Mistress Firebrand

by Donna Thorland

  Severin felt weak and wasted, but he was clean and warm and he was alive.

  No thanks to General Howe or Lord Germain, who had left him to rot at the bottom of the mine. Who would have expressed mild distaste if he had handed Frances Leighton over to them, then clapped her in irons and made such use of her as they had always intended.

  He had dirtied his hands, time and again, so they could keep theirs clean, and they had not come for him. He recalled, with a sense of shame, how he had so often acted on all that they left unsaid, done the unpleasant things no gentleman could put into words but that were necessary.

  How he had forfeited his opportunity to remain with Jennifer Leighton out of misplaced loyalty.

  The door opened and a man entered. He was tall and lean and graying, but he walked with an easy stride and bowed his head beneath the lintel and the center beam as if from long habit.

  Severin struggled to sit up. Good God, he was weak as a newborn kitten. “I owe you a debt, sir,” he said, trying to find some dignity while swaddled in blankets and wearing someone else’s nightshirt.

  “There is no debt where family is concerned.” The man offered him a pained half smile and pulled a chair up to sit beside the bed.

  “Your sons could have been captured, or shot.” Coward. He ought to own them, after what they had done for him. It occurred to him now that he had not really believed they would come. “It was a risky undertaking, for you and yours.”

  “Your cousins knew what they were about,” said the man, who was his uncle by marriage and whom Severin had never laid eyes on before today, but who had risked his all to save him. He had the patient air of a schoolmaster—a profession he had once followed—with bad news to impart.

  “But I won’t lie to you about your situation. We brought you here at night, in the dark, but you’ve been at death’s door for eight weeks now, and it was impossible to keep your presence a secret from the Committee of Safety. They have their headquarters here in Lebanon, not six miles from this house, and they meet every day, sometimes more than once. Their business is requisitioning supplies for Washington’s army and ferreting out and trying suspected Tories. They know they have an invalided British officer on their very doorstep. The only real question before them is what use they can make of him.”

  July. He could remember only bits and pieces of the last eight weeks. No wonder he felt so enervated, and his mind was working so slowly. But not that slowly. “You know a great deal about the workings of this committee.”

  “That is because I am a member.”

  So his uncle was a Rebel. It should not have surprised him. The Indian School that had educated Severin’s father had been a place of advanced, if often misguided, ideas. That Solomon Harkness—who had defied the school’s founder to marry one of the Mohawk students, and set up his own rival institution—should have caught republican fever was of a piece with the little Severin had heard about the man.

  “Yet you still came for me,” said Severin.

  “You’re Molly’s brother’s boy, and the son of the best friend I ever had.”

  The son he so blithely gave away, Severin thought, but did not say.

  “We would have walked through hell to get you out of that place,” continued Harkness, “but with the condition you were in when the boys brought you out, we didn’t have a whole lot of choices. You have even fewer now.”

  “Are you advising me to switch sides?”

  “You don’t have a side. Not anymore. The men who left you to die in that hole made you a free agent. I can’t judge you for whatever you’ve done to get where you are, Severin, because you and your mother weren’t given any choices, but you have some today. This is your opportunity to decide what kind of man you want to be.”

  I think it is just possible that you may remember that you are an American yourself.

  “You must know your side employs people like me, every bit as ruthless,” said Severin.

  That isn’t who you are. It’s who you choose to be.

  “I know it,” said Solomon Harkness. “Doesn’t mean you have to be one of them.”

  It didn’t. But he had obligations, debts from that life, and they had to be paid before he could build a new one.

  “I am prepared to give them everything they want,” said Severin. “I’m even prepared to put myself at their disposal, though it’s high time to draw some lines. I’ll gather intelligence and write reports, but I will not start riots or blackmail or kill for them.” He would leave that to Angela Ferrers. “And there is something I want in return.”

  “I can put your condition before the Committee, if it’s within reason.”

  “There was a girl, in New York. She risked a great deal to save my life. A very great deal. The British could hang her, twice over, for the things she has done, and I believe that one of your side’s less scrupulous agents is trying to get hooks into her. I want her out of New York. I want her back with her family in New Jersey, where she’ll be safe.” And where perhaps, when he was recovered, he might see her again. His mind kept returning, over and over, to the sense of promise he had experienced standing beside her on the steps of the little blue house beside the theater, fitting the key to the lock.

  “You could ask for more,” said Harkness.

  “I expect so. But that’s all I want.”

  The Committee visited the next day. Eight men, including the governor, who Severin knew had refused General Gage’s call for aid after the debacle at Lexington, siding early and decisively with the Rebels. That had been one of the many tasks Severin had carried out for his government: compiling dossiers on the royal governors and tendering his opinion as to which would remain loyal to the Crown, for how long, and with what provisos. He had been right about John Trumbull, and his close study of the man allowed Severin to put all of his considerable gifts on display.

  The committeemen took up chairs around the bed and listened to what Severin had to tell them. He did not give them everything, but he gave them enough to buy his life and Jennifer Leighton’s safety and whet their appetites for more. He had been with Sir William Howe in Boston sufficiently long to provide them a very detailed assessment of the Crown’s forces there, and he had studied the general carefully enough to offer them a finely limned portrait of their adversary. “He will not press his advantage in any fight that he stands even the slightest chance of losing. Bunker Hill was too bloody for his liking, and he still believes some form of reconciliation—that peace—is possible.”

  “He and his brother,” said Trumbull, meaning Billy Howe and Black Dick, the admiral who had been angling for months to be part of the peace commission, “wish to negotiate, but they are not empowered to treat with an independent America. What are the terms they have been instructed to offer?”

  Severin had been in the meeting with Lord Germain where the terms were discussed. “Entirely one-sided,” said Devere, frankly. “You will lay down your arms in exchange for not having your cities burned, and sixty of you will hang, publicly, in each colony, as a lesson to future generations and a demonstration of imperial power.” He had attempted to explain, patiently and more than once, the stupidity of this to superiors who had never set foot in America, who believed that mass executions would cow the populace.

  These men were not cowed.

  “General Howe is not your true enemy,” Severin continued. “John Burgoyne is the real danger. He is anything but sentimental about America. He is not obsessed with capturing her cities. He is pleasure-loving and self-indulgent, but it is London that calls to him—not Philadelphia or New York—and he will not go to winter quarters or set up court like the provincial administrators you are used to. He is a hard campaigner. He knows that the best way to break the rebellion is to control the Hudson and cut New England off from the rest of the colonies.”

  It went on like that for some time. They asked astute questions and
Severin gave them frank answers, and at length they thanked him and took their leave, all save Severin’s uncle, who remained behind after the door closed.

  “Are you sure that’s all you want? This girl out of New York?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What about money?”

  “I have money.”

  “If you mean Devere money, you must know that’s lost to you.”

  “I have my own money.” He had funds in good hands in Boston and New York. And in France and Portugal and Italy. It was a sensible precaution for a man in his line of work. “And I’m not without skills.”

  “No. That much was obvious today. You’ve got your father’s head for politics and strategy. It can’t have been easy for you, rising through the army with Ashur causing trouble on the frontier these past twenty years.”

  “It is surprising what powerful men will overlook when it is convenient for them,” said Severin. “And what infamies they will claim as their prerogatives. I want Jenny safe.”

  “What do you intend to do about the girl, once she is out of New York?”

  “I’m in no position to do anything at all about any girl until I can get myself out of this bed.” That was something he was determined to do. He had seen prisoners in France who had been broken by their confinement, their health never recovered. He had been injured often enough in the past to know that it was possible to claw his way back from this, but it would not be quick or easy.

  “When you’re mended, then,” said Harkness, doggedly.

  “She may have no desire to see me. Or she may be attached to another.” Or she too might want to take up where they left off in the kitchens at Vauxhall, once he procured some French letters. The stirring he felt at the thought did a good deal to reassure him that he would indeed recover.

  “Washington holds New York,” Harkness said. “It should be an easy enough thing to get her out. I’ll make enquiries. In the meantime, write to her. I’ll see that the letter goes by private channels and that prying eyes don’t intrude on your sentiments. If she’ll see you, I’ll take you to New Jersey myself, when you’re well enough. If not, think about what else you might ask from the Committee. If you break ties with England, you’ll have to make a new life for yourself here. There are great opportunities for men with ambition and vision.”

  Severin believed that, and he tried to take his uncle’s advice to heart. He considered his options as he began his slow recovery, using two chairs at first to cross small distances in the room, from the bed to the bureau, from the bureau to the washstand. Even sitting upright in a chair was exhausting in those first few weeks, but he persisted. He wrote to Jenny, and he made his first foray outside his room, and after a month he managed to get down the stairs, and finally to move from the kitchen to the keeping room to the best room with the assistance of his young cousins—who, it turned out, were part of the local militia protecting the stores gathered by the war office.

  No matter how far his mind ranged, though, it always returned, a bird to the nest, to Jennifer Leighton.

  * * *

  Jenny did not tell Bobby about her interview with Washington. The fewer people who knew what she was doing, the better, or so the young Irish officer—Moylan by name, a former neighbor of Washington’s in Virginia—had told her after their lunch as he counted gold coins into a purse for her.

  “I did not think Congress had coin to spare,” she said, watching the gold glimmer in the sunlight of a little office adjacent to the room where she had met the general.

  “It doesn’t come from Congress,” said Moylan. “His Excellency serves without pay. He asks Congress to reimburse his expenses, but he takes a Roman view of patronage of the arts. This gold, and the coin to buy paper and ink to print your play, comes from his own purse. It is his hope that you will send him more of your work in future, and that he may continue to support your endeavors.”

  The gesture struck her dumb for a moment, but then she recovered her wits and said, “Then I will do my best to see that it is not all bread and circuses.”

  Bobby’s interview with the Committee had been less to his profit. They had threatened him. He could volunteer the use of the John Street for the good of his country and to alleviate the sufferings of his fellow Americans, or his property would be forfeit, and he himself would be sent to Simsbury.

  Jenny lied and said her interview had been much the same, and Bobby did not question her. She decided, with as much regret as satisfaction, that she was indeed developing as an actress.

  She did tell Aunt Frances, because she trusted her, and it was necessary to speak of money, and she did not want to lie about where her funds had come from. They agreed to tell Bobby that their support came from Courtney Fairchild, even though Frances had refused his money.

  With the theater closed, they decided that Jenny ought to make a visit to her parents in New Brunswick. She was writing a new work, a one-act pamphlet piece for Washington, and she reasoned that she should be able to write as well at home as in New York.

  In this she was proved wrong. After three weeks in the little brick house where she had grown up, Jenny managed to write a grand total of two pages. At home there was no escaping the domestic duty Aunt Frances despaired of. It took all morning, starting before dawn, to keep a household even of that modest size fed, swept, and laundered. In the afternoons there was a parade of suitors arranged by her mother.

  The house, Jenny discovered, was smaller and more crowded than she remembered. Two of her four brothers had recently married and brought their new wives to live with them. Jenny’s father had added a wing—in brick, naturally—to the back of the house for the new couples, but her sisters-in-law, Ida and Letty, were obliged to make do sharing the old summer kitchen, and their arguments could be heard throughout the house.

  When Jenny finally returned to John Street, she had a new appreciation for the working conditions Aunt Frances provided. In three days she managed to finish the play and work in two characters inspired by Ida and Letty and their epic dispute over the bread oven.

  While Jenny had been away, Aunt Frances had put her knowledge of medicines to use nursing the sick Continentals at John Street. Jenny soon joined her, measuring out tinctures from Aunt Frances’ collection of blue glass bottles. In the evenings they took up their pens and wrote, and by some unspoken but mutual agreement they avoided talk of Courtney Fairchild and Severin Devere.

  When the letter arrived, Jenny did not share it with anyone. It was unsigned, but she had no doubt from whom it had come.

  My dr Jenny

  I hope that I do not give offense by using your Christian name on such familiar terms. It is a liberty I granted myself in the privacy of my imagination, and I hope you will grant it me in truth when next we meet. I wish you to know that I am grateful for the sacrifice you made on my behalf and only sorry that I did not comprehend at the time how very right you were, and how very wrong I was, about the business I was engaged in.

  I cannot come to you at present, and the knowledge that others will doubtless read this letter before it reaches you constrains me, but I wish you to know that I am free and resolved to quit my former life and give up the business that separated us. I promise that you and the people you care for, and even the person whose machinations parted us, are all safe from me.

  It is possible that you will wish nothing more to do with me. I have undertaken to see that you are repaid for the kindness you did me, and I wish you to know that I expect no consideration in return for that aid. If, however, I remain in your thoughts as you have remained in mine, then I hope we might meet again and take up the matter that lies unresolved between us. A reply to a gentleman by way of the usual channels will reach me. If not, I only ask that you do not share this missive with a certain mutual acquaintance. An able intelligencer could with a little effort trace me by it, and the people who delivered me out of Egypt should not
be made to suffer in the desert for their pains.

  I do not wish to put you in any further danger by this correspondence, but I am, and have been since that night, and would be in future if you permit it, yours.

  As love letters went, it would not make the poets weep, but it did move Jenny. She read it alone in her bedroom beneath the stuffy eaves, and let the longing and the loneliness she had known since her encounter with Devere consume her. What she felt for him was undoubtedly physical. She ached whenever she thought of what had almost happened in the slot at John Street and then again in the kitchens at Vauxhall. But it was more than that. Much more. It was the way she had come alive running beside him through the darkness, and then later wandering the garden, and even closing up the shutters at John Street. She had felt light and free and believed when she was with him that she was capable of anything—even as her dreams had been crumbling all around her.

  Men—husbands and marriage—had always represented obligations and burdens to Jenny. That had been an unavoidable conclusion growing up in New Brunswick. The wives and mothers she had known acted as servants or, if they were wealthy enough, managed complicated households, directing the activities of servants. They did not write books or plays or paint portraits or any of the thrilling things that Jenny had heard women could aspire to in London and Paris.

  That a man might ever be a source of delight, or partnership and pleasure, had never truly occurred to her. Before now. Aunt Frances had represented her affair with Harry in that way, but it had come at a terrible cost. Devere, though, had described how they might have passion and pleasure without risk, and if he had truly given up his ambition to eliminate Angela Ferrers and any designs upon Aunt Frances, Jenny could see no reason why she shouldn’t share those things with him.

  She composed, in her mind, while at work in the hospital the next morning, a reply that would make the poets weep. An outpouring of feeling and a confession of physical longing, but when she sat down to put pen to paper the result sounded rather like a prologue for the stage, and she remembered too that anything she wrote in these difficult times was likely to pass through many hands and be scanned by many eyes. So, in the end, she trusted in Devere to anticipate her as he had in the street by the docks and replied with a single word.