Circle of Spies (The Culper Ring #3)

“I’m in no great hurry for the horse.” Though that tingle at the base of his neck was interesting. Devereaux waited for the man to look his way again, and then he lifted a hand, rubbing a finger over the top of his lip.

The smithy’s eyes snapped. He cleared his throat and gave the answering tug on his ear.

A brother Knight. Finally. Finally things were going right.





Eighteen


Slade might be a friend of silence, but he hated little more than the sudden descending of it on a room just because he entered. Well, not the whole room. But the familiar corner of the tavern in Washington went deathly quiet when his colleagues spotted him. And the ever-present knot in his gut twisted.

The men had been friends not all that long ago. The kind he would give his life for, certain they would do the same for him. Brothers, far more than Ross had ever been. But now they all looked at him with distrust, some with outright hatred. As if they were none too sure it had been his twin who had been buried. As if wondering if the face that had deceived them four months ago were the same one approaching them now.

None of them had been willing to take his father’s word as to which Osborne son had come away from that dark boardinghouse room the victor. None but Pinkerton himself.

Slade’s fingers curled into his palm as he wove his way around the last crowded table between him and them. Was there anything left in his life Ross hadn’t tainted, hadn’t ruined?

Yet part of him knew it was his own fault. He forced his fingers to relax, and then forced his face to follow suit into the peaceful lines his brother could never replicate, hadn’t understood. Had Slade not taken that assignment, hadn’t been the first one to borrow his brother’s name, he wouldn’t be in this mess.

It hadn’t been his idea. He hadn’t wanted to assume the cover of a soldier in the Confederate army, arriving to take his brother’s place after their father begged Ross out of following through on his commitment. Pinkerton had been the one to ask it. Pinkerton had been the one to claim that he could get invaluable information from behind enemy lines.

He stopped at the table of stony, silent detectives and nodded at them. It hadn’t been his idea, but he had been so sure it was the right decision. And why? Why had the Lord wanted him there, while his brother ruined his life here? Why had He led him home that day, the day Ross was lying in wait for him? Why, why had He whispered a warning to duck but not stayed his hand when he raised his pistol?

Why did the whole blasted world have to shatter with that one pull of a trigger?

Frederick Herschel, once the closest of his friends, leaned back in his chair and glared at him. “What do you want, Osborne?”

Osborne. He used to call him Slade. Back when he could be sure that’s who he was. He drew in a long breath that brought no ease. “I need to talk to you.”

The man to his right, Kaplan, pushed away from the table with thunder in his gaze. “You’ve got nothing to say I wanna hear.” He spat on the floor and strode to the bar.

The others followed him, their movements all slow, deliberate, and menacing. As if they would pull their weapons happily. Herschel was the only one who held his seat, but Slade knew it was no favor. He was flipping a coin through his fingers, the way he did when he was working. Measuring, probing, discovering. Ready to pounce. He used his foot to push out a chair. “This ought to be real entertaining.”

Slade sank onto the sturdy wood. If any of these men should have known him, recognized him behind the face that Ross shared, it was Herschel. “Hersh…” He met his friend’s gaze but saw nothing. Nothing. He sighed and leaned close. “Pinkerton said he’d tell you about this new job he has me on. Did he?”

The only indication that Herschel even heard him was the long, lazy blink.

He’d take that as a yes. Leaning even closer, he pitched his voice low. “I’m in. The groundwork Ross laid—” He hated to even say the name, but what choice did he have? “—did its job like Pinkerton hoped. They’re starting to trust me.”

A snort escaped Herschel’s lips, puffed out beneath his long mustache.

It might as well have been a curse. Or a dagger, the way it pierced. Would he ever be able to convince these men he was honest? Or would they think him always just waiting for the right moment to betray them, the way Ross had done?

The words of the prayer he had read on the train here, the faded brown writing on the yellowed page, whispered through his mind. Let me willingly accept misery, sorrows, temptations, if I can thereby feel sin as the greatest evil, and be delivered from it with gratitude to Thee…

Slade let the centuries-old thought sink deep and join with the truths his father had taught him all his life. He had been forgiven. He had left the old ways behind. And so what were these pains but a reminder of what he had escaped? Even if his friends never accepted him again, he would know he was living according to the Lord.