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.