Remember the Morning (46 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning
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“We have to save her, no matter what it costs us,” I said.
“How?” Malcolm said.
“I don't know,” I said. “Bribe the governor?”
“He wouldn't dare reprieve her. There'd be a mob in the streets yelling for his scalp.”
Malcolm rose to his feet. For a moment he seemed to fill the room. “There's only one way,” he said. “She told me when I tried to persuade her to speak out early on that I cared more for my reputation than I did for her. I'll have to prove she's wrong.”
“You'll be an outlaw!” I said.
“So be it.”
Not for the first but perhaps for the last time I had to face the bitter truth that Malcolm loved Clara more than he loved me. I could have used Hugh against him—and the child that was swelling in my belly. I was now at least eight months pregnant. But I also faced the melancholy truth that I loved Clara too and was ready to sacrifice everything I had struggled to build here in New York—my store, my business reputation, my dream of establishing the Stapletons as one of the city's first families.
“Tell Duycinck to have a boat at the foot of Nassau Street at eleven o'clock with my gun and fifty rounds of powder and ball,” Malcolm said.
“Give me half of all the cash you've got. We'll go up the Hudson until dawn and then strike out across country for the Delaware. We'll go up that to the Susquehanna. Will the Senecas take her back?”
“Yes. If her grandmother is alive, without question. I think they'll take her anyway. But what will you do?”
“I don't know.”
“I don't think I can bear never seeing you again!”
Malcolm kissed me with surprising tenderness. “I'll value those words, no matter what happens,” he said.
He slid a pistol under his coat. He put a smaller one in his boot. “You better be prepared to go to New Jersey as soon as possible,” he said. “I don't think you'll be any more popular than I'll be.”
“I'll survive. They won't abuse a pregnant woman,” I said.
“I'm not so sure,” Malcolm said. He kissed me hard and vanished into the night.
I sent Peter for Duycinck. When I told him what Malcolm had in mind, his eyes bulged with terror. “We'll all get hanged,” he said.
“Perhaps. But we owe Clara the risk. You as much as anyone. Perhaps more.”
That shut him up. He took Malcolm's gun apart and put it into a sack with the powder and balls. Finding a boat along the river would be no problem. There were plenty of them tied up at the piers, often with their oars in the thwarts. But to be on the safe side, Adam thought it might be a good idea if he headed for New Jersey afterward.
“You know I'm no hero,” he said.
“You'll do until one comes along,” I said and kissed him on his balding head.
 
An hour later, Malcolm strode into City Hall and descended to the basement, beyond the jail cells. He found Undersheriff Mills finishing supper at his desk. He was halfway through a bottle of brandy.
“I want to see Clara Flowers,” he said. “I think I've found some evidence that could save her.”
“What the devil would that be?” Mills said.
“This,” Malcolm said and put a pistol to his head. He relieved him of his gun and keys and prodded him down the dank corridor to Clara's cell.
“They'll hang you, General Stapleton,” Mills said.
“They'll have to catch me first,” Malcolm said.
The cells were mostly empty. Only a few more slaves remained to be tried. Clara was kneeling in her cell, praying, her arms outstretched. “I knew she was a bloody witch,” Mills said.
“What are you doing?” Clara said.
“What does it look like?” Malcolm said.
Malcolm manacled Mills's hands and feet and gagged him to guarantee them several hours' headstart. Locking him in the cell, he led Clara into the office, where he hauled a set of men's clothes out of a sack. “Put these on,” he said. “Fast.”
“Does Catalyntie know you're doing this?”
“Of course.”
“I'm not worth it.”
“Yes, you are. Hurry up. Get into those breeches and that shirt.”
She struggled into the clothes and Malcolm handed her a big cocked hat. She shoved her hair under it and he lowered it on her brow. “Perfect,” he said.
As they strolled out of City Hall, Malcolm threw his arm around Clara, as if they were a bit drunk. No one paid any attention to them. The streets were largely deserted. They only had one close all. On the Broadway, they passed two members of the Night Watch.
“Good evening, General Stapleton,” one said.
“Good evening,” Malcolm said.
In five minutes they were at the Hudson on Nassau Street. Adam stepped out of the shadows by the wharf. “The boat's below,” he said. “It's got a sail. You'll have the wind and tide with you. By morning you should be well north of Judge Horsmanden's clutches.”
“You're a true friend, Adam,” Clara said.
“Maybe now you'll forgive me for what I did to you out of cowardice that day in Hampden Hall,” Adam said.
“I forgave you long ago.”
Out on the river, Clara was silent until the lights of the city slipped behind them. “I'm still not worth it,” she said. “You're ruining your life—and Catalyntie's life—”
“Our lives would have been ruined if you died at that stake.”
“I don't love you anymore,” Clara said. “Do you realize that?”
“I can understand why.”
“I don't think I love God, either.”
Malcolm answered her out of his own pain. “It's ended my illusions about America. Patriotism here will be just as hard to realize—maybe harder—than in England. It will be a long struggle—maybe a losing one.”
“I'm afraid you may be right.”
“I wish I believed in your God. I don't understand His purposes.”
“Neither do I. I can only testify to His presence.”
They slid into the night on those anguished words.
 
 
Back in New York the next morning, I prepared for trouble. I sent Hugh and old Peter and his wife Shirley across the Hudson with money to proceed by hired wagon to Hampden Hall. An hour later, about 9:00 A.M., a fist pounded on my door.
I opened it to face a livid Undersheriff Miller and Sheriff Tompkins. “Where is your husband?” the sheriff roared.
“I don't know. He went out about ten o'clock last night and didn't return,” I said.
“The hell you don't know. We're searching this house.”
They stormed through the rooms, hurling clothes out of wardrobes, peering under beds, scouring the cellar and the backyard.
“What's wrong? What's he done?” I said.
“You really don't know?” the sheriff growled.
When he told me, I burst into tears, putting to good use my ability to cry on demand. “You'll protect me, won't you?” I said. “I'm afraid I'll be mobbed.”
“I don't see why or how we can do that,” the sheriff said.
The two lawmen stalked out. About a half hour later, I heard the roar of the mob. The news of Malcolm's escape with Clara had swirled through the city and the people were about to take their revenge. They ripped open the door and crowded into the house, shouting curses in my face.
“If you weren't with child we'd have burning fagots at your feet by noon,” Rebecca Hogg screamed.
“It proves all Judge Horsmanden's said about you in private,” shouted her husband.
“Your own aunt says you're possessed by the devil,” cried a woman.
“Can't you have pity on a wife who's been abandoned by her husband?” I said. “Traduced and abandoned?”
“Abandoned, hell,” snarled an older man. “He's never done a thing you haven't thought for him first!”
Many of the mob were Night Watchmen and constables, carrying their clubs. They methodically smashed every window in the house. Then they began pitching everything—silver, dishes, clothing, out the windows into the street. What would not fit out the windows, they flung out doors, including beds (dismantled), chairs, tables, and rugs. In a furious hour, the house was a stripped shattered shell. In the street, people pawed through the wreckage, taking what they pleased as if it were the spoils of war.
“On to the Universal Store!” shouted one of the constables.
I would bear it, I told myself. I would bear it for Clara's sake. But it was hard. The thought of them looting the store brought real tears down my cheeks. Between my losses in the house and at the store, the day would
cost me five thousand pounds. I would never sell another item in New York again. I had no idea how I could be a businesswoman in rural New Jersey. The biggest town was Newark, with a grand total of six hundred souls.
My next visitors were Judge Daniel Horsmanden and Governor Clarke. Horsmanden was apoplectic. “I have conferred with His Excellency here on the advisability of confining you in the city jail until your husband returns with Clara Flowers and faces the justice they both so richly deserve. But he has decided for your own safety and the good order of this city, it would be best if you immediately departed this province.”
“I don't have much choice,” I said. “Unless I want to sleep on the floor.”
“How could your husband throw away his good name this way?” the governor said.
“He's a patriot, Your Excellency,” I said. “He'd rather disgrace himself than see his country commit an injustice.”
The governor goggled. “He doesn't love her? It's all patriotic moonshine?”
“Oh, he loves her too. He loves her more than me or this damned stupid country.”
This time my tears were beyond real. They were eternal.
SIX
I
N THE CRUDE FARMHOUSE I HAD built from the stones and timber of Hampden Hall, I faced myself in the bedroom mirror. Was that creature with the streeling hair, the soiled dress, the same woman who never ventured out of her New York house without her hair crimped and permanented, her hat, shoes, dress, and cloak in the latest, most expensive style? I was growing ugly and coarse. Was that what happened to a loveless woman?
For the hundredth time I told myself I was not loveless. Never had I felt so much love in my heart. Joining Malcolm in his decision to rescue Clara had united me with him on a level we had never before attained. I felt that I had won his love and respect for the first time.
No, I was not loveless. I was merely deprived of immediate love, the love that was created by touch, by words, gestures, presence. But another kind of love was in my heart—a love that often seemed stronger than immediate love.
At other times, this spiritual love seemed so much vapor, a compound of moonshine and wish. My furious heart, my aching belly, wanted Malcolm with a violence that frightened me. I found myself drifting back to hating Clara, even hating the color of her skin, the fate of her race—all the things that compounded pity and desire into love in Malcolm's warrior soul.
Two years had passed since Malcolm and Clara fled north to the Iroquois country. I had heard nothing from them. But no news meant they were still free. Their capture would have been trumpeted in the
New York Gazette
, to which I stubbornly subscribed, even though reading it made me melancholy for hours each week.
I did not expect a letter. They would have had to entrust it to a stranger. No one could be relied on to resist the two-hundred-pound reward that Judge Daniel Horsmanden had persuaded the City of New York to offer for their capture. That offer still stood, but opinion in New York about Malcolm's exploit had been undergoing a slow change. The war with France and Spain had ended in a negotiated peace. With the threat of invasion and rapine removed, many people began to regard
the Great Conspiracy in a calmer light. In particular, they accumulated grave doubts about Mary Burton as a witness—and Daniel Horsmanden as a judge.
Mary had taken her hundred-pound reward from the city and combined it with my one-hundred-fifty-pound bribe to live in luxurious style in Clara's house on Maiden Lane. As her funds dwindled, she had turned to her original trade, prostitution, to replenish her purse. The neighbors were soon complaining that she was running a bawdy house. The city fathers had arrested her and offered her a choice of the stocks or a one-way passage to the West Indies. Mary was last seen boarding a ship to Barbados.
Around the same time, people began assailing Horsmanden in public and private for the reckless way he had stampeded juries to guilty verdicts against every person indicted by the grand jury. Many New Yorkers began to mutter that most of the Africans who died at the stake or on the gallows had been innocent. The judge grew so defensive, he published a “Narrative” of the trials which made him sound like the savior of the city—but convinced no one.
I had been encouraged enough to hire a well-known Philadelphia lawyer to appeal Clara's conviction on the ground that she had been denied counsel by Judge Horsmanden's rush to judgment. The case was now before New York's Supreme Court. I vowed to appeal it to the highest court in England, if necessary. If Clara's guilty verdict were voided, Malcolm's so-called crime would be transformed into an act of courage.
Meanwhile, I had been struggling to survive. I had found the great house, Hampden Hall, unlivable. It was virtually impossible to heat. The roof leaked; half the windows were broken. I decided to tear the grandiose structure down and build a more sensible house with the materials. Adam Duycinck borrowed a book of architectural drawings from a neighbor and designed a two-story slope-roofed farmhouse with wings to which more rooms could be added if necessary. We used the labor force from the farm to build it during the summer months, with some help from carpenters and stonemasons imported from New York and Hackensack.
With the mansion a heap of rubble, I decided the place should no longer be named after a long-forgotten English general. I renamed it Great Rock Farm, after a big grey boulder that lay in a field about a quarter of a mile from the house. “It's an American name,” I said, remembering the way the Senecas named places and persons after the world around them.
Adam heartily agreed. He had taken on the job of overseeing the farm. One of the Africans, Luther, had long been working as foreman and handled the discipline and settled disputes about housing and other matters among the workforce. Adam handled the business end, keeping the books, buying seeds and tools. The twenty-five Africans working the
farm were all slaves. I decided to promise them their freedom—but not immediately. I did not have the money to post the required two-hundred-pound bonds for each of them—and I pointed out there was no way for any of them to earn a living in rural New Jersey. To prove I meant my promise, I gave Luther and his wife, Bertha, the cook, their freedom and hired them for ten pounds a year wages.
The result of this small act of generosity—which I made in Clara's name—was remarkable. The productivity of the farm doubled. Our wheat and corn and rye crops were twice as big as the previous year, under the miserly supposedly businesslike rule of a hired overseer. Granted, we had enjoyed better weather, but it was still a startling development. It showed the amazing power of that word
freedom,
the way it energized people's souls.
There was a dark side to this inspiring story. As I studied Adam's books, I saw it would be impossible to free the rest of the slaves, even on a gradual basis, and pay them decent wages if they all chose to stay—and show a profit. Wheat from New York and New Jersey was being undersold by newcomers from Europe who were swarming into western Pennsylvania and Maryland. The price was dropping steadily—and like the fur trade, the market was controlled by London merchants who resold at whacking profits what they bought from the hapless Americans.
Another problem was my slave-owning neighbors. Some of them ran huge farms, with as many as fifty field hands. On Sundays, Great Rock's Africans visited other farms and the news of my attitude toward slavery soon became common knowledge. I began receiving unsigned letters such as this one:
If you want your house burned around your ears one night soon, free another of your Africans. We know the story of the part you played in trying to burn New York and would consider it simple recompense for the losses suffered by friends and relatives in that city. We will tolerate no talk of freedom for these ignorant creatures here in New Jersey. It will be answered as it was in New York—with the gun and torch.
If Malcolm were only here, I would dare them to try mobbing me. But the only man I had in the house was Adam, who begged me to cease all talk of freeing another African. I could only ruefully consent. But it buttressed my conviction that Malcolm's dream of a morally pure America was patriotic moonshine.
In another month, I had not even Adam to protect me. The little fellow
sickened and died of the great pox
53
with lamentable swiftness. He bore it like the philosopher that he was, saying it was the price a man with a hump on his back must be prepared to pay for his pleasure. At the end he held my hand and again voiced his regret at destroying Clara's child. I told him he was forgiven by her and any god worthy of our worship.
I had other worries. One was my new son, Paul. I gave birth to him a month after I arrived at the farm; Bertha, Luther's wife, served as midwife. My first look at the child was unnerving. I had feared he would look like Philip Hooft. Instead, he was almost unnaturally beautiful, with features as perfectly formed as the Infant Jesus in a sacred painting and a head of black hair and dark brown eyes that could never be explained by any Dutch or Scottish genealogy. I was almost glad Malcolm was not present to ask me bluntly if the baby was his child. I abandoned my plan to name him Philip (Malcolm had heard a good deal about Philip Hooft) and called him Paul.
Paul's brother Hugh was bounding into manhood. I had to think of giving him an education worthy of the great merchant I wanted him to become. I took him with me in our buggy to Hackensack, the nearest town, in search of a tutor. I discovered the minister of the Dutch Reformed Church was none other than Harman Bogardus, the teacher Cornelius Van Vorst had hired to civilize me and Clara. He was still a teacher at heart and for a modest fee offered to board Hugh in his house five days a week and instruct him in arithmetic and spelling and grammar.
At first Bogardus and I discussed the upheaval that had brought me to New Jersey in neutral terms. I remarked disconsolately that everyone in both provinces seemed to know the story. Bogardus abandoned his reserved pedagogic manner and revealed his true Dutch feelings. “I've told everyone I'm sure the charges against Clara were false and denounce as atrocious lies everything that's rumored about you. Only an English judge like Daniel Horsmanden, with his barbaric ideas of justice, would have committed such atrocities against innocent Africans.”
I decided it would be best not to mention that some of the Africans were guilty—or that my Dutch uncle Johannes was Judge Horsmanden's enthusiastic collaborator. Instead I lamented the loss of my business and talked plaintively about my financial problems at Great Rock Farm.
“Why don't you open a store here in Hackensack?” Bogardus said. “Good-sized ships come up the river with no difficulty. From Hackensack to the New York border you have the most prosperous farmers in America—and almost every one of them is Dutch. The only store in town is run by an Englishman—who charges double New York's prices and has nothing but cheap goods.”
For a moment I could not breathe. I was sure Cornelius Van Vorst was speaking to me in the voice of this man of God. It was, of course, exactly what I had been hoping Bogardus would say. I was familiar with the depth of the Hackensack River—I had seen oceangoing ships as large as Killian Van Oorst's
The Orange Prince
at the town's wharfs. I had also reconnoitered the Englishman's store and was sure I could outsell him.
Back at the farm, I got the shock of my life. Drinking tea in my parlor was Robert Foster Nicolls. He gazed disdainfully at the oversized chairs and tables and sofa from baronial Hampden Hall and told me Chesley White had died six months ago. Thanks to his marriage to Elizabeth White, Robert was now the head of the firm. He had decided to expand the business by opening stores in all the major port cities in America and had come over in pursuit of this object. He was also determined to collect the numerous debts which the kindhearted White had allowed various American merchants to pile up. One of the biggest was two thousand pounds to a certain Catalyntie Van Vorst Stapleton, former proprietor of the Universal Store on Pearl Street in New York.
“I've heard all about Malcolm's fit of madness—and its predictable effect on your business,” Robert said. “How in God's name did you let him do such a thing?”
“It was my idea as much as his,” I said. “We both love—and esteem—Clara. We couldn't let her die on trumped-up charges extorted from witnesses threatened with the stake.”
Robert smirked at the way I stumbled on the word love. “You might have given some thought to people like my father-in-law, who'd trusted you to behave like an intelligent businesswoman. Two thousand pounds' worth of goods thrown into Pearl Street! I can assure you, no one in London will ever do business with you again.”
“How is your wife? Has she come to New York with you?”
“Elizabeth's in London saying her prayers. That's all she's good for,” Robert said.
His patent unhappiness was a small but empty satisfaction. I could almost hear Malcolm warning me not to betray an innocent young woman like Elizabeth White into the hands of a scoundrel. It was dismaying to discover that honesty and honor might have some value in this confusing world. Or, to put it another way, just desserts had a way of turning up at the most unexpected moments.
“I can't pay you the money now,” I said. “But I plan to open a store in Hackensack soon. I'll put you at the head of my creditors.”
Robert shook his head. He saw no reason to have mercy on me, remembering the coldness I had displayed toward him in London. If there is anything more heartless than sworn enemies, it is former lovers. “You
would have been wiser to pack your baby on your back like a squaw and follow your husband north. I'm sure Clara has been warming his wigwam all winter.”
Robert finished his tea and smiled in a wry humorless way. He had grown less attractive with age. Some men acquire flesh as they grow older; others grow lean. Was it a commentary on the state of their souls? I was sure this was the case with Robert. His dry lips, his rheumy eyes, his sallow complexion, suggested some sort of withering process was at work.
“I've always rather fancied this estate,” he said. “Perhaps it's got something to do with the scenes of my youth. I'm thinking of staying in New York for a while. Every gentleman needs a country house. I rather hold it against you, tearing down Hampden Hall.”
“You wouldn't—you couldn't—turn out Malcolm's sons. No matter what you think of me.”

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