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on either side of this war whose reach is equal to his grasp.”
    They watched the house burn. There was little to save, and no point in pursuit.
    On the cold ride back after Talbert left them, Tremayne’s thoughts turned to Kate, and he fingered the ribbon at his cuff. A showy flourish, a bit of schoolboy romance, plucking the lace from her jacket, but well worth the result.
    He recognized infatuation, though he’d not felt it in a long time. Affairs, some of them long and satisfying, he had pursued since his late teens when he had left home for the army. He had enjoyed briefer encounters as well, none more debauched than in the company of his cousin and brother officer, Bayard Caide. It occurred to him that there were elements of his past—and regrettably, with this late war, of his present—that made him an unfit companion for a Quaker girl.
    Those considerations were for tomorrow, though. Today, she waited for him.
    The house looked different in the cold blue light of dawn. The windows that yesterday had glowed softly with welcome now stared like empty sockets.
    He’d hoped to wake only the servants by knocking quietly, but no one came. Lytton joined him on the porch. “There’s no smoke in any of the chimneys, sir.”
    “What?” Fear stole over him. The viciousness that would cause a man to burn his neighbor’s house led to worse things in a conflict like this. England’s own Civil War had been rife with atrocity, and the Colonists seemed determined to replay that internecine struggle. He pounded hard on the door.
    It swung away from his hand.
    They searched the hall, parlors, and bedrooms, and finally the attics and cellars, calling out for the women; but of the servants, Mrs. Ferrers, and Kate Grey, they found no trace.
    Recalling with sickening apprehension and the first cold sparks of anger Mrs. Ferrers’ anecdote about the cruelly deceived Hessian colonel, he reached for the oilskin packet in his bag, and the papers entrusted to him by General Howe.
    The envelope was still there, but when he examined the pages in the cold morning light, they were utterly blank.

Three

    After Tremayne had gone, Kate had remained in the parlor listening to the clatter of spurs and hooves on the paving. There was little talk. She was not surprised. She’d seen it before. Her father was one of the men their community called upon when Indian raids threatened, and she knew from experience that men who had been wakened in the middle of the night for skirmishing were rarely garrulous.
    She slipped her hand into her pocket and was reassured to find her father’s letter there. Absently, she attempted to tie her jacket shut, and blushed when she realized that a man was now riding into the dark with her ribbon around his cuff. She subsided into the lolling chair where he had sat that afternoon and tried to get her mind around what she had just done.
    Kate had always been the gray mouse of Grey Farm. Most of her friends were married or courting by now. She knew that some of them enjoyed an advantage of appearance and, most saliently, of disposition. Few farmers wanted a tart-tongued girl for a wife.
    Marriage, of course, was not what Peter Tremayne was offering. Untempted by matrimony, Kate had never considered that she might discover needs not easily satisfied outside the bounds of wedlock. Or a man who brought out those needs.
    Perhaps, had she not met Peter Tremayne, the matter would never have arisen.
    She shut her eyes and replayed their encounter abovestairs, imagining what they might have done next had Silas Talbert not intervened.
    It was then that it occurred to her that Silas Talbert had been rather too conveniently alert today. He had spotted the British on the road, when but for the lameness of his horse, he should have been miles away with Kate’s father. And he had spotted the Continentals tonight, at the unnamed farm to the west. Kate tried to remember which of their neighbors lived due west of them. Only the