The British care only for Canada, they had said. There’s no tactical reason for them to attack us.
“You are all a bunch of dunderheads,” Thad muttered under his breath, hoping the wind would carry the sentiment back to the capital. Had they a lick of sense, they would realize this was neither about military tactics nor logic. This was about revenge for the Revolution. It was about men now admirals whose fathers had been killed here a generation before. It was about hatred.
Thad twisted the reins around his hands and clicked Electra up into an easy trot. At least the president had been alarmed by the news from Europe, but to launch an effective campaign against the British, secretaries Jones and Armstrong had to take action.
And from what he had seen, that was unlikely.
Heat welled up inside. ’Twas like April 1810 all over again. That dread expectation. That knowing he had been right but without the power to change anything. And then looking into the hollow eyes of a weary sailor and hearing the words that sealed his future. Arnaud is dead. Barbary pirates took his ship and killed everyone but me.
Now the harried script of the ambassador in Ghent. There is an outcry for vengeance. With France surrendered, the populace of England is now demanding they teach America a lesson. That they burn our cities and punish us for our audacity. Our shores will soon be covered in Redcoats again.
Four years ago, there was nothing he had been able to do. He could not go back in time and tie Arnaud to a chair to keep him from taking that voyage. He had been able only to go to his widow, hat in hand, and tell her his premonition had been right. Watch as the pain shattered her gaze and then bent her back, sending her into labor with Jack. Swear to her he would keep them safe.
He clenched his teeth together as Electra clopped her way from dusty road to cobbled street. He would not sit idly now and be ignored. He would not merely utter a prayer and then dismiss that tug in his spirit that cried Do something!
He would act.
Mother’s face filled his mind, her emerald eyes sober and gleaming with purpose. He could see her once again handing over the crate filled with their legacy. The codes she and Father had rewritten. The invisible ink they had perfected.
The mantle.
“Welcome to the Culper Ring,” she had said that day in 1811, when war was still but a whisper on the lips of sailors enraged by the impressment. “You will answer to Congressman Tallmadge, code-named John Bolton. He will refer to you as Samuel Culper III. Whenever you bring someone into the Ring, assign them a designation, either a name or numeral. But Thaddeus.”
She had gripped the crate tighter rather than releasing it. “This is no game. Only those you trust most implicitly can know about the Culpers. Anonymity is the best tool in this box.”
With that advice he had never wanted to argue. It was her next directive that had grated.
“We do not take direct action. We merely put information into the hands of those who need it.”
We do not take direct action. Thad had known that was one tenant he could not obey. It had proven itself right for Mother and Father, when action had nearly undone them, but he had learned his own lessons about what one could lose when one did not act.
The key, in either case, was to obey that Voice in the spirit, of the Spirit. That whisper that said go or stay. Act or wait. That murmur that told him now the fate of his nation could not be left solely to the politicians.
He turned down the road that was the most direct route home—and pulled Electra to a halt when he spotted the Wesleys rolling his direction in an unfamiliar wagon. “Mr. Wesley?”
Though his wife merely folded her arms and averted her face, Mr. Wesley regarded him wearily. “We are going to Canada, Captain Lane. If we can without passes. And from there, home.”
Thad’s horse shifted. “You are abandoning her?”
“’Tis hardly abandonment.” Mrs. Wesley huffed and lifted her chin. “She is safe enough, though cold-hearted and cracked in the nob.”
“Now, Georgetta—”
“The girl left her father to die, Marcus, and now she is trying to blame it on her uncle.” The woman’s sniff seemed to be holding back tears. “Next you know, it’ll be us she turns on and leaves slain somewhere.”
Mr. Wesley sighed. “I admit she ain’t been right since we got on that ship. But—”
“I’ll not stay with her, Marcus. When I think of how she ran out of that house and never once hinted at what she left behind her—” Mrs. Wesley pressed a hand to her lips, but it did nothing to contain the sob. “The poor general.”
Thad drew in a long breath as the rope within him went taut. One side pulled him to help, to calm them, to offer them whatever support he could. To convince them Gwyneth had not hurt them; she had been hurt herself. But he saw no crack in their armor. Getting through to them would take more time than they would grant him.