Dreams of Glory (8 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Dreams of Glory
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“It's like music, madam. Fierce, sweet, fierce again.”
“As I told you, I've never—played the music you're suggesting. Never gone from fierceness to sweetness to—”
Liar,
boomed Caesar from within his coffin.
Liar.
She saw his hands reaching out for her. Those murderous dark hands. Terrifying in their ferocity—and the sweetness they created. She saw them, black on her white breasts.
She sat down at the harpsichord in the corner of the living room. “Will you allow me to sing my favorite song for you?”
The words were on her lips:
Plaire à celui que j'aime.
It was a way of saying good-bye to Caesar, good-bye to the dream, however dubious, that he had given her of escaping the diminished woman she had become.
Liar
, roared Caesar from his cold box, and the words froze on her lips. All right, she whispered to him. I will not sing it in French I will never sing it in French to anyone but you.
Not good enough
, roared Caesar, and she heard herself choosing another song.
The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow;
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow
The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur'd her moans;
Sing willow, willow, willow;
Her salt tears fell from her, and soft'ned the stones;
Sing willow, willow, willow … .
That's better,
whispered Caesar from the icy darkness.
“What a lovely voice,” the congressman said. “I wish you preferred a happier song.”
Congressman Stapleton sat down beside her on the harpsichord bench. “Is there nothing I can do to assuage that sadness?” he asked.
“I fear not,” she said, her head bowed.
He turned her face to him and softly kissed her on the lips.
Kill him,
Caesar said.
Tell Cato to kill him in my name.
“No!” she cried, and fled across the room. She found herself face to face with the last thing she wanted to see, a portrait of Caesar and Henry Kuyper as boys. Each was dressed in an elaborate velvet suit, with lace cuffs and a ruffled collar. Caesar gazed up adoringly at his young white master, who sat on a pony. It was madness. Hugh Stapleton would be melting in her arms, if it were not for that dead voice out there in the winter night.
The congressman was baffled by her conduct. “Madam,” he said, “Have I said or done something that disturbs you?”
“No,” she said. “You must take me—I can't offer myself. I'm not a woman of fashion. There are scruples, memories—”
It was very close to the truth and it penetrated his rake's mask. He drew her to him with unexpected gentleness. “My dear, I'm not a mere cocksman. I feel a power, a hope of affection in you, beyond anything I've ever known.”
“Show me,” she said. “Rescue me—from the past.”
He took a candle off the harpsichord and led her upstairs. Her bedroom fireplace was aglow with coals, banked by Cato with his usual skill. Before it was a tin tub, filled with water
scented with attar of roses. “I must bathe,” she said, “in spite of winter.”
“Isn't it dangerous?” he said, amazed. Few Americans bathed between October and June.
“Everything is dangerous,” she said. “Help me.”
He undid the buttons on the back of her gown and she stepped out of it. Together they unlaced the stays that had added firmness to her soft, plump waist. She slipped the pannier belt that held the little half hoops on her hips and threw those fashionable encumbrances on a chair. Turning, she gave the congressman a swift challenging kiss. She always felt freest when she escaped the confines of the feminine mode, free and wild, equal to the most confident man. She let him unbutton the petticoat and underpetticoat. They slid down her body to a soft heap at her ankles. Mounting the tiny three-step ladder beside the tub, she descended into the warm, scented water.
Memory flooded her. She saw Caesar beside the tub in the hot summer night, the black soap-flecked hands sliding down her flesh, his own body gleaming like oiled metal.
Bitch
, he roared at her from his cold coffin. But she had control of her fear now. You are dead, she whispered. I would do anything, give anything, to restore you to life. But it is not possible.
“I need—a little drink of that,” she said, pointing to the laudanum on her night table. Faithful Cato had left a glass of fresh water beside it. She put five drops in the glass and drank it down. Soon Caesar's voice became more distant; she no longer felt any need to answer him. The congressman's hands were massaging her back, her breasts, exploring beneath the water the silken hair of love: She smiled and let his tongue probe her mouth. It was the best way to say good-bye to Caesar.
With no warning Caesar changed into another ghost, Henry Kuyper whispering in Dutch:
“Ah, myn Flora, myn Flora.”
For a moment she relived the old struggle against indifference,
remembering Henry panting above her while Caesar waited in the thick summer heat of the barn, ripe with hay and animal smells. One last time Caesar speared her like a triumphant hunter, taunting her, making her beg him for release, for breath, at last crooning softly,
Plaire à celui que j'aime.
The congressman was inviting her to bed. He had removed his expensive clothes and found a purple robe in the big Dutch cupboard on the other side of the room. He was holding up a sky-blue dressing gown for her. She stepped into it and into his arms in one falling motion. “Take me, rescue me,” she murmured, and he carried her to the bed.
He drew the curtains, and darkness consumed the ghosts around the fireplace. The blank swift motions of desire dismissed memory. He was a man, the congressman. She savored the sinewy muscles of his arms and back as he drew her to him. She welcomed the first deep thrust of his sex, and his eager tongue in her lying mouth. At least this was not a lie, she wanted him now as much as she had ever wanted Caesar or any other man. She remembered his words downstairs: “a hope of affection in you.” Even he, behind or beneath his boredom and self-satisfaction, sought a love that was strong enough to transform a mercenary world.
He began to stroke her slowly, deliberately, with the practiced skill of a man who knew how to extract maximum pleasure from this ancient ritual. Flora struggled to keep her will, her wish, focused on that promise of affection, to meet his rising excitement. But the knowledge that she was lying beneath this man on orders from Walter Beckford collided with this wish, with the possibility of affection. In the wreckage, Caesar's voice boomed out of the wintry night:
Never. Never love anyone but me.
Memories of other men, grinning peers and politicians for whom she had assumed this supine position, prowled in the distance like deserters in search of plunder. She should have sung the secret words,
Plaire à celui.
She should have dismissed hope, mocked love, once and for all.
“Ahhh,” gasped the congressman. Flora felt his seed surge
deep in her belly, a young man's coming, after many long lonely nights. He lifted her against him and for a second they were together, his fists tangled in her hair, his lips against her throat. Then they were on the earth again, in Bergen, New Jersey, with Caesar in the cold barn growling
Never
and the British and their money and power a half-hour away across the frozen Hudson.
Congressman Stapleton cradled her in his arms. “My dear, my dearest Flora,” he said. “You really are a goddess of nature, of spring. You transform winter—”
She had him. She had a congressman. She had a lover who thought he had rescued her from guilty dreads and lackluster widowhood, from the griefs and humiliations of her fictitious past. Flora wondered what Major Beckford planned to do with him.
HUGH STAPLETON SLEPT IN BERGEN, his arms around Flora Kuyper. Two dozen miles away in Elizabethtown, a saturnine man in a Continental Army uniform sat at a dining-room table reading a letter. It was addressed to one of the young ladies of the village and on first inspection appeared to be nothing more than a chatty note from a loyalist cousin in New York. The letter discussed fashions and balls and plays, handsome officers and their budding romances and foundering liaisons. The young lady was obviously fascinated by the British army's gallants. That was hardly unusual. Her cousin, who happened to be Susan Livingston, daughter of the rebel governor of New Jersey, had agreed in a recent letter that almost every female, rebel or loyal, was liable to contract a case of “scarlet fever” if she spent too much time with these red-coated gentlemen.
The man took from his pouch an hourglass-shaped mask and placed it over the chatty note. Almost all of the page was obscured, except parts of a half-dozen lines in the center. These communicated something far more important than af fairs of the heart.
Some officers say the
best way to finish the
business is to kill a
certain general or buy
him off and claim they
are indifferent, as to
which is done. They want
to end the war this year.
Muttering a curse, the man took another letter from a pouch on the chair beside him. This one was written in gibberish.
byon nzitelnl tifeailr el uiltir mrtnelelf
tpayr yh elkenl nrrnlc yl lyti ektuio
Beside the letter the man placed the key to this alphabet cipher. He soon had the message decoded:
First American Regiment in secret training. Rumor of Indian attack on Albany. Fearful mortality aboard the prison ship
Jersey.
Quantities of counterfeit money being sent to Connecticut.
A knock. Instinctively, the man reached for the pistol on the table beside him. “Who is it?” he said.
“Usaph Grey, sir. I was hoping for a chance to speak with you.”
“Just a moment.”
The man swept everything off the table and into the pouch. Unlocking the door, he admitted a small, limping civilian with the darting stricken eyes of a trapped rabbit.
“What happened to your leg?”
“I slipped on the ice coming across the Kill last night,” Grey said. “Our sentries chased me. I never expected them out in this weather.”
“We've improved the discipline in this place,” the saturnine man growled. “Where have you been lately?”
“I got back from New England two nights ago. I carried a letter from Dr. Haliburton in Newport. He tells me that he has made a great catch. Metcalf Bowler, the chief justice of Rhode Island, has agreed to come over to them the moment affairs look promising for reconciliation.”
“Did you copy Haliburton's letter?'
Grey shook his head. “Too dangerous. Anyway, it was in that same code. The one you couldn't break.”
“God damn it,” said the saturnine man, crashing his fist on the table. “If we get more than one sample, we improve our chances a hundred percent.”
“It's too dangerous, Major. They searched me at the ferry. Stripped me to my skin in the damn ferry house without even a fire. Let me stand there in below-zero cold while they went through every stitch. It was Beckford's orders. He's got a nose for double agents. I think he's wise to me.”
“So you don't want to go back?”
Grey shifted from one foot to another. “I'd like to return to duty with my regiment, sir. My constitution is worn out from the strain.”
The saturnine man pulled at his nose. He made an odd clicking sound with his back teeth. “How many other men do you think we have in your position, Grey? Trusted courier for His Majesty's secret agents, from here to Canada?”
“I don't know, sir.”
“None.”
“None,” Grey said in a doleful echo.
“We'll double your money.”
“It's not the money. It's—it's the consequences. I've got two boys. I don't want them to think of me dying at the end of a rope.”
“Some good men have died that way.”
“And who remembers them? Who remembers Captain Hale?”
“I do,” snarled the saturnine man. “He was my best friend.”
In spite of this warning, Grey sullenly persisted. “His own family scarcely mention him. They all feel the disgrace.”
The saturnine man stared at the polished tabletop. He was back four years, in the fields outside the city of New York, watching Nathan Hale play football with the men of his regiment. Hale gave the ball one of his tremendous kicks, which had sent it soaring over the tops of some nearby trees while everyone watched, openmouthed. A trivial memory—the vanishing ball, the athlete's laughing face. But for a moment the man could think of nothing else.
“Captain Grey,” he said, “when we caught you in treasonous correspondence with the enemy two years ago, we could
have hanged you on the spot. We gave you a chance to repent of your crime and expiate the stain from your soul. But those charges could be revived at any time. Would you want your farm confiscated, your wife and boys turned into the road? I can arrange to have it done—you hanged, them dispossessed—in a week's time.”
“All right,” Grey said with a sigh. “I'll go back for another run. They want me to meet some escaped officers in Mount Hope and cross New Jersey with them. In case they can't get through our lines around New York, I'm to take them through Connecticut and across the Sound. They seem uncommonly concerned about these gentlemen. Beckford offered me double the usual pay to meet them on time.”
“Send me a careful list of their names, as well as the names of the houses in which you stay. Pay close attention to their conversations.”
“How shall I get it to you?”
“Use the substitution cipher I gave you. Write it when you're safely out of New York. Leave it with the proper token at the Sign of the Elk in Stamford.”
“I don't trust that innkeeper. He's drunk half the time. What's this month's token?”
The saturnine man handed him a six-dollar Continental bill. It was torn almost in half. “It'll buy you tuppence of brandy,” he said, in bitter reference to the way inflation had made American currency laughable.
“I'll leave it with him for a tip,” Grey said. “I want to be on the road when he finds the packet. He enjoys the business too much. The last time, he spent half the night winking at me, the rest of the time treating me as if I was a visiting general. Tell him I'm a peddler and should be treated like one.”
“I'll tell him,” the saturnine man said. “I must get on to Morristown with this pouch.”
Usaph Grey limped from the room. Benjamin Stallworth sighed and rubbed his aching eyes. Had he sent Grey to his death? he wondered. Perhaps. But in a sense, Grey was already
dead. Stallworth remembered the man's terror as he pleaded for his life in the Morristown jail two years ago. Grey had experienced death that night, sweating, trembling, puking. He, Stallworth, had chosen not to execute the sentence. Instead he had permitted him to survive as his creature; he had restored him to the half-life of a double agent.
Officially, Stallworth was a major in the 2nd Continental Dragoons. These horsemen served mostly as messengers, operating from small outposts dotted along the Connecticut shore, and across Westchester County into New Jersey. The major moved from outpost to outpost, ostensibly making sure that his men retained their military discipline on detached duty. Actually, he was like a patient spider, moving around the rim of New York, weaving webs of information and deception. Major Stallworth was the American army's chief of intelligence.
Another knock on the door. The man who entered the room this time was also an American spy—but that was where his resemblance to Usaph Grey ended. This second visitor was dressed in expensive, brilliantly colored clothes. He wore spots of rouge on his cheeks and Stallworth suspected he also tinted his lips. He walked like a woman; the movements of his hands, the tones of his voice, were effeminate. Paul Stapleton was a Williamite, the common term for men who were attracted to other men. The sin of Sodom had been popularized, almost legitimized, in England because King William the Third, hero of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, had practiced it. When Stallworth was a boy, his minister father had preached a sermon at the hanging of a Williamite, who had been caught corrupting the youth of Geeenwich, Connecticut. Now the minister's son sat stonily at a table, concealing his revulsion, dealing with one of these perverts as a more or less trusted ally. The fact that Paul Stapleton was the younger brother of a Continental Congressman intensified Stallworth's distaste.
“Who have you seen on this visit?”
“I'm painting a portrait of General von Knyphausen. Beckford talks to him in German, which I don't know very well. I only got a smattering of it on my European tour. But I gather they're discussing some sort of coup. I hear variations on the verb
schlagen.
It must have something to do with politics. At one point Becky—I mean Beckford—referred to it as a
staatsmännischer Zug
—a stroke of statecraft.”
Paul Stapleton was an artist by profession. He had been driven out of New York by the war. Late in 1777, he had unexpectedly asked General Washington for permission to return to the British-occupied city to paint portraits. Having spent several years in London, Stapleton had numerous friends among the British garrison. The officers, eager to see themselves on canvas, had already accepted his declaration of neutrality and guaranteed his safety. Only Washington—and now Stallworth—knew that this unlikely man had volunteered to serve as a spy and for two years had been bringing them information that he picked up while painting British and German officers and their mistresses.
“I hope you haven't finished your portrait of General Knyphausen.'
“Not quite.”
Stallworth rummaged in his saddlebag and came up with a tattered notebook. “Here's a dictionary of German phrases that I put together for my men, to help them question deserters. Take it with you and study it before your next visit.”
Paul thumbed the pages. “I can't promise you much. Languages have never been my forte.”
Paul Stapleton departed. Stallworth sat there, trying to measure the probability that he was telling the truth against the possibility that he was lying. Before the war Paul Stapleton had been Walter Beckford's lover. Had Beckford planted Stapleton and fed him information that was not significantly harmful to the British, while waiting to use him to mask a major operation? This possibility, coupled with his revulsion for
Stapleton, always made Stallworth reluctant to act on anything the painter brought him.
An hour later, Stallworth said good-bye to his host, Colonel Elias Dayton, a large, solemn man noteworthy chiefly for his stupidity. From drops on enemy-held Staten Island, less than a mile away across the narrow Kill van Kull, and from carefully selected innkeepers and postmasters in New Jersey, Dayton collected the coded letters that Stallworth had just spent two hours deciphering. Dayton also had one or two spies with whom he worked personally. He was always convinced that their information was vital and infallibly true. By now Stallworth had learned to doubt every spy's report, to see behind it the frightened or boastful or greedy or reckless human being who wrote it.
Up the dark frozen road to Springfield Major Stallworth rode on his careful Connecticut horse. The major's father had been a minister of the sternest of stern old New England school and the gloomy rigor of unrefined Calvinism was deep in Stallworth's bones. His world was inhabited by men and women with hearts corrupted by Adam's fall. How many times had he heard his father thunder from the pulpit:
We naturally as we come into the world are disaffected to God, are in league with Satan and in love with his cause and interest. Mankind are much worse than they are wont to imagine.

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