Free Mistress Firebrand by Donna Thorland Page A

again in a moment.”
    It didn’t feel like it. It felt like she was going to die. She was locked, voiceless, in a body that could barely perform its most basic function. Devere’s touch was her only tether to the world. And then her lungs began to work again. Only a little at first, and it was pure, undiluted agony, and sweet, joyous relief.
    She breathed at first in ragged, ugly gasps, like an old bellows. Each expansion, each contraction made her chest ache. Her eyes watered and she was only glad that in the pitch blackness of the slot Devere could not see how horrible she must look, like a hooked fish, mouth open, flopping on deck.
    Finally, when she was breathing normally, she became aware of the sounds of destruction, of splintering wood and tearing cloth, muffled by the thin walls. She gathered herself together and tried to push past Devere.
    “Where do you think you are going?” he asked, without moving.
    “To stop them, or there will be nothing left.”
    “They’ll stop when the rum runs its course, and not before. Until then, there is nothing practical one can do to deter a drunken mob.”
    “So John Street is ransacked while trembling Governor Tryon sleeps snug on the
Duchess of Gordon
tonight,” she said bitterly.
    “Some would say it is the price you pay for trying to play both sides. You can’t stage plays catering to loyalists and appease the radicals at the same time.”
    “We were managing until tonight.”
    “You were managing until you invited Burgoyne to the theater and someone in the Rebel faction found out about it.”
    “I was discreet,” she said.
    “But someone else wasn’t,” replied Devere. “And
The American Prodigal
is an easy target for Whig ire.”
    “A play—or a person—that expresses no point of view might as well not exist at all.”
    “Then may I suggest choosing a less divisive one?”
    “It is impossible to stage anything in New York at the moment without giving offense to someone.”
    “Have you considered that there are safer ways to earn your bread?”
    “That is what my parents say.”
    “
Is
there a mother and a father Leighton?”
    “My birth was not the stuff of miracles. Quite the opposite, or so my mother and the midwife like to remind me. Usually in company. It is exceedingly embarrassing.”
    “Forgive me, but I can’t be the first man to have wondered if you are a natural daughter of Frances Leighton.”
    The idea had certainly never occurred to Jenny. “I am twenty-five. Aunt Frances is barely forty.”
    “She was fifteen when she made her debut on the stage, and it is not so very uncommon for women in such circumstances to invent origins for their bastards that allow them to be kept close to hand,” Devere said.
    Jenny hadn’t known that. Aunt Frances, she was coming to think, practiced a decidedly selective form of candor. “Then she did a very poor job of it. I met Aunt Fanny once when I was eleven and didn’t see her again until she turned up on our doorstep two years ago. In between she sent me a subscription to the circulating library and boxes of plays. And my parents are very real. You cannot get much more prosaic than being a bricklayer in New Brunswick.”
    “Have you considered going home to them?”
    “Have you ever been to New Brunswick? My aunt calls it New Bumpkin, and with good reason.”
    “It may be dull, but I’ll wager it’s a good deal safer than New York at the moment.”
    “So is London. And yet here you are, dressed—if the blow did not disorder my mind—as a Mohawk.” She thought of Aunt Frances’ remarks about the man’s parentage.
    “It was the easiest way to infiltrate the mob, but the several ironies of the costume are not lost on me,” he said.
    “Are those
chicken
feathers?” she asked, reaching up to pluck them free. His hair was silkier than she’d expected, and touching it was far more intimate than she’d intended.
    “Unfortunately, yes.”
    They were knee to knee, thigh to thigh in the