Gwyneth wished, prayed she would wake up and prove this scene nothing more than another nightmare. But despite the table corner biting into her palm, the image wouldn’t waver. Instead, Thad’s words kept echoing through her head.
How could it be true? She tried to draw in a breath deep enough to soothe, but an invisible hand pressed on her chest.
Thad was a spy. Whatever he wanted to call it, that was what it came down to. That was why he heard so often from all his sailor friends. That was why Mr. Whittier had sought him out in his last moments. That was why he disappeared at odd hours. Because he was involved in espionage. Perhaps not the filthy kind, perhaps not for gain. But still he went slinking around in the dark, still he passed along information to those for whom it was not intended. Still he sought to undermine the British cause. Not openly, honorably, on a field of battle, but underhandedly.
Why, then, did her feet still want to pull her his way?
She gripped the edge of the table until her knuckles ached. “I most certainly am not involved.”
“Not willingly.” Thad pushed off the windowsill, and for half a pulse she feared he would come to her.
He walked past, to the door, and her heart sighed in disappointment. Fickle thing.
A moment later she heard him opening one of his saddlebags, though she didn’t turn to watch. Couldn’t. What did it matter what he was pulling out? Culpers. The name still reverberated, though she had no notion why it would or what it mattered.
“This arrived on the same ship as the news from Belgium.” His voice drew nearer again, but then his steps halted. “Mother, there you are.”
Gwyneth finally convinced her head to move, though the rest of her frame remained rigid. Mrs. Lane entered the room with caution in her step, her gaze wary. Her eyes were still red rimmed, her lovely face swollen with grief.
Tears threatened Gwyneth’s eyes yet again at the sight. It had been a solace to grieve with someone who mourned Papa as well. She had felt, sitting beside Mrs. Lane on the couch, as if she had a real friend again, someone who could be there when she so desperately needed Mama.
Now she wished she could spare her this truth about her son.
“What is it?” Despite the evidence of her sorrow, Mrs. Lane’s gaze was sharp as she glanced around the room. “Tell me there is no more bad news.”
Thad merely cleared his throat and motioned for her to move toward his father. “I was about to explain to Gwyneth and Father how, whether she wished to be or not, Gwyneth is irrevocably involved in our Culper business.”
Our? Gwyneth sagged against the table. They could not possibly all…
“Thaddeus.” Mrs. Lane’s outrage rang differently than Gwyneth had expected. “This had better be an exceptional explanation.”
Thad lifted the folded paper in his hand. “Like this, perhaps? ‘When we captured the ship, one rather smirking sailor told us there would be no stopping the British now that their forces were free from Europe, especially after the murder. I asked him what in thunder he meant by that, and he made mention of a beloved general, slain in his home. Said he heard from the lips of the general’s brother-in-law, who holds a government office, that an American spy was most likely responsible, and that he planned to personally see to retribution.’ ” He lowered the page and captured Gwyneth’s gaze, though she tried to look away before he could. “Sound familiar, sweet?”
She shook her head, sending a loose curl to irritate her cheek. “I have no uncle in the government. Two are in the House of Lords, but that is not exactly an office.” Although a beloved general, slain in his home…who else could it possibly mean? There was no other general so beloved in England.
“I believe you do, in fact.” He folded the page, his every move slow and quiet, as if she were a rabbit he feared startling away. “There is a Gates in the Home Office. I was not sure at first it was your Gates, but I have been convinced.”
“The Home…” Her head would not shake quickly enough to show how completely she rejected that idea. “Nay. My uncle is a…a writer.” Was he not? I deal in words, he had said. What if…? What if those words were not written in some Gothic novel, but in…this?
Images flashed, lightning-fast portraits, frozen in time. And then Papa’s accusation came back to her. The Home Office has decent men in it yet. A few at least, though you are not one of them.
How, why had she forgotten that so long? Her knees wanted to give way, but she held fast to the table. If she let herself fall, Thad would be at her side in a heartbeat. He would lift her and carry her to the couch. Touch her face and smooth her hair.
And she would enjoy it far too much. “No. Papa would have nothing to do with espionage.”
A snort of a laugh spilled from Thad’s lips. “He was a general, Gwyneth. Generals rely on intelligence to plot their campaigns.”
“Scouting is different.”
His lips twitched again into an infuriating grin. “Good to know you think so, as that is a more accurate description of what we do. Though I daresay he used intelligence from other sources too.”
“You do not understand. He lost his dearest friend to espionage. He hated the entire practice.” Though she felt the elder Lanes shift, she kept her gaze on Thad. “I heard him many times speak of the devastation of losing Major André.”
“It was quite a blow to us all.” Mrs. Lane’s voice slipped into the conversation quietly, gently. “André was a fine man, yet had he succeeded in his task, Benedict Arnold would have handed West Point over to the British. There would be no United States of America today.”
Something in her tone drew Gwyneth’s gaze to her face, where she read regret mixed with determination.
Mrs. Lane shook her head. “It can be a sad business indeed, and a dangerous one. Yet sometimes, my dear, it must be done for the greater good, for the greater calling. Much as he detested it, your father knew that. It is, in fact, how he met your mother.”
“No.” She couldn’t explain why the denial came so fast and hot, except that it grated against all she knew.
Thad eased a step closer. Had she any room to do so, she would have backed up a step in response. He held out a hand, imploring. “Think about it, sweet. What was a British officer doing in France on the eve of revolution?”
Why must they do this? Why must they make her question what had always just been? “France and England were not at war yet. He was…on holiday.” Yet the claim sounded so weak now, where it had always been undeserving of examination before.
“On holiday,” Thad echoed softly. “At Versailles? Paris, perhaps, I would believe, but the palace itself?”
A tremor swept through her. He must have been scouting, then. That was all. Scouting out the situation that everyone the world over knew was tense. Seeing…evaluating…oh, mercy. He had already reached the rank of brigadier general. Such mundane tasks would never fall to him, not unless there were a specific purpose that only he could fulfill. “You think my father went to France on covert business?”
Mrs. Lane released her husband’s arm and glided over to take Gwyneth’s hand. “I know he did. We came to London for the wedding, and he confided in us. He was sent in under the guise of a comte to whom he bore an especial resemblance, and who had been in British custody for many years. First he went to get a gauge of how things stood in the fracturing political system. And then he returned to help your mother and grandmother escape before the Revolution erupted, upon your grandfather’s request.”
A convulsion pulsed through her, made a cry try to rip from her throat, but she reined it in. “So you know, then, that it was my uncle.”
Mrs. Lane’s fingers squeezed hers. “He never said who sent him. But at this point it seems clear. Which I find terrifying. Because the one thing I remember about Mr. Gates from the two times I met him was that, under his polite smile, he hated us simply for being American.”
Mr. Lane followed his wife to Gwyneth’s side. No merriment sparked now in his eyes, only calculating sobriety. “Let us pray Isaac never confided in Gates, or it would be more than an ambiguous hatred he feels for us.”
Before she could wrap her lips around the question of why that would be so, Mrs. Lane sighed and tightened her grasp on Gwyneth’s fingers. “Your father knew of our part in the Revolution—that through a chain of well-trusted intelligencers I was feeding General Washington information. He cannot have known we revived the Culpers three years ago—”
“Give the man credit, Mother. ’Tis logical.” Thad drummed the fingers of one hand against the opposite arm. “And I suspect he also knew I had taken over its primary function, given that letter he sent with you, Gwyneth. Not to mention the one two months earlier.”
She twitched to alert like a hound who had caught the fox’s scent. “My father wrote you before he sent me here? What did he say?”
“Nothing intelligible, but I will fetch it.”
A moment later he was out the door, leaving Gwyneth to stare at his parents. They looked, standing there with their quick-witted gazes, like any well-settled couple. Bound by love, comfortably situated, well but simply dressed. Handsome and pleasant.
Why could it not be so easy? “What am I to do with this information?” The question whispered out before she could stop it.
Mr. Lane’s mouth pulled into a half smile. “The same thing your father did, my dear. Accept us for who we are and follow the leading of the heavenly Father. You must do what He tells you, above all.”
Her gaze fell to the floor. “What if He tells me to turn you over to the British authorities?”
A gentle touch on her chin drew her gaze up again. Mrs. Lane’s eyes glistened. “I believe that would be to your uncle, Gwyneth. Which means Thaddeus is right. You are involved because your family is involved, and because you are fleeing that family.”
Thad ducked back under the door frame, a piece of paper in hand. “There is a reason your father entrusted you to us, sweet. He must have thought that, together, we could best Gates.”
Together. Together with a family that had more secrets than London had soirees. Together with this man who made her insides a jumble of trust and frustration, fascination and fear.
A man who would be the target of each and every British rifle if they knew who he was and what he did.
He held out the paper. “Any light you can shed on this would be welcome.”
Ought she? But this was from Papa, and he would have sent nothing to compromise England. She took the page, ignoring the trill of awareness when her fingers brushed Thad’s. Her head began to shake only a line or two in. ’Twas Papa’s hand, sure enough, but the message made no sense. All the right names were mentioned—Mama, Uncle Gates, even Gwyneth—and the sentences made sense as mere arrangements of words. Just not as facts. “This is all wrong. Every bit of it.”
Mrs. Lane sighed. “That much we realized. Have you any idea what he could mean by it? We have tried codes, known counter liquors for invisible ink, everything.”
Invisible ink? Codes? She lowered the paper so she could better stare at the Lanes, first the couple and then the son. What family dealt in such things?
Thad leaned against the table beside her. “Did he send anything else with you? Some sort of text he uses as a key, perhaps? A book, another letter? Anything?”
Gwyneth frowned. “In all honesty, I can scarcely recall what was in my trunk. So much of the past months has been a fog. But I know Mrs. Wesley emptied it out, and I cannot remember seeing anything in there I did not myself pack.”
Her gaze caught on one of the lines. Not on the words, but on their arrangement. The spacing looked off. A word more narrow than the rest. Papa usually had such measured script, all in a careful, elegant flow. And there, on a line near the bottom, was a touch too much space between two words.
Testament to his hurry, perhaps?
“What do you see?” Thad leaned close, peering at the letter with her.
“Just irregularities in his hand.” She pointed at the two places.
A low hum sounded in Thad’s throat. “Interesting. You notice things I do not. No great surprise from our resident Michelangelo.”
The praise warmed her, though ice rushed through her veins in the next moment. She ought not earn such accolades in this way. Trying to find hidden meaning in her own father’s words… Such secrets ought not be chasing her, such darkness ought not be lurking. She ought to be fully ensconced in her first Season, basking in the joy of a betrothal to Sir Arthur.
But he had become nothing more than a shadow in her memory.
She touched a finger to where Papa had signed his name. So familiar, those loops and lines. Like his face, his eyes, his laugh. Yet this had outlived him, this iron gall on paper, and had shown his life to be so very different from what she thought it was. In what had he been involved? What secrets had he kept until they killed him? Why had he never told her, even when matters became so dire he must send her away?
“Would you like to keep the letter?” Thad’s voice strummed across her nerves. “It does me very little good without knowing how to find its meaning.”
For a moment, she considered the offer. Considered what balm it might be to open this up and see his hand.
Considered how that balm would be negated by the nonsensical words. “I thank you, but no. It is meant for you. You ought to keep it. I…I will go look through all my things to make sure he did not include anything that could help us.”
And she would. But what she really wanted to do was put those new brushes in her case and run her fingers over the bristles to get to know their shape and structure. Then to pick up her pencil and cure that sheet of paper of its blank state. Her hand flexed in anticipation. Later. As soon as she had kept her promise.
Thad bent down, scooped up the scattered brushes, and picked up her pencil. He held them out to her with an indulgent smile. “Which will it be?”
She reached for the whole set with a small return smile. “Both. After my search.”
Rather than relinquishing the brushes, he held them when she grabbed hold. Which, of course, forced her gaze up to his. The irises shone like amber, holding life within them. “You must remember, sweet,” he murmured, “that you needn’t feel any disillusionment on account of this discovery about your father. Every decision he made, every bit of information he withheld would have been to protect you.”
Her eyes burned, so she let her gaze drop again. How odd it was to need such a reminder. And more, to have gotten it from an American spy.