Dreams of Glory (36 page)

Read Dreams of Glory Online

Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Dreams of Glory
6.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Case jammed his musket into Caleb's chest. “Where'd you get them cards? Did you find them by accident?”
“Flora—Mrs. Kuyper—gave them to me. She needs help. I'm telling you the truth.”
“I don't think you've been acquainted with the truth for a long time, Chaplain. You've been visiting Mrs. Kuyper's thingy the way Caesar Muzzey done. That don't sit well with Twenty-six. I expect you're going to end up like Caesar, Chaplain.”
“It's Mrs. Kuyper. She must have deceived me. I'm a servant of the King, so help me God.”
“Sure. That's why you had that pistol in your hand. I suggest you start talking to God. I'll give you ten seconds.”
Caleb heard the click of the hammer as Case cocked the musket. Suddenly something or someone transfixed the skull-like
face above the gun. The eyes bulged; the mouth gaped. Simultaneously a foot flashed into Caleb's field of vision, kicking away the barrel of the gun. The musket crashed and a blast of hot air and gunpowder sparks scorched Caleb's cheek. Case toppled out of sight. Caleb stared up through a swirl of gunsmoke at Major Benjamin Stallworth.
“God damn you, Chandler. What are you trying to do?” he said.
Case writhed on the ground beside the pit of coals. Stallworth had bayoneted him. The major cut Caleb loose, reiterating his demand for an explanation. Caleb told him about the bearded queen and his decision to hunt Twenty-six alone. Stallworth groaned in frustration.
“How many times do I have to tell you to stop worrying about Mrs. Kuyper's whorish soul? With that card we might have flushed the bird if you'd given me time to work out a plan. Now you've driven him into deeper cover.”
“Too deep—for you, Major,” gasped Case.
Stallworth glowered at him. “I assume this isn't Twenty-six.”
Caleb shook his head. “One of Caesar Muzzey's hutmates. Probably the man who killed him.”
Stallworth propped Case against the wall of the cave. “Who's Twenty-six?” Stallworth demanded. “Have you ever seen him?”
“He's a fine and generous gentleman. Which is more than I can say for any whoremaster of an officer in the American army.”
Stallworth cuffed the man in the face.
“Who is Twenty-six? Where do you meet him? Tell me and I'll get you to a doctor.”
“Too late for that, Major. I'd rather die loyal to the man who paid me—enough to keep my wife and children alive these last two winters. No fucking American paymaster—or congressman—has done that.”
“We'll see how loyal you are,” Stallworth said. He thrust
the tip of his bayonet into the coals. In a few seconds it was white. He held the glowing metal an inch from Case's eyes. “If you don't want to die cursing, tell me the truth.”
“I'll meet you in hell, Major.”
Caleb looked away as the bayonet moved forward. Case's scream was horrendous. It leaped around the walls of the cave like a berserk animal. Then it was gone. Caleb looked back. Case was dead, his head lolling to one side, blood drooling from his right eye.
“Couldn't you see he was already dying?” Caleb said.
“Shut up,” Stallworth muttered. “Just shut your mouth and come with me.”
In an hour they were in the Ford mansion. The upstairs windows were dark. One or two lights glowed on the first floor. A black servant led them past a room where an aide was hunched over a desk to the rough log office Washington had added to the west wing of the house. The general was at his desk writing letters. He looked up, a polite smile on his face until he saw Stallworth's scowl.
“What's wrong, Major?” he said.
“A great deal,” Stallworth said. He told the commander in chief how one of his men had warned him that Caleb Chandler was making an unauthorized visit to Red Peggy's groggery. He had rushed there, trailed the Reverend Chandler through the woods, and rescued him from execution—a deed that unfortunately required killing the man who might have led them to Twenty-six.
Stallworth glowered at Caleb. “Your Excellency,” he said, “I give up on this fellow. He ignores my orders. He scorns my advice, criticizes my methods, while he consistently proves himself to be the most infuriating fool I've ever seen. I've brought him here in the hope that he'll take a direct order from you.”
“What's the order, Major?”
“I want him to write a letter to Mrs. Kuyper, telling her that
she must come to Red Peggy's immediately. His life is at stake.”
“What do you think of that, Mr. Chandler?”
Caleb found himself confused and surprised by Washington's mild, calm manner. From a distance the man had looked so severe. “I would hate to do it, Your Excellency. I'm afraid it would cause her considerable pain if she discovered I'm—an American agent.”
“Isn't that too damned bad,” Stallworth said. “If anyone deserves a shock to the nerves, it's that bitch. Tell him what she did today, Your Excellency. He won't believe me.”
“Mrs. Kuyper seems to have persuaded Congressman Hugh Stapleton to pay her a visit,” Washington said. “A British officer and several men were waiting for him. He's now their guest … or their prisoner—we're not sure which—in New York.”
Exhausted—he had not slept for twenty-four hours—battered by musket butts and muzzle blasts, Caleb looked into Washington's eyes. He saw regret there. Understanding. He also saw necessity. It did not wear Stallworth's Yankee snarl. But it was no less imperative. He had tried to defend Flora from its iron grip. It was no longer possible.
“I'll write the letter,” he said.
AT GREAT ROCK FARM, HANNAH Stapleton awoke to find sunshine streaming in her window for the second day in a row. Was the Great Cold ending at last? She lay there, listening to the drawled, sibilant call of a snow lark, wondering why she felt so contented. Then she remembered: Paul was returning from New York today.
At first, after Paul had told her that he was a spy, his trips to New York had been a source of new anguish for her. Although he had laughed at her fears, there was always the possibility that one of Walter Beckford's agents might betray him. It was clear, from what he had told her, that most spies lived in a shifting, shadowy world of loyalty to the cause they served and regret for the cause they were betraying.
Hannah sensed that Paul himself was not much different in this respect. His loyalty to America was a fragile thread, consisting largely of his failed, suppressed longing for his father's love. His midnight revelation of his spying implied another thread—equally fragile, she was sure—Paul's love for her. Looking back over the two and a half years of their life together at Great Rock Farm, she realized that she had wanted, needed this love. It was a need that had grown more acute as the collapse of her love for Hugh and his repugnance for her became visible.
Odd how loyalty to America, to the revolution, had become so entangled in both her loves. Hugh's increasing disgust with the war had paralleled the decline of her affection for him. Paul's revelation of loyalty had confirmed, even exalted, her love for him. Why? It was not simply the memory of that harrowing encounter with John Nelson and Wiert Bogert in Hackensack. It was Malcolm Stapleton, something he embodied
that gave meaning to the word “American.” All the brutal bloody stories he had told her about his warrior days in the north woods. His memories, which reached back through his father to the first comers, the Stapletons who had built this house and more than once fought attacking Indians from its windows and doors. The old man spoke of the long struggle to build a nation in the wilderness, the pride in that achievement, the strength it had required. In spite of all the sermons on humility she had heard in her Quaker youth, Hannah wanted that pride, that strength, for her sons.
Daughter, the old man had called her, in the style of his day. Daughter this and daughter that. At first she had disliked it. But now the memory pleased her. She wanted to be his daughter. She had ceased to be the daughter of that meek pious Quaker in Burlington who carped at the rebels and prated about everyone's longing for peace. Damn peace without honor, without pride!
Downstairs, Hannah repeated a morning ritual. She took Paul's latest portrait of her and set it by the window, where it caught the morning light. He said it was going to be the best painting he had ever done. At first glance it was a repetition of the “history” painting he had completed a year ago. She was wearing the same faded housedress; her hair was ribbonless, undressed. Again, it was winter. She stood by a window, looking out at a snowbound landscape. But Paul had transformed the winter light. He had found an inner radiance, a silvery-dark gleam that reminded her of the reflection in a running brook in December. The eyes of the woman of the portrait echoed the same subtle radiance. A ghost of a smile was on her lips. On second glance, the woman was as transformed as the winter light. She was no longer the weary fading creature he had painted in similar workaday clothes.
Was it vision or reality? Hannah was not sure. But she wanted to be the woman of the second glance.
It was Sunday. Hannah decided to go to church. Dominie Freylingheusen was preaching in Hackensack. Like the rest of
New Jersey, the Dutch Reformed Church was divided between rebels and loyalists. Rebellious Dominie Freylingheusen rode a circuit, preaching to like-minded churchgoers at Hackensack, Schraalenberg, and several other towns on successive weeks. Hannah asked Pompey to get out the sleigh and horses while she had breakfast.
The dominie proved to be his usual militant self, denouncing loyalists as depraved sinners and calling on his fellow rebels to stop backsliding, to turn out for militia duty and quit selling their corn and beef to the enemy. With vivid effect he compared losing the war to going to hell and implied that if they were defeated, the Americans, like all sinners, had no one but themselves to blame.
Coming out of church, she smiled and nodded to several neighbors. Dr. James Beattie, who had gone to Kings College with Hugh, fell into step beside her. “How is the rising politician?” he asked.
“Rising to what? He never writes me a line,” Hannah said.
“He's been appointed to a very important committee that's in Morristown at this moment conferring with General Washington. According to the
New Jersey Journal
, Hugh made a speech in Congress proposing emergency measures.”
“Thank you for the news,” she said.
“I'm going to write him a letter warning him of the dangers of neglecting a pretty wife,” Beattie said.
On the trip back to Great Rock Farm, Hannah's spirits dwindled in spite of the brilliant sunshine on the white fields. How could her husband come so close—Morristown was little more than an hour's ride away—and not even tell her? She began composing an angry letter to him. Perhaps she could make more of an impression by putting her grievances on paper, where he could not interrupt her. The only consolation she could find was Dr. Beattie's report that Hugh was taking a more active part in Congress. Could her exhortations have had something to do with it?
Coming up the path to the farmhouse, Hannah noticed a
strange sleigh at the front door. A soldier in uniform lounged beside it, chatting with her son Malcolm. In the house, Pompey greeted her with a worried expression. “An officer from Morristown is in the congressman's study.”
A short young man with a leonine head and an erect martial bearing emerged from Hugh's study. “Mrs. Stapleton?” he said. “I'm Colonel Alexander Hamilton. I'm here at General Washington's orders. May I speak with you?”
Hannah threw her cloak on a chair in the hall and followed Colonel Hamilton into the study. “I'll come to the point at once, madam,” he said. “Your husband has apparently been captured by the British. He's in their hands in New York.”
“What do you mean—apparently been captured?”
“It distresses me to be the bearer of such news,” Colonel Hamilton said. “Congressman Stapleton was visiting a woman in Bergen. A woman we know to be a British agent. From what our people tell us—we have men watching her house—he seems to have gone willingly with his captors. There's a grave possibility that he's deserted to their side.”
Hannah sat down on the edge of a wing chair. God was turning Dominie Freylingheusen's sermon, her early-morning meditation about pride and strength, into cruel comedy. “I—I don't know what to say,” she murmured.
“I must ask your permission to search Mr. Stapleton's papers for anything that may shed some light on his—capture. General Washington feels we should continue to call it that until we have solid proof to the contrary.”
“Yes,” Hannah said, certain that no documentary proof was necessary. The proof was in her memory of Hugh's self-pity, his boredom, his disillusion with Congress, his antipathy to contumacious Yankees.
“I'd like to take the papers back to Morristown so I can examine them in detail.”
“Of course.”
She ordered Pompey and his son Isaac to bring a trunk down from the attic. As they filled it with Hugh's letter books
and ledgers from the West Indies and records of his privateering and mercantile ventures in Philadelphia, Hannah glanced hurriedly at them and was amazed at the profits. Hugh was incredibly richer than he had ever intimated to her. Another example of the distance that had grown between them.
Colonel Hamilton departed, his sleigh sinking into the softening snow under the weight of the trunk full of papers. As the rest of the day drifted listlessly into dusk, Hannah realized that Paul had not returned from New York. Had he deserted her, too? Had he joined his brother in a joint decision to “improve some moneys”? That would be unbearable. God would not permit it. He would not allow her to be humiliated twice by these devious hardhearted Stapletons. Her misery multiplied as she remembered her morning thoughts about becoming part of the family. She was trapped here, with no retreat, no refuge. She could not go home to beg crumbs from her father's table, to accept his condescending affection.
She got out Paul's unfinished portrait of her and set it on an easel. Was that woman a fool? Was that radiance in her eyes, on her face, a clever lie? She could not believe it. But where was Paul? Drinking with his former lover, Beckford, and his traitorous brother, Hugh, and the mysterious woman from Bergen, laughing at love and loyalty?
Little Malcolm came in to say good night. “When will Father come home again?” he asked.
“I don't know,” Hannah said.
“He promised me a sleigh ride. Now the snow's melting.”
“I'll ask Pompey to give you one tomorrow.”
“I want it from Father.”
She tousled his blond head and hugged him, whispering, “I hope he'll come soon.”
She would accept Hugh, she would try to love him in spite of the woman in Bergen, Hannah told herself. If only he had not deserted to the British. That was all she wanted now. His loyalty.
About an hour after Malcolm went to bed, Pompey came
into the parlor, where Hannah still sat staring disconsolately at Paul's unfinished portrait. “Mistress,” he said, “they in the barns again.”
“There's nothing we can do about it. Lock the front and back doors. Tie Achilles on the porch.”
“I'd like to fight them just once, mistress.”
“No. They'd kill us all, Pompey.”
Before Hugh left, he had apparently commissioned Pompey to guard the house, without bothering to consult her or Paul. Tonight, as usual, she insisted on limiting the old soldier to defensive measures. A half-hour later, Achilles began barking. Suddenly his deep bass became a strangled yelp. With a tremendous crash the front door splintered around the lock and burst open. Wiert Bogert lunged into the hall, seeming to fill it from floor to ceiling. He was dragging Achilles by the tail. Blood oozed from the dog's slashed throat. “Hello, liddle lady,” he said. “Here's your mutt.”
Behind Bogert came John Nelson, herding the farm's eight male blacks, including a very disgruntled Pompey, into the kitchen. Returning to the parlor, Nelson gave Hannah his shark's smile. In the firelight the scars of his tarring and feathering writhed up his throat. “We're here with marching orders from your husband,” Nelson said. “He's joined the King's side and expects you to cooperate with us. We're going to collect twenty or thirty horses from loyalists hereabouts and put them in your barn for use later tonight. Until then this house will be under guard. Anyone, black or white, who tries to sneak off will be shot. Is your brotherly protector, Mr. Stapleton, here?”
Hannah shook her head.
“Maybe Beckford's put him to work, too. About time, I'd say.”
“You understand all that, liddle lady?” Bogert said.
Hannah nodded, still unable to speak. She sat there for another hour while Pompey disposed of Achilles's corpse and wiped the blood from the hall floor. Something very important
was obviously about to happen. Hugh's desertion, Paul's disappearance, were connected to it. But what could she do about it? She found herself despising her helplessness, almost hating her womanhood.
A light rain pattered against the windows. A pathetic, dismal sound. As it began to penetrate, almost absorb her mind, the front door crashed open again. Wiert Bogert loomed in the hall. “Get in here and stay,” he ordered. “You don't go near d'barn again. John in command here.”
Bogert shoved Paul into the parlor and returned to the barn. With a violent shiver, Paul threw off his hat and cloak; both were drenched. His breeches were equally soaked; his stockings were matted with wet snow from the road. Hannah threw her arms around him. “I've been praying and praying for you to come,” she said.

Other books

Wrangled Mess by Reese Madison
The Alchemist's Code by Dave Duncan
Wiseguys In Love by C. Clark Criscuolo
The Surrogate (Clearwater) by Dobson, Marissa
Bath Belles by Joan Smith