The Secrets Of Catie Hazard. Miranda Jarrett

nasty devils came poking about.”

      “Oh, Belinda, forgive me, I didn’t know.” Gently Catie drew her daughter back into her arms, and with a little sigh Belinda pressed her head against Catie’s side.

      “She was safe enough, Mrs. Hazard,” said Abigail, shifting the musket butt from her shoulder to the ground, leaning on the long barrel like a staff. “And brave as can be into the bargain. We were both sick abed and powerfully ill, weren’t we, Belinda?”

      Catie frowned, slipping her hand beneath Belinda’s chin to feel if she was warm. “Ill?”

      “We were only playing, Mama.” Belinda sniffed loudly, and she smiled in spite of herself. “When the redcoats tried to come into the house, Mr. Piper told them that Mrs. Piper and me were sick.”

      Abigail chuckled. “Nothing an army fears more than a good dose of smallpox sweeping through the camp,” she said cheerfully. “Owen met them at the door, all harried and long-faced, while Belinda and I lay beneath the coverlets upstairs and moaned as if our last hour had come. We had our faces all dabbed with flour-paste sores, too, in case they dared come peek. Not that they did. Lord, you should have seen them turn tail and run, Mrs. Hazard!”

      “But they could come back.” Protectively Catie tightened her arms around Belinda. The Pipers’ ruse had been a clever one, more clever than any she’d have invented herself—in peacetime the Pipers had been smugglers, accustomed to outwitting the authorities, which was one of the reasons Catie had trusted Belinda to them in the first place—but still she couldn’t help half considering taking Belinda back with her to Newport after all.

      “Nay, they won’t come back, not once the word goes round their camp,” declared Abigail. “You’ll see. The pox is better than a score of muskets.”

      Yet her smile faded. “But you, Mrs. Hazard. Coming out here all by yourself—that wasn’t wise, ma’am, ‘specially not if things are as bad in town as we heard. Don’t want to consider what those redcoats might do to a lady like yourself.”

      Catie felt how Belinda shrank closer. Automatically she hugged the girl for reassurance, though she couldn’t have said which of them was the more comforted.

      “I didn’t see a soul the whole way out here, Abigail,” she said, as much for her daughter’s benefit as for the other woman’s, “and I doubt I will on the walk home, either. As for us in town—true, it seems they’ve put half the infantry under my eaves, but I’ve officers staying with me, as well, and I pray those fine gentlemen with the gold lace on their coats will make their men behave.”