Dreams of Glory Page 4

  “Twenty-six. Call him Twenty-six. I want no one to know you have any connection with him. I very much doubt that he’d do such a thing without consulting me. However unpleasant Caesar probably was to him, as he was to me and everyone else who knew him. Twenty-six needed his services. He’s always been a practical man-”

  “Then it must have been the Americans.”

  “They seldom kill spies surreptitiously. They prefer to hang them. They’re always trying to teach the faithful a lesson. I’m inclined to think the murderer was someone with a personal grudge against Caesar. I’m sure he had enemies by the dozen in his regiment. They wouldn’t dare attack him in daylight. But in the dark even a behemoth like him could be downed by a man who knew how to use a bayonet.”

  Flora began to weep - violent sobs that Beckford found intensely irritating. “My dear Flora,” he said, “you’re not helping matters with this excessive grief. He was only a slave, after all. What are you out, two or three hundred pounds? We’ll pay you in full for him.”

  “Caesar was . . . a member of my family, I . . . I promised him his freedom. I . . . you - the two of us - led him into this business.”

  “No one led Caesar anywhere. He did only what pleased him. He was as arrogant a bastard as I’ve ever seen. And untrustworthy. I’ve thought for some time he might be a double agent.”

  “What if he was? He had no reason to love you. He only despised you less than the Americans.”

  “I hope such a sentiment doesn’t inhabit your lovely breast, my dear.”

  The unspoken threat calmed Flora considerably. “I’m loyal,” she said, “But am I safe now? Was Caesar carrying a message that implicated me?”

  Beckford paced the parlor for a moment. He had long since learned that in intelligence work almost every reverse could be turned to some advantage if the director of the operation did not lose his head. An intelligence chief needed two things: good nerves and a comprehensive plan. Walter Beckford was confident that he had both. He picked up the Reverend Caleb Chandler’s letter.

  “This odd mixture of sympathy and indignation that you’ve received from Chaplain Chandler is the best possible proof that the Americans don’t suspect you. They’re having a Continental Congressman deliver Caesar’s body. They’d never put a man like that within our reach if they thought you were untrustworthy. If you behave well, we may gain more than we’ve lost from his misfortune.”

  “What do you mean?” Flora said, staring morosely into the fire.

  “This congressman, Hugh Stapleton, is high on our list of disaffected Americans. We’re quite certain he’s a plum ripe for the plucking. He could be very useful to us in the aftermath of the mutiny. Why don’t you charm him into confiding his private thoughts on politics to you, then keep him dangling until we’re ready to draw him into our net?”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “He’s very rich, my dear. He made a half-million pounds in the West Indies running gunpowder and other goods for Congress during the first two years of the war.”

  “I’m still not interested.”

  Beckford took her arm and forced her to turn and face him. “My dear Flora, must I order you to be interested? I need to see a willing spirit in my agents. Otherwise I lose faith in them. The consequences can be very unpleasant.”

  Flora Kuyper reconsidered her distaste of Congressman Stapleton. “Is he old?”

  “Not at all. He’s about my age. I knew him slightly in London in the mid-sixties. He was quite a rake in those days. He’s married since. Which dulls a man. But you must make some sacrifices for the cause. Tonight, I heard something that virtually guarantees victory for us. I can’t tell you what it is, but believe me, victory is very close.”

  Beckford had made this prediction so often in recent months, it had begun to make him uneasy. There was no doubt that the Americans were close to collapse. But only the men in headquarters knew that there were also signs of faltering determination in London. Every ship that arrived from England brought new rumors of secret peace negotiations. The latest gossip suggested that His Majesty’s government, embroiled in a global war now that France and Spain had allied themselves with the rebel colonies, might abandon North America and concentrate its forces in the West Indies and India. Beckford had spent hours at his desk writing letters to members of Parliament, urging them to resist any suggestion of surrendering this immense continent, the part of the empire that would guarantee England’s world supremacy for five hundred years. He had deluged his correspondents with details of the rebels’ parlous morale, their desertion-riddled army, their feckless, quarrelsome Congress. He had enlisted his mother and her two brothers in this war within the war. One, Lord Thomas Lyttleton, the head of the family, had a seat on the Privy Council; the other was a Groom of the Bedchamber and a frequent hunting companion of the King.

  Flora Kuyper intensified Beckford’s unease by ignoring his prophecy. She freed her arm and turned away from him to stare into the fire again. For a moment an image flashed into Beckford’s mind, as vivid as a scene from a play. He was in London, strolling through Pall Mall with Flora on his arm. Major General Beckford and his German mistress, her face a lurid mask of paint concealing the lines of age, approach. Beckford and Flora pass them without so much as a nod.

  Absurd, Beckford told himself. Flora belonged by agreement to the man they called Twenty-six. She was replaceable in that Pall Mall scene by another woman, any woman of comparable beauty. But many things could happen to his old friend Twenty-six between today and the consummation of their intricate plan. Beckford had not seen any woman in America who came close to Flora Kuyper’s exotic beauty. It was important that the woman in the Pall Mall scene be a trophy, a symbol of triumph, carried back to England as his father had brought his own mistress back from Germany, announcing his defiance of his pudgy English wife and the fortune for which he had married her. That kind of freedom belonged only to conquerors.

  “Victory, Flora,” Beckford said again, seeking a response that went beyond mere obedience.

  She continued to ignore him. The firelight played on her mournful mouth, her downcast eyes. Walter Beckford struggled to control his exasperation. Women were as unknowable, as transient as the weather. Wayward personal emotions, such as sympathy for dead slaves, distracted them. Why was he allowing such a creature to make him doubt the certainty of that transcendent word, victory?

  Idiocy, Congressman Hugh Stapleton thought as he watched the hospital orderlies lug the pine coffin out of the shed behind the army hospital. The Reverend Caleb Chandler walked beside the coffin, a model of morose Puritan piety. It was impossible to imagine him ever smiling, much less laughing or dancing. His worn wool stockings drooped, the wide buckram skirt and boot-sleeve cuffs of his coat had gone out of style in the 1760s, his cloak was a mass of patches, yet the fellow assumed that because he was a college graduate, a gentleman should treat him as an equal. As if a degree from Yale - or Harvard, for that matter - proved a man was anything but a canting Yankee hypocrite.

  The wind came out of the northeast like a spear, piercing the beaver greatcoat that Stapleton’s London tailor had guaranteed would keep him warm anywhere, even in Saint Petersburg. The slate-gray sky was unchanged from yesterday and showed no sign of changing tomorrow. The Yankees had not only exported their fanatic politics to the rest of America, Stapleton thought, they had also sent their abominable New England weather.

  “It’s good of you to do this, Congressman Stapleton,” Caleb Chandler called as he and the equally ragged pallbearers approached the sleigh.

  “I’m doing it as a favor to my old friend Henry Kuyper, Chaplain. For no other reason.”

  “I hope you can find time to question Mr. Kuyper about the money in Caesar’s pocket and his whereabouts when he was absent without leave. General Washington’s investigation made no attempt to explore those matters.

  “General Washington has more important things on his mind, Chaplain.”

  “I wish I saw some p
roof of it,” Chandler said. “He and his staff continue to live in luxury while their troops starve and freeze.”

  There it was again, that mindless Yankee hatred of Washington which Stapleton heard so often from the New Englanders in Congress. It was really a hatred of anyone who lived like a gentleman. They want to pull us all down to their patched-homespun grubbiness, Stapleton thought. To abandon all of life’s pleasures and talk through our noses about salvation and righteousness. What perverse deity had gotten him - gotten America - involved with these creatures?

  The orderlies heaved the coffin onto the floor of Hugh Stapleton’s sleigh. “If I get any information, which I doubt, I will write to you, Chaplain,” Congressman Stapleton said, wedging his fur-lined boots between the coffin and his seat and gathering a bearskin rug around his knees. He gave his Negro coachman, Pompey, a peremptory wave. Pompey cracked his whip over the heads of the two black Burlington geldings, which had won the admiration of that lover of good horseflesh, George Washington. The sleigh surged away from the army hospital and its attendant burial shed, away from the nearby rows of enlisted men’s huts in Jockey Hollow, with their pervasive stench of urine and excrement. Congressman Stapleton took a small diamond-encrusted silver box from his pocket and tried to banish the stink with a corrosive snort of snuff.

  This was more like it, he thought as the sleigh skimmed down the snow-packed road behind the powerful horses, jingling the first bar of one of his favorite songs, “The Good Fellow.” He hummed the rest of it to himself as they raced along.

  Good fortune attend

  Each merry man’s friend

  That doth but the best he may;

  Forgetting old wrong

  With a cup and a song

  To drive cold winter away.

  Instead of cheering him up, the song made Hugh Stapleton melancholy. He thought of one of the last times he had sung it in his fine tenor voice, which had once set the fair sex sighing. Tom Barton of Philadelphia and Harry Brockholst of New York had been sitting beside him in this sleigh, with three of the prettiest girls in New Jersey around them, on the way to the old Three Pigeons Inn for a night of dancing and drinking and flirting and kissing. Only fifteen years ago. Where were they now? Tom Barton was a refugee in British New York, writing bitter ballads and essays ridiculing the American rebels. Harry Brockholst was dead, in a frozen grave outside Quebec.

  They soon reached the center of Morristown, with its rectangular snow-heaped green surrounded by churches, taverns, stores, and private houses. “Stop at the general’s headquarters,” Hugh Stapleton called. Near the end of the green, Pompey reined in the geldings and the sleigh slithered to a halt in front of the fine Palladian doorway of the two-story hip-roofed house, the former home of Colonel Jacob Ford, Jr. Another old friend lying in a cold grave.

  In the spacious center hall, Congressman Stapleton encountered Washington’s affable young aide, Colonel Alexander Hamilton. “I only stopped to reassure the general that I have Muzzey’s body and will deliver it as requested,” the congressman said. “Mr. Chandler seems somewhat mollified.”

  “We’re eternally grateful,” Hamilton said. “I hope it won’t take you too far out of your way.”

  “Far enough, but I’m glad to do it. Let us hope it will keep your would-be Jeremiah quiet for a while.”

  “If it doesn’t, we may resort to harsher methods,” Hamilton said.

  “Did you enjoy your evening with Miss Schuyler?”

  Hamilton groaned. “Another one like it and I’ll be a gone man. I hate to admit it, but she’s everything I want in a wife. Religious, but not a saint.”

  “And beautiful and good-tempered and submissive but not doltishly dependent,” the congressman added with a laugh. “Sometimes I think we New Yorkers all want the same woman.”

  Hamilton shook his head: It was obvious that he was already a gone man. “I swore I wouldn’t marry until I was thirty.”

  “I went through exactly the same experience.”

  “And you’re still a happy man?”

  “I’m sufficiently cynical to doubt that any husband of thirteen years is happy. But I wouldn’t trade the first five or six years-”

  “I’m afraid I know what you mean, Congressman.”

  “Give General Washington my regards. Tell him he can depend on my support in Congress, for whatever it’s worth.”

  “It may be worth a great deal, Congressman. I’m convinced it’s time for younger men like yourself to exert some influence. Otherwise-”

  He spread his hands in a gesture that included the snowbound landscape and the starving men in Jockey Hollow.

  Congressman Stapleton returned to his sleigh and resumed his journey to Henry Kuyper’s farm in Bergen. Stapleton had come to Morristown as a committee of one, sent by the New Jersey congressional delegation to protest the Continental Army’s supposed abuse of local civilians. He had volunteered for the job for only one reason - to escape Congress, with its interminable bickering and wrangling and windy speeches about nothing. Worse yet, the Delaware River was frozen, which meant there was no business worth doing in Philadelphia. Without business, that endlessly fascination game of profit and loss, Hugh Stapleton tended to become restless. Only the chance to operate as a merchant for the past eighteen months in Philadelphia had made Congress endurable.

  General Washington had been relieved to discover that Hugh Stapleton was the bearer of the congressional protest. “I can speak plainly to Malcolm Stapleton’s son,” he had said.

  The words had irked Hugh Stapleton. He was tired of that designation, Malcolm Stapleton’s son. He respected his father’s memory. He had been one of the chief soldiers of New Jersey, the man who had outfitted an entire regiment at his own expense and led them against the French and Indians in Canada in 1758 and against the Spanish in distant Cuba in 1762. But Malcolm Stapleton was dead. His older son was a very different man. If you only knew how different, General, the congressman thought as he nodded acquiescently.

  Hugh Stapleton had listened with apparent sympathy while Washington explained the situation in Morristown during the first week of the year 1780. After a four-day blizzard, there had been no choice but to let the troops go into the countryside and take food where they found it. “Either that or the army would have disbanded,” Washington said. “I suspect some in Congress would consider that a blessing in disguise. But I’m convinced that these men are America’s only protection from defeat and disgrace. I’m sure your father told you what happened here in New Jersey in 1776, when we tried to rely on militia.”

  The old man had told him, with expletives that almost scorched the paper, that had still seared Hugh Stapleton’s mind when he read them in the West Indies three months later. I warned those Yankee sons of bitches in Philadelphia that they would ruin us with their prating about patriot militiamen. I told those goddamn cantankerous know-it-alls that nothing would stop the British but regular soldiers, well trained and well paid. Now it’s come to pass. New Jersey’s militia, the part-time soldiers who were supposed to turn out in an emergency the way the Massachusetts farmers did at Lexington and Concord, had all stayed home and allowed the British to overrun the state, to almost turn it into a royal province again. Samuel Adams and his Yankee cohorts had denounced the Jerseymen as cowards, ignoring the difference between the tiny British army that had fought at Lexington and the immense host, backed by artillery and cavalry, that had invaded New Jersey.

  Face to face with George Washington for the first time, Hugh Stapleton did not find him the pompous potential Cromwell described by his enemies in Congress. On the contrary, he seemed too soft-spoken and diffident to be the man who had led the slashing counteroffensive on Christmas night, 1776, that had rescued New Jersey, and the nation, from disaster. Stapleton wondered if Washington himself had begun to regard that three-year-old campaign as ancient history, as remote and meaningless as Malcolm Stapleton’s heroics storming French and Spanish forts in the Seven Years’ War.

  General
Washington had invited Hugh Stapleton to supper with the army’s quartermaster general, Nathanael Greene, and ex-Major General Philip Schuyler, who was on his way to Philadelphia to become one of New York’s congressmen. Schuyler had brought his dark-eyed daughter, Elizabeth, with him; Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton had been delegated to entertain her, with catastrophic impact on his emotions. There was a lot of joking about her capture of Hamilton, who had often boasted of his immunity to matrimony.

  The talk soon turned serious. As they ate well-cooked mutton and a veal pie, Washington had poured the wine generously and explained what was wrong with Congress’s solution to America’s greatest problem - the collapse of the Continental dollar.

  “When it takes a wagonload of money to buy a wagonload of hay, I can see why Congress thought it a waste of time to print any more of it. But money that must be spent by the wagonload is still better than no money at all. We are told that the states will now supply the army with goods in kind. New Hampshire, for instance, will ship us thirty thousand gallons of rum, Connecticut a thousand tons of wheat. But how can we get any of this to camp without money to hire wagons and wagonmen?”

  “We have, at this moment, not a dollar in the army’s treasury,” Nathanael Greene reported. He was about Stapleton’s age, a cheerful man at first impression, until you looked into his cold gray eyes.

  “We haven’t heard a word about plans for this year’s draft from any state except New Jersey,” Washington said. “Last year ten states never filled their quotas.”

  “And the men you got, if those I saw in Albany were a sample, “Philip Schuyler added, “were mostly neutrals and criminals, almost everyone resolved to desert at the first opportunity.”

  “Can you blame any man for deserting?” said Greene, “when no one has been paid for over a year now?”

  Philip Schuyler, portly, pink-cheeked, and vehement, the quintessential Dutchman, began telling horror stories of earlier years, when he had commanded an army in northern New York. The New Englanders in Congress had decided one of their favorite generals should have his job. Schuyler had spent half his time fending off attacks on his integrity and ability while trying to fight a war without men, money, or supplies, all of which Congress failed to send him. “I am going to Congress for only one reason,” the former general said, puffing furiously on a long clay pipe, “to make those goddamned Yankees listen to reason.”