with Burgoyne. Before that, she had identified with the loyalists whose patronage had kept John Street open. She had mimicked their scorn for all things provincial. On the Boyne she had experienced just what that scorn led to. Her loyalties were no longer fixed.

  An identical summons from this new “Committee of Seven” arrived an hour later addressed to Jenny. And she too was ordered to present herself at Black Sam’s tavern at eleven o’clock the following morning.

  “Shall I faint, as you did?” Jenny asked her aunt.

  “Only if you are reasonably certain a gentleman stands ready to catch you, dear,” replied Aunt Frances.

  Bobby made a show of harnessing the matched bays to the coach that had sat little used in the shed next to John Street since Lewis Hallam’s departure, and Mr. Dearborn drove them the half mile to Mr. Fraunces’ tavern.

  The four-story brick mansion that housed Black Sam’s premises, where Jenny liked to drink her chocolate and read her mother’s letters, had been built for the DeLancy family fifty years earlier, on a scale and with an elegance that fitted it for use as a public building even five decades after its completion. The place had long been the haunt of the Sons of Liberty and the Committee of Safety, and more lately of General Washington, who was said to be so partial to Mr. Fraunces’ cooking that he’d begun ordering his meals sent from the tavern all the way to his headquarters at Richmond Hill, two miles north of the city.

  Bobby had dressed in republican homespun and sober leather kneebands.