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  “Then it must be very dull to be a knight,” Ysabeau said. “And I shouldn’t worry about causing trouble. It seems to find this family no matter what we do. Something will happen any day now. It always does.”

  Matthew and I exchanged glances. Sarah snorted.

  “Has Diana told you about the griffin?” my aunt asked.

  * * *

  —

  WITHIN THE HOUR, Apollo was perched on Ysabeau’s arm like one of Emperor Rudolf’s eagles. Though the griffin was about the same height, I suspected that his leonine hindquarters added considerable weight. Only a vampire could have held him aloft with such elegance. In spite of her modern clothing, Ysabeau handled the creature with the grace of a medieval lady going hawking.

  Becca had elected to have Sarah and Agatha read her a story rather than play with the griffin. The rest of us were with Ysabeau to witness the rare sight of a griffin taking to the open air.

  Ysabeau had a dead mouse in one hand, and the griffin’s complete attention. When Ysabeau lifted her arm, the griffin left his perch and soared above her. Quickly, Ysabeau tossed the mouse into the air.

  Apollo swooped down and caught it in his beak, his tail streaming behind him. He returned to Ysabeau, and laid the trophy at her feet.

  “Good boy!” Philip cried, clapping for added emphasis.

  Apollo chortled something in response.

  “Okay.” Philip seemed to understand what his griffin had said and picked up the mouse. He threw it with all his might. It landed about two feet behind him.

  Apollo retrieved the mouse in several bounds and dropped it at Ysabeau’s feet this time.

  “I fear that Apollo is not getting enough exercise, Matthew. You must fly him, or he will amuse himself,” Ysabeau said, picking up the mouse once more. She hurled it across the moat. “You won’t like the results.”

  Apollo gamboled up to the edge of the water, flew over it, and found the mouse in the reeds on the other side. The griffin took off with it and circled overhead a few times. Ysabeau’s piercing whistle brought him back down to earth.

  “You seem to know a lot about griffins, Grand-mère,” Marcus said suspiciously.

  “A bit,” she replied. “They were never very common. Not like centaurs and dryads.”

  “Dryads?” I said faintly.

  “Back when I was a girl, you had to be very careful walking through the woods,” Ysabeau explained. “Dryads looked like perfectly ordinary women, but if you stopped to talk to one, you could be encircled by trees before you knew it and find it impossible to see your way out.”

  I glanced at the thick forest that bounded the property to the north, uneasy at the thought that the trees might try to strike up a conversation with Becca.

  “As for centaurs, you can be glad Philip didn’t summon one of them. They can be devious, not to mention impossible to house-train.” Ysabeau crouched down by her grandson. “Give Apollo his mouse. He’s earned it.”

  Apollo extended his tongue in anticipation.

  Philip picked the mouse up by the tail. Apollo opened his beak, and Philip dropped the rodent into the griffin’s craw.

  “All done,” Philip said, wiping his hands together in a gesture of completion.

  “Still think you can weave a disguising spell for him?” Matthew murmured in my ear.

  I had no idea. But I was going to have to reconsider the knots so that it could include weighted feet to keep Apollo attached to the ground. The creature definitely liked to fly.

  “I’m sorry Rebecca did not stay to watch the hunt,” Ysabeau said. “She would have enjoyed it.”

  “Becca is a bit jealous,” I explained. “Right now Philip and Apollo are getting a lot of attention.”

  Philip let out a mighty yawn. The griffin followed suit.

  “I think it’s time you took a nap. You’ve had a lot of excitement today.” Matthew swung his son into the air. “Come. Let’s go find your sister.”

  “’Pollo, too?” Philip inquired, looking especially winsome.

  “Yes, Apollo can nap in the fireplace.” Matthew gave me a kiss. “Will you join us?”

  “There was a bucket of cherries on the kitchen counter this morning. I’ve been thinking about them for hours, and wondering what Marthe is going to do with them,” I confessed, leading the way back into the kitchen.

  Marcus laughed and opened the door for me, gentlemanly as always. I knew now that it was his mother who had instilled these manners in him. My thoughts returned to Hadley, and to Marcus’s story. What had happened to Catherine and Patience, after Marcus fled?

  “Diana?” Marcus said, concerned. I had stopped in my tracks.

  “I’m fine. Just thinking about your mother, that’s all,” I said. “She’d be very proud of you, Marcus.”

  Marcus looked shy. Then he smiled. In the years I’d known him, I’d never seen such unalloyed joy on his face.

  “Thank you, Diana,” he said with a small bow.

  Inside, Marthe was pitting the fruit by boring one slender pinkie into each cherry and popping the seed kernel into a waiting stainless steel bowl with a satisfying pling.

  I reached into the bowl. Something snapped at my fingers. “Ow!”

  “Keep your hands to yourself and nobody gets hurt,” Marthe said, glowering. She had a new crime novel, and was learning all sorts of useful English phrases.

  Ysabeau poured herself some champagne, and I made myself a cup of tea and cut a slab from a freshly baked lemon loaf to console myself until Marthe declared open season on the fruit. Sarah and Agatha joined us. They’d finished Becca’s first story—and her second—and left her in Matthew’s capable hands. He would sing songs from his childhood to send the twins to sleep.

  “Matthew really does have a special touch with the children,” Sarah acknowledged. She headed over to the coffeepot. As usual, Marthe had anticipated her need for caffeine and the coffee was hot and fragrant.

  “The twins are lucky,” Marcus said. “They won’t have to search for a good father—a true father—like I did.”

  “So everyone knows about Obadiah now?” Ysabeau asked her grandson.

  “Everybody except Phoebe,” Marcus replied.

  “What?” Agatha was stunned. “Marcus. How could you keep this from her?”

  “I tried to tell her. Loads of times.” Marcus sounded miserable. “But Phoebe didn’t want me to tell her about my past. She wanted to discover it for herself—through my blood.”

  “Bloodlore is even more unreliable than a vampire’s memories,” Ysabeau said. She shook her head. “You should not have let her dissuade you, Marcus. You knew better. You followed your heart, and not your head.”

  “I was respecting her wishes!” Marcus retorted. “You told me to listen to her, Grand-mère. I was following your advice.”

  “Part of growing older and wiser is learning which advice to follow and which to ignore.” Ysabeau sipped her champagne, her eyes glittering. My mother-in-law was up to something, but I knew better than to try to ferret it out. Instead, I changed the subject.

  “What’s a ‘true father,’ Marcus?” Vampire family vocabulary could be confusing, and I wanted to be sure I had it right. “You mentioned it earlier. Obadiah was your birth father—is that the same thing, in vampire terms?”

  “No.” The colored threads around Marcus were getting darker, the purple and indigo now almost black. “It has nothing to do with vampires. A true father is the man who teaches what you need to know about the world and how to survive in it. Joshua and Zeb were truer fathers to me than Obadiah. So was Tom.”

  “I found some letters online about the summer of 1776 and the lifting of the inoculation ban in Massachusetts,” I said, determined to find a safer topic of conversation than fathers and sons. “Everything you remember fits into what I discovered. Washington and Congress were panicked at the
thought that an epidemic would wipe out the entire army.”

  “Their fears were justified,” Marcus replied. “When I finally reached Washington and the army, it was early November. The battles were drawing to a close for the year, but fatalities were destined to increase when the fighting stopped and the army went into their winter camp. Back then, peace was more deadly to the army than war.”

  “Contagion,” I said. “Of course. Smallpox would spread like wildfire in a crowded encampment.”

  “Discipline was a problem, too,” Marcus said. “Nobody followed orders, unless Washington himself gave them. And I wasn’t the only young man who’d run away from home seeking adventure. For every runaway who enlisted, though, it seemed that two men deserted. There was so much coming and going that nobody could keep track of who was there and who wasn’t, or which regiment you belonged to, or where you’d come from.”

  “Did you go to Albany, like Joshua suggested?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Marcus said, “but the army wasn’t there. They’d gone east, to Manhattan and Long Island.”

  “So that’s when you joined the medical corps.” I was eager to put together the fragments of what I knew.

  “Not quite. First, I joined up with a company of gunners. I had been traveling at night for more than a month. I was alone, spooked like a newborn colt whenever anybody spoke to me, and utterly convinced I would be caught and hauled back to Massachusetts to answer for my father’s death,” Marcus explained. “The Philadelphia Associators took me in without any questions. It was my first rebirth.”

  But not his last.

  “I had a new father—Lieutenant Cuthbert—and brothers instead of sisters. I even had a new mother of sorts.” Marcus shook his head. “German Gerty. Lord, I haven’t thought of her for decades. And Mrs. Otto. Christ, she was formidable.”

  Marcus’s expression darkened.

  “But there were still so many rules, and so much death. And precious little freedom,” he continued, before falling silent.

  “Then what happened?” I prompted.

  “Then I met Matthew,” Marcus said simply.

  Washington Papers, United States National Archives

  George Washington to Dr. William Shippen Jr.

  Morristown, New Jersey

  6 February 1777

  Dear Sir:

  Finding the Small pox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can prevent it from running through the whole of our Army, I have determined that the troops shall be inoculated. This Expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects. Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy. . . . If the business is immediately begun and favoured with the common success, I would fain hope they will be soon fit for duty, and that in a short space of time we shall have an Army not subject to this the greatest of all calamities that can befall it when taken in the natural way.

  15

  Dead

  JANUARY–MARCH 1777

  Marcus looked down the barrel of the rifle he had taken at Bunker Hill, toward the head of George III. The image was mounted to a distant tree with the point of a broken bayonet.

  “Eyes or heart?” Marcus asked his audience, squinting as he took aim.

  “You’ll never hit it,” a soldier scoffed. “He’s too far away.”

  But Marcus was an even better shot now than he had been when he’d taken his father’s life.

  The face of the king transformed itself into the face of his father.

  Marcus pulled the trigger. The gun cracked into life, and bark flew. When the smoke cleared, there was a hole right between King George’s eyes.

  “Take your best shot, lads.” Adam Swift walked around the crowd with his cap like an entertainer at a fair. He was Irish, wicked, clever—and a source of amusement to half the colonial army, with his songs and pranks. “A halfpenny will buy you a chance to kill the king. Do your bit for liberty. Make Georgie pay for what he’s done.”

  “I want to go next!” cried a fourteen-year-old Dutch rigger named Vanderslice who had run away from a ship newly arrived in Philadelphia and joined up with the Associators soon after.

  “You haven’t got a gun,” Swift pointed out.

  Marcus was just about to loan Vanderslice his when two uniformed officers came into view.

  “What is the meaning of this!” Captain Moulder, the nominal head of the Philadelphia Associators, surveyed the scene with disapproval. Lieutenant Cuthbert, a rawboned man in his midtwenties of Scottish extraction, was at his side.

  “Just some harmless fun, sir,” Cuthbert said, glaring at Marcus and Swift.

  Cutherbert’s assurances might have satisfied the captain, had Moulder not spotted King George.

  “Did you take that from a picture in the college at Princeton?” Captain Moulder demanded. “Because if you did, the college would like it back.”

  Swift pressed his lips together and Marcus stood at attention.

  “Captain Hamilton claimed he damaged the painting, sir,” Cuthbert said, diverting the possible blame onto someone better able to withstand it. “Shot a cannonball straight through the canvas.”

  “Hamilton!” Vanderslice was disgusted. “He had nothing to do with it, Cuthbert. It was the three of us who cut it out of the frame.”

  This was precisely what Captain Moulder had feared.

  “In my tent. Now. All three of you!” Moulder barked.

  * * *

  —

  MARCUS STOOD IN FRONT of Captain Moulder, with Swift and Vanderslice on either side. Lieutenant Cuthbert stood at the entrance to the tent, keeping the rest of the regiment safely out of range of the captain’s wrath, though within earshot. Cuthbert was greatly beloved. He refused to put up with any nonsense from the men in his charge while ignoring most of the instructions given to him by his superior officers. It was an ideal style of leadership for the Continental army.

  “I should have you all flogged,” Captain Moulder said. He held up the limp piece of canvas with the defaced image of their former ruler. “What on earth persuaded you to take it?”

  Vanderslice looked at Marcus. Swift looked at the ceiling.

  “We wanted to use it for target practice. Sir,” Marcus replied, looking Moulder in the eye. He struck Marcus as a bully, and Marcus had some experience with them. “It was my doing. Vanderslice and Swift tried to stop me.”

  Vanderslice’s mouth gaped open in astonishment. This was not at all what had happened. At Princeton, Marcus had climbed up on Swift’s shoulder and used a British bayonet taken from the battlefield to behead the portrait of the king. Vanderslice had encouraged him every step of the way.

  Swift shot Marcus an approving glance.

  “And who the hell are you?” Moulder’s eyes narrowed.

  “Mar—Galen Chauncey.” Marcus still tended to blurt out his baptismal name when under stress.

  “We call him Doc,” Vanderslice volunteered.

  “Doc? You’re not from Philadelphia. And I don’t remember signing you up,” Moulder replied.

  “No. That was me, Captain.” Cuthbert lied with breezy assurance, the mark of someone skilled at fabrication. “Distant cousin. From Delaware. He’s a good shot. Thought he could be useful manning a musket in case the cannon were overrun.”

  This tale of Marcus’s origins was complete fiction, but it served to quiet the captain—at least about how he’d become a part of Moulder’s regiment.

  Moulder spread the piece of canvas wide. There was little left of the face of George III. The eyes were gone, the mouth was nothing more than a gaping hole, and the monarch’s powdered hair was peppered with shot.


  “Well, at least one thing you’ve told me is true,” Moulder admitted. “The boy is a good shot.”

  “Doc saved my life at Princeton,” Swift said. “Put a ball right through the eye of a British soldier. And he doctored the lieutenant’s hand when he burned it. Useful boy to have around, sir.”

  “And these?” Moulder picked up two brass semicircles, finely engraved, that had been found in Marcus’s haversack when the captain searched it for other spoils of battle. “Don’t tell me they’re medical instruments.”

  “Quadrants,” Swift replied. “Or they will be when we’re through with them.”

  In addition to the head of George III, Marcus had taken the two pieces from the orrery that stood outside the room where he’d found the king’s portrait. Other soldiers had smashed the glass and part of the fine mechanism that marked the passage of the planets across the sky. He had pocketed what remained because it reminded him of his mother, and home.

  “General Washington is bound to hear about this target practice of yours.” Moulder sighed. “What do you propose I tell him, Swift?”

  “I’d let him think Captain Hamilton did it,” Swift replied. “That popinjay likes to take credit for everything, whether he’s responsible or not.”

  There was no denying it, and Captain Moulder didn’t even try.

  “Get out of my sight, all of you,” Moulder said wearily. “I will tell the general that Lieutenant Cuthbert has already disciplined you. And I’m docking your pay.”

  “Pay?” Swift guffawed. “What pay?”

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll see to it that nothing like this happens again.” Cuthbert took Swift by the scruff of the neck. “Enjoy your lunch, sir.”

  Outside the tent, Vanderslice, Swift, and Marcus were greeted by silence. Then the pats on the back started, the offers of swallows of rum and gin, the proud smiles.

  “Thanks, Doc,” Vanderslice said, relieved that he was not going to be beaten.

  “You lie like an Irishman, Doc,” Adam Swift said, clapping his hat on his head. “I knew I liked you.”