Yes.
* * *
Devere tried not to be impatient, but when a month had passed he asked his uncle directly for news of Jennifer Leighton.
“There are difficulties,” his uncle said.
“What kind of ‘difficulties’?”
“Trumbull put his request to remove the girl from the city directly to General Washington, and it was refused.”
Angela Ferrers. He knew it had to be her thwarting him. “I shall go myself, then,” said Severin.
“You can scarcely walk more than a few yards unaided and you’re in no condition to sit a horse.”
Solomon Harkness was right, but it galled Severin.
“As soon as I am able, then.”
Had he not been worried about Jennifer Leighton, it would have been an almost Arcadian convalescence. The Harknesses were like so many American smallholders. They did a little farming, a little dairying, and their days were ruled by the progress of the sun and rhythm of the seasons. There were blackberries and peaches and fresh corn and there was very good meat. It was like a second childhood for Severin—enfeebled as he was by starvation and sickness and injury—the boyhood he might have had if things had gone differently for his parents, if they had been left to carve out a life for themselves as Harkness had.
By August he was out of bed and making slow circuits of his room, but Howe was also in Long Island and Jenny was not yet out of New York. Severin’s letter to her, which had traveled by private channels, was finally answered. Jacob brought it with him on his return from a trip to Long Island, the purpose of which neither Severin’s cousin nor his uncle would divulge. They had saved him and they cared for him but they did not yet trust him, and this filled him with a great sense of relief. These were perilous times, and he was glad that the Harknesses were so cautious. Severin would not see this island of familial happiness destroyed.
He opened the letter in private in the best room, where his aunt Molly had put on display all of the homemaking skills she had learned at the Reverend Wheelock’s Indian School—the ones that were supposed to fit her for a life as a missionary’s wife. There were swag curtains here, neatly sewn from bright red worsted, and an embroidered chair back with a classic English scene, a man and woman fishing by a lake beneath a willow. It was not a room much used except by Harkness himself, but it was exceedingly comfortable, and his aunt had set a table and chair by the window for Severin’s use.
It was impossible to sit in this room and anticipate opening a letter from Jennifer Leighton without thinking on his parents. Molly and the other girls at the Indian School had been educated to be helpmeets for ministers. Eleazar Wheelock’s vision had been a peculiar marriage of New England thrift and New Awakening devotion. Sending missionaries into Indian country was costly and dangerous. Training Indians themselves to spread the Word could be done at half the price with—to a European way of thinking at least—none of the risk.
Molly had not married an Indian missionary. Instead she had married one of the teachers, Harkness, which had raised few eyebrows. On the frontier it was not unheard of for Englishmen to take Indian wives. It was when her brother—Severin’s father—who was also studying at the school, proposed to an English girl that all the trouble started.
So much trouble.
If Severin was honest with himself, he would admit that he had avoided falling in love with Phippa after that summer at Courtney Fairchild’s home, when his heart was still an unruly thing, because he had seen grand passion—that of his parents—up close, and it had blighted all their lives. He had never dared to imagine that he could shape a different fate for himself.
Jenny had sent him permission to try: Yes.
Elation gripped him. A sense of promise, the kind Englishmen felt when they looked at the wilderness, the kind that Severin had learned to reject in the forests of New York, but that could be true for him with Jenny: I can build something here. A life.
By September he could get about the house himself ably enough, but he was still too weak to wield a blade or sit a horse or jolting cart, and New York was once more in British hands, and then she was in flames. They learned of the fire in October; nearly a quarter of the city had burned and accusations were flying over who had done it: the fleeing Americans, the arriving British, a cabal of real estate speculators, or perhaps the slaves again.
Harkness could get no word at all of Jennifer Leighton, and Severin determined that if his uncle could not spirit her out of New York, then he would have to do it himself, under the nose of the army he had lately betrayed. For that, he would need to be his old self.
His early attempts to ride were slow and clumsy, but his uncle Solomon was generous with his time. One day, when Severin was mounted on an elderly pony that was more used to drawing carts than carrying people, his uncle said, “We never blamed her. Your mother. For marrying Devere. She didn’t know what he’d done to Ashur. She thought your father had abandoned her.”
“You didn’t have to blame her,” said Severin. “She blamed herself.” He blamed her too, for lacking faith in his father, for lacking the courage to find out what had happened to Ashur Rice, for making choices she couldn’t live with, that he’d had to live with.
The early frost made Severin’s first game efforts to spar with his cousins more difficult, but he was determined to sit a horse properly by the new year.
He managed the feat by Christmas: a modest celebration by English standards, marked with a dinner and prayers. They cooked and ate as a family, with Uncle Solomon winding the clock jack that Molly considered to be an English idiocy, but that gave her mechanically minded husband enormous pleasure. They argued—no, they bantered—about it in Mohawk, and Severin felt something tighten in his chest to be around such easy companionship.
When the clock jack was finally wound and the meat rotating on the spit, his aunt turned from the fire and said, “Your father taught Solomon to speak my language, to woo me.”
“The bastard,” said Harkness with fondness, “sabotaged me. The first set of phrases he taught me would like as not have gotten me scalped if Molly did not already like me.”
“What did he teach you to say?”
Harkness repeated it—verbatim, Severin could tell, because Molly mouthed the words as well—and when he was done Severin burst out laughing, and it occurred to him that it was the first time he had really laughed since he had spent the night with Jennifer Leighton. And thankfully, his ribs no longer ached.
That was when he realized how much he wanted a life like this, with someone like Jenny. Someone he could laugh with. Someone who would tolerate his foibles and have ones of her own.
His strength returned slowly. His speed and swordplay were not yet what they ought to be—not for a trip into a city occupied by an army he had so lately deserted—but he was a veteran of many such dangerous undertakings, and never before had he been better motivated: by his own desires. He kept Jenny’s precious, laconic letter in his waistcoat pocket.
The raid on the Harkness farm occurred in the dead of night, when everyone was sleeping. At first he thought the dull roar was thunder in the distance, but when it grew steadily louder he knew it had to be cavalry. Muffled spurs, he realized, with a sinking heart, but at least thirty horse. Severin knew better than to reach for his pistols. He could not risk an armed confrontation with his aunt in the house. That was how civilians got killed.
He tied his shirt closed and went into the darkened hall. It was a moonless night, but he could see the riders, splashes of red in the night, from the window over the stair. His uncle was up too now and carrying a musket, but Severin took it from his hands and shook his head.
“There are too many of them, and your resistance will only provide them an excuse for brutality.”
Joshua and Jacob emerged from their rooms, knives in hand.
“Put them away,” said Harkness, who had fought i
n the last war and knew Severin was right.
His aunt, for her part, was steely eyed, pinning her bed jacket closed and putting her hand in her husband’s with absolute trust.
Everything happened quickly after that, and Severin had to admit that it was very well done. The door crashed open. Harkness led the way down the stairs, Molly’s hand still in his, Severin and the two boys following. The dragoons at the bottom herded them into the kitchen at the points of their bayonets, and Severin made sure to put himself between his family and the steel blade of the wild-eyed young cornet barking the orders.
Severin marked the man, in case things turned violent. Body language and bearing distinguished the young officer as a real threat—his bite, likely, as bad as his bark.
He supposed there was some justice in what was happening. Severin had planned raids like this for General Howe, with these very men: Harcourt’s 16th Light Dragoons, created two decades earlier by Gentleman Johnny to fight the French in Spain and Portugal. Burgoyne’s hand in their origins showed in their decidedly theatrical uniforms: scarlet coats with striking blue wool facings, gold lace, leather helmets sporting leopard-fur turbans and bearskin crests. Light horse units were an innovation borrowed from European cavalry—light, as their name indicated, fast, and damnably effective. The sort of swift, nimble, tactical unit he had advised Howe to use to break him out of Simsbury.
His uncle stepped forward and addressed the cornet. “It’s me you want.”
Severin very much doubted it. Kidnapping high-ranking Rebels was one of Howe’s favorite tactics, but Solomon Harkness did not rate the risk of sending a troop of horse deep into enemy territory. They were here for him.
“And who are you, exactly?” asked a voice from the hall, cultured, melodious.
The speaker was no dragoon. Severin did not know him. He wore the uniform of a captain in the 26th, that much-depleted regiment that had come to deal with the Stamp Riots in ’67 and never left. His coat was scarlet with a yellow collar, turndowns, and cuffs; silver buttons; and a silver gilt epaulet on one shoulder. His coal black hair was neatly clubbed, and his gold-flecked hazel eyes were quick and alert, taking stock of the room and its occupants, before coming to rest on Harkness.
Severin had devoutly wished to leave his former life, but he knew he must take up its trappings again now if he was to have any hope of saving his family.
“He’s no one,” said Severin, in the disaffected drawl he had perfected in London clubs and gambling halls. “A local functionary receiving a stipend for my keep. It is me you are here for, I presume.”
The reasons didn’t matter. There were only so many possibilities, none of them good. It was possible that the Lebanon Committee of Safety had a spy in their midst, someone who had told Howe that Severin had turned coat, informed the general that one of his spies was in the hands of the Americans with a head full of valuable secrets. Or it was possible that this was some machination orchestrated by Angela Ferrers, to remove him from the playing field once and for all. Or most remotely, perhaps the post had been exceedingly slow and Howe had only lately opened his mail.
Would-be saviors or no, on balance, Severin’s chances of getting out of this seemed rather poor. The important thing was protecting the people who had saved him, who had delivered him from hell, given him a place to recover, reflect, and find his way. A lump rose in his throat at the thought of anything happening to his family. He vowed that he would not allow it.
The handsome captain bowed to Devere, his formal manner at odds with the rustic simplicity of the kitchen, and said, “My apologies, Colonel. My name is André, and I would have come sooner, but your letter languished at headquarters due to certain deficiencies on the general’s staff. By the time I arrived and read it, you were no longer at Simsbury. You are, in fact, a damnably difficult fellow to find.”
“Surely not as difficult as all that,” said Severin.
“No,” admitted Captain André. “You are quite right, sir. There was gross incompetence involved as well.” His eyes flickered over the Harkness family. “Is there someplace we might talk in private?”
“There’s a parlor,” said Severin.
“Excellent,” interjected the young cornet who had ordered the door knocked down, as though he was an invited guest. “Perhaps there might be some refreshment for the men?” He looked at Molly meaningfully, and Severin’s aunt nodded, her face perfectly blank as she stepped cautiously toward the cupboard.
“Shall we?” said André, gesturing for Severin to lead the way. The cornet showed no inclination to follow, appearing more than happy to leave his superiors to whatever clandestine business they were about.
Severin guided the glittering captain through the darkened keeping room to the parlor, where his aunt’s curtains and embroidery were on display—where Severin very much wished he might use some of his hard-won skills to kill this elegant intruder—but that would help no one at all. Severin was not quite prepared to believe that this young man represented the rescue he had once longed for, and no longer wanted. He must know more.
When they were seated at the little table, and his aunt had made up the fire and left them two glasses and a bottle of her very worst local whiskey, André waited until the door closed before speaking.
“I won’t make excuses for the abominable treatment you have received, because we both know quite well there aren’t any,” said André, pouring. “I spent the last year in captivity myself, though my circumstances”—he gestured to indicate the room—“were not so pleasant.”
“As it happens, Simsbury,” replied Severin, “was not nearly as homely.”
“No,” agreed André. “I am certain it was not. What did you give the Americans to extricate yourself?”
Severin shrugged. “Fictions mostly, and a few truths they already knew, to make the whole convincing.”
“There are those who will say that such a long captivity would tax any man’s powers of invention.”
Severin knew what the man was hinting at: that he had turned, and of course he had, but hopefully he was good enough to convince this fellow otherwise. “I would reply that I had extraordinary leisure in which to exercise my creativity.”
“Just so.” André nodded. “And I am deeply sorry for it. Had I been with General Howe when you were taken, I would have acted, but his adjutant general is Gage’s brother-in-law, Stephen Kemble, whose chief qualification for the job is that everyone wants to fuck his sister.”
It was crude talk after spending so many months in a household where a man and a woman lived companionably with each other, where Severin had fallen asleep more than once to the soft sound of the bed ropes sighing in the room next door and had envied that kind of deep and lasting happiness.
“I met Kemble in Boston,” said Severin. “If he had other qualifications, they escaped me. He prefers running and relying on spies to cultivating informants, and hasn’t a clue how to turn disaffected Rebels into useful allies.”
“Such was my assessment as well. Unfortunately, I lack the connections to rise to such high office with so little acumen, so I must advance by hard work alone. I have studied your career, and I hope you will not take it amiss if I confess that certain of my own ambitions have been shaped by your failures. I mean to replace Kemble as adjutant general in North America, and I intend to do it by capturing the Rebel agent known as the Widow.”
So Severin had been right to doubt his government’s belated recognition of his service. This man had not been sent at all: he had come because Severin could be useful to him. It explained the midnight ride into enemy territory.
“You want my help,” said Severin.
“I would value your guidance,” flattered André. “I understand you bedded her in Boston.”
Severin was no longer sure who had bedded whom, but he was certain that he had been discreet and that his tryst with the Widow was not an easy piece o
f intelligence to come by. This Captain André was a very dangerous young man, decided Severin. “I do not suggest that particular method for getting close to the woman.”
“But you did get close to her. What was she like?”
He had asked about the Widow, but despite the fact that Severin had bedded her—with some brio, in fact—she herself had somehow become indistinct in his memory. It was Jenny whom he could recall with crystal clarity: the copper of her hair, the music of her voice, the lithe curves of her body.
“Ruthless,” answered Severin at last.
“Do you sketch, Colonel?”
“No.”
The young man looked slightly surprised. “It is a useful skill for men in our profession.”
“My chief expertise lies in handwriting,” replied Severin.
André smiled. “I had heard that. It may yet be useful. Perhaps, though, for the moment you could describe her to me. A portrait in words.”
“Tall,” said Severin, though he was not sure that was exactly true. She had given the appearance of height, but so did Frances Leighton, her mentor in the theater, and the Divine Fanny was almost as petite as her niece.
“Pale and beautiful, in face and form.” Though, again, artifice might enhance or conceal those features with relative ease.
“Fair haired.” That much he was certain of, unless she dyed all of her hair.
“Athletic. She has forged herself into a formidable opponent. Underestimate her at your peril.”
“And yet, she has weaknesses. Liabilities. Connections in New York. Or so your letter indicated.”
The letter he had written when he still thought that he mattered to William Howe, to Lord Germain, to the system he had devoted his life to maintaining and that had left him to die in the cold and dark. He had no intention of giving Frances Leighton to this ambitious, calculating man. To the government’s latest willing agent.
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