Dottie and Denzell exchanged a brief marital look.
“I believe Friend Wattiswade has gone to some trouble to give that impression,” Denzell said, carefully not looking at Ben. “Will thee sit down, William? There is some wine.” Without waiting for an answer, he rose and gestured to his empty chair, going then to fetch a decanter from a small table near the door.
William ignored both the invitation and the chair. Ben was slightly taller than his father, but he was still six inches shorter than William, and William was not sacrificing the advantage of looking down on him. Ben stiffened, glaring up at him.
“I repeat, what the devil are you doing here?”
“I came to find your sister,” William replied, and gave Dottie a slight bow. “Your father wants you to come back to Savannah, Dottie.” Now that he had a chance to look at her, he thought Uncle Hal had been right to want that. She was very thin with dark circles under her eyes, her dress hung on her bones, and overall she looked like a fine piece of china with a crack running through it and a chip out of the edge.
“I told thee, thee shouldn’t have written to him,” she said reproachfully to Denzell, who handed her a glass of wine—and seeing that William was not about to accept the other one, sat down and took a sip from it himself.
“And I told thee that thee should go home,” Denzell replied, though without rancor. “This is no place for any woman, let alone one who—” He caught sight of Dottie and stopped abruptly. A hectic flush had risen in her cheeks and her lips were pressed tight. William thought she might either burst into tears or brain Denzell with the poker, which was near at hand.
Even odds, he concluded, and turned back to Ben, who had gone white round the nostrils.
“Step outside with me,” William said. “And you can tell me what the bloody hell you’re doing and why. And why I shouldn’t go straight back to Savannah and tell your father. If you feel like it.”
IT WAS COLD outside, and the sky lay low and heavy, the color of lead. William felt the itch of Ben’s eyes boring a hole between his shoulder blades.
“This way,” his cousin said abruptly, and he turned to see Ben push open the door to a large shed from which the warm, thick smell of smoke and grease floated out, surrounding them.
Inside, the smell was stronger, but the air was warm and William felt his hands tingle in gratitude; his fingers had been half frozen for days. The bodies of deer and sheep and pigs hung from the beams, streaks of fat showing gray and white through the slow drift of smoke from the trench below. Large gaps showed where meat had been taken away—to feed the officers occupying Wick House, he supposed, and wondered how Washington proposed to feed his troops through the winter. From his hasty appraisal of the camp-building in the hollow, there must be nearly ten thousand men here—many more than he’d thought.
“Adam said you’d resigned your commission.” There was a creak and a thud as Ben shut the door. “Is that true?”
“It is.” He eyed his cousin and shifted his weight a little. He didn’t have cause to suppose Ben would try to hit him, but the day was young.
“Why?”
“None of your business,” William replied bluntly. “So Adam’s still speaking to you, is he? Where is he, come to that?”
“In New York, with Clinton.” Ben jerked his head to the left. His face was pale in the gray light.
“Does it occur to you that you could get him in serious trouble, talking to him?—arrested and court-martialed, even bloody hanged? Or does that consideration not weigh against your new … loyalties?” William’s heart was still beating fast from the shock of finding Ben alive, and he was in no mood to mince words.
“How the fuck dare you?” William said, fury rising suddenly out of nowhere. “Never mind being a traitor, you’re a fucking coward! You couldn’t just change your coat and be straight about it—oh, no! You had to pretend to be fucking dead, and kill your father with grief—and what do you think your mother will feel when she hears it?”
Despite the dim light, he could see the blood rush into Ben’s face and his hands clench into fists. Still, Ben kept his voice level.
“Think about it, Willie. Which would my father prefer—that I was dead, or that I was a traitor? That would bloody kill him!”
“Or he’d kill you,” William said brutally. Ben stiffened but didn’t reply.
“So what was it?” William asked. “Rank, General Bleeker? It can’t have been money.”