Washington and Caesar (65 page)

“Only from a distance, sir. You always seem to be keeping me from them.”

This last prompted a burst of nervous laughter. Stewart could tell he was sailing close to the wind, but Washington did not seem an utterly formal man, and was obviously used to men of good breeding and good conversation. Judging by Hamilton and Fitzgerald, better breeding than his own. He smiled for the absent Jeremy, who had trained him so well. He looked at George Lake, who was chewing carefully and trying not to be seen.

“Are you a farmer at home, Captain?” Washington clearly wanted him to say yes, as everyone knew that Washington liked to go on about farming. Stewart shook his head.

“I fear not, sir, although I gather that you are an eminent farmer. My father is a Turkey merchant.”

“How many turkeys does he have?” asked George Lake from across the table. It was almost his first comment since they had been seated. The roar of laughter in return was like a volley of musketry, it was so loud and so high. Lake shrank with embarrassment.

“Look how different the language is already,” said Stewart into the last of the laughter. “My father owns ships that trade between Edinburgh and Smyrna, in the Empire of the Grand Seigneur.”

“Goodness,” said Hamilton. “Have you been there yourself?”

“I have, too. A wonderful place, like the Arabian Nights brought to life. I went twice as a lad.”

Hamilton nodded along eagerly. Again, Stewart had the ears of the whole table.

“Did you like it much? In Turkey?” asked Fitzgerald. Stewart thought that when alone, he might ask about the women there. Everyone did. Veils made men so curious.

“All but the absolute nature of the place. The slavery had worked its way into the national fabric,” he said, and winced. The table fell totally silent.

“Polly was never a slave,” said her father, looking at her with affection. “She was born one, of course, but her mother and I were free before any man ever told her what a slave might be.”

Polly nodded. “I remember England. Most of the ladies were very kind, although I did tire of being a curiosity. Because of my color, I mean, and being from America. Other people were from America, but they didn’t have to wear a sign on their skin to say as much.”

“And you were a slave for Washington,” Marcus said.

“I met Washington once,” said Sally. They all looked at her in surprise.

“I was with Bludner. My mother was still alive then, I think. We was taking crabs on his river, an’ he came an’ near beat Bludner to death. I liked him fine.”

“Washington?” Caesar looked surprised. “He beat Bludner? I’d have paid good money to see that.”

“Who is Bludner?” asked Polly, quietly.

“He’s a slave-taker from Virginia. He almost killed me, and Virgil and Jim when you come to it, back in ’75.”

“He owned me my whole life,” said Sally, her lips trembling, and she spilled a little wine from her glass.

“He doesn’t own you now,” said Marcus White, but Sally rose and bolted out the door. Marcus made to follow but then came back. Caesar shook his head.

“I don’t know what you see in her, Reverend,” he said.
“She’s been trouble since I knew her. And men get ideas, seeing you going around with her.”

“Perhaps they should get ideas if I don’t go around with her, Caesar. Do you know your Bible?”

“Not as well as you, I dare say. But I’ve read it, yes.”

“Then you know that Our Saviour spent a great deal of time with prostitutes. And soldiers and tax men, too, I think.”

Caesar bowed his head at the answer.

“It’s never as easy as you think, Caesar. No matter how hard your life has been, hers was harder. And no matter how brave you are, she has been braver. Think on that before you jibe at her again.”

Sally came back with a little powder over the tear tracks she had made, and sat composedly.

The silence dragged on. Stewart knew he could end it with an easy apology, but some part of him knew that he had wanted to say those words since he sat down with them, and that he wasn’t sorry. But he hated to seem a boor, so he attempted to change the subject.

“May I ask what kind of fish they
do
have in Virginia?” he asked. George Lake was white as a sheet.

Lafayette leaned forward, smiling as if he had followed this point for some time. He blinked his eyes, and Stewart suddenly knew he had an ally, someone else who had long wanted to speak out.

“I have always felt that slavery leaves an indelible mark on a country,” he said. And the silence deepened.

Hamilton turned to Stewart and shook his head.

“This is a most unfortunate subject for this table. Are you a particular enemy to slavery?”

“I didn’t think so, before,” said Stewart.

“You had a slave of your own, I think?” said Johnson.

“No, sir. A servant. Closer than servant.”

Washington spoke up from the end of the table, where he had been silent.

“A slave may be close, I think. Both the ancients and the Bible tell us as much.” Washington was careful in his speech, and Stewart realized that he was quite angry.

“Oh, aye, they do. But not as close as a true friend, surely?”

Washington considered Billy, and his fury grew. “Surely not only equality can bring true friendship? So that a slave can be as much your friend as a servant?” Washington was just civil. He knew he was berating a guest at his own table, a sin at least as great as the one the guest had committed by starting this fox, this damnable subject, at his table. And yet he realized that his views were not as simple as they had once been.

“And yet, are not these men your friends, though they also serve you?” Stewart thought,
I am contending with a man at his own dinner table. Jeremy would have my head.
And he thought
this is the arch-rebel himself. I’ll say what I please.
“And how do you know that the friendship of a slave is not compelled or feigned? A servant can leave. Even a staff officer…” He smiled, willing them to laugh.

“And can you speak in comfort of our having slaves when you attempt to impose tyranny over us by violence?” said Henry Lee.

Stewart smiled, relishing his response. He no longer cared to be perfectly civil.

“Can you speak in comfort about liberty, sir, when you keep slaves?”

Henry Lee turned a bright crimson. Lafayette leaned forward attentively.

“Yes,” he said decisively, as if he had just decided a question. “Yes. Slavery is a blot on the escutcheon of liberty that this country bears.”

Stewart feared an explosion from General Washington, but instead he appeared troubled.

“It is not a simple issue.” He looked at the table. “I once thought that it was a mere matter of property, but it does
have to do with rights. And yet, if a man treats his slaves fairly…”

“They are yet slaves,” said Stewart firmly. Washington loved Lafayette like a son, and Hamilton not much behind, and Stewart felt strongly that they were both of his opinion, and it made him bold.

Washington turned on him. “What do you know of how a man treats his slaves, then?”

“I know one of yours, sir.”

Stewart suspected that if he had been hale, he’d have been summoned to a duel by half the room, but he was not daunted by their looks, although George Lake was cringing.

“Who?” like a pistol shot.

“Do you recall Julius Caesar, sir? He is now a sergeant in our army.”

Washington sat a moment, as if stunned, and looked at Stewart. He was seeing the black man at Brandywine, and the one who had taken his cloak at Kip’s Bay, and the new African boy with the scars over his eyes.

“I remember Caesar,” he said softly, as if the man were standing there himself, and Washington had just noticed him for the first time.

“Do you hate Mr. Washington?” Marcus White had asked this before, and it always seemed to fascinate him.

“No. No, I don’t hate him. I don’t love him much, either.” Caesar said, looking through the wine in his glass. “We exchanged shots at the Brandywine. Something like a duel, I think. I’ve thought that it settled something between us.”

“Do you have any happy thoughts from then? When you was a slave?” Polly asked.

“Oh, yes. I was learning a good amount every day. I had a comfortable place to live, and it was so much better than the Indies.”

“But what of Washington?”

“He was a distant master. He seldom beat a slave, and he was often fair. He never liked me.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Queeny said it was my scars.” He rubbed them.

“They do give you a
savage
look,” said Sally in a low voice, as if she was wooing him.

“And I had to be free.”

Marcus nodded at him, as if they had conspired together.

“Yes, it comes to you that way, doesn’t it?”

Caesar frowned, remembering. Sally looked at them both.

“How did you ‘have to be free’?”

“One day, you know you’d rather die than be a slave,” said Caesar. “Some never get it. I grew up with slaves, in Africa. Sometimes one would kill himself, or run. Now I know why.”

Marcus looked at him. “Was it injustice that moved you?”

“Perhaps it was. I just remember the little things. I was never beaten while I was at Mount Vernon. It was never a great injustice, and that is why I say that Washington was mostly fair.”

Marcus White nodded. “That’s the power that slavery has, though. To make a man’s likes and dislikes into the power of a god. A man can be the very best of masters, and yet, in a fit of temper, abuse a slave in a way he would never abuse another free man. As if slaves aren’t human.”

“What else do you remember?” asked Polly.

“He loved to farm and he loved to hunt. He was a master of both. Those skills probably make him a good soldier.”

“The first time I saw him…well, he reminded me of a soldier. He was my dogs boy. He had an eye for ground that…well, that has doubtless made him a good one.”

Washington took a glass of wine from Billy.

Stewart watched the black man, who pretended a complete lack of interest in the conversation.

Washington spoke carefully, because the subject was so great and so painful that he could not simply dismiss it. Nor was this the first time the subject had surfaced at his table, and he wondered again if he was changing.

“Slavery is an issue that will haunt us for some time, I think.”

Hamilton shook his head vehemently.”Can we allow that, sir? When even an advocate like the marquis tells us that it is a blot on our liberty?”

Henry Lee shook his head just as vehemently. “When you speak of the end of slavery, Colonel Hamilton, you speak of depriving us of our property as surely as if you’d come and burned my house.”

Stewart was seated at almost the middle of the table, and now he looked back and forth among the young men, and realized that it split them all. It was odd, as he had seen so many slaves in the north that he thought the matter was pandemic.

But George Lake, whose accent was as deeply Virginian as Henry Lee’s, spoke with quiet confidence.

“Can any man, who has fought so hard for his
own
liberty, sit idle while another man loses
his?”

Every head turned to him, the most junior officer present and welcome mostly as the prisoner’s escort and Lafayette’s friend.

“What do you say, sir?” asked Henry Lee. In Virginia, he owned property worth thousands of pounds, and George Lake was a tradesman’s son and an apprentice, if that.

“I say, with respect, that the men who have fought this war, the handful of us who served from Morristown and will still be here at the end, we know what all these words like
liberty
really mean. And we know when other men who didn’t do the fighting…” He stopped, as if stricken, and muttered an apology, but Hamilton looked like to applaud.

“The ones who write the speeches and didn’t ever serve?
Is that what you mean, Captain Lake?” Hamilton asked, rising a little. “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

Lee looked at Hamilton with scorn.

“Free the slaves? Who will indemnify the owners? What will they do with themselves? Will they be citizens?”

“King George might have said the very thing of us, sir!”

“I think that the southern states would go to war rather than lose the full value of the property they have fought to save.”

“Perhaps, then, we can see the precious manpower they cannot spare to fight
this
war!” Hamilton was on his feet. “At home, guarding against some fabled revolt of their slaves while
we
face the cannon and the redcoats.”

He flamed red in the face. “My apologies, gentlemen. You all know I do not mean Virginia.” He turned to Captain Stewart. “And please pardon my fling against redcoats.”

“My coat is most certainly red,” Stewart said with a smile.

Washington looked down the table sternly, and shook his head.

“I think this is why we keep politics out of the mess, Captain Stewart.”

“I apologize for what I started, sir.”

Hamilton turned to him and whispered as a strained conversation covered him from up the table. “You didn’t start it, sir. They did. When they bought their human cattle.”

“Can we drink to the happy couple?” Sally asked, and Caesar glared at her.

“I haven’t asked yet,” he said sheepishly. He was enjoying the mood and the conversation, and he didn’t want to come to the point of the evening yet. In a social way, he was afraid of Marcus White, and a little afraid of Polly.

“You’re slow, then,” Sally quipped.

Caesar looked across the table at Polly, whose eyes
were down, and then at Marcus White. He reached into his pocket and pulled forth a plain silver band, hammered by the armourer from a shilling. His hands were trembling.

“Sir, I have not hidden from you my admiration for your daughter, and I would like to take this occasion to ask for the honah, that is,
honor
of her hand,” he said. There was a quaver in his voice, but he got it out just as he had practiced it.

Marcus White waved easily at Polly. “You know that you have my consent if you have hers.”

Polly smiled. “You have mine.”

Caesar went and knelt by her, and placed his ring on her finger.