Dreams of Glory (39 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Dreams of Glory
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“Look, sir,” called a dragoon, “is that a signal?”
Off the road about a mile away a gush of flame leaped against the night. “That's Great Rock Farm. Where our fresh horses are waiting,” Beckford said numbly.
“
Were
waiting, Major,” Birch said.
Beckford dug his spurs into his crippled horse and sent the animal hobbling down the road to Great Rock Farm. By the time he reached the barn it was a huge tower of flame. John Nelson came running up to him, screaming, “Your friend the painter ratted. They fired the barn and turned the bloody house into a fortress. I've lost three men trying to break down the door.”
“Are you sure?” Beckford said dazedly. Was it possible? Paul?
“He left this on the porch. He called to us to use it for target practice.”
By the leaping flames of the barn Beckford saw Paul's portrait of him—the same resolute expression on his face, the background precisely as he had described it, the cavalry charging, the Ford mansion in flames. But a dunce cap had been added to his head.
Beckford cut away the ropes holding the mine on his saddle. “Take this,” he said. “Shove the spear in the front door and the charge will knock it down in sixty seconds. Go in there and kill every man, woman, and child in the house.”
“With pleasure,” Nelson said.
Beckford swung his horse around and tried to goad him back to the main road. The anguished animal refused to take another step. The major leaped from the saddle and tried to shoot him. The rain had dampened his powder and his pistol clicked uselessly. He labored back toward the main road on foot. Halfway there, he was confronted by Brigadier Birch and a dozen of his officers.
“Damn it, Major,” roared Birch, “we have no time to waste. That fellow—your agent—tells me your whole network is uncovered. Your chief agent caught, disguised as a woman. It's the talk of Morristown.”
“And will soon be the talk of New York, I fear,” said one of the officers in a distinctly mocking voice.
Beckford laughed bitterly. “I begin to think Mr. Washington is a genius, after all.”
“I begin to think you're a fool,” snarled Birch. “Get up behind one of these fellows and—”
A terrific explosion raced across the snowy darkness from Great Rock Farm. Birch's horse skittered wildly. “What in hell was that?” he said.
“The mine,” Beckford said.
“God damn all,” Birch said. “We've risked four hundred men and ruined four hundred horses to blow up a bloody farmhouse.”
INSIDE THE HOUSE AT GREAT Rock Farm, they had wedged beams, cut from the underpinnings in the cellar, against the front door. Elsewhere they had erected barriers in hallways and doorways, jumbles of furniture and mattresses. These obstacles were Pompey's idea. It was the way they had fought the Indians in the north woods in his youth. Malcolm Stapleton had ordered his men to pile branches and bushes in front of their bivouacs to trap the Indians when they charged. Would it work against the savages they were about to challenge? Hannah wondered.
Pompey and the other blacks were amused by the dunce cap Paul had added to his portrait of Walter Beckford before he propped it up outside the front door. Paul said that he hoped it would convince Nelson that the plan was blown. He might retreat without attacking them. Hannah saw the caricature's deeper significance. Paul was abandoning once and for all the double agent's ambiguity.
While they were turning the house into a fortress Hannah had obeyed Nelson's arrogant orders to give food and rum to his men. She met him at the kitchen door with whatever he demanded, truckling to his boastful humor, humbly nodding to his reiterated threat to kill anyone who tried to leave the house. He talked freely about the trouble he was having with local loyalists, who were reluctant to volunteer their horses. To speed the roundup, he withdrew the sentries from the front and back doors. Hannah's cringing obedience, his contempt for the blacks, and his assumption that Paul was in Beckford's pay had convinced Nelson that there was no need to worry about them.
When Nelson withdrew the sentries, Hannah ordered fifteen-year-old
Lewis, the youngest of the blacks, to take little Malcolm through the woods to the Van Damm farm a mile away. Then she and Paul rehearsed the plan to burn the barn. She practiced with the pistol-shaped fire lighter until she was able to get a flame three tries out of four. She went over the story she would use if she encountered one of Nelson's men: she wanted to say good-bye to her favorite horse.
At 2 A.M. Hannah crept out through the cold rain and reached the barn unchallenged. She opened the back door and threw herself into the dank winter hay. Beyond her, in the darkness, the horses stamped and snuffled.
Poor beasts
, she prayed.
Forgive me for this terrible act. I wish there were a way to tell you why I am doing it.
She took the pistol tinder from the inner pocket of her skirt. It had the trigger and flintlock mechanism of a gun, without the barrel. Inserting a candle in the metal loop beside the flintlock, she added some grains of gunpowder to the tinder in the pan. She pulled the trigger. The flink clicked against the metal. There was a spark but no flame. Her heart almost stopped beating; the click had seemed so loud. She tried again. This time the candle became a finger of flame. She thrust it into the hay. At first it only ran thinly across the dank outer fibers. Then it burrowed like a voracious snake into the dry inner stuff.
Whuff!
In seconds the whole interior of the barn was blazing light. It reminded Hannah of the illumination she had once imagined her soul would receive when she ascended to the God of Glory. Now it was earthly salvation she sought as she crawled backward toward the door in the ferocious heat and stumbled into the rainy, half-white darkness. She pulled her skirts above her knees and ran for the house while behind her a voice howled, “She burning them!” It was the monster, Bogert. Once, she fell and thought she was doomed. She imagined Hugh learning of it in New York and wondered if he would feel any grief or guilt.
As the wet snow struck her face, guns roared in the house;
she heard the bullets hissing through the darkness above her head. The battle had begun. They needed her in the house. Paul, Pompey, needed her. To hell with Hugh! She scrambled to her feet and lunged toward safety while muskets boomed behind her and more bullets hurtled above her to smash into the old timbers.
Paul flung open the kitchen door and she crashed into his arms. “Welcome home,” he said. They helped Pompey and his son Isaac wedge a beam against the door. They piled chairs on the kitchen table and placed them behind the beam to create more obstacles for the attackers. Isaac was left to guard this position. In the front hall, Paul picked up his father's favorite gun, the huge double-barreled musket. Pompey handed Hannah a lighter musket called a fusil. They waited behind another barricade of chairs and tables. The other blacks, six of them, guarded side windows.
Pompey had given them all lessons in loading and firing the clumsy guns. He had made them repeat at least two dozen times the basic routine of ramming home the bullet and powder charge, sprinkling powder in the firing pan, then squeezing, not jerking, the trigger. As they waited Pompey shouted one more reminder: “Aim low!”
Two more volleys from Nelson and his men smashed out windows and thudded into the timbers. Then they rushed the house. Wiert Bogert crashed his huge shoulder against the front door. But the reinforcing beams held. Paul and Pompey forced him to retreat with blasts from the front windows. Other guns thundered on the right and left flanks. From the back of the house came a cry of agony. Isaac, Pompey's son, came staggering into the hall, blood gushing from his mouth. Pompey steadied his musket on a chair and killed the man who came charging at them from the kitchen.
The blacks at the side windows shouted that they had hit at least two other attackers. That eliminated almost half of Nelson's force. Pompey ordered two of the blacks to guard the kitchen door. They waited for a few minutes while the light
from the burning barn flickered wildly on the shattered windows and the screams of the dying horses filled the house.
A blast of musketry blew the last shards of glass from the front windows. Footsteps thudded on the front porch. A strange pause. Then a blinding, head-splitting explosion. Fragments of the front door flew past them like bullets. A huge billow of smoke gushed into the hall. Out of the murk came Wiert Bogert and two other men. They thrashed against the barrier of furniture and mattresses, roaring curses and firing their guns. Paul's gun boomed and Pompey fired a second later, toppling the two lesser men. Hannah pressed her fusil against her shoulder and aimed it at Bogert. She pulled the trigger and felt a jolt of pain as the gun recoiled. Bogert fired back at point-blank range. Pompey shoved her aside and the bullet struck him in the chest. Dropping his musket, Bogert flung chairs and chests right and left to get at them. As he burst through the barrier the mortally wounded Pompey tried to club him with the butt of his empty musket. Bogert brushed the gun aside and drove his fist into the old man's face.
“Get up the stairs,” Paul shouted. Hannah obeyed him, scrambling on her hands and knees. Behind her, Paul backed up crabwise, reloading his gun. Bogert drew a pistol and shot Paul above the heart as he reached the top of the stairs. Gasping in agony, Paul pulled both triggers of his father's old gun. The blast struck Bogert in the chest. It would have sent an ordinary man hurtling backward down the stairs. But the monster continued to stumble upward until his hand clutched Paul's dangling foot. Weeping, Hannah kicked the hand away and dragged Paul into the bedroom.
“Load the gun,” Paul said as she propped him against the wall. “Load—the—gun.”
She obeyed him like a child, mechanically ramming home the cartridges and the balls, sprinkling the powder in the pan, while more blasts of gunfire, screams of rage and pain, echoed downstairs. Then terrible silence.
Then footsteps on the stairs. John Nelson's cry: “Oh, lad,
lad, the bastards have done you, they've done you. Why didn't you wait for me?”
Then a scream of madness. “But we shall have revenge, lad!”
John Nelson in his filthy regular's red coat, rose from the stairwell. His face was streaked with powder and blood, his musket leveled. “We would have sailed home,” he shouted. “We would have sailed home together from this murdering country.”
Hannah clutched Malcolm Stapleton's gun to her breast, its barrel pointed to the ceiling. Nelson paused at the door. Paul lay against the wall, helpless, dying, his shirt soaked with blood.
Nelson glared contemptuously at her. He assumed she was incapable of using the gun. Her grief, her dazed horror, made her look like a female parody of a soldier. Then he recognized Paul. “There you are, you buggering little doublecrosser,” he said. Ignoring Hannah, he strode across the room, raising his musket to bring the butt down on Paul's head.
All in one motion, one moment of mingled love and despair, Hannah leveled and fired the old gun. The two bullets struck Nelson in the back, flinging him against the wall. The recoil of the gun flung Hannah in the opposite direction. A dense cloud of white gunsmoke swirled into the center of the room. Nelson writhed along the wall for a moment, then managed to turn, still gripping his gun.
“Bitch,” he said. He tried to raise his gun to a firing position. Paralyzed, Hannah watched him through the haze of gunsmoke. “Bitch,” Nelson choked again, and slid sideways down the wall into oblivion.
Hannah did not know how long she leaned against the bed, clutching the gun. Voices downstairs aroused her. She listened indifferently, not caring whether they were British or American. Then more footsteps on the stairs.
A muscular, remarkably handsome young man wearing a green coat and a leather cavalryman's helmet appeared in the
doorway. “Mrs. Stapleton?” he said. “Thank God you're alive. I'm Major Henry Lee. We saw your barn burning—”
“It's part of a plan to seize General Washington. The British cavalry—”
“—are hobbling back to New York as fast as their crippled horses can carry them. One of our spies fortunately penetrated their plan.”
Hannah stared numbly at another spy. Paul's eyes were closed, his face peaceful. She found herself yearning for the power to proclaim his courage throughout America. The prodigal son had returned to his father's house in time to rescue it from disgrace. His heroism would never be recorded in a history book. Their murderous little skirmish would probably not even be mentioned in the newspapers. She alone would have to keep Paul's memory alive in her ruined heart.
Major Henry Lee, her rescuer, only made the ruin of that treacherous organ more complete. He was so young, so handsome. His flowing blond hair, his confident smile, reminded her of Hugh ten years ago. Hugh, her traitor husband.
Hannah asked Major Lee if there were any survivors downstairs. He said three of her blacks were wounded but alive. His men would rush them to Morristown to be treated by the army's doctors. “It might be best if you came, too, madam,” Lee said. “The loyalty of this countryside is too uncertain to leave you here alone.”
In the dawn, Major Lee's troopers buried Paul and Pompey and Isaac beside Malcolm and Catalyntie Stapleton in the shadow of the great hump of rock that had given the farm its name. They stopped at the Van Damm farm to pick up little Malcolm, then rode on to Morristown.
At headquarters, General Washington received Hannah with grave courtesy. He shook hands with Malcolm, then sat him on his lap while Major Lee described the battle at Great Rock Farm. Washington listened with fascination, his eyes, his whole face, coming alive. As Lee finished the story the general reached across the desk and took Hannah's hand. “I
grieve for your losses, madam. For your brother-in-law and your brave blacks. But let me say what comes irresistibly to my lips. Malcolm Stapleton would have been proud to call you his daughter.”
“I find it embarrassing, Your Excellency,” Lee said. “We had four hundred British within reach of our sabers and only this lady struck a blow at them.”
“There were strong and sufficient reasons for our tactics, Major,” Washington said. “I'll explain them to you at another time. Now, would you take this young man on a tour of our camp while I talk for a few moments with his mother?”
Major Lee, knowing a reprimand when he heard one, obeyed. As he left, Malcolm informed him that he wanted to see a cannon.
Washington smiled briefly. “There are times when Major Lee makes me wonder if he and your son are the same age,” he said. “What he tells me of you, however, is more important than his disappointment at my not letting him cross sabers with the British. Your courage, madam, makes me hope you can bear a frank discussion of a matter that must be very painful to you.”

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