Free The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles by John Jakes Page B

around his wife’s, felt its heat. Her chestnut hair glistened with sweat just above the forehead. The light dusting of freckles on either side of her nose—prominent when her skin was wholesomely tanned by sunshine—had almost faded into invisibility.
    Suddenly Anne rolled onto her side, gasping while her hand sought and touched the great mound of her stomach beneath the comforter.
    Fearful, Philip bent closer. He smelled the staleness of her breath. “I’ll find you a doctor, Annie. I’m trying hard as I can—”
    Her glazed eyes showed no sign that she heard. The hand on the comforter knotted convulsively.
    Gradually the pain passed. She relaxed again. Philip’s voice sounded hoarser than ever:
    “Annie, look at me. Don’t you know me?”
    The brown eyes closed. Her breathing became more regular.
    Despairing, Philip stumbled to his feet. In the shadows behind him, a sneeze exploded.
    “I’ve caught a plagued disease myself! Guess I shouldn’t be in here—”
    Sneezing into a kerchief a second time, Abraham Ware stumped back into the lamplit parlor crowded with large and small trunks: the belongings of a prosperous Boston lawyer who had been forced to flee his home, and his livelihood, because of his patriot convictions. Philip heard his father-in-law walk into the other bedroom.
    Gently, he stroked Anne’s forehead. He wished she could speak to him. Wished she could listen to a pledge that he would desert the damned army, if necessary, to locate a physician. But she neither saw nor heard.
    Just looking at her pale, drawn face was agony for him. Despite her youth, she bore little resemblance to the pretty, quick-witted and independent girl he’d first encountered in Henry Knox’s London Book-Store. She seemed frail and altogether vulnerable as she muttered in her sleep.
    Close to tears, Philip remembered the joyous moments of their courting. And the times when he had questioned his own feelings for her, tempted as he was by the daughter of the Earl of Parkhurst, who had almost lured him away from Anne in Philadelphia—
    Then the past receded. Only the present counted. He loved his wife with every fiber of his soul That love made his helplessness all the worse.
    He uttered a frustrated curse, blew out the candle, tiptoed out leaving the door ajar. Abraham Ware, disheveled in an expensive suit that showed hard use, had returned from the bedroom with a fresh kerchief and was helping himself to what amounted to little more than a thimbleful of precious claret. With overseas trade at a standstill because of the hostilities, everything was in short supply—including money to buy life’s necessities. Ware was spending his savings to shelter himself, his daughter and her near-penniless husband during these days when no man could accurately predict what would happen next.
    Philip sat down wearily on the battered travel trunk in which Anne had carefully stored the sum of his worldly possessions—three items. The first was a small, worn leather casket with brass corners. It contained letters from James Amberly, Duke of Kentland, to the French actress from Auvergne whom he’d loved and reluctantly left in Paris. The Duke, still alive in England, was Philip’s father.
    Just the preceding spring, after fruitless and near-fatal attempts to claim the portion of Amberly’s fortune which he’d been promised, Philip had finally burned one particular document from the casket. That document was a letter declaring Amberly’s intention to share his riches with his illegitimate son. Philip had decided he wanted no part of Amberly’s world, in which the rich and the powerful exploited others. Destroying the letter, he’d become an American in spirit as well as in fact.
    Also in the trunk was a memento of his boyhood in the French provinces: a splendid sword. The grenadier’s briquet had been presented to him by a young nobleman he’d helped out of a difficult situation. The nobleman’s title was the Marquis de