Dreams of Glory (41 page)

Read Dreams of Glory Online

Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Dreams of Glory
4.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
IN HIS CELL IN THE Provost Prison, Hugh Stapleton crouched in a corner on his pile of straw, trying to escape the chilling current of night air that the March wind swept through the glassless window. His head ached, his nose ran; he had the worst cold of his life. After three days of prison food, his stomach alternated between hunger and nausea. The meat was foul, the soup rancid with grease, the bread as hard as stone.
Footsteps ascended the stairs. He placed his eye to the small, barred opening in the cell door. Were they bringing George Washington to share this misery? If Beckford's plan had succeeded, the general would have been captured yesterday. But the British would probably try persuasion first; only if Washington were defiant would they consign him to the Provost.
One part of the congressman's mind dreaded Washington's appearance. His capture would mean the end of the rebellion. Another part of his mind almost welcomed it. He needed an ally, an example, if his own defiance was going to last much longer. On the other hand, perhaps a captured Washington would counsel negotiation, a qualified surrender. The congressman's ordeal would be over.
Stapleton got a glimpse of Walter Beckford's fat face in the flickering lantern light of the passageway. Then the lock turned, the door swung open, and the director of British intelligence walked into the cell. He was accompanied by the chaplain from Connecticut, Caleb Chandler, wearing the same threadbare cloak and old-fashioned suit he had worn the night they had met on Morristown green.
“Mr. Stapleton,” Chandler said, extending his hand, “how nice to see you again, sir. I wish it were in better surroundings.”
“So do I,” Stapleton said, ignoring his hand. “And I wish you were in better company.”
“How are you this evening?” Major Beckford asked.
“As cold—and as much an American—as I was two nights ago. Have you captured General Washington?”
“Our plan worked perfectly,” Beckford said. “Now all we need is your signature on this statement calling on Congress to negotiate peace.”
He drew a piece of paper from his pocket and thrust it at Stapleton.
“I couldn't possibly sign such a statement without conferring with General Washington,” the congressman said.
“That's out of the question,” Beckford shrilled. “He'll soon be on his way to the gallows. But you can still save your neck if you cooperate.”
The congressman began to look closely at Major Beckford. His tone was much too strident for a man who had just executed the most daring coup of the war. He was not exuding the sort of confidence he had displayed at Flora Kuyper's house. There was something wrong with the expression on Caleb Chandler's face, too, something fraudulent about his supercilious smile.
“I begin to suspect you're a liar, sir,” Stapleton said to Beckford. “I wouldn't be surprised if General Washington is sitting down to supper in Morristown at this very moment. Would to God I were with him.”
“No matter where Mr. Washington is,” Beckford said, “you are here, sir, in our power. If you want to get out of here alive, if you don't want your reputation ruined, you will sign this statement.”
“If I have to choose between being known as a fool or a traitor, I prefer the fool. It has the merit of honesty. I have been a fool. I was never a traitor and nothing you say or do to me can make me one.”
“Flora Kuyper is here in New York. She's prepared to describe your meetings with her in detail.”
“The
Royal Gazette
will sell out that edition,” Stapleton
said. “I hope the editor makes it clear that you set her to the business. If the world knows me as a fool, it should also know you as a swine.”
For a moment Major Beckford looked as if he might burst into tears. “Talk some sense to him,” he all but wailed to Caleb Chandler.
The chaplain replaced his supercilious smile with a sanctimonious manner. “Let me first admit that Mr. Washington has not been captured,” Chandler said in an infuriatingly unctuous tone. “That was merely a stratagem of Major Beckford's, to speed your persuasion. The plan to seize the great man miscarried, but I was fortunately able to warn the major and the British cavalry in time and they returned to New York without the loss of a man.”
“You've been in this bastard's pay from the start?” Stapleton shouted. “You goddamn Yankee hypocrite.”
“I became a servant of His Majesty out of a conviction that only his goodness can restore peace and prosperity to America,” Chandler said.
“Piss on His Majesty and His Majesty's servants,” the congressman roared.
“Sir, your language shocks me,” Chandler said. “I'm trying to save you from unnecessary pain and suffering.”
“Thus far,” Beckford added, “I've protected you from Provost Marshal Cunningham. If I walk out of here without your signature, that protection will be withdrawn.”
“The more I hear, the more I think you're trying to save your own neck, Major,” Hugh Stapleton said. “As for this contemptible man of God, I'm sure he's like every Yankee I've ever known—ready to sell his soul for the right price.”
The turncoat chaplain's eyes squinted with indignation. “Your blasphemous reference to my calling is bad enough, sir. But to heap contumely on the place of my birth—”
“Don't waste any more breath on him, Mr. Chandler,” Beckford snapped. “We'll see how patriotic he feels after a week or two in a dungeon belowstairs.”
“May God have mercy on you, Mr. Stapleton,” Chandler said.
“Go to hell,” the congressman said.
The frustrated persuaders departed. For a few minutes Hugh Stapleton felt good. The argument had been almost as invigorating as a warm fire in his cell. But a
whoosh
of the March wind through his window reminded him of how chilled he was, how isolated. He lay down on his bed of straw and realized that the failure to seize George Washington would only make the British more determined to wring some profit out of capturing him. While the circumstances of his capture, the motive that had brought him to Flora Kuyper's house in Bergen, would incline the Americans to abandon him.
A half-hour later, Stapleton heard the familiar stomp of Provost Marshal Cunningham's boots on the stairs. He opened the cell door and gave the congressman a grim smile. “We've got orders to escort you to the accommodations you deserve, you rebel bastard,” he said. An Irish sergeant almost as big and mean-looking as Cunningham gestured with a musket. They led the congressman down the winding stairs to the prison's dungeons, fifty feet below the ground. Here the cold had a harsher, more abusive power. The below-zero days of January and February still lurked in this subterranean world.
Cunningham opened an iron door and pointed into a cell not much wider than a grave. There was an inch of water on the floor. The walls oozed slime. “I won't go in there,” Hugh Stapleton said.
Cunningham punched the congressman in the face, sending him flying into the watery muck on his back. “Sweet dreams, rebel,” the provost marshal said, and slammed the door.
Congressman Stapleton stumbled to his feet, his coat and breeches soaked. He was in almost total darkness. Only a faint light entered the cell through a slit in the door. There was no furniture, only a slop bucket; not even straw for a bed. For the first day, or what he thought was the first day—it was hard to
judge the passage of time—he received neither food nor water. The cold was unrelenting, voracious. It seemed to emanate from the walls in a brutal parody of heat. Refusing to lie down in the muck, the congressman tried to sleep standing up and found it impossible. He finally collapsed into a huddled fetal ball, searching for warmth in his congealing flesh.
He awoke desperately hungry and thirsty. He pounded on the cell door and shouted for food and water. Another Irish soldier eventually responded. He threw a piece of bread in the muck and handed him a cup of water. “Eat up, rebel,” he said. “That's breakfast, dinner, and supper.”
Much later, as Hugh Stapleton crouched in a corner shivering convulsively, Provost Marshal Cunningham opened the door. “Ready to sign that statement, rebel?”
“No,” the congressman said.
“You're a fool, rebel,” the provost marshal said, and slammed the door.
Was he right? Hugh Stapleton wondered. If he died in this inhuman icehouse, who would know? The British would publish a lie: Congressman Stapleton hanged himself in his cell. Something like that. His letter to Flora Kuyper would be flourished to substantiate the story. The turncoat Yankee chaplain, Chandler, would vouch for it. Hannah, his sons, George Washington, his fellow congressmen, would see no reason to doubt it.
Worse, the war might well end in a negotiated peace two or three months after his death. Was there any other alternative to the present stalemate? He had read enough history to know that the advantage in such negotiations lay with the side that held out longest. The supplicant was always the loser. Was that diplomatic difference worth his life? Didn't it make his death even more meaningless? Wasn't there a very good chance that someone else in Congress, captured or free, would issue the call for reconciliation Beckford was demanding?
For a while Hugh Stapleton clung to his personal resentment of Walter Beckford. The fat sodomite, probably with the
connivance of his brother, Paul, had selected him for plucking. He would not give the Williamite bastard the satisfaction of breaking him!
As the cold began to bite into the congressman's bones, the cell door opened again. The Reverend Chandler, his supercilious smirk intact, introduced a middle-aged, scholarly-looking officer, Major Henry Whittlesey of the engineers. Whittlesey said the Reverend Chandler had persuaded him to make this visit. “I want you to know that many officers in the garrison sympathize with your situation and sincerely hope you'll see the wisdom of a call for negotiations. Personally, I've long been hoping for a peace of reconciliation.”
“You have an odd way of reconciling people, sir,” Stapleton said. “So far I've become reconciled t+o only one thing—an early death.”
“I'm sure Major Beckford had no idea that conditions in these dungeons were so harsh,” Chandler said, drawing his cloak around him to ward off the cold.
“Would you be so kind as to tell him about them?” Stapleton said.
“I'd be happy to do so—but he's indisposed,” Chandler said, missing the sarcasm. “Some of the cavalry officers have made a most unjust attack on him for the failure of the attempt to seize Mr. Washington. There's even talk of a court martial.”
“That's the best news I've heard in days.”
“But it won't alter your situation, sir,” Whittlesey said. “Unless you change your mind.”
The visit deepened Hugh Stapleton's moral confusion. The cold soon evaporated the small satisfaction of Walter Beckford's disgrace. Major Whittlesey was right. It did not alter his situation. Others besides Beckford wanted his signature on a call for peace. Why not sign it? Hugh Stapleton was a businessman, not a politician. All his life he had lived in comfort, ease. Who could expect him to endure this kind of torture?
Alone in the icy darkness, the congressman groped for the answer to this question. Certainly not Congressman Samuel
Chase of Maryland or Robert R. Livingston of New York. They were men of the world, they knew there were limits to a gentleman's endurance. But the voices, the faces, of these acquaintances had no resonance. Neither did his mother's voice:
You have gotten yourself into a bad bargain, Hugh,
she would say.
You must cut your losses and buy your way out of it.
Only one voice gave him a different answer—a voice that came out of the grave:
Tell those limey bastards to go fuck themselves.
That was what his father would do, say. But he had had the physique and endurance of a Hercules. He had marched and fought through two Canadian winters. Scraps of the journal he had published in the 1760s drifted through the congressman's mind:
With the temperature 20 below zero every man knew that even a bullet in the arm or leg meant death unless the limb was immediately amputated. The Indians and French came at us through the snow like howling ghosts.
A hero. But he was dead. What did voices from the grave matter to the living?

Other books

Along Came a Spider by Kate Serine
Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston
Queer Theory and the Jewish Question by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, Ann Pellegrini
This Is All by Aidan Chambers
Unspeakable by Caroline Pignat
The Prison in Antares by Mike Resnick