Hal snorted, looking his nephew over from head to toe. William was dressed much as John and Hal were, in ordinary clothes—though clothes of good cut and quality, John observed; clearly his own.
“And where the devil have you been for the last three days, may I ask?”
“No, you mayn’t,” William replied briefly. “Why are you here?”
“Looking for you, for one thing,” John replied equably, before Hal could stick his oar in again. He’d put the fowling piece on the mantel, easily within Hal’s reach, but was reasonably sure it wasn’t loaded. “And for Captain Richardson, for another. Have you seen him recently?”
William’s expression of surprise made John heave an internal sigh of relief. “No, I haven’t.” William glanced shrewdly from one man to the other. “Is that what you were doing at Arnold’s headquarters? Looking for Richardson?”
“Yes,” John answered, surprised. “How did you—oh. You were watching the place.” He smiled. “I did wonder how you happened to appear here so fortuitously. You followed us from General Arnold’s.”
William nodded and, stretching out a long arm, drew out one of the chairs from the wall. “I did. Sit down. Things need to be said.”
“That sounds rather ominous,” Dottie murmured. “Perhaps I’d best fetch the brandy.”
“Please do, Dottie,” John said. “Tell Mrs. Figg we want the ’57, if you would. If it isn’t buried, I mean.”
“I think everything of an alcoholic nature is in the well, actually. I’ll fetch it.”
Mrs. Figg herself arrived at this point with a rattling tea tray, apologizing for the lowly earthenware pot in which the beverage was brewing, and within a few moments, everyone was provided with a steaming cup and a small glass of the ’57.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” Hal said, accepting a glass from Dottie, then adding pointedly, “You needn’t stay.”
“I’d rather you did, Dottie,” William said quietly, but with an overt stare at Hal. “There are things you ought to know, I think.”
With no more than a brief glance at her father, Dottie, who had been picking up the scattered squash, sat down on the ottoman, opposite her cousin.
“Tell me, then,” she said simply.
“Nothing out of the way,” he assured her, with an assumption of casualness. “I’ve recently discovered that I am the natural son of one James Fraser, who—”
“Oh,” she said, and looked at him with renewed interest. “I did think General Fraser reminded me of someone! Of course, that’s it! Goodness, Willie, you do look like him!”
William looked flabbergasted, but quickly pulled himself together.
“He’s a general?” he asked Hal.
“He was,” Hal said. “He’s resigned his commission.”
William made a small, humorless noise. “Has he? Well, so have I.”
After a long silent moment, John placed his cup carefully on its saucer with a small clink.
“Why?” he asked mildly, at the same moment that Hal, frowning, said, “Can you do such a thing while technically a prisoner of war?”
“I don’t know,” William said tersely, and evidently in answer to both questions. “But I’ve done it. Now, as to Captain Richardson . . .” and he recounted his astonishing encounter with Denys Randall-Isaacs on the road.
“Or, rather, Denys Randall, as he now calls himself. Evidently his stepfather’s a Jew, and he wishes to avoid the association.”
“Sensible,” Hal said briefly. “I don’t know him. What else do you know about him, William? What’s his connection with Richardson?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” William said, and, draining his cup, reached for the pot and poured another. “There is one, obviously, and prior to this, I would have assumed that Randall perhaps worked with, or for, Richardson.”
“Perhaps he still does,” John suggested, a slight edge in his voice. He’d been a spy himself for some years and was disinclined to take things said by known intelligencers at face value.
That seemed to take William aback for a moment, but he nodded reluctantly.
“All right,” he conceded. “But tell me—why the devil are you two interested in Richardson?”
They told him.
At the conclusion, Hal was perched anxiously on the ottoman beside Dottie, an arm round her shaking shoulders. She was weeping silently, and he was dabbing at her face with his handkerchief, this now a grubby rag following its service as a flag of truce.
“I don’t believe it,” he was repeating doggedly, for the sixth or seventh time. “Do you hear me, darling, I do not believe it, and I won’t have you believe it, either.”
“N-no,” she said obediently. “No . . . I won’t. Oh, Ben!”
In some hopes of distracting her, John turned back to William.
“And what business brought you to Philadelphia, may I ask? You can’t have come in search of Captain Richardson, because when you left camp, you didn’t know he’d disappeared.”
“I came on a personal matter,” William said, in a tone suggesting that the matter was still personal and was going to remain that way. “But also . . .” He pressed his lips together for a moment, and again John had that odd sense of dislocation, seeing Jamie Fraser. “I was going to leave this here for you, in case you came back to the city. Or ask Mrs. Figg to send it to New York, if . . .” His voice trailed away, as he pulled a letter from the breast of his dark-blue coat.