Whispers from the Shadows Read online

  She stood, her brows pulled down. What had she even sketched? And what was wrong with her, that she could not remember something so basic? She recalled the pencil in her hands and that intense concentration Mama had called her muse. The crick in her neck from being too long hunched over the desk. That burning need to join line to curve and shade to light. And the startling realization that night had passed and morning had come along with Thad.

  His fingers on her forehead, brushing through her hair.

  Her cheeks burned. His image filled her mind’s eye. Those yellow-topaz eyes, looking at her with the same focus she gave her art.

  Did he really distrust her? Think her so ignoble that she could be here to spy?

  “Are you all right, Gwyneth?” Opening her eyes, she saw that Philly had walked to the door but stood in the threshold, waiting. “You look flushed. Perhaps you ought to avoid the midday sun until you have acclimated to the heat.”

  The mere mention of it made her realize how heavy and humid the air hung. Yet the thought of going back inside… She had scarcely seen the sun for two months, being always closeted below deck on the Scribe under the fearful watch of the Wesleys.

  But she needed a bite to eat, or at least something to drink. She could take it by an open window, perhaps, and enjoy both sunshine and breeze. She smiled at Philly and followed her in.

  Mrs. Lane emerged from the library when she heard them enter. She embraced her daughter and then grasped Gwyneth’s hand. “Up already? I had hoped you would rest more than a few hours.”

  No lost day, then. Gwyneth smiled and realized it must have been Mrs. Lane who helped her up to bed that morning. Hers was the touch that felt like Mama’s. “I suspect it will take some time to adjust. But I feel better than I did on the ships. Clearer.” Mostly.

  “Good.” Mrs. Lane looked as though she would say more, but the sound of the front door interrupted her.

  Thad charged around the corner, so fast that they surely would have collided had Mrs. Lane not pulled them to the side. “Thaddeus! Did I not teach you against running in the house?”

  He grinned and doffed his hat. “You always said no running in your house. This one is mine.”

  Laughter sparkled in her eyes, though her lips remained straight. “But I am in its halls and in danger of being bowled over. Have a care.”

  “Yes, Mother. Sorry, Mother.” Looking as though he would rather laugh than play the part of meek son, he nevertheless leaned over to plant a kiss on his mother’s cheek. Then he turned his probing gaze on Gwyneth and frowned. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

  “She is not an owl, Thad.” Philly turned toward the kitchen. “Have you any apples for Grandmama Caro?”

  Thad pursed his lips, his gaze still on Gwyneth. “You were asleep when I left an hour ago, at least. You had to have gotten five hours.”

  He had left only an hour ago? That was when she had awoken. Perhaps she had heard him leave and that was what roused her. It would account for that insistence in the back of her mind that he was not at home.

  “Perhaps if the air cools this evening, we will all go for a promenade. A bit of exercise would no doubt help.” Mrs. Lane turned Gwyneth around with her.

  Philly was already halfway down the hall. “The apples, Thad?”

  “It depends on how many Jack pilfered while he was here.” Amusement wove through the words. “That little imp will devour them by the half dozen if he isn’t checked.”

  Mrs. Lane chuckled. “I tried to limit him. Go look, Philly. There ought to be plenty left.”

  His gaze was still upon Gwyneth. She felt it like a hand upon her cheek, but she couldn’t be sure whether it meant to slap or caress.

  She darted a glance up at him. No hatred spewed from his eyes, no suspicion. But then, even when he had narrowed his eyes at her last night—was it just last night?—it had been only intensity in his gaze. Contemplation perhaps, or calculation. But no dislike.

  Thankfully Mrs. Lane kept a hand upon her arm as she guided her toward the kitchen, for her vision blurred again. She kept moving, but with each step the floor wobbled more.

  Fire balled in her stomach. When would this stop, this infuriating weakness? They would all think her a burden, an invalid, a spoiled child incapable of standing on her own feet.

  Mrs. Lane’s voice echoed in her ears, but she could make out no particular words. A chaotic din filled her mind.

  Or, no, it was just that the entire household had converged upon the kitchen. The fog lifted from her eyes enough as they stepped into the room that she could see the Wesleys had both appeared, along with Mr. Lane, his arms laden with baskets from which Rosie unloaded vegetables and fruits. A Negro man leaned against the wall—he must be Henry, Rosie’s son-in-law. Philly was telling her father about something that required sweeping gestures of her hands, and little Jack had even returned. He bounced about like a marble in a ring, chanting, “Apples? Apples? I want apples!” until Mr. Lane stopped his ricocheting with a hand atop his head. The chant dissolved into giggles.

  Mrs. Lane headed for her husband—or perhaps the boy—and Gwyneth feared her knees would buckle, traitorous things.

  But then new hands braced her, cradling her elbows from behind. Thad. Obviously, as everyone else was in front of her. A glance down merely confirmed it. His long fingers, yes, curling around her arm. With that jagged nail on his left pointer finger, and the scar upon his opposite knuckle. Rough enough to declare he was a man of trade, yet smooth enough to prove he had done well at it and paid others, now, to take on the heavy burdens.

  And strong. Strong enough to all but lift her from her feet and set her gently upon a chair at the wide, thick table. When he then pressed a cool tin mug into her hands, she lifted it to her lips.

  Lemonade. Sweet and tart and blessedly cold. Gwyneth let her eyes slide shut and sipped again.

  “The market was all abuzz.” The elder Mr. Lane? It must be. “I trust you heard the same news I did, Thad.”

  “About the action along the Patuxent?” His voice flowed steady and smooth over her.

  “Aye.”

  “Battles? That close to us?” Who was that? A female, but who would be talking of war? Aunt Gates perhaps. “Who won?”

  “There was no tactical advantage to it, but Barney’s men won the day.”

  Barney. She had heard that name. One of the American leaders. Gwyneth sighed and leaned onto the arm she propped on the table. “That is a shame.”

  The silence pounded, scattering the lovely haze that had overtaken her. Her eyes flew open, and her pulse raced when she saw that every single person in the room stared at her, even little Jack.

  Oh, heavens. What had she said? Had she…? No, surely she had not replied to their news as she would have had Papa been the one sharing it. She was not so stupid, nor so insensitive.

  The fire seemed to leap from the stove directly onto her face. “Forgive me. I am so sorry. I was not thinking—Of course, you would…it is just that my father and his friends…forgive me. Please.”

  They all moved again, their gazes shifted, but she felt no relief. Not until Mrs. Lane knelt at her side and pressed a cool hand to her hot cheek. Gwyneth blinked burning tears away and focused on the warm green eyes of her hostess.

  “We understand, Gwyneth,” she said. Softly, calmly. “You are accustomed to giving the opposite reactions of ours to such news. We do not hold that against you. And never, never feel you must feign anything in our company. You may disagree all you like with us, with our positions, with our loyalties. Do you understand?”

  How could she, when she had just shouted with that careless murmur that she was their enemy? Gwyneth shook her head.

  Mrs. Lane smiled and smoothed the damp tendrils from Gwyneth’s cheek. “For years during the Revolution, I had to pretend to be what I was not. I had to deny everything I held dear. You will not be asked to do the same. Think what you will, believe what you will, sweet one. Our only requirement is that you take no action that
could endanger us.”

  She covered the woman’s hand with her own and held on lest the tide snatch her away from this oasis and out to the ravaging sea. “I could not. Would not. I swear to you that.”

  A plate slid onto the table, a yellow square covered in melting butter. She sent a questioning look up, and up still more into Thad’s face. He nodded toward the plate. “Corn bread. Sweet but hearty. You need to eat.”

  “Thad.” What did she intend to say? She could hardly expect her feeble words to convince these people that she could be trusted, that though she wished her homeland victory always, that did not mean she wished theirs defeat. She let her gaze drop. “Thank you.”

  He nodded and then turned back to his father. “That is not all I heard. They are raiding again.”

  Raiding…again. The words made something clang in the back of her mind, some memory from home. Words drifting down a hallway, out of Papa’s study. His precious voice, raised in frustration. Insisting that this was not how England waged war.

  Mr. Lane sighed. “Provisions?”

  “If only that, it would be nothing beyond the expected.”

  Another, deeper sigh. “We have friends along the Patuxent.”

  “I know. Let us pray they abandoned their farm before the British arrived. The reports I heard were of savage attacks on innocents. Houses burned, churches destroyed.”

  “Much like Hampton.”

  “But at Hampton ’twas the Independent Foreigners that committed the atrocities.” Thad’s tone was hard, cool. “Now the British ranks all seem to have adopted the tactics that outraged them at the start.”

  Though her stomach churned, she picked up the crumbly bread and told herself it was hunger that made her hands shake so. Not fear, not dread, not revulsion. Only hunger.

  Nine

  Thad shoved his fingers through his hair and concentrated on the document before him. He blew on the final word, still darkening from the layer of counter liquid he had applied, and watched it turn from pale green to blue to nearly black. The news from Freeman was, in a way, exactly what he had expected.

  The northern front of the war was an entirely different enterprise from what they faced in the Chesapeake. On the Canadian border, the British weren’t the aggressors, they were the ones defending their territory—territory the politicians in Washington City had decided to try to annex since war had handed them a shiny excuse.

  For a good while little effect had been felt here, given that the British didn’t know the waterways well enough to either stop the American privateers from escaping the blockade or to navigate their fleet away from the coast. But they had fallen back on proven tactics—luring slaves away from their masters with the promise of freedom in exchange for their help. And given Maryland and Virginia’s large slave population, more effort had been put into stemming revolts than in fending off the British.

  Freeman had taken too great a risk, posing as a runaway himself, to get Thad names, and no doubt it would have proven fruitless had the man, now seventy, not looked fifteen years younger than he was.

  But now they knew. Now they knew which parts of the British navy had native pilots to lead them through the estuaries. No wonder the raids along the Patuxent, the aggression, the confidence.

  Thad drew his letter forward, the one he would send with Arnaud to Washington City tomorrow to be delivered directly into Congressman Tallmadge’s hand. He uncorked the vial of sympathetic stain.

  The formula was similar to the one the Culper Ring had used during the Revolution. But when the brothers Jay had ceased its production after the war, Father had taken it over and made a few small changes.

  Thad drew out his code book as well, though he only occasionally needed to refer to it. Mother and Father had set to work on this too after peace settled over the land some thirty years ago. They had used Tallmadge’s original code as a base but had studied other examples of cryptography and had made improvements accordingly. No longer, for instance, did they encode the shortest words—such as “a,” “an,” “I,” and “the”—for doing so would all but guarantee that anyone who got their hands on a developed message could crack it. He had been rather surprised to look at both new and old versions and see that Tallmadge hadn’t considered that from the start.

  But then, they had been novices, all of them. Trained only in love for their country, not in espionage.

  Thad flipped open the book. He had found it in a hidden drawer of Mother’s secretaire when he was thirteen and had set about memorizing it so that he and Arnaud could pass messages between them in school. It had earned him a knuckle rapping from Mr. Taylor, but still the memory made him grin. When his parents realized what he’d done, they had been far too impressed with him to dole out any extra punishment.

  And a ruler across his hands was not so great a penalty, not when one considered that his mother had risked her life every time she wrote a message. Had she been caught, she would have been hung. Thad had no such danger facing him. Though the British would no doubt be happy to see him dead, they were hardly within reach.

  He and Tallmadge had political enemies aplenty, though.

  As Mother would say, better to spend an hour encoding and decoding than a lifetime wishing one had.

  He dipped his quill into the vial of stain. Careful not to let the straw-colored ink cross over the iron gall and leave telltale smudges, he penned the pertinent information into the blank space between the visible lines. Even as he wrote, the pale stain faded and dried, disappearing entirely.

  Magic. Two centuries earlier, Father would have been called a sorcerer for creating such a potion and likely burned at the stake. Praise the Lord they lived in a more enlightened age.

  Once the message was dry, Thad folded the sheet, let a few drops of melted wax fall onto the edge, and pressed to seal it. He slid the code book and vials back into their drawer, cleaned and mended his quill to be ready for its next use, and then pushed away from his desk. Arnaud had said he would be over to collect Jack before dinner, which meant anytime.

  As if summoned by his thoughts, Jack came flying into his study, leaping upon his legs and trying to climb him like a ratline. Thad laughed and hauled him up into his arms.

  But the boy stuck out his lip. “Not funny.”

  No? Odd, he had heard him laughing like a loon not five minutes earlier. “What is not funny?”

  “Papa said it is time to go home, but I don’t want to go home. ’Tis no fun there.”

  Thad lifted his brows and met the boy’s scowling brown eyes. “Is that not where all your toys are? Your carved horse, your tin soldiers? Your wagon?”

  For some reason, that reminder only served to bring the lip out farther. “Papa is mean.”

  “Oh?”

  “I asked if he would bring them all back here, and he said no. But I bringded them all before.”

  “Brought.” Thad tapped Jack’s nose and gave him his best wise-uncle look. “And that was because you were staying with us for a month, my little mate, not for an afternoon.”

  “But—”

  “Jacques?” Arnaud appeared in the doorway, his smile edged in frustration. “Are you ready?”

  The boy squirmed so that Thad had no choice but to put him down lest he fall and then went tearing from the room shouting something to the effect of “No!”

  Rather than chase after him, Arnaud fell into one of the leather chairs with a long sigh and rubbed a hand over his face. “I am a monster, you know, for expecting my son to live at his own home with me.”

  Thad sat on the edge of his desk. “Hmm. That is because you have no Grandmama Winnie there. Though if you wish to transfer Father’s laboratory to your house and have them stay with you…”

  The look Arnaud shot him was far too pained to play along with the jest. “Am I doing wrong by him, Thad?”

  Sorrow pulsated from his friend’s hunched shoulders. Thad sent a silent prayer heavenward. “He is still so young, Alain. He hasn’t the reason yet to sort throug
h his conflicting emotions—his love for you and his fear for you.”

  Arnaud seemed not to hear him. His gaze remained fastened on a tassel of the rug, his shoulders now slumped. “I still miss her so. I still think, every time I feel at a loss with him, that Marguerite would know exactly what to do.”

  Thad sighed and gripped the edge of wood under his hands. “She would be proud of you. Proud of you for taking charge of him when it would have been so easy to entrust him to someone else.”

  The way Arnaud winced, eyes closed, made Thad wonder if the pain would ever dull for this friend of his. “If only I had not missed so much of his life, perhaps then it would be better. Perhaps I would not feel so helpless had I been here when he was born, before Marguerite died.”

  “’Tisn’t your fault you were not. Those pirates all but killed you—”

  “But I ought not have gone.” Arnaud surged to his feet and paced to the window. “Had I but listened to that blasted feeling of yours…”

  How different it all would be. So many years of questions and grief that never would have been. So many fewer nightmares. So many shadows that would have no place.

  But still, there was light anew. “We must simply thank the Almighty yet again for the miracle of your escape, of your return to Jack, and trust that He is leading you still. Just as He led you out of that infested pit in Istanbul.”

  Arnaud braced himself against the window frame. “I know. And I have no trouble crediting Him with the miracles, but seeing Him in the hours of tedium is…” He squinted out the window as he cocked his head to the side. “That looks like—But it cannot be.”

  Thad gained the window with two quick strides, his eyes going wide at the figure riding down the street who looked to barely be keeping his saddle. “Whittier?”

  “It cannot be. Last I heard, he joined up with Barney’s flotilla after the British sealed the harbor. He ought to be well up the Patuxent.”

  The river’s name, along with the way the man in the saddle listed to the side, lit a spark of urgency within Thad in the same place that warned him against Arnaud’s disastrous trip to the Mediterranean. He ducked his head through the open window, his left leg following.