The fact that William had no blood relationship at all to John Grey had never seemed important to either of them. Until now.
Still, if Lord John had had a casual encounter with an Indian woman—or, God help him, an Indian mistress in Quebec—it was no one else’s business. Cinnamon said his mother had died when he was an infant; it would have been entirely in keeping with Lord John’s sense of honor to see that the boy was cared for.
And just what will Papa do when he sees this … this … fruit of his whoremongering loins?
That was too much. He stood up and walked away.
He’d just wanted a piss and a moment’s privacy to settle his mind, but it didn’t want to settle, and he kept walking, though darkness was falling.
He didn’t care where he was going. Turning his back on the fire, he headed toward the fields that lay behind the house. Mount Josiah had boasted only a score of acres in tobacco when he had known it years before; was the land even cultivated now?
Rather to his surprise, it was. It was too early to harvest the crop, but the sap-thick smell of uncured tobacco lay like incense on the night. The scent soothed him, and he made his way slowly across the field, toward the black shape of the tobacco barn. Was it still in use?
It was. Called a barn for courtesy’s sake, it was little more than a large shed, but the back of it was a large, airy space where the stalks were hung for stripping—there were only a few there now, dangling from the rafters, barely visible against the faint starlight that leaked through the wide-set boards. His entrance caused the few dried, stacked leaves on the broad curing platform at one side to stir and rustle, as though the shed took notice of him. It was an odd fancy, but not disturbing—he nodded to the dark, half conscious of welcome.
He bumped into something that shied away with a hollow sound—an empty barrel. Feeling about, he counted more than a score, waiting. Some old, a few new ones, judging by the smell of new wood that added its tang to the shed’s perfume.
Someone was working the plantation—and it wasn’t Manoke. The Indian enjoyed smoking tobacco now and then, but William had never seen him take any part in the raising or harvesting of any crop. Neither did he reek of it. It wasn’t possible to touch green tobacco without a black, sticky sort of tar adhering to your hands, and the smell in a ripe tobacco field was enough to make a grown man’s head swim.
When he had lived here with Lord John—the name caused a twinge, but he ignored it—his father had hired laborers from the adjoining property upriver, a large place called Bobwhite, who could easily tend Mount Josiah’s modest crop in addition to Bobwhite’s huge output. Perhaps the same arrangement was still in place?
The thought that the plantation was still working, even in this ghostly fashion, heartened him a little; he’d thought the place quite abandoned when he saw the ruined house.
Thought of the house made him glance back. The flicker of firelight shone through the empty front windows, giving the illusion that somebody still lived there. He sighed and began to walk slowly back.
He hadn’t found peace, but the effort his mind made to avoid thinking about his paternity, his title, his responsibilities, the goddamned shape of the rest of his life, and now Lord fucking John’s bloody fucking son had caused it instead to squirm off in the other direction, latching on to the problem of Ben.
Someone had put a stranger with no ears in the grave marked Benjamin Grey, and whomever it was almost certainly knew what had happened to Ben. He’d talked to—at latest count—twenty-three militiamen who’d been in the Watchung Mountains with Washington during the time when Ben had theoretically died. Four of them had heard of Ben and heard that he was dead, but none of them had seen the body or the grave, and he’d swear that none of them were lying.
But. Uncle Hal had received a letter telling him of Ben’s death. It had been passed to him by an aide to General Clinton, who had received the letter from some officer on the American side. Who had written that letter?
“Why the bloody hell didn’t you ask to see it?” he muttered to himself. Because you were too busy being on your high horse about your damned dignity, his mind replied.
That was the logical next thing to do, though. Find out the name of the American officer who wrote the letter and then … find the officer, if he hadn’t been shot, been captured, or died of syphilis in the meantime.
The next step was logical, too: Uncle Hal would certainly have kept the letter—and Uncle Hal （and Papa …） had the sorts of army connections that might allow them to make inquiries about the whereabouts of a specific American officer.