Remember the Morning (38 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning
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“You're about to see the advantage of trained troops, Stapleton,” Wolfe said.
At one hundred paces, the order to fire rang out. A tremendous blast leaped from the British muskets, a hellish mixture of smoke and flame. The whole front rank of the Scottish line toppled to the grassy earth but behind them came the next wave, their fearsome claymores raised. The British infantry had been training for weeks to meet this weapon. Every private had orders to bayonet the man to his right, so his thrust would go under the upraised arm of the attacker.
Most regiments obeyed this order with fierce elan and highlanders fell by the hundreds. But in Jamey's 24th Regiment, panic shook half the line. They dropped their guns and fled to the rear. Malcolm caught a glimpse of his brother, screaming curses at the running men. Without asking permission, Malcolm leaped from his horse and flung himself into the melee. The Scots, decimated elsewhere, tried to break through the 24th's splintered ranks. Malcolm waded into the confused struggle, his eyes on Jamey, who stood his ground and labored to reform his company. Malcolm reached him just as a highlander raised his sword to split Jamey's head like a melon. Seizing an abandoned musket, Malcolm bayoneted the Scot in the heart. Then, armed with his claymore, he stood in the breach like a maddened Hercules, felling his Celtic kinsmen left and right.
Jamey Stapleton pointed to Malcolm and shouted: “See what we have for reinforcements! Stand by him, men. Stand by the hero of the Bracken.” The boy had told his company about his brother's American exploits when Malcolm visited their camp on the march north. Other officers took up the cry and the regiment rallied. It was an amazing example of what courage can accomplish on a battlefield.
A few minutes later, the Duke of Cumberland ordered his cavalry, led by Hawley and Wolfe, to strike the Scots from both flanks. The shattered clansmen fled, leaving over fifteen hundred dead and dying men on the field.
An aide rode up to Malcolm and ordered him to report to His Royal Highness immediately. Was he to be hanged for disrupting the regularity of the battle line? Malcolm wondered.
He found the duke on horseback, surrounded by aides and generals, including Hawley. “Mr. Stapleton,” Cumberland said. “I want to apologize for any aspersions Brigadier Hawley and I may have cast on your loyalty and courage. You're a soldier after my own heart. Take this as a small gesture of my appreciation.” He handed Malcolm a leather purse containing one hundred guineas.
The duke invited Malcolm and Wolfe to ride across the battlefield with him in the place of honor, on either side. It was a scene of carnage, dead and dying men everywhere. When the rebels saw the royal standard flying from the flagstaff of the dragoon at the head of the troop, several hurled Gaelic curses at them. One man, slumped against a rock, his chest soaked in blood, simply stared, defiant to his last breath.
“Wolfe,” the duke said. “Shoot me that highland scoundrel who dares to look on us with such contempt and insolence.”
“My commission is at Your Royal Highness's disposal,” Wolfe replied. “But I can never consent to become the executioner of a brave enemy.”
“What a peculiar fellow you are, Wolfe,” His Royal Highness said. “Don't imitate his example, Stapleton. You'll never get promoted.”
The duke, having disposed of the Bonnie Prince's army, now planned to extirpate rebellion from the Scottish soul by multiplying Hangman Hawley a thousandfold. Not a glen in the highlands would be safe for disloyalty. Malcolm begged to be excused from this duty and turned his face south to London. He was worried about his wife and his son but his chief motive was escape from his Scottish nightmare. His brain seemed split into atoms by it, his heart was a torment of confusion. He stayed drunk from the beginning to the end of his journey.
You can imagine his amazement when he arrived in the metropolis to find he was London's hero. Perhaps worse, from his point of view, it was his wife who had worked the miracle.
C
OLONEL HARTSHORNE HAD WRITTEN ME A letter, describing Malcolm's heroism at Culloden. Hartshorne's regiment had been in line beside Jamey Stapleton's and the older man was an eyewitness to the whole performance, which he naturally thought was motivated by patriotism and the military prowess he had encouraged in Malcolm at Oswego. I showed it to John Williams, the owner of the White Horse Inn. He took the letter to the
Daily
Courant,
a paper financed by the Walpole-Pelham regime. They published it immediately, with embellishments that had “the American volunteer” sustaining the entire right wing of the Duke of Cumberland's army.
John Williams offered me free room and board if I would move back to his establishment. Even before Malcolm arrived in London, crowds showed up at the White Horse to ogle the American hero. When the giant appeared in the flesh, all he had to do was dine twice a day in the inn's taproom to pack the place. The government was equally delighted to hail a champion from distant America. Malcolm's readiness to risk his life for their cause seemed to prove their popularity, although half of England and three fourths of Scotland despised them. Chesley White assured me that my credit would be good with him until my debts mounted to the moon—if I would bring Malcolm to dine at his house on Leicester Square.
Before I could accept that invitation, we were invited to a dinner at the Old Lodge in Richmond Park, one of the many houses of the Great Corrupter himself, Robert Walpole. We were escorted there by Colonel Hartshorne, who had returned to London to enjoy his money and bask in a share of Malcolm's fame, leaving his regiment to fend for itself in Scotland. He told us the Patriots were no longer a political force. They had been routed by Walpole's Parliamentary army as thoroughly as the highlanders had been broken at Culloden. Half had made their peace with the Duke of Newcastle and his brother, Henry Pelham, who was now prime minister, in return for a nice raffle of offices. The rest had taken to drink or gone to France to commune longingly with James Edward Stuart. Hartshorne had bought a seat in Parliament
47
and was
hoping to obtain the rangership of a royal park in Surrey in return for his vote.
Richmond Park was part of the king's demesne, not far from London. Walpole had made his son Ranger of the Park and appointed himself his deputy. The son had given his father the Old Lodge, on which Walpole had spent a reported fourteen thousand pounds. The house was magnificent. Damask draperies on every window, French and Italian and Dutch paintings on every wall, statuary inside and outside, French furniture that rivaled Versailles.
The dinner was a private celebration of the victory at Culloden. The Duke of Cumberland was there with his generals, including Hangman Hawley. The Duke of Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham and a half dozen other notables from Parliament were also in the crowd surrounding Robert Walpole. The Great Corrupter was one of the fattest men I had ever seen: a huge hearty slab of a fellow, with the hard knowing eyes of a successful highwayman. He exuded power; it seemed to emanate from his bulk as well as from the total assurance of his manner.
Walpole pounded Malcolm on the back and joked about his size. “If the latest crop of Americans are as big as you, the damn colonies may be worth the money we spend on them after all.”
Mrs. Walpole was nowhere to be seen, but the great man's mistress, a tall thin dark-haired woman, was in cheerful attendance. Most of the women in the party were mistresses, not wives, Hartshorne offhandedly told me, confirming everything I had heard from Robert Nicolls about marital fidelity among the British upper classes.
The conversation was mostly about who among the captured Jacobites would be hanged, who would be beheaded, who would be shot. A half dozen noblemen were consigned to the ax at the Tyburn Gallows, the rest to the noose at the same site. Deserters from the army, mostly lowland Scots, were to be shot against the wall at Hyde Park. “Let's appear generous,” Walpole said. “There's no need to kill more than a few hundred.” His successor, Henry Pelham, cheerfully agreed. They were, of course, not counting the thousands of garden variety Scots who were being slaughtered at that very moment in Scotland.
The principal business of the evening settled, they sat down to a stupendous feast. There must have been a hundred dishes on the table—beef, venison, geese, turkey, lamb, fish of a dozen varieties. Everyone imitated the former prime minister and the present chief, Pelham, who was almost as fat as Walpole, and dug in with a gusto that I soon found beyond my capacity. Pelham seemed determined to outeat Walpole. He frequently had venison on his fork and a turkey leg in his other hand, chomping back and forth, while gravy drooled over his double chins.
Never had I seen such gorging, except in my Seneca village after a starving time.
Even more abundant were the drinks, jeroboams of Château Lafite, Latour, and other French clarets, as well as strong beers, punch heavily reinforced by gin and brandy, and champagne. All this was poured down in staggering quantities as toast after toast was shouted along the table—from the king to the Duke of Cumberland to the army to the navy down to Walpole's favorite racehorse. Soon everyone was as drunk as the Iroquois at Oswego. The Duke of Newcastle, who lacked the flesh of his brother and Walpole, toppled from his chair, unable to stand the pace. He was left flat on the floor and was soon joined by a half dozen others.
Finally, Malcolm was asked to provide them with entertainment. Someone produced a huge gleaming broadsword. A chair was brought in from the kitchen and Robert Walpole shouted: “Show us now, Stapleton, how you cleaved those highland scum. I'll wager a hundred pounds he can break this thing apart with a single stroke.”
Brigadier Hawley maintained that was impossible. The chair was a stout piece of work. Malcolm might split the back but he would never get through the seat, which was solid oak. The bets flew around the table while Malcolm hefted the sword. He was as drunk as anyone in the room. Beside me, I heard Colonel Hartshorne, the man who had solemnly vowed never to make another bet, wagering two hundred pounds that Malcolm could do the job.
Planting his feet wide, Malcolm raised the broadsword until its tip vanished into the shadows of the ceiling. Down it came with a fearsome hiss and
whack
—the chair, back and seat, was in fragments on the floor. Malcolm stared at the ruins as if they were somehow repugnant to him. Robert Walpole staggered from place to place, collecting his winnings, and deposited a small mountain of guineas before Malcolm's plate.
“'Tis yours, my friend,” he shouted. “Fairly won.”
There had to be two thousand pounds in the pile. I could scarcely resist counting it. Clutching the broadsword, Malcolm staggered back to the table. He gazed down at the money and began to weep. No one in the room, including his wife, knew what was going on in his head. He had told me nothing about his discoveries in Scotland.
With a snarl, Malcolm flung the back of his hand against the money, sending the coins flying across the table at the astonished Walpole and Prime Minister Pelham, who was sitting beside him. “A patriot,” Malcolm said, laboring out each word as if it were a ten-pound weight. “A patriot doesn't fight for gold. He fights for his country.”
A hush fell over the room. To fling the word
patriot
in Walpole's face
was the greatest political insult imaginable. For twenty years the opposition had used it as a club to belabor his corruption.
“I think we can lay claim to that word, patriot, as well as anyone in England,” Pelham said.
“Can you, sir? Can you?” Malcolm said. “I wish to God I could believe that!”
For a horrendous moment, I wondered if Malcolm was going to slaughter everyone in the room with that broadsword. I saw myself hanging from a gibbet at Tyburn as a conspirator in the most sensational murders in English history.
Robert Walpole seemed oblivious to this possibility. He barely looked at Malcolm. Instead, he glared up and down the table. “If a word of this reaches the newspapers, we'll spend ten thousand pounds of secret service money to track down the whisperer.”
“Twenty thousand,” said Prime Minister Pelham, whose face had acquired a grim cast.
Walpole ordered a servant to gather up the scattered coins and put them in a purse. He handed it to me. “Take this with my compliments, madam. You seem to be an intelligent woman. Tomorrow or the next day, when your husband regains his wits, talk some sense into his head.”
Colonel Hartshorne helped me half drag, half carry Malcolm to a carriage. “I fear this is my fault,” the colonel said. “I gave the lad these patriot notions when he was at an impressionable age. I never realized he would take them so seriously. In Oswego, in the middle of nowhere, patriotism was an easy note to strike. In London it's another matter.”
“Don't blame yourself. He's always been inclined to see himself as a knight errant,” I said.
Malcolm said nothing. Slumped in the carriage, he stared out at London's passing parade. The whores, the beggars, the gorgeously dressed gentlemen and their ladies were on full display everywhere on this warm spring night.
“What would Clara think?” Malcolm said.
“I beg your pardon?” Hartshorne said.
“What would Clara think of that dinner tonight? The plunderers of our country, gorging and swilling over the bodies of poor starving Scotsmen who had the courage to believe in a cause.”
“Now, now,” Hartshorne said. “You can't let wild men like that run the country—any more than you could let the bloody Iroquois run New York. Right, Mrs. Stapleton?”
“Of course not,” I said. I still had no more idea than Hartshorne of the war that was raging in Malcolm's brain.
On Piccadilly, as we approached the White Horse Inn, Malcolm saw a boy and girl selling flowers to the patrons who lurched from the taproom
door. They were about ten years old and very emaciated. Business was far from brisk. “Fresh roses and daffodils,” they piped in pathetic voices.
“Where's that purse Walpole gave you?” Malcolm said.
I handed it to him as we descended from the carriage and Hartshorne paid the driver. Malcolm staggered over to the flower sellers. “How much for the lot?” he said.
“For all of them?” the boy said. Each had four bouquets in wicker baskets suspended from their necks. “Three shillings, sir.”
“Here's three pounds instead,” Malcolm said.
He poured a dozen coins from the purse into the basket. “Sir,” said the astonished boy. “That's more than three pounds.”
“Keep it,” Malcolm said and stumbled upstairs and fell facedown in the bed, unconscious. I lay awake beside him, listening to his snores, trying to decide what to do. He was out of control and I did not know why. He had thrown away a chance to win preferment from the men who ruled England. One side of my mind thought it was madness. The other side thought there was a certain nobility to it.
Good God. I was thinking like Clara. The Evil Brother leered in the far corner of my soul, whispering:
Worse is to come.
Clara somehow helped me defy him. I began to see myself loving this reckless madman who flung defiance in prime ministers' faces. We would somehow survive his outrages. I would make enough money for both of us.
As dawn greyed the windowpane, I pressed myself against Malcolm. “Husband,” I whispered. “You've barely looked at me since you returned from Scotland. You know how much I need your kisses.”
It began well enough. He caressed me sleepily. I took his hand and placed it on my mound. “There's where I want you,” I said. “Where I belong to you, no matter what befalls us.”
I felt his lips stiffen. His hand lay there, inert. No fingers caressed my thighs, explored my creamy interior. For a moment or two he fumbled with my breasts, then turned away, leaving me with nothing but a view of his mountainous back and shoulder. “Some other time,” he said.
I was overwhelmed by rage and shame. All the memories of my Moon Woman days assailed me. “What is it?” I said. “Have you given your all to some Scottish slut?”
“No,” he said.
“Am I so repulsive?”
“No,” he said.
“What is it, then?”
No answer.
Two nights later we went to dinner at Chesley White's house. He had explained in his invitation that he was giving a party for his daughter Elizabeth and her fiance and her friends. They were eager to display Malcolm
as a catch that would make them the envy of London. Meanwhile, I entertained acid thoughts about my approaching encounter with Robert Foster Nicolls. As I expected, the fox was more than a little discomfited to discover his future father-in-law beaming at his former love.
“Mr. Nicolls and I are old acquaintances,” I told White. “We knew each other well in New York.”
“I hear he played a soldier's part in more than one broil with your Iroquois,” White said.
“Really?” I said. “That must have been in my captivity days.”

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