“So you did.” I sat down beside him and took hold of his wrist. He let me, watching curiously. His pulse was fine; it had slowed and was thumping along very steadily.
“How long have you been subject to fainting spells?” I asked, bending to look closely into his eyes. No sign of petechial hemorrhage, no jaundice, pupils the same size . . .
“A long time,” he said, and pulled his wrist abruptly away. “I haven’t time to chat about my health, madam. I—”
“Claire,” I said, and put a restraining hand on his chest, smiling amiably at him. “You’re Hal, I’m Claire—and you aren’t going anywhere, Your Grace.”
“Take your hand off me!”
“I’m seriously tempted to do just that and let you fall on your face,” I told him, “but wait until Mrs. Figg finishes brewing the tincture. I don’t want you thrashing about on the floor, gasping like a landed fish, and no way of getting the hook out of your mouth.”
I did in fact take my hand off his chest, though, and, rising, I went out into the hall before he could find breath to say anything. Jenny had taken up a stand by the open doorway, looking up and down the street.
“What’s going on out there?” I asked.
“I dinna ken,” she said, not taking her eyes off a couple of rough-looking men who were lounging down the other side of the street. “But I dinna like the feel of it a bit. D’ye think he’s right?”
“That the British army is leaving? Yes. They are. And very likely half the Loyalists in the city with them.” I knew exactly what she meant by not liking the feel of things. The air was hot and thick, buzzing with cicadas, and the leaves of the chestnut trees along the street hung limp as dishrags. But something was moving in the atmosphere. Excitement? Panic? Fear? All three, I thought.
“Had I best go to the printshop, d’ye think?” she asked, turning to me with a slight frown. “Would Marsali and the weans be safer if I fetched them here, I mean? If there was to be a riot or the like?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think so. They’re well-known Patriots. It’s the Loyalists who will be in danger, if the British army is leaving. They won’t have any protection, and the Rebels may well . . . do things to them. And”—a very unpleasant feeling snaked down my backbone, like a cold, slimy finger—“this is a Loyalist household.” “Without even a door to shut and bolt,” I might have added, but didn’t.
There was a loud thump from the parlor, as of a body hitting the floor, but Jenny didn’t turn a hair, nor did I. We’d both had a lot of experience with stubborn men. I could hear him panting; if he started wheezing again, I’d go in.
“Will it put ye in danger, then, to have him here?” she asked, sotto voce, with a tilt of her head toward the parlor. “Maybe ye’d best come to the printshop.”
I grimaced, trying to evaluate the possibilities. The notes I’d sent with Germain would delay inquiries, and I could put off anyone who did come. But that also meant I could expect no immediate help from the army, if help was needed. And it might be; someone in that hostile crowd on Fourth Street might well have heard where I’d told the chairmen to come. That hostility now showed itself in a different light.
If the Rebels in the city were about to rise and turn upon the defenseless Loyalists—and the currents I sensed beginning to swirl through the streets were dark ones—
“Someone might just show up on your porch wi’ a keg of tar and a bag o’ feathers,” Jenny observed, preempting my thought in a most unnerving way.
“Well, that wouldn’t help His Grace’s asthma a bit,” I said, and she laughed.
“Had ye maybe better give him back to General Clinton?” she suggested. “I’ve had soldiers search my house, wi’ a wanted man hidin’ in the bottom o’ my wardrobe and my newborn bairn in his arms. I dinna think it would be a great deal easier on the nerves to have the Sons o’ Liberty come in here after His Grace, if half what Marsali told me about them is true.”
“It probably is.” A gunshot smacked through the heavy air, flat and dull, from somewhere near the river, and we both tensed. It wasn’t repeated, though, and after a moment I drew breath again.
“The thing is, he’s not stable. I can’t risk taking him through streets filled with dust and tree pollen and then leaving him in the care of an army surgeon, or even that quack Hebdy. Were he to have another attack and no one able to get him through it . . .”
Jenny grimaced.
“Aye, ye’re right,” she said reluctantly. “And ye canna leave him here and go yourself, for the same reason.”
“That’s right.” And Jamie would be coming here, to find me. I wouldn’t leave.
“Ken, if Jamie came and didna find ye here, he’d go to the printshop next thing,” Jenny observed, making the hair prickle on the back of my neck.
“Will you stop doing that!?”
“What?” she said, startled.
“Reading my mind!”
“Oh, that.” She grinned at me, blue eyes creasing into triangles. “Everything ye think shows on your face, Claire. Surely Jamie’s told ye that?”
A deep flush burned upward from my low-cut décolletage, and only then did I recall that I was still wearing the amber-colored silk, which was now soaked with sweat, rimed with dust, and altogether rather the worse for wear. And which had very tight stays. I rather hoped that everything I was thinking didn’t show on my face, because there was quite a bit of information I didn’t mean to share with Jenny just yet.