“Couldn’t have stopped him, short of shooting him. Sir,” he added flatly. The flesh around Smith’s nostrils whitened, and Grey had the distinct impression that the Englishman must find his new command not quite what he’d been used to.

The quarters certainly weren’t. While Smith’s Continental uniform was smart and well tended, and his wig in good order, his tent, while large, appeared to have been through several campaigns, being worn to the threads in places and patched in others. Not entirely a bad thing, Grey thought, briefly closing his eyes as a faint evening breeze came wafting through the walls of the tent, relieving the stifling heat. He had a noticeable headache, and even such minor relief was welcome.

“Very well, Corporal,” Smith said after a moment, having evidently tried and failed to think of something new to ask. “Well done,” he added, offering a belated note of congratulation.

“Thank you, sir.” Woodbine hovered, obviously loath to surrender his share of the excitement. “If I may ask, sir—what do you mean to do with the prisoner?”

Grey opened his eye and a half, interested to hear what the answer might be, and found Smith eyeing him in what seemed a faintly carnivorous fashion. The turncoat smiled.

“Oh, I’ll think of something, Corporal Woodbine,” he said. “You are dismissed. Good night.”



SMITH GOT UP and came over to Grey, leaning down to examine his face. Grey could smell his sweat, sharp and musky.

“Do you need a doctor?” he asked dispassionately, but without hostility.

“No,” Grey said. Both his head and his side ached deeply, and he felt dizzy, but he doubted there was anything a doctor could do about either condition. And he found that after prolonged contact with Claire and her opinions, he had much less trust in physicians than heretofore—and he hadn’t had much to begin with.

Smith nodded and, straightening up, went to a battered campaign chest and dug out two dented pewter cups and a stone bottle of what proved to be applejack. He poured two generous tots, and they sat in silence for a time, sipping.

So close to Midsummer Day, it was still bright light out, though Grey could hear the rattle and shuffle of a camp beginning the evening routine. A mule brayed loudly, and several more answered it in raucous chorus. Wagons, then … perhaps artillery? He breathed deeply, nostrils flaring; an artillery company had a distinct smell to it, a sort of distillation of sweat, black powder, and hot metal, much more pungent than the scent of an infantry company with their muskets—the scent of searing iron seeped into an artilleryman’s clothes, as well as his soul.

What came to him was not the stink of guns but the smell of roasting meat. It drifted through the tent, and his stomach growled loudly; he’d eaten nothing since the beer that had been his preliminary to a preempted meal. He thought Smith’s mouth twitched a little at the noise, but the colonel politely ignored it.

Smith finished his drink, refilled both cups, and cleared his throat.

“I will not plague you with questions, as you don’t wish to answer them,” he said carefully, “but in the interests of civil conversation, should you wish to make any inquiries of me, I should not take offense.”

Grey smiled wryly.

“Very gracious of you, sir. Do you wish to justify your present allegiance to me? I assure you, it’s unnecessary.”

Small red patches sprang up immediately on Smith’s cheekbones.

“That was not my intent, sir,” he said stiffly.

“Then I apologize,” Grey said, and took another mouthful. The sweet strong cider was assuaging his hunger pangs as well as the pain in his side, though it admittedly wasn’t doing much for the dizziness. “What sort of question did you think I might ask? What is the current state of the Continental army? I could deduce that easily enough, I think, from the state of the gentlemen who captured me, and … other evidence.” He let his eyes roam deliberately around the tent, taking in the chipped pottery utensil under the lopsided cot, the tail of dirty linen straggling out of a portmanteau in the corner; evidently Smith had either no orderly or an inept one. For an instant, Grey felt a pang of nostalgia for Tom Byrd, the best valet he had ever had.

Smith’s flush had faded; he gave a small, ironic laugh. “I imagine you could. It’s not much of a secret. No, I rather thought you might be curious as to what I propose to do with you.”

“Oh, that.” Grey put down his cup and rubbed gingerly at his forehead, trying not to touch the swollen area around his eye. “Frankly, I’d forgotten, in the surprise of seeing you. And the pleasure of your kind hospitality,” he added, lifting the cup with no irony at all. “Corporal Woodbine and his men appeared to think I should be promptly hanged, both on the charge of spying and on the more serious one of being related to Major General Charles Grey, who I gather is believed to have committed some atrocity at a place called Paoli.”

Smith’s brow creased.

“Do you deny being a spy?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Smith. I’m a lieutenant colonel. What on earth would I be doing, spying in a deserted wood? Well, deserted until Woodbine and his merry men showed up,” he added. His cup was empty; he stared into it, wondering how that had happened. With a small sigh, Smith refilled it.

“Besides, I was carrying no documents of information, no secret writings—no evidence whatever of spying.”

“Doubtless you committed to memory whatever information you had gained,” Smith said, sounding cynically amused. “I recall that you have a prodigious memory.” He gave a small snort that could perhaps have been called a snigger. “So sayeth Sally, nimble-fingered, as her grip upon his prick did linger …”

In fact, Grey’s memory was quite good. Good enough to remember a dinner at which a number of officers from different regiments had been guests. When the gentlemen were at their port, Grey had—upon invitation, and to thunderous applause—recited entirely from memory one of the longer, and very scabrous, odes from Harry Quarry’s infamous Certain Verses Upon the Subject of Eros, copies of which were still eagerly sought and covertly passed around the circles of society, though the book had been published nearly twenty years before.

“What on earth is there to spy on?” he demanded, realizing the logical trap too late. Smith’s mouth turned up at one corner.

“You expect me to tell you?” Because the answer, of course, was that Washington’s entire force was likely on the move in his immediate vicinity, positioning for the move into Philadelphia—and, very possibly, for an attack on Clinton’s withdrawing troops.

Grey dismissed Smith’s question as rhetorical and took another tack—though a dangerous one.

“Woodbine gave you a correct assessment of the circumstances in which he discovered me,” he said. “Plainly I was not discovered in flagrante by Colonel Fraser, as he would simply have done what Corporal Woodbine did and arrested me.”

“Are you asserting that Colonel Fraser met you by arrangement, to pass on information?”

Jesus Christ. He’d known this tack was dangerous but hadn’t foreseen that possibility—that Jamie Fraser could be suspected of being his confederate. But of course Smith would be particularly sensitive to such a possibility, given his own change of loyalties.

“Certainly not,” Grey said, allowing a certain asperity to creep into his tone. “The encounter that Corporal Woodbine witnessed was of a purely personal nature.”

Smith, who plainly knew a thing or two about interrogation, cocked a brow at him. Grey knew a thing or two about it, too, and sat back, sipping his applejack insouciantly, as though quite sure his statement had settled matters.

“They will probably hang you, you know,” Smith said after a suitable pause. He spoke quite casually, eyes on the amber stream as he refilled both cups again. “After what Howe did to Captain Hale? Even more, after Paoli. Charles Grey is your cousin, is he not?”