“I’ve met him,” Randall said cautiously. “‘Trace,’ you said? Has he been … lost?”
“You could say that. He was captured at the Brandywine and held prisoner at a place called Middlebrook Encampment, in the Watchung Mountains. My uncle had an official letter from Sir Henry Clinton’s clerk, passing on a terse note from the Americans, regretting the death of Captain Benjamin Grey from fever.”
“Oh.” Denys relaxed a fraction of an inch, though his eyes were still watchful. “My condolences. You mean that you want to find where your cousin is buried? To, um, move the body to the family … er … resting place?”
“I had that in mind,” William said. “Only I did find his grave. And he wasn’t in it.”
A brief recollection of that night in the Watchung Mountains washed over him suddenly, raising the hairs on his forearms. Cold, wet clay clinging to his feet and rain soaking through his clothes, spongy blisters on his palms, and the smell of death coming up from the ground as his shovel grated suddenly on bone … He turned his head away, both from Denys and the memory.
“Someone else was, though.”
“Dear Lord.” Denys reached automatically for his cup and, finding it empty, shook himself briefly as though to dislodge the vision, then reached for the brandy bottle. “You’re quite sure? I mean, how long …？”
“He’d been buried for some time.” William took a long, burning gulp of the brandy, to purge the memory of the smell. And the touch. “But not long enough to hide the fact that the man in that grave had no ears.”
Denys’s evident shock gave him a sour satisfaction.
“Exactly,” he said. “A thief. And no, it wasn’t a mistaken identification of the body. The grave was marked with the name ‘Grey,’ and Benjamin’s full name was listed in the camp’s records of prisoner burials.”
Denys was twelve years older than William, but he looked suddenly older than thirty-three, his fine features sharpened by attention.
“You think it was deliberate, then. Well, of course,” he interrupted himself impatiently, “naturally it was. But by whom, and to what purpose?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “If someone had murdered your cousin and sought to hide his death, why not simply bury him as a fever victim? No need for the substitute body, I mean. So, your first supposition is that he’s alive? I think that’s reasonable.”
William drew a breath tinged with relief.
“I do, too,” he said. “So then it’s one of two possibilities: Ben faked his death and managed to substitute the other body in order to escape without pursuit. Or someone did it for him, without his consent, and took him away. I can see the first possibility, but damned if I can think of a reason for the second. But it doesn’t matter that much; if he’s alive, I can find him. And I bloody will. The family needs to know, one way or another.” This was quite true. He was honest enough to admit to himself, though, that Ben’s disappearance had offered him a purpose, a way out of the morass of guilt and sorrow left by Jane’s death.
Denys rubbed a hand over his face. It was late in the day and his whiskers were starting to rasp, a dark shadow over his jaw.
“The words ‘needle’ and ‘haystack’ come to mind,” he said. “But theoretically, yes, you could find him, if he’s alive.”
“Definitely yes,” William said firmly. “I have a list”—he touched his breast pocket to make sure that he still did have it, but felt the reassuring wodge of folded paper—“of men belonging to two militia companies who were put on gravedigging detail in Middlebrook Encampment during a fever outbreak.”
“Oh, so that’s what you were doing with—”
“Yes. Unfortunately, American militia companies enlist only for short periods, and then scatter off to tend their farms. One of the companies was from North Carolina and one from Virginia, but the men last night weren’t—” He stopped abruptly, reminded. “The men last night … does Major Allbright actually intend to hang some of them?”
Denys shrugged. “I don’t know him well enough to say. It might have been meant only for effect, to frighten and scatter the rest. But he’s taken those three along with him, back to his camp. If his temper cools by the time he gets there, he’ll likely have them flogged and let them go. He’s got enough men under his command that hanging civilians out of hand would become a matter of record—not really what an officer with an eye to advancement wants, if he’s any sense. Not that Allbright gives one the impression that he has,” he added thoughtfully.