Alice Payne Rides by Kate Heartfield

Author:Kate Heartfield
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER TEN: Where Alice Went Next

1789

Alice runs up to her rooms and brings down the breeches, shirt and boots she wears when she’s a highwayman. She wriggles in, as Jane helps her out of her corset and skirts. Then she opens a cedar chest and pulls out her father’s uniform jacket. The red wool and silver lacing have not dimmed, although the white of the facings has yellowed a bit. She throws it over her shoulders.

“Well?” she demands.

Jane cocks her head. “Aren’t the breeches meant to be white? And I don’t think those boots are right at all.”

“But these fit me. I think anyone who gets close enough to wonder about my breeches and boots will have quite a few questions beyond that. I don’t want to pass for a soldier, just not draw too much attention. Look, beloved, you haven’t seen the best bit yet.”

When Alice was a child, she thought the 17th Light Dragoons helmet was the most astonishing thing she had ever seen, and she has not changed her opinion since. It’s a dome of black leather, upon which a brass crest rises like the prow of a ship, and out of the crest tumbles a plume of scarlet horsehair. Three inches of sheepskin line the bottom edge, and in front, a black metal triangular plate rising to a point in the middle, with a white skull-and-crossbones painted on it. It is as though the dragoons had been unable to decide whether to go to a masquerade as pirates or as centurions.

Alice ties her hair in a male style, with a black ribbon at the nape of her neck, and tries the helmet on. It is too big for her, so she takes her torn and stained green handkerchief and stuffs it into the helmet. It settles nicely, then, and she tucks stray tendrils into it. It’s heavy, but not uncomfortable.

“There. Do I look fearsome?”

“I feel as if I’m about to be boarded,” says Jane, putting her hand to her heart.

“Time for that later. Now, what about you? Shall we shimmer over to Auden’s house and steal his old uniform?”

“I’ll go as I am. Don’t fuss, Alice. I’ve never heard of a war yet that didn’t have women in it. I won’t stand out.”

Colonel John Payne loved nothing more than maps. On his rare visits home, when Alice was a child, he would show her maps of the world, the two round halves of the globe staring out at her like the gilded eyes of an owl, and the sturdy inhabitants of the Earth rising mostly nude from the bottom margin, or cherubs swooping entirely nude from the top. She would trace the trade winds with her chubby child’s finger.

So Alice knows where to find the maps of America, the maps they need. They look at New York, and Boston, and Philadelphia, places that might as well be out of legend. Jane finds the latitude and longitude of Charleston, and Alice finds a smudged “Hart’s Mill” on

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