Remember the Morning (14 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning
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Drifting along the edge of eternity, Clara received the gift of second sight. She saw Georgianna Stapleton hovering above the bed, her face a whitened skull. It was the face of the demon who inhabited her rosy beauty, her flushed cheeks, her glowing red hair. Long ago, she had made a pact with the Evil Brother; she was one of his creatures, ready to commit any act that multiplied the power of his reign.
She saw George Stapleton's sorrowing double, a hunchbacked parody of the expostulating attorney, forever bent under some mysterious burden, perhaps the loss of his Scottish bride, Malcolm's mother. Whatever tormented
him, his eyes were crossed with secret rage at the Master of Life. She saw Adam Duycinck's spiritual self, a tall straight-backed warrior, a man without illusions, cursing his humpbacked reality. She saw herself, an empty shell of a woman with a barren womb, forever childless, thanks to the fever and Duycinck's vile medicines and viler surgical instruments.
Ultimately she stood on the precipice above an immense river, watching it plunge into a foaming, thundering, spray-engulfed gorge. Behind her in the forest peered Malcolm and Bold Antelope and her Seneca grandmother, waiting for her to leap into eternity. Each of them wanted her to vanish for a different reason. Malcolm to escape the guilt of his sin, Bold Antelope to banish the shame of his defeat, her Seneca grandmother to know she had escaped the white world with her
orenda
unblemished, to await her in eternity.
Clara swayed there, wondering why she did not leap. Duycinck watched her, gulping brandy, alternately crying “Jump” and begging her to live, to forgive him, to love him in some impossible world beyond the stars. None of them cared, Clara thought. None of them cared for Clara beyond her meaning to their hungry souls. She would jump. She would vanish into the roaring oblivion of eternity.
“No!”
Catalyntie's arms were around her, dragging her back from the precipice. Catalyntie, her Seneca sister, who loved Clara without qualifications, reasons, demands, laws, explanations. How could she be here? Was it her real self or a spiritual shadow, lured on the wind by the distant sound of her pain?
I
F WINTER WAS CLARA'S UNDOING, SPRING—and She-Is-Alert's calculating brain—were mine. Winter, far from being the season of my discontent, was the icy zenith of my happiness. In New York, when the snow began to fall—and that first winter saw the streets and roads and fields heaped with it—young people bring sleighs out of their family barns and hitch them to teams of fast horses. Off they go on parties of pleasure into the shrouded countryside.
Sleighing is one of the world's most exhilarating sports. You zoom along the roads, two or four to a sleigh, beneath great bearskin rugs, feet
encased in fur-lined boots, hands in furry mittens. Best of all, no member of the older generation, prey to ague and chilblains, has the slightest inclination to join the party.
I have since been told that no other country in the world allows its young women the freedom Americans permit their daughters. I am inclined to agree with this observation. Whether other couples took advantage of it, I can only wonder. But for Robert Nicolls and me, winter was heaven-sent. In his wondrous sleigh, pulled by two of the finest Arabian horses in the province, we hurtled across the frozen Hudson to the town of Hoboken, we zoomed up Manhattan Island to the little community near Kings Bridge on its northern tip and sometimes ventured into the county of Westchester.
On all these trips, Robert saw to it that a tavern was alerted along the way for a pause that included a warm room and mugs of hot flip
24
beside the bed. How we basked in our secret when we returned to New York that night for a decorous dinner party at the Cuylers or the Franks or the Van Vorsts. Aunt Gertrude patently suspected the worst but she could prove nothing. My sense of triumph multiplied my conviction that I was binding Robert to me with ever-deepening love.
He heaped presents on me. Baskets of flowers from the greenhouses of the Long Island estate, a second greyhound to keep Walpole company, a golden locket on my birthday
25
with a miniature painting of him inside it. On New Year's Day he insisted I stand beside him and greet the hundreds of guests who swarmed to shake his and the governor's hands. He was treating me as if I were virtually a member of the family.
The governor himself was scrupulously polite to me. He was twenty or thirty pounds heavier than his son, with a pot belly and dewlaps that drooped like a turkey's wattle, but he had the same sunny good nature and foxy smile. His eyes were far more cunning, however. I sensed he was a man who was always looking for the main chance. A widower, he seemed fond of a half dozen different ladies, but I made no effort to learn anything of his private life. I had no idea, for instance, of his liaison with Mrs. Stapleton.
Robert and I continued to enjoy our blissful winter trysts until spring winds weakened the ice in the rivers and thawing temperatures turned the roads to gumbo. Sleighs were hauled into barns to be polished and oiled for six months of hibernation. We were effectively trapped in New York, which made a rendezvous far more difficult. Even the little country tavern where we met that first night was beyond our reach, on the far side of a river of mud.
All in all, I felt nature had timed the descent of spring perfectly to suit my hopes. When you are in love, it is so easy to believe the world is revolving around your throbbing heart. I sat in my room, gazing at the miniature of Robert in my locket, reading a letter in which he mixed poems and paeans to my beauty. At the close he wrote:
Remember those words that I once told you I could only speak when my heart impelled them from my throat? I think I hear them blowing on the April wind that fills my room with the promise of summer.
In that moment, I thought I was the equal, even the superior, of every diplomat in the world. Horatio Walpole, the first minister's brother, who was renowned for his ability to manipulate the French, acknowledged my supremacy. The Moon Woman was no more. She had been annihilated by She-Is-Alert's agile brain and knowing heart. I wrote a spirited reply:
I'm sure Aunt Gertrude and Uncle Johannes would be happy to entertain almost any offer to take me off their hands!
How little I knew of how the white world worked. At Shining Creek, when a warrior claimed a young woman as a wife and the matron of the clan gave her approval, the bridegroom simply took her to his longhouse, leaving behind appropriate presents—some wampum or a haunch of venison or a swatch of good cloth. In New York, I soon discovered, a marriage was more like the negotiation of a treaty of commerce between rival tribes or nations.
“Robert Nicolls has asked for your hand,” my uncle said to me one evening at supper. “Are you agreeable?”
“Yes. I love him,” I said.
My cousin Esther looked as if she were going to choke on the oyster she had on her fork. Her hard-eyed sister Anna, who had no hopes for such a catch, gazed at me with something close to admiration.
“He will have to take you as you are,” Johannes said. “It will be a nice test of his devotion.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your estate will be your dowry. I can add nothing to it. I have two daughters of my own to marry.”
“My dowry?” I knew about such things. Princesses brought dowries to princes and kings, but I never realized they were integral to the weddings of lesser mortals.
It so happened that the day of this conversation was the anniversary of my grandfather's death. “What is my estate worth, Uncle Johannes?” I asked.
“That depends on the value of New Netherlands Trading Company stock,” he said.
“And what does that depend on?”
“The profits we have made in the previous year.”
“What percentage of the stock can I expect to own?”
“Computed against the money we made from the sale of your grandfather's assets—about one percent.”
“One percent!” I cried. “How much did you receive from the sale of the houses—and the Mohawk lands—are they sold too?”
“They are. I received fair market value for all,” he snapped.
“I would like to know an exact figure,” I said.
“Don't be impertinent, young woman,” Uncle Johannes said. “I can arrange for you to get nothing at all. And no court of law could ever challenge me.”
The next day, the Governor called on Uncle Johannes. His Excellency greeted me with an affectionate kiss. Then the two men adjourned to the parlor to discuss my fate. I never felt so powerless—and so dreadful. Not even the memories of my sobbing childhood journey from the bloodstained banks of the Mohawk to Shining Creek compared to it. The anguish seemed redoubled by my undoubted adulthood. I was a grown woman—but I was being treated like a child.
No, I thought. More like a piece of merchandise. Or a slave. How odd it was—and how prophetic—that I would feel kinship with Clara at this moment. I suddenly yearned for her presence. I desperately needed someone who was a true friend.
After a half hour's conversation, His Excellency the Governor departed without giving me another kiss. I found this ominous. If the negotiation had been successful, wouldn't he have welcomed me into the family? I dressed for a supper party at the Cuylers with a foreboding-laden heart.
In the spacious parlor and dining room of the Cuyler mansion on Pearl Street a merry party was in progress. Robert was dancing a gavotte with pert Elizabeth Cuyler, Guert's sister, as I arrived. He saw me across the room and his face acquired a stricken expression—like a man who had learned bad news and had been trying to forget it until he saw someone with whom he must share it.
I watched while he finished the dance and let him bring me a glass of punch. “My dearest love,” he murmured. “We must have a talk.”
“Where?”
“Let us go up on the roof.”
The Cuyler house, like the mansions of many merchants, had a walk on the roof from which they could watch the lower harbor for their ships. It was in some ways a poor choice, because it inevitably reminded me of the night last fall when I had capitulated on the battlements of the fort.
“My father told me the most stunning news,” Robert said, in a wavering voice. “Your estate is worth less than two thousand pounds.
26
Your
uncle flatly refuses to supplement it for your dowry. My father says anything less than thirty thousand pounds
27
is out of the question.”
“Then we must marry for love,” I said. “The poets seem to think it's a fine idea.”
“Most poets die poor,” Robert said. “My father has no great sum at his command. Don't you notice how eagerly he snaps up every present that's offered to him? If I'm to make my way in the world, I must marry a decent fortune.”
“Robert, together we can overcome this, this monstrous injustice. With your father's help, we can force my uncle to admit I'm entitled to half the worth of the New Netherlands Trading Company. I'm my father's only living heir! I foresaw this problem a year ago—”
“Did you?” he said. “You knew it—and never so much as hinted it to me? You let me continue to this nice point, where I must prove myself a scoundrel or a fool?”
“Foresaw is perhaps too strong a word,” I said. “I had only a passing insinuation.”
“You used foresaw. It's much too late to withdraw it. Much too late for a great many things! Do you seriously think my father is going to challenge the honesty of a man who has given him one of the finest estates on Long Island?”
“I thought you said George Fowler gave it to him.”
“It was sold to Fowler for a pittance, to make it legal. In return, your uncle received the contract to carry all the new recruits and supplies for the garrison of the fort for the next five years.”
He turned his back on me and gazed out at the dark river. “I almost wish you'd never broached such a topic. I would rather go to my grave thinking you truly loved me and I was a coward who abandoned you for money than believe—as I now think I must—that you never saw me as more than a cat's-paw to your own avarice.”
“You can't believe that,” I said. “Not after the nights we've spent together. How can you speak of avarice—when I'm only trying to win what's rightfully my own property! If anyone has avarice in his heart—it's you!”
“Not avarice. Simply the desire of a reasonable man to see the world as it is. To cope with it. Your condemnation of me only suggests the ugly motive that lay like a canker at the heart of our love.”
“Let's forget that. Let's go back to damning you as a coward. I find that far more satisfying. That is what you are. A pusillanimous mercenary coward!”
It was unbelievable. We had gone from lovers to loathers in fifteen
minutes. For a wild moment I wondered what he would do or say if I flung myself off this roofwalk to smash my skull against Pearl Street's cobblestones. Would that prove I was sincere—that I truly loved him?
She-Is-Alert's cold cutting snarl rescued me.
Once and for all, when will you trust only my voice in your head? When will you stop listening to your brainless heart?
Through thick welling tears I said: “I will repeat it one more time, although the words all but choke me—I truly loved you. I think you truly loved me.”
“I did!” he said. “Now the mere sight of you will be enough to poison my digestion for a week. I've told my father I wish to return to England. I hope to be at sea a week hence.”
“Bon voyage,”
I said. “That's French for good riddance.”
That night, back in my room, I copied the opening stanzas of Sir Walter Raleigh's “The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd” out of a book of poems which Robert had given me.
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee, and be thy love.
 
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.
I gave Thin Tom two pence to take this sweet farewell to Fort George, addressed to:
The Hon. Robert Foster Nicolls, Esq.
After this gesture of defiance, I relapsed into total misery. For days I lay in my room weeping. My woe was hardly lessened by the knowledge that my cousin Esther was spreading the story of my rejection all around New York. I had no doubt the flinthearted
vrouws
and burghers of the older generation would find no fault with Johannes Van Vorst for his parsimony. Thirty thousand pounds was far beyond the dowry of most New York maidens—and why should he part with it for someone who had no maidenhood worth mentioning?
When I finally emerged from my room, I found my situation was even worse. Robert Nicolls had gotten drunk and stayed that way until they poured him aboard his London-bound ship. In the course of his maunderings, he had regaled more than one crowded taproom with the story of our amours. My reputation was shredded beyond repair. All this was told to me with breathless wide-eyed pseudosympathy by my cousin Esther.

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