Remember the Morning (9 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning
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T
HE STAPLETON MANOR HOUSE STOOD ON a broad meadow, a few miles from the falls of the Passaic River. Beyond it stretched fields of green corn and wheat and orchards full of flowering apple and pear trees. The fieldstone mansion looked huge, compared to the size of the houses Clara had seen in New York. It was four stories high, with a central hall that separated it into two massive wings. There were six matching windows on each floor—proof of the builder's wealth or arrogance or both. The cost of heating such a house had to be stupendous. On the red tile roof a half dozen chimneys poked red brick snouts into the sky.
Around the mansion were red barns, a fieldstone carriage house, and at least two dozen smaller wooden huts, which she would soon learn were slave quarters. “Does this village have a name?” Clara asked.
“Happenstance Hall,” Adam Duycinck said.
“Hampden Hall,” Malcolm Stapleton said. He was holding the reins of the two-horse team that was pulling their springless wagon, in which crude seats had been fastened by a country carpenter.
“After some bloody English hero,” Duycinck said.
“He was a real hero, you stupid Dutch bastard,” Malcolm said. “John Hampden defied the Stuart kings and their corrupt ways. My grandfather, Hugh Stapleton, served in his regiment in the civil war. He was with him when he died at Chalgrove Field.”
“You can't get an idea into this fellow's noodle that isn't connected to a battle,” Duycinck said to Clara. “All he thinks about is war.”
“What's wrong with that?” Clara asked. Among the Senecas, men thought of little else except the exploits of the great warriors they hoped to match.
“You can get yourself killed in a war,” Duycinck said.
“What difference does that make, as long as you die with your honor unbroken?” Clara said.
“Listen to that, Duycinck!” Malcolm Stapleton said. “From the mouth of a slave girl.”
“I'm not a slave,” Clara said. “I'm a Seneca. A daughter of the Bear Clan!”
Startled, Malcolm looked over his shoulder. Was he seeing her for the
first time? Words from her Seneca mother leaped into Clara's mind.
There are people who look and see nothing. Trust only those who look hard and see truly
. This young man was learning to look hard. Should she trust him?
No, it was impossible. He was white. With him, as with the others, even Catalyntie, she would always wear a false face. But she soon saw the value of having Malcolm Stapleton's good opinion. In the lofty entrance hall, they met the mistress of the mansion, whom Malcolm introduced almost rudely as “my stepmother.”
A tall, and fair-skinned woman, Georgianna Stapleton faced the world with the hauteur of a queen. Her hair was a glistening auburn, strewn with darker shades. She was wearing a green riding outfit and green hat with a black raven's feather in it. “Who is this beautiful creature?” she asked, with the hard eyes of a woman who does not tolerate rivals.
Malcolm explained who Clara was and why she was here. “We have no need of another house servant,” Mrs. Stapleton said. “She'll have to go into the fields.”
“She's too educated for that,” Malcolm said. “She can read and write. Father thinks she can help Jamey with his lessons. She can also help Adam with his accounts.”
“Lessons!” Mrs. Stapleton said. “I fear scholarship will be as lost on Jamey as it was on you. I will never understand how an intelligent man like your father sired two such boobies.”
Malcolm flushed and struggled to control his anger. Mrs. Stapleton went blithely on: “What does Adam need with an assistant, unless she knows how to turn red ink into black?”
“She's turned black blood into red, madam,” Duycinck said with his leering smile. “Her mother was killed by the Indians and she was adopted by them. She considers herself a Seneca.”
In a more confiding voice, he added: “They say her mother had powers. She may be able to change our luck.”
“That would be a novelty,” Mrs. Stapleton said. “I'm off to the Alexanders for a fortnight. We'll decide what to do with Clara when I return. If she wants to try teaching Jamey in the meantime, good luck to her.”
“As for you,” she said, poking her riding crop into Duycinck's protruding stomach. “If there's a Negro born with a twisted back in nine months, I will personally persuade Governor Nicolls to deport you to the West Indies. I'll color you black first to make sure you go directly into the sugarcane fields.”
“Madam, that would be Satan at work, not poor pathetic Adam,” Duycinck whined.
“You were born a scoundrel and you'll die one,” she said. She
seemed more amused than angry. “We're entertaining the governor and his entourage on my return. Make sure the kitchen, the bedrooms, the public rooms, are ready to receive them. I've written out the menus for the dinners.”
“All will be attended to exactly as you wish, madam,” Duycinck said.
“You may kiss me good-bye, Stepson.”
Georgianna Stapleton turned her head, permitting Malcolm to kiss her rouged cheek, and strolled past him onto the sunny lawn, where an African in a red coat was soothing a skittish white horse. Malcolm glared sullenly after her. The encounter had annihilated his good cheer.
“If there's any trouble in this neighborhood, it'll be between her legs, not mine,” Duycinck muttered.
“Shut your filthy mouth,” Malcolm snarled.
“I don't know what you people are talking about,” Clara said, concealing her disgust behind the false face of a timid bewildered girl. Duycinck's remark was not much different from jokes she had heard in the longhouse of the Bear Clan since she was a child. Her performance was designed to win Malcolm Stapleton's sympathy.
Malcolm watched his stepmother canter down the curving drive, followed by the red-coated groom on a smaller horse. “Mrs. Stapleton rules my father and the rest of us like a Russian czarina,” he said. “My father loves her extravagantly. He built this great pile for her—going monstrously into debt—but as far as I can see she loves no one but herself.”
A big black man named Samson lugged Clara's trunk up the stairs to her room on the top floor. “How long have you lived here?” Clara asked him.
He shook his head angrily, as if he disapproved of her question. Duycinck, who had followed them upstairs, explained: “He's just off a ship from Africa. He doesn't know a word of English.”
He spoke rapidly to Samson in a language Clara did not understand, though the sound of it stirred a tremor in her flesh. Had she heard similar words from her parents as a child? Samson retreated down the hall and Clara asked Duycinck the name of the language. The hunchback shrugged. “I picked it up from the blacks on the ship that brought me here,” he said.
Suddenly his arm was around Clara's waist. “I'll be glad to teach it to you between midnight and dawn,” he said. “My back may be crooked but there's other parts of me that can stand as straight as a pine tree with a little encouragement.”
“Why should I be so generous?” Clara said.
“I can help you with Madame Stapleton. No one else can tease her into a decent humor when she goes on her rampages. Malcolm flees to the woods, his father to New York City.”
“Why does she rampage—as you call it?”
“She regrets leaving England. She considers the Stapletons—and everyone else in America—beneath her. Her father was a London merchant who went bankrupt after presenting her at court and otherwise raising her to live like a princess. She had to take the best offer she could get.”
“Was the first Mrs. Stapleton as beautiful?”
“Pretty enough. Scottish. It's where Malcolm gets his name and his warrior blood. She died giving birth to Malcolm's brother, Jamey. Malcolm gets drunk on the anniversary of her going, every year. Can you imagine a soldier with such a heart? It's fitter for a woman.”
“Soldiers never let their hearts trouble them?”
“They must never admit the pain to their mind's eye. A soldier's heart must be as tight and tough as a drum, and he marches to its martial beat, no matter what sort of vapors rumble inside it!”
The little Dutchman swelled his chest like a screech owl as he declaimed this fustian. “You too have a warrior's heart?” Clara asked.
“Haven't I just told you I'm a man?” Duycinck cried.
“I'm glad you'll be able to bear the pain of what I must tell you. I'm not interested in your proposal. I can only give myself to a man I love.”
This was another false face, Clara told herself, even if the words were true. She watched with amusement as Duycinck deflated like a frog in a kettle. “You'll soon find you need me,” the hunchback said.
“If so, I hope I'll discover a friend generous enough to help me without any expectation of a reward,” Clara said.
Muttering, Duycinck withdrew and Clara unpacked the half dozen everyday dresses and petticoats Catalyntie had hastily given her. As she finished hanging the clothes in a dusty wardrobe, Malcolm Stapleton appeared in the doorway, an unhappy expression on his face. “You must never cross my stepmother. Her good humor can vanish in a flash. She can persuade my father to do anything.”
“Is your father pleased with her when she behaves that way?”
“He stopped being pleased with her a long time ago,” Malcolm said. “Except when she deigns to comfort him in bed.”
“Why doesn't he find another woman to live with?”
“Because marriage is for life,” Malcolm said.
“What a foolish idea,” Clara said. “Among the Senecas people often have two or three husbands. My grandmother had four.”
“That's easy for them. They're heathens,” Malcolm said. “We have to bear witness before God.”
“We too bear witness before God about important things,” Clara said. “Everyone does.”
He gave her that hard look again. But this time his eyes were cold. She sensed a darkness in his soul, born of a disappointment that was
profound. It was a strange spirit for such a young man. Clara had only seen it in old men who had failed to win greatness as warriors.
“Do you plan to become a soldier?” she asked.
“It's what I want to be,” Malcolm said. “But I'm as like to do it as I am to fly to the moon. My father's determined to pound me into a lawyer, whether I like it or not.”
“Is that so bad? Lawyers grow rich, don't they?”
“I hate the whereases and whereifs—I'm no good at it—but I hate it first and last.”
Clara heard real pain in this young giant's voice. He was almost as shackled by his father's will as she was by the arbitrary laws of the slave trade.
“A Seneca believes if something is truly your heart's desire, you must seek it, no matter what it costs you,” Clara said.
Her head did not reach Malcolm Stapleton's shoulder. But she spoke to him with such calm authority, he forgot the color of her skin, her status as a slave. Clara's
orenda
was at work here, shaping both their lives.
“I applied for a commission in one of the king's regiments,” Malcolm said. “The answer came back from London only last week—there's no room for someone from an insignificant colony like New York.”
“You must never think of yourself that way,” Clara said. “No man with a low opinion of himself can lead men in battle. New York is not insignificant. New York is part of America. When you place a map of America over England, it becomes a little island, no bigger than a mudbank in Lake Ontario. Duycinck is right, when he calls you American. You and I and Catalyntie—all those who were born here—are Americans.”
There was skepticism in Malcolm's smile. She could see he did not really agree with her. But he honored her good intentions. “I'll try to remember that,” he said.
Malcolm led Clara downstairs to the kitchen, where he introduced her to Bertha, a black woman who was almost as big as Fat Alice, but had a much more cheerful disposition. “This manor would fall apart without Bertha,” Malcolm said. “She keeps us all happy with the best cooking in the colony.”
“Oh, go on, since you been a tot barely up to my knee you ate everythin' I put in front of you. Would've eaten grass or dirt, I swear, if I put a little gravy on it,” Bertha said. “Never seen a boy with such an appetite.”
She examined Clara with shrewd humorous eyes that evoked memories of her Seneca grandmother. “I already heard all about you from the Dutchman,” she said, meaning Duycinck. “What a high and mighty lady you is, with your head full of readin' and writin'.”
“That doesn't mean I'm afraid of hard work,” Clara said. “I'll be glad to help you here whenever you need it.”

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