Several hours later, as Cecilia followed the cheerful young lieutenant who had been dispatched to escort her to the Devil’s Head, she wondered when her heart might finally stop pounding. Dear heavens, how many lies had she told this afternoon? She had tried to keep her answers as close to the truth as possible, both to ease her conscience and because she had no idea how else to keep track of it all.
She should have told Edward the truth. She’d been about to, honestly, but then Colonel Stubbs had returned with the doctor. There was no way she was going to make her confession with that audience. She would have been booted from the hospital for certain, and Edward still needed her.
She still needed him.
She was alone in a very strange land. She was almost out of funds. And now that her reason for holding herself together had woken up, she could finally admit to herself—she was scared out of her mind.
If Edward repudiated her she’d be soon in the streets. She’d have no choice but to go back to England, and she couldn’t do that, not without discovering what had happened to her brother. She had sacrificed so much to make this journey. It had taken every ounce of her courage. She could not give up now.
But how could she continue to lie to him? Edward Rokesby was a good man. He did not deserve to be taken advantage of in such a brazen manner. Furthermore, he was Thomas’s closest friend. The two men had met when they had first entered the army, and as officers in the same regiment, they’d been sent over to North America at the same time. As far as Cecilia knew, they had served together ever since.
She knew that Edward felt kindly toward her. If she told him the truth, surely he’d understand why she’d lied. He would want to help her. Wouldn’t he?
But all this was neither here nor there. Or at the very least it could be put off until the following day. The Devil’s Head was just down the street, and with it the promise of a warm bed and a filling meal. Surely she deserved that much.
Goal for today: Don’t feel guilty. At least not for eating a proper meal.
“Almost there,” the lieutenant said with a smile.
Cecilia gave him a nod. New York was such a strange place. According to the woman who’d run her boardinghouse, there were more than twenty thousand people crowded into what was not a very large area at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Cecilia wasn’t sure what the population had been before the war, but she’d been told that numbers had surged once the British had taken over the city as their headquarters. Scarlet-clad soldiers were everywhere, and every available building had been pressed into service to house them. Supporters of the Continental Congress had long since left town, but they had been replaced and more by a rush of Loyalist refugees who’d fled neighboring colonies in search of British protection.
But the strangest sight—to Cecilia, at least—were the Negroes. She had never seen people with such dark skin before, and she’d been startled by how many of them there were in the bustling port town.
“Escaped slaves,” the lieutenant said, following Cecilia’s gaze to the dark-skinned man coming out of the blacksmith’s shop across the street.
“I beg your pardon?”
“They’ve been coming up here by the hundreds,” the lieutenant said with a shrug. “General Clinton freed them all last month, but no one in Patriot territories is obeying the order, so their slaves have been running away to us.” He frowned. “Not sure we’ve got room for them, to be honest. But you can’t blame a man for wanting to be free.”
“No,” Cecilia murmured, glancing back over her shoulder. When she turned back to the lieutenant, he was already at the entrance to the Devil’s Head Inn.
“Here we are,” he said, holding the door for her.
“Thank you.” She stepped in and then out of his way so that he might locate the innkeeper. Clutching her meager valise in front of her, Cecilia took in the main room of the inn and public house. It looked very much like its British counterparts—dimly lit, a bit too crowded, and with sticky bits on the floor that Cecilia chose to believe were ale. A buxom young woman moved swiftly between the tables, deftly setting down mugs with one hand as she cleared dishes with the other. Behind the bar a man with a bushy mustache fiddled with the tap on a barrel, cursing when it seemed to jam up.
It would have felt like home had not almost every seat been filled with scarlet-clad soldiers.
There were a few ladies among their ranks, and from their clothing and demeanor Cecilia assumed they were respectable. Officers’ wives, maybe? She’d heard that some women had accompanied their husbands to the New World. She supposed she was one of them now, for at least one more day.
“Miss Harcourt!”
Startled, Cecilia turned toward a table in the middle of the room. One of the soldiers—a man of middling years with thinning brown hair—was rising to his feet. “Miss Harcourt,” he repeated. “It is a surprise to see you here.”
Her lips parted. She knew this man. She detested this man. He was the first person she’d sought out in her quest to find Thomas, and he’d been the most condescending and unhelpful of the bunch.
“Major Wilkins,” she said, bobbing a polite curtsy even as her mind was whirring with unease. More lies. She needed to come up with more lies, and quickly.
“Are you well?” he asked in his customary brusque voice.
“I am.” She glanced over at the lieutenant, who was now conferring with another soldier. “Thank you for asking.”
“I had assumed you would be planning your return to England.”
She gave him a little smile and a shrug in lieu of a reply. Truly, she did not wish to speak with him. And she had never given him any indication that she planned to leave New York.
“Mrs. Rokesby! Ah, there you are.”
Saved by the young lieutenant, Cecilia thought gratefully. He was making his way back to her side, a large brass key in his hand.
“I spoke to the innkeeper,” he said, “and to—”
“Mrs. Rokesby?” Major Wilkins interjected.
The lieutenant snapped to attention when he saw the major. “Sir,” he said.
Wilkins brushed him off. “Did he call you Mrs. Rokesby?”
“Is that not your name?” the lieutenant asked.
Cecilia fought against the fist that seemed to be closing around her heart. “I—”
The major turned back to her with a frown. “I thought you to be unmarried.”
“I was,” she blurted out. “I mean—” Damn it, that wasn’t going to hold water. She couldn’t have got herself married in the last three days. “I was. Some time ago. I was unmarried. We all were. I mean, if one is married now, one once was un—”
She didn’t even bother to finish. Good God, she sounded the worst sort of ninny. She was giving women everywhere a bad name.