Dreams of Glory Page 9

  Caleb groped for a response while Fool echoed ominously in his head. Case was right. He had sounded like an officer. Did becoming a brother soldier mean you stopped caring about victory? Was the cause poisoned beyond redemption?

  The boy’s eyes had a liquorish shine. He was enjoying this game of teasing the chaplain. “Might go down to Red Peggy’s and ask her a few questions. Caesar spent a lot of time there.”

  “Shut your stupid mouth,” Case snarled, and cuffed the boy on the side of his head.

  It was not the first time Caleb Chandler had heard Red Peggy’s mentioned. The place was a groggery about two miles from Jockey Hollow, on the Vealtown Road. There were several of these establishments on the outskirts of Morristown. Unlike taverns, groggeries neither served food nor rented rooms; they specialized in cheap liquor.

  Cowed by a warning glare from Case, Caesar Muzzey’s former hutmates refused to say another word about Red Peggy. The goodwill created by the ham and the rum was vanishing into the murky air of the hut’s interior. Caleb abandoned his pretensions to being a brother soldier and left the men with an exhortation.

  “I hope none of you will be craven enough to desert your country now, when your help is so badly needed.”

  “Seems more like the country’s deserted us, Chaplain,” Case said.

  Half frozen, sinking into the snow with every step, Caleb trudged down the Vealtown Road to Red Peggy’s groggery. He found himself yearning for his sturdy old farm horse, Horace, who had brought him to Morristown. Like the army’s horses, Horace was being boarded at the stable of a nearby farmer. Even General Washington’s mounts had been dispersed for the winter.

  Only the emergence of a soldier in uniform enabled Caleb to find Red Peggy’s place. It sat back from the road, an ordinary faded red Jersey farmhouse, without even the crude imitation of a tavern sign that most groggeries displayed. Inside, he found the parlor had been converted into a taproom. A welcome blaze crackled in a fieldstone fireplace. Behind a corner bar stood a buxom woman with a strong, not unpleasing face, topped by a mass of curly red hair. She needed no introduction.

  Red Peggy looked vaguely disreputable at first glance. She wore too much makeup on her rounded cheeks and full lips. But her dress was as high-necked and modest as anything worn by the respectable ladies of Lebanon, Connecticut. Caleb allowed her the benefit of the doubt for the time being.

  Perhaps a dozen drinkers sat at tables scattered about the room. They were being waited on by a squat man, not much taller than a dwarf, in a Continental army uniform. At the bar, Chandler asked for a rum toddy to banish the cold. The hot drink restored a semblance of life to his hands and feet. “Are you familiar with a New Jersey soldier, a Negro named Caesar Muzzey?” he asked.

  Red Peggy looked at Chandler with uneasiness on her overrouged face. “What regiment be you from?” she said.

  “I’m the chaplain of the Second Connecticut Brigade.”

  “Then what have you to do with Caesar Muzzey?”

  “I’m trying to find out who killed him.”

  “I’ve told all I know of him to Major Stallworth,” Red Peggy said. “Why all this fussing and fretting over a private soldier? You’d think it was a general we’d lost instead of a black private as wayward as Caesar Muzzey.”

  “Did he come here often?”

  “Often enough. He was here the night he died. He was in great spirits. He sang us a love song in French.”

  “I’ve talked to some men who think Caesar came here to buy a forged discharge. Do you know anything about such a business?”

  Red Peggy’s blue-lidded eyes bulged; her powdered cheeks swelled. “What the devil are you talking about? Though I was born in Dublin, Ireland, I’m as much an American patriot as any man or woman on this continent. I saw my husband, Dan Walsh, die beside his cannon on Monmouth battlefield. If I even heard of anyone selling discharges in this house, I wouldn’t wait to tell General Washington. I’d finish the traitor on the spot with this pistol.”

  She whipped a brass gun from beneath the bar and brandished it at Caleb.

  “Madam, I’m not suggesting that you would tolerate such a thing. But you might have heard one of your customers talk about it,” he said.

  “Never!”

  “Madam, please accept my apologies,” Caleb said. “I came here without the slightest intention of accusing you. I was - I remain - concerned about the barbarous way Caesar Muzzey died. I regret the army’s indifference to finding his killer.”

  “They’re far from indifferent, I can tell you. Major Stallworth asked me enough questions to fill a book. I told him all I knew about Caesar Muzzey, which isn’t much. Now I’ll tell you. Many a night he got drunk here and damned the Americans. I called him for it more than once. With my poor husband lying dead in them Monmouth pine woods, I tolerate no Tory talk in this place.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” Caleb said.

  “Where would a black man get such ideas? A slave? In my opinion, they could only have come from his owner, Mrs. Kuyper. The widow of the fellow who sent him into the army. Muzzey talked about her once in his cups. Said she taught him to read. Made her sound like a paragon. Who else could have stuffed his head with Tory opinions? I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in his regiment killed Caesar for his disloyal talk. If you want to see justice done, Chaplain, find out the truth about that woman. I suspect she’s one of them secret Tories who should be run out of the state and her property confiscated.”

  “Did you tell that to Major Stallworth?”

  “I didn’t. It’s none of the army’s business. But a letter from someone like you, Chaplain, to the civil government of the state might make things uncomfortable for her.”

  “I’ll have to give the matter some thought. I wouldn’t want to accuse an innocent woman.”

  “Certainly, certainly. Have another toddy, now, before you go.”

  Red Peggy served Caleb his drink and turned to greet two customers from the Pennsylvania brigade. The chaplain gulped the rum while it was hot, hoping it would sustain him for the long cold walk to his quarters. Within a mile, his body had totally forgotten the very idea of heat. Once more he lost all contact with his hands and nose and ears. The northeast wind whipped sadistically beneath his cloak. By the time he reached the Widow Clark’s house on the Morristown green near Washington’s headquarters, the chaplain’s teeth were chattering and his bones were numb.

  In Mrs. Clark’s parlor, Caleb found Lieutenant Charles Rutledge, a cousin of John Rutledge, the governor of South Carolina, sharing a bottle of Barbados rum with two friends. The swarthy, bull-necked lieutenant was boarding with Mrs. Clark while he recuperated from a leg wound that he had received storming the British fort at Stony Point the summer before. “Hey, Chaplain,” Rutledge drawled, “you found out who killed your nigger yet?”

  Lieutenant Rutledge already thought Caleb Chandler was peculiar, with his monologues on the misery of the enlisted men. Few Southerners were more instinctively aristocratic than the South Carolinians. When Rutledge learned that the chaplain was determined to find the murderer of a Negro deserter, he did not even try to conceal his contempt.

  “I’ve discovered a good deal more about him than General Washington did in his inquiry,” Caleb said, edging closer to the fire to restore his circulation.

  “This is the Yankee parson I been tellin’ you about, boys. Thinks we ought to free our niggers and give’m the vote.” Rutledge said to his drinking companions. “Thinks it’s a damn crime when one of them gets himself killed.”

  “How many niggers you got in Connecticut, Parson?” asked a burly young man with a jagged saber scar on his cheek.

  “I don’t know,” Chandler said. “Perhaps a thousand or two.”

  “Wonder what you’d say if you had two hundred thousand, like we’ve got in South Carolina.”

  “The principle remains the same, no matter how many or how few,” Caleb said. “Slavery is wrong and we must somehow find a way to get rid of it.”
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  “Yeah?” said the third drinker, a thin redhead with an ominous choking cough. “You’d think twice if you saw one of’m run wild. Had one on our plantation - killed the overseer with an ax, then the overseer’s wife and two kids. Run into the woods. We hunted him down like a bear.”

  “Who killed your nigger, Chandler?” Rutledge asked.

  “It may have been one of his company’s officers,” Caleb said.

  “Chandler,” shouted Rutledge, “I warned you against slandering the officers of this army. I’ve told you a dozen times that if you kept it up, I’d consider it a personal insult and ask you for satisfaction.”

  “And I told you that I consider dueling a criminal act, punishable - justly punishable - in New England by hanging.”

  “You Yankees,” sneered the young man with the scar. “Always hidin’ behind the law.”

  Fool, whispered the mocking voice. You’re a fool to think you can change the minds of these strange beings from the South. Maybe you’re a fool to believe in this revolution that was supposed to create a United States of America. United for what, fool?

  A knock on the parlor door. The lined puffy face of the Widow Clark peered into the room. “Mr. Chandler?” she said. “There’s a coachman here with a message for you.”

  Glad to escape the South Carolinians, Caleb hurried into the hall. A huge black man muffled to the nose in a watch coat, with a gray fur cap on his head, confronted him. “Good day, sir,” he said with a brief bow.” My name is Cato. I have a letter for you from my mistress, Mrs. Kuyper.”

  Caleb Chandler opened the sealed envelope. The handwriting was delicate, very feminine, but clear.

  Dear Sir:

  The minister of the Dutch church to which I belong refuses to conduct a funeral service for Caesar Muzzey, in whose death you became so unfortunately involved.

  He says Caesar was not a Christian and even doubts that he had a soul. Would you consider presiding at the burial? I would like to have some representative of the army, as well as a man of God, to bolster the patriotism of my other slaves, all of whom admired Caesar and are distraught over his death. My servant Cato (who is Caesar’s older brother), and my sleigh are at your disposal. You may detain him until it is convenient for you to come, if, as I hope, it is possible for you to do so. Rest assured I am prepared to pay whatever fee you see fit to charge for your services.

  Your most obedient svt.,

  Flora Kuyper

  Here was a chance for Caleb Chandler to demonstrate his concern for black men and women, a way to answer, without exchanging unchristian insults, those sneering Southerners in the parlor. It was also an opportunity to find out more about the enigmatic Caesar Muzzey and his puzzling owner, who certainly sounded more like a patriot than the loyalist Red Peggy had labeled her. Caleb glanced past the black coachman at the winter world beyond the door. “Can we get there before dark?”

  “No, sir,” was the response. “But the roads are open.”

  “Let me pack my Bible and a change of clothes. We’ll go at once.”

  “Major Beckford, are you still with us?”

  Face down, having just sprawled over a fallen branch in the predawn woods, Walter Beckford silently cursed Lieutenant Colonel John Graves Simcoe. The northeast wind drove icy granules of snow down his neck and up his sleeves. “I am most assuredly still with you, Colonel,” the major said, scrambling to his feet. “March on.”

  Beckford ordered himself to defy the chills that were racing through his corpulent torso, to ignore the barbaric wind and cold. He would master the American weather, as well as the Americans. He fueled his determination by visualizing the immense estate, the magnificent house, the hundreds of slaves and servants that a proconsul of imperial Britain would command. Artists would fawn on him, wealthy provincials would shower him with gifts, beautiful women like Flora Kuyper would be at his disposal. What was the line from Gibbon? The public authority was everywhere exercised by ministers of the Emperor and that authority was absolute. There was the idea that fired the soul and warmed the body: absolute power.

  Behind Beckford and Simcoe trudged a column of white-hooded soldiers. The lieutenant colonel raised his hand and the men halted. They were on the edge of a clearing in the woods. In its center stood a handsome two-story hip-roofed house, once the country seat of one of New York’s wealthiest rebels. Behind it were a dozen huts. In front of the house was another hut, in which a fire glowed against the windows. A sentry stood beside the hut, stamping his feet against the cold.

  “Attack plan A,” whispered Simcoe to the loyalist American captain behind him. The captain passed the word in the same whisper and the column divided. Half followed the captain, circling the clearing to assault the house from behind. Simcoe began counting off the 120 seconds it would take them to get into position. At the same time, he waved a half-dozen other men forward. Inching across the clearing on their bellies, they vanished into the mixture of whiteness and semidarkness as Simcoe continued to count.

  “One hundred and eighteen, one hundred and nineteen, one hundred and twenty. Attack.”

  Two artillery squads lunged forward, straining at ropes that towed three-pound cannon on sleds. Between them raced Simcoe and the remaining Queen’s Rangers. The advanced crawlers leaped to their feet and charged the sentry. “Turn out,” he cried, and fired his gun before they toppled him to the snow. Simcoe blew two shrill blasts on a silver whistle and his men unleashed howls that rivaled the war whoops of the Iroquois. From behind the house came an answering howl as the second half of the attack force burst from the trees to assail the huts. Men rushing from the huts were met with blasts of musketry.

  Beckford watched from the edge of the woods as the survivors of these blasts ran toward the house. In sixty seconds, muskets blazed from every window. The Queen’s Rangers answered them with volleys of suppressing fire while the artillerymen maneuvered the cannon into position. In another sixty seconds, the first gun boomed, followed instantly by the crash of the second one. Simcoe had promised a bottle of rum to the squad that fired first.

  The door of the house hurtled from its hinges. Simcoe and six men plunged into the dark interior, muskets low, ready to fire from the hip. In thirty seconds, they reemerged, still led by Simcoe. Behind him, two men half carried, half dragged a large figure across the clearing to the trees. The slack limbs and drooping legs suggested death. But Beckford knew it was a stuffed dummy wearing an American uniform. Simcoe blew three sharp blasts on his whistle and the gunfire around the huts abruptly died away. The rehearsal for the task of inviting James to New York was over.

  “Four minutes and ten seconds,” Simcoe said triumphantly.

  “Remarkable,” Beckford said.

  A half-hour later, the stuffed figure sat on a sky-blue Queen Anne sofa in the elegant parlor of the Morris mansion, on the northern heights of Manhattan Island. Lieutenant Colonel Simcoe and Major Beckford stood before a huge blaze in the marble fireplace. The change of scene produced a subtle shift in their relationship. The snowy wind-whipped woods, the marching men, the blazing muskets, were Simcoe’s element. This parlor, this sumptuous house, was Beckford’s element. He noted with satisfaction a pleading quality in Simcoe’s voice.

  “You must admit, Major, you’ve seldom seen men attack with such vigor, such enthusiasm.”

  “No question, Colonel,” Beckford said, accepting a tankard of hot rum from a blue-coated German servant. “But it’s easy to be enthusiastic when you know the enemy are only shooting blank cartridges.”

  “I’ve led these men. Let me assure you that the presence of the rebels will increase their enthusiasm. In the last three years, they’ve killed, wounded, and taken six times as many men as they’ve lost.”

  “Everyone knows and admires the prowess of the Queen’s Rangers, Colonel,” Beckford said.

  As he spoke he turned away from Simcoe, who had his back to the door, and stepped past him, a welcoming smile on his face. He had heard General von Knyphausen’s martial s
teps on the stairs. Despite the late hour, the short, sharp-featured Hessian was wearing his full uniform, the dark blue, black-cuffed coat and yellow waistcoat of the Regiment Knyphausen. A half-dozen decorations gleamed on his chest. The general felt ill at ease with his British compatriots and always needed the panoply of his rank to reassure him. Unfortunately, the uniform usually reminded the British of the surrender of the Regiment Knyphausen and two other German regiments in Washington’s surprise attack on Trenton in 1776.

  “Well, gentlemen, you have captured Mr. Washington for me?” Knyphausen asked in German.

  Still smiling, Major Beckford translated the question into English.

  “There he is, at your mercy, Your Excellency,” Simcoe replied, pointing to the dummy on the sofa.

  Beckford translated the words into German. Knyphausen laughed heavily and gave the dummy a formal bow. Then, uncomfortable as always because of his inability to speak English, he became the commander in chief. “Tell me how things went, Colonel,” he said in German.

  “The General awaits your report,” Beckford translated for Simcoe. He added a slightly mocking sweep of his arm, as if he were introducing an actor on a stage.

  “We used Plan A this morning,” Colonel Simcoe said. “In which we assume Major Beckford’s master spy is unable to work his miracle and corrupt Washington’s guard. We made the best time yet, by five full minutes. I think we’re ready to strike. All we need is Your Excellency’s written order.”

  Beckford quickly translated the report into German. “No, no,” said Knyphausen with a curt shake of his head. “First there must be a dress rehearsal against an American outpost. We must divert their attention from Morristown.”

  Beckford translated this negative decision with the same polite smile on his face. It did not produce an answering smile from Lieutenant Colonel Simcoe. “A dress rehearsal? That will take the better part of a month to plan,” Simcoe said. “Some of my men may be captured. Or desert. Give away the whole game.”