Shivering violently, Hawkwood raised himself up. There was no sign of the Snake. The steamboat’s aft section filled his field of vision. Sparks were still shooting from her thin smokestack, but Hawkwood saw that she was indeed reducing speed. Her paddles were slowing. Then the beat of her engine changed and he knew she was going into reverse.

Lawrence muttered something. Not catching the words, Hawkwood looked up to find that Lawrence was staring at the name painted across the steamboat’s stern.

Vermont.

“I’ll be damned,” Lawrence swore hoarsely. “Whatever the hell that beast is, it looks as if we’ve caught the bloody ferry after all.”

10

“Special couriers, you say?”

“Bearing dispatches for General Dearborn. Yes, sir.”

Hawkwood tipped the rest of the brandy into his coffee and gripped the mug tightly, grateful for the warmth spreading slowly through his palms and fingertips. He took a swig and wondered how long it would be before he stopped shivering and was able to feel his toes again. A while, probably, though he knew that the tremor in his hands and the throbbing in his head came not only from his submersion in the lake’s cold waters and the effects of the brandy but also from the engine vibrations pulsing through the deck beneath his feet, and the turning of the paddlewheels on the other side of the bulkheads.

They were seated in the steamboat’s stern cabin, dressed in borrowed jackets and trousers, courtesy of the crew’s slop chest. Their own clothes had been taken away to be dried off in the fire room, wherever and whatever the hell that was. The steamboat’s captain had assured them that they would be returned in a wearable condition probably within the hour or shortly thereafter, which seemed to Hawkwood to be more than a tad optimistic.

The captain’s name was Winans. Smartly dressed in a dark blue pea-coat, he was a sturdily built man with close-cropped grey hair, matching beard, a solemn expression and the practice of clasping his hands behind his back as if he was striding across the quarterdeck of a frigate rather than the aft compartment of a smoke-belching paddle boat.

His brisk, economic manner suggested he was not a man who suffered fools gladly. Indeed, this trait had betrayed itself soon after he’d provided his uninvited passengers with their dry wardrobe, at which point he’d demanded to know who they were and what the devil did they think they were doing sailing a vessel without lights?

Hawkwood’s response did not seem to mollify him in the least, for he continued glowering at them, leaning across his chart table in an adversarial pose.

“And you were aboard the sloop, why?” he demanded.

To buy himself time, Hawkwood raised the mug to his lips and took another slow drink, exaggerating the shakiness in his grip.