Free The Turncoat by Donna Thorland

a blow, and André went down, but only for a moment. He rose back up like a buoy, with a wicked smile and a glint in his eye. He would have a black eye in the morning.
    Something told Tremayne that André did not take kindly to being bested. In his next move, he proved Tremayne right. With speed and grace, he executed a series of dirty maneuvers just clean enough to be allowable, but ungentlemanly all the same, bringing his opponent down in a bloody heap on the boards. It was, reflected Tremayne, exactly what he would have done.
    André collected a tidy pile of winnings, and a simpering blonde slipped his shirt over his shoulders.
    “Good man,” Howe opined, collecting his own winnings, Tremayne, and André, and heading out onto the terrace and into the cool night air. Steam rose off André’s glistening chest. “Captain André here has need of you, Peter.”
    Dirtier than cleaning the stables. On the surface, Captain André was a staff officer and charming dilettante, his name already connected with several of the town’s Tory daughters, most often with the notorious Peggies: Shippen and Chew, though Shippen was said to be the odds-on favorite. No doubt they were charmed by the ambitious Huguenot’s gallant manner and exotic good looks; his coal black hair and gold-flecked hazel eyes. His dress and manner, no doubt learned during his education in Geneva, were altogether impeccable. Few would guess he was the son of a middling Huguenot merchant.
    But his brother officers knew André as a hardened veteran of the siege of Fort St. John. He’d spent nearly a year in captivity after the garrison surrendered, and came away from the experience with a bitter dislike of Americans. Those within Howe’s close circle knew him better as a calculating and ambitious spymaster who would stop at nothing to further himself.
    “You can identify the Merry Widow,” Howe explained to Tremayne.
    Tremayne didn’t like where this was going, and fought against the urge to touch the letter and the ribbon concealed in his breast pocket.
    André drained the glass of punch he was holding and fixed his remarkable gold-flecked eyes on Tremayne. “Mrs. Ferrers won’t come near us, Lord Sancreed, because I can identify her. She’s working through someone else. We need a name.”
    Kate. Her name was Kate. And she was false, ruinously false, duplicitous and beguiling. “I’m not certain I can help you. I wouldn’t know the first thing about ferreting out a spy.”
    “That is unfortunate.” General Howe sounded disappointed. “Do you know what chevaux-de-frise are, Major?”
    “Frisian horses. Some kind of river fortification,” Tremayne ventured. He was a soldier, not a sailor.
    “An incredibly nasty bit of business,” Howe replied. “Pine boxes thirty feet square and weighted with stone, topped with iron pikes. Float ’em downriver, sink ’em, and no ship can pass without exact knowledge of their locations.”
    “ Our ships cannot pass,” supplied André. “Philadelphia is a trap fast closing around us. The Rebels control the roads to the north. We are surrounded by water on the south, east, and west. We must have the Schuylkill and the Delaware or we cannot supply the city. Washington hopes to starve us out of Philadelphia and force a winter march on us.”
    Howe downed his beaker of punch in a single draught. “The chevaux-de-frise protect the approaches to Rebel forts Mercer and Mifflin—if we attempt to bring our ships with their naval cannon into range of the forts, they will be holed and sunk. And if we attempt to move the chevaux-de-frise, our craft will be blown to flinders by the long gun batteries in the forts. My brother, the admiral, has four frigates loaded with supplies sitting idle in the Delaware. He cannot reach us.” Almost as an afterthought, Howe added, “Colonel Donop has offered to lead a land assault on Mercer.”
    Donop. The Hessian colonel beguiled and disgraced by the Merry Widow—Mrs. Ferrers—at