It was a black moonless night. John Sladen was a dark blur on the opposite side of the swaying coach. The sultry air swirled sluggishly through the open windows. It was the perfect place to speak: they might have been in a boat, drifting down the underground river on which they had once embarked—and in their tormented imaginations had spent too much of the rest of their lives. It was time to speak to her fellow voyager in that frozen world—to speak as a traveler in the daylight world of time and chance, of spoken love, of pledged trust, of truth beyond poetry.
“John, the love I once felt for you was real. But like all living things, it’s been subject to decay, decline, death. Another man has been in my life, in my arms, for the past twenty years. His generosity, his fidelity, his tenderness, his sense of honor, his modesty, have been visible, ever more visible, to me throughout these years. In response to my ambition, he’s risking General Corcoran’s fate, or worse, in Mexico at this very moment. It’s time for me to tell you that I love him—and I no longer love you.”
“There’s no gratitude, no admiration, no sympathy—for me?”
“There’s a river of it. Only I know what you’ve sacrificed. You’ve thrown away Clothilde’s love, ignored your children. Only you know what I’ve sacrificed. My sons dislike me. Other women hate me. I may even have lost George’s love—as Sarah’s lost James Polk’s love. We can’t help that hunger. Life, fate, inflicted it on us. But we can make choices, we can still refuse to do certain things that would damn us in this world, no matter what we believe about the next one.”
“You’re talking idiocy! You can’t love one thing without the other. I was with you—you were with me—when Aaron Burr implanted the hunger in our souls. You knew as well as I did that he was speaking in the name of our dead fathers—calling on us to defy the idiocies of conventional morality once and for all. You’re succumbing to the ultimate American temptation: you want to be good—and powerful. You’ll find out it isn’t possible. It will never be possible.”
“I’m not talking about goodness, John. I’m talking about love. I can’t betray my love for George Stapleton. I’ll have to live with that reality, somehow. So will you.”
Was she telling the truth? Or was this confession a way of protecting her love for that tormented woman in the White House? At this point in her life, Caroline Kemble Stapleton herself could not be sure. There was no conflict between the two loves. The conflict was between them—and the subterranean love she had once felt for this man.
“Ma’am?” Judson Diggs knocked on the coach door.
“Yes?”
“We’s here, ma’am. Been here for a while.”
In the darkness loomed the outline of 3600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Diggs had brought Caroline home first. Gadsby’s Hotel was another mile from the White House.
Caroline thought of that long-ago journey to Miss Carter’s Female Seminary, the way Messrs. Sladen and Biddle and Stapleton had neglected to notice their arrival. “I’m not ashamed of what we did so long ago,” she said. “It was a kind of love that I won’t forget. But now I’m speaking for a different kind of love. Accept it, John.”
“What about Mexico?”
“It should have nothing to do with this.”
He kissed her on the mouth for a long bitter moment. She gently extricated herself, without reproaching him.
“Good night,” she said.
In the parlor, scene of her triumphs as a hostess, Caroline Kemble Stapleton sat in the darkness, weeping silently. As the tears poured down her cheeks, she twisted Hannah Stapleton’s wedding ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. Twisted and twisted and twisted it, as if she wanted to tear it off. But she knew that would be a meaningless gesture now.
EIGHT
IN THE GLOOMY HALF-LIGHT OF a September dawn, Major General George Stapleton led twenty-five hundred men toward a collection of adobe buildings known as the Molino del Rey—the King’s Mill. Beside him, Hannibal Flowers muttered, “Don’t like the looks of this place, General. I smells trouble here.”
General Stapleton paid no attention to Hannibal. He was indifferent to the possibility of sudden death erupting from the roofs and windows of the Molino. He would almost welcome it. Did Hannibal suspect this?
Two weeks before, the American army had smashed another Mexican army at the battles of Contreras and Churubusco, within three miles of the gates of Mexico City. They could have captured the city on the same day. But General Santa Anna had once more played on the American desire for peace by proposing another armistice for further negotiations.
The chief American diplomat, Nicholas P. Trist, had proven himself a total idiot by presenting the Mexicans with the full text of the proposed treaty of peace, giving away his whole hand. Compared to the All Mexico campaign that was being waged by John Sladen and his fellow Southern Democrats, the terms were mild. The Americans were prepared to settle for a Texas boundary on the Rio Grande and the acquisition of New Mexico and California, which Mexico had not a prayer of regaining. Shaving Polk’s original offer to reflect the costs of the war, Trist proposed to pay $15 million for New Mexico and California—a sum that would restore order to Mexico’s chaotic finances.
It was a generous treaty, considering that Mexico had not won a single battle. But the Mexicans had spent the next two weeks picking holes in the American proposal, while Santa Anna scraped together troops for another battle. The negotiations had collapsed when the Mexicans revealed that their congress had declared anyone who agreed to peace with the United States would be guilty of treason and would be promptly executed.
General Stapleton had distinguished himself at Contreras, leading a charge that swept seven thousand Mexicans out of their entrenched position in seventeen minutes. Reporters were calling him the beau sabreur of the American army. General Scott praised him in his dispatches, declaring he had seldom seen an officer display such reckless daring. Neither General Scott nor the reporters had any idea why General Stapleton was so ready to risk his life.
Awaiting him in the nearby village of Tacubaya, where Trist had fecklessly negotiated with the Mexican peace commissioners, was Maria de Vega. They had become lovers on their last night in Puebla. But the general did not tell her why he accented the gift of her body. His presumed love amounted to a kind of betrayal—his mind, as he enjoyed her, was clotted with only one scarifying thought: revenge. Every thrust, every kiss, was flung in Caroline Kemble Stapleton’s imagined face. He saw himself, a Hercules of rage, describing the night to her in exquisite detail.
In the morning, as he rode out of Puebla toward Mexico City with Maria beside him, her lovely face aglow with adoration, he had been appalled by what he had done. He could never explain it to her. He could only continue the charade, telling himself it was necessary now, because when they reached Mexico City, Maria’s powerful family might consider her redeemed if she brought a man who was determined to rescue her country from humiliation. But that idea clashed with his own and his fellow Americans’ mounting disgust with the dishonorable way the Mexicans were fighting the war. Ultimately even the idea of exquisite revenge foundered on the prospect of divorcing Caroline for adultery and inflicting public disgrace on the Stapleton family and his sons.
In this psychological trap of his own and Jeremy Biddle’s devising, death in battle seemed by far the simplest choice for General Stapleton. He had sought it at Contreras. With the irony that the god of history seemed to prefer, he had found glory instead. Maybe the Molino would produce death for him, but he doubted it. They were occupying it to make sure the Mexicans did not seize it to disrupt the assault on the final obstacle between them and Mexico City—the frowning Aztec castle of Chapultepec, which overlooked the main causeway to the capital. The Molino was a quarter of a mile from this fortress, which Santa Anna had crammed with men and cannon for a last-ditch defense.
“Forward the storming party,” George said, springing from his horse and drawing his sword. He handed the reins to Hannibal; he had forbidden the big blac
k to follow him into the cannon’s mouth. There was no reason for him to die, further compounding the ironies of General Stapleton’s dreams of glory.
The storming party, five hundred picked men from the regular army’s regiments, trotted to the head of the column. The rest of the division peeled off to the left and right, to take up their assigned positions. General Stapleton strode to the head of the detachment. Before them in the gloom, the Molino squatted, silent and seemingly empty.
To the left of the storming party was a battery of six-pounders commanded by a Kentucky-born West Pointer, Captain Robert Anderson. General Stapleton pointed to the Molino’s thick wooden gate and said, “Open that for us, Captain.”
Anderson’s guns boomed. Pieces of wood flew from the gate. “Forward, men,” George shouted, and led the storming patry on the run. They had covered about half the distance to the gate, which Anderson continued to blast with his guns, when flame erupted from the windows and rooftops of the Molino. Thousands of bullets hissed into and around the storming party. Suddenly the rooftops of the Molino were swarming with Mexicans. From one window a cannon boomed, hurling hundreds of murderous pieces of grapeshot into the ranks.
A terrible groan swept through the storming party. Their line wavered as they stumbled over the bodies of their friends. George turned to call for reinforcements, and something—a bullet or a grapeshot—struck him in the head. He swayed, his sword slipped from his hand, and he toppled to the ground. The storming party turned and fled, leaving at least two hundred men, including General Stapleton, stretched on the brown earth.
With a shout of triumph at least a hundred Mexicans rushed from a doorway not far from the main gate and began stabbing and shooting the Americans who were still alive. This habit of executing the wounded was one of the enemy’s least admirable habits. Through a haze of blood, General Stapleton groped for his sword. He wanted to die fighting these bastards.
Shots, groans, cries, swirled around George as the Mexicans continued their slaughter. A blast from Robert Anderson’s cannon sent a dozen of them whirling to the earth in agony. As they hesitated, a figure loomed over General Stapleton. It was Hannibal Flowers. Swinging a musket like a club, he demolished a half dozen Mexicans near them. Anderson held his fire while the big black slung George over his shoulder and staggered out of the battle with him.
As Hannibal lowered George to the ground behind Captain Anderson’s battery, the rest of the division, recovering from the shock of the surprise attack, rushed forward with a shout of rage to avenge the ambushed storming party. “That’s some nigger you got there, General,” one of Anderson’s gun crew said. “No white man’d gone out there alone against them crazy Mexicans. He figured out the whole thing—got the captain to hold his fire—”
The battery thundered. The gunner rammed home another charge. “One smart nigger,” he shouted above the chaos of the erupting battle.
Hannibal asked Captain Anderson to guard General Stapleton while he found a surgeon. George lay propped against a tree, wondering if he was dying, while Anderson’s guns continued to crash and the artillerymen shouted news of the battle.
“They’re goin’ over the walls, General! We’ll even the score for you, depend on it. Not one of them little slimy bastards is gonna get out of that place alive!”
“General, so many officers are down,” Captain Anderson said, “I’m going to lead a charge on the gate. We’ve blown a nice hole in it. My sergeant will take good care of you.”
A surgeon was crouching beside George, wiping the blood from his eyes. “A nasty graze, General. You’ll have a hell of a headache for the next two or three days. But you’re not badly hurt.”
George’s head felt as if someone were shoving knitting needles through it. “I’ll worry … about that … later. My place is with my men.”
“You’d only be in the way, General. Let Hannibal here get you on your horse and—”
“Oh, God!”
It was Hannibal. He had been standing beside the surgeon. Bullets from the Molino were still hissing around them, but after a half dozen battles, soldiers got used to the sound. As the army saying went, you only had to worry about the bullet with your name on it. Hannibal’s name had been on one of the last shots fired from the Molino del Rey.
The young surgeon turned him over and cut away his shirt to examine the wound. “The lung,” he muttered. “He’ll be gone before morning.”
“Get him to the hospital!” George said.
They had to finish cleaning out the Molino first. It was ugly, brutal fighting; the Mexicans expected no mercy and they got none. Only after the final shots dwindled away did a lieutenant carrying the American flag appear on the roof and signal for the wagons to take the wounded to the hospital in Tacubaya.
George rode in a wagon with Hannibal and a dozen other badly wounded men. A bloody froth kept rising to Hannibal’s lips. George wiped it away. Next to him, a man shot in the stomach kept asking George to kill him. The pain was unbearable.
In the hospital, a convent from which the nuns had been evicted, chaos reigned. A frantic surgeon told George there were over five hundred wounded. They had lost seven hundred men at Contreras and Churubusco two weeks ago. “Another victory like this and there won’t be much of an army left,” the doctor said.
The words clanged around George’s skull like an avalanche of carving knives. “What can you do for my friend Hannibal? He saved my life.”
The surgeon examined Hannibal’s wound, a raw, bleeding gash in his back. A musket ball did terrible things when it struck flesh. “Nothing,” the doctor said.
George went looking for Maria de Vega. He found her in Tacubaya’s main square. She cried out when she saw his blood-caked forehead. He assured her that he would live and told her about Hannibal. With help from members of Captain Anderson’s battery, they carried him to an empty house Off the square. Most of Tacubaya’s residents had fled to Mexico City.
The surgeon told Maria to give Hannibal a mixture of wine and opium for his pain and gave her a package of opium powder. She wanted George to take some of the potion too, but he refused it. He sat beside the bed as Hannibal drifted in and out of consciousness. At times he seemed to see someone in the shadows on the other side of the room.
“It’s Tabitha. She’s there waitin’ for me, General. I can see her as good as I see you. She’s all in white. Her face is shinin’—she’s as beautiful as she ever was.”
“If there’s one thing in my life I regret, it’s her death, Hannibal.”
“Wasn’t your fault, General. It was God’s way of leadin’ me to Him. Makin’ me ready to go home to her. If you never done nothin’ else for me, General, bringin’ me to New Jersey so I could meet Tabitha would’ve been enough.”
“I want to do even more for you, Hannibal. For you and little Tabitha—and Mercy.”
“You’ll be good to ’em, General. I know you will. I got no worries about them. Maybe sometime if you get a chance, you could do even more good—for all the black people in America.”
“I’ll try, Hannibal. I promise you.”
“Maybe you’ll be president someday. Then you could do a lot.”
The bloody froth was on Hannibal’s lips; it gurgled in his throat. “We all … in God’s hands … General. He’s a good God … He heard my prayers … He led me to you … and Tabitha.”
“I feel God in this room,” Maria de Vega said. “There are angels all around us, waiting to take you to Jesus.”
“I see them!” Hannibal said, raising himself in the bed. “They’re all around Tabitha—smilin’ at me.”
He fell back on the pillow, drew one more long, shuddering breath, and died. Maria gently closed his eyes. Pain throbbed in George’s skull. Maria wiped away his tears. “Now more than ever I know I’m in love with a good man,” she said.
Five days later, the American army stormed Chapultepec and, on the same day, thundered down the causeways to the San Cosme and Belén Gates of Mexico City. Once more Ge
neral Stapleton was in command of a division, leading his men in reckless charges that overwhelmed barricade after barricade until they were close enough to the San Cosme Gate to draw fire from its numerous defenders on the walls and in breastworks around it.
In the late afternoon, George found himself in a ditch beside the causeway with the first soldier he had met en route to Mexico, Lieutenant Ulysses Grant of the Fourth Infantry. Ahead of them were several dozen houses and a small church to the left of the gate. To attack down the causeway in the face of massed cannon and musketry was suicide. “If I had a howitzer,” Grant said, “I could work my way around those houses, hoist it to the belfry of that church, and raise hell with those fellows behind that gate.”
George scribbled an order and handed it to Grant. “The guns are about a half mile back.”
Who should come scrambling into the ditch next but Colonel Jack Hays of the Texas Rangers. “How about using a leaf from our Monterrey book, General. Blast our way through them houses.”
In the last day’s fighting in Monterrey, the Rangers had combined pickaxes and eight-inch shells to tunnel through dozens of houses and outflank the Mexicans fighting at street barricades. “Get to work,” George said.
In an hour, Lieutenant Grant had his howitzer in the belfry of the church. He began dropping shells into the middle of the defenders of the San Cosme Gate. A half hour later, Hay’s Rangers and numerous infantrymen appeared on the rooftops near the gate and swept the already shaken defenders with volleys of pistol and musket fire.
About five o’clock; General Stapleton decided it was time for a frontal assault. He ordered artillery Lieutenant Henry J. Hunt forward to blow a hole through the main gate. Thundering through 150 yards of ferocious Mexican fire, Hunt came within 50 yards of the gate before his horses went down in bloody foaming agony. He and his men leaped off, cut the traces, and proceeded to duel with the massed batteries behind the gate. Already rattled by Grant’s howitzer and the Texas Rangers’ small arms, the Mexican gunners fled.
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