I couldn’t stop thinking of Clara and Gert, how André would get his talons on them once I was dead—saw Clara in my mind’s eye, Clara wearing her black velvet mask. Ye gods, I would not go lightly. I’d whack Loring the moment he came near enough. But he pushed his pistol into Paul’s cheek.
“Mr. Black Brigade, I will give you one second to say your prayers.”
Paul smiled. “One second will not suffice. I need two.”
He wasn’t a captain now of an uncertain British brigade, but the prince of Little Africa, with a knife that appeared willy-nilly from his sleeve, a knife he held against Loring’s neck.
Loring squealed like a pig in a slaughterhouse and started to blubber.
“Don’t kill me, please. I have nothing against the Blues. ’Tis John Stocking I want, only John. He hath made himself free with my missus.”
Loring’s lads cocked their pistols, and Paul dug his knife a bit deeper into Loring’s flesh.
“Disarm, disarm…he’s killing me.”
We did disarm the whole lot of them, and they rode off with Loring, a bloody handkerchief tied like a tourniquet round his neck. I was not in the mood to gloat. I helped the Blues pick up their cache of weapons, and then we returned to our “base,” a barn for black soldiers near my old college.
Thirty-Seven
I WAS EXHAUSTED AFTER I LEFT THE BARN. I LAY in my closet back at the nunnery and could hear marching on the cobbled streets. There must have been a full company of redcoats. And my first thought was, The farmer in chief is attacking the town! But there was no musket fire, no brouhaha of animals and men—nothing but the merciless drumming of feet.
And then I shuddered at the truth of it. These merry lads weren’t going to the Commons. Not even redcoats were diligent enough to drill at three o’clock of a morning, when the witches and succubi were about and lads like me were abed. I ran around in my nightshirt as they kicked open our gate. They’d come to arrest Clara and Gert, and I had nothing to defend the nuns with except a worthless pistol and my cutlass from the Black Brigade.
I would give the redcoats neither girl. I rushed out into the yard, where indeed the nuns were all assembled in their nightgowns—I remember the lace, Clara’s lace, and the look of terror in my mother’s eyes. But something was amiss. Gert wouldn’t have feared her own capture. Major André stood against a tree in his powdered white wig and the regalia he might wear at a ball. He had not arrived on Holy Ground to menace the nuns.
He plucked an apple from my mother’s tiny orchard and commenced eating it, while he waved a writ in my face, under the feeble light of an evening lamp.
“Ah, how good of you to rise,” André said. He signaled once and his redcoats, who could scarcely fit in our yard, aimed their muskets at me.
“John Stocking, I arrest you in the name of His Britannic Majesty, King George.”
THE LITTLE SHIT had a warrant signed by Clinton himself. I was led out of the nunnery with my ankles tied together so that I had to hop in my nightshirt across Robinson Street. I wasn’t taken to the king’s own jail, because I wasn’t even considered a military prisoner. I was hustled off to our own lockup for drunkards in the attic of City Hall.
André manufactured a tiny cell for me, clearing out a handful of drunken men, and stationed two redcoats outside my door.
I had pen and ink, a chamber pot, a straw pallet, and a lantern with a very weak wick so that the redcoats could see me if I tried to burn myself. But I wasn’t going to become my own funeral pyre to satisfy Major André. I hadn’t visited a magistrate. We had no magistrates in Manhattan. We were under martial law.
I’d have to go before a tribunal that was held together by John André himself. It was André who danced around the provost marshal, André who selected and sat the court. He’d become the entire apparatus of the British army away from the battlefield. He prepared all the books. I assumed that he would have one of his own assistants drill me, tell me how I ought to behave in front of the tribunal.
But I’d misread the little shit. He came with a steward carrying a jug of wine, a chicken leg, and delicacies that only Great Britain could have dreamed of for its Manhattan subjects—mushroom ketchup, blancmange, red and white currants.
André had no bodyguards with him. The steward unlocked the door and fed all the drunken men in the attic, not mushroom ketchup, but little cakes and crumbs of cheese, while André brought me some of his clothes to wear, including a neckcloth. But I wasn’t in the mood to be gracious.
“Sir, am I to be charged with trespassing or piracy?”
“Attempted murder, I should imagine. Firing one of the king’s own muskets at a British officer. But my secretary hasn’t finished copying the bill.”
“Hessian,” I said. “Not British.”
“Still an officer of the Crown. And you needn’t play on heroics. If you think you’re protecting Captain Paul and his Blues, don’t bother. I have an elaborate picture of what occurred, moment by moment.”
“From Commissary Loring’s mouth, I presume.”
Loring was the richest nabob on our little island. He could have bribed the court.
“Stocking, I’m not the fool you think I am. Loring is a bully and a thief. We shall disabuse ourselves of him and, I should add, dismantle his whole enterprise, from the ground up. And you, dear soul, could trespass until time stands still. It would not injure me or the Crown. But you should not have poached.” “Poached, sir?”
“Yes, you are a hunter of the king’s men. You had no authority to interfere with the Hessians.”
“Who steal cows and molest women,” I said.
“They shall be dealt with in due time. I am familiar with their designs. But you are not a soldier, and you cannot stop soldiers, no matter the cause. You were told to discourage civilians. Those dreadful Cowboys.”
“And when your Hessians disguise themselves as Cowboys?”
“They wore no disguise, Stocking. They were in uniform.”
He gulped wine and offered me a goblet. “From the general’s own table,” he told me. “Admit, you were leading an insurrection.”
I looked at this lunatic. “What insurrection?”
“You were followed to a clandestine meeting but a month ago in Little Africa, a meeting in the guise of a ball, where you and your black devils plotted to overthrow His Majesty’s government in North America and create an independent black republic. And Holy Ground was also at this meeting in the person of Mistress Clara.”
“I swear to you, Mistress Clara presided over the minuet.”
“A cover-up, a mask. Did you not have live ammunition in your search of Loring’s estate when you were strictly forbidden to carry loaded guns?”
“We had enough lead balls to furnish a single musket.”
“And that, dear boy, is the start of an insurrection. But Clinton says we must not alienate our colored sappers and drummer boys, that we would lose their affection and would not find fresh recruits should we torment them. And so I will pursue the narrower subject of Hessians and Harlem Heights. You have no one on your side, not a flea. The Blues cannot save you. They are but cattle or cargo in a military court and do not exist as men with a heart and soul.”
“Is that British custom, sir, or British law?”
“You make light of me. Captain Blue will not appear in your defense. He struck a Hessian—and nearly disgorged Mr. Loring, who is the king’s commissary, despite his peculations—but since your captain does not exist, you must be tried in his place.”
“That is pretty and profound,” says I, aware that the major had manufactured his own little quagmire for me, a veritable drowning pool.
“Harold may have hired you as his puppy, but you live in limbo as far as the Crown is concerned. Neither soldier nor civilian. For us you are an injured American combatant on perpetual parole. And you broke that parole once you entered Clinton’s headquarters and sat with members of his staff and listened to military secrets.”
I smiled, and
it unnerved the major.
“’Tis all about Peggy Shippen,” I said. “She is your recruit. You mean to entrap my poor, poor Arnold, bring him over to the British with your blond Salome.”
He snapped off the bottom joint of my chicken leg, dipped it in the mushroom ketchup, and started to bite while he mumbled, “Good, very good…congratulations, John. You shall be hanged as a spy. I will see to that, mark my words. I will sway the court, build such bold arguments as can never be challenged…unless you deliver Madame and all her nuns. These harlots take me for an idiot. That’s what hurts. And you also think I’m a ninny. The nuns are Washington’s slaves, that much I know. I would not be astonished had they slept with half his army, if ever he had an army. But I cannot arrest them. It might interfere with Clinton’s parties if Mistress Clara sat in jail.”
I smelled a wound somewhere, and ’t wasn’t only mine. I let him rattle on.
“She will be my agent, she says, sleep with my officers—with Clinton himself—but not with me. I heard what she did to General Howe’s brother—Black Dick. Nearly sent him to the asylum. She has the cheek to say that she cannot share a bed with her own spymaster…Stocking, I make it a habit to sleep with all my women agents.”
The little shit had primed Peggy Shippen, instructed her in the art of seducing Arnold, and now he would have Clara lie down with him and seduce the Continental Congress. There was no end to his malefaction. He wasn’t some ordinary Divil, hobbled with cloven hooves. André was the Fiend, bred in Great Britain, an aristocrat who danced on air and made life miserable for everyone who did not have his own aristocratic liens. He meant to break Arnold and break me.
“You will deliver Madame and her nuns into my hands. You will sign affidavits at my suggestion, naming the nuns as George Washington’s secret agents. And you will deliver Clara, say that it is in her own interest and the interest of the nuns to be much more pliable with me. And if you cannot do as I ask, I will most certainly kill you, John, with or without the hangman’s help.”
He snapped his finger at the steward, wiped his mouth with my napkin, and had the steward lock my cage. I wasn’t even his homunculus. I could have delivered the world and it would not have saved me. He must have had his spies at the Ethiopian Ball, spies who caught me dancing with Clara—and it infuriated the Fiend, assuming willy-nilly that I had a certain sway over Clara when I had none. Perhaps Clara and Peggy Shippen had become fused in his head—the Philadelphia princess he’d seduced with one of his silhouettes and the tall octoroon who could not be captured in a silhouette. He meant to kick me into hell like a dog for dancing with Clara at the Ethiopian Ball and stumbling upon the secret of Peggy Shippen.
A chill had entered the attic, and I could not drive it off. Winter had come to Manhattan, and from the tiny opening in the attic wall, a perch near the ceiling no bigger than the “eye” of a telescope, I could see children skating in the frozen pond outside City Hall. I envied not their freedom, but their delight in gliding about a small infinity of ice. That I could not recapture in my cell.
Thirty-Eight
SHE LOOKED LIKE A SPINSTER IN HER SHAWL, not the queen of the finest nunnery from here to Newport. The rawness in her eyes disquieted me, turned me cruel. Perhaps André was right, and I was a hunter of men—mothers and men. And like André, she brought me food and clothes in my attic cell.
“Has Sir Harold switched sides?” I asked. “Why is he not here with you?”
“You should not blame him. Harry has gone begging to the British. You are like a son to him.”
“Mother, I forbid you to talk about fathers and sons. You have utterly flummoxed my paternity.”
Gertrude began to cry, she who never cried. I could not bear it, lads. I took her in my arms.
“Forgive me, Mum. I have no right.”
I stroked her hair, and I was caught in a tide I could not comprehend—the brokenness of her was killing me. I kissed her hair, her cheek, her eyes, and she did not shove me away as she was wont to do. However strange my circumstance, or odd my upbringing, she was still my mum.
“I love thee, little John.”
I could not help my feelings. I blubbered like a baby boy.
“Mum, you and Clara are dear to me—dearer than the world. You must flee with her from this godforsaken town.”
“I cannot, little John.”
“André will get Clara in his clutches and never let her go.”
“I would still have to stay,” she said
“Dost thou love her less than thy revolution?”
Forgive me—I made my mum cry again with my rotten canister of words. But had I been gentler with her, she might not have told me more about Clara—Clara’s arrival, she said, had rescued her from months and months of morbidity. ’T was exactly seven years ago. Mum had wrenched me from her mind—the changeling, the secret child, who’d become the sweep and beer boy in her own establishment. And she had not the slightest hope of ever seeing Washington again, the Virginia farmer with his stepson and stepdaughter and a plantation larger and longer than a town. All she had was a pile of silver and a few nabobs in her bed. Then she found Clara at the docks, a runaway from the Windwards with enough lice on her to make a small plantation. The high sheriff would have delivered Clara to the poorhouse, fed her stale meat, and sold her into slavery.
But Gert brought her to Holy Ground. This strange girl—a woman at thirteen, with a woman’s tallness, a woman’s bones—never whimpered and kept looking at Gert with outlandish green eyes. It must have been fatal for the two of them, a devotion without much history, and they were almost never apart. But Gert couldn’t bed her down in her own apartment with so many nabobs about, leaving their coins and their slaver on every pillow. She gave her to the beer boy, let her sleep in my closet. And it cured Gert of her melancholy. Now she had a daughter, a girl as mysterious as a jungle plant, a girl she did not have to hide. Gert would have gladly given her a subscription to Mrs. Poor’s School of Etiquette on Garden Street, near the Old Dutch Church, but Clara did not wish to be subscribed. She preferred to smoke a pipe with the nuns. Gert’s customers couldn’t keep their eyes off Clara, and pretty soon Clara was returning each customer’s stare. She threatened to run away if Gert did not give her a closet of her own. Gert resisted for a week and caved in.
And so, you see, mum did love Clara as much as her revolution, but she could not abandon Washington’s one and only “citadel” on York Island, even if guarding it meant her own death. But my death was a different matter.
“John, I’ve hired a dozen cutthroats, bitter and brazen men. They will fight their way into this hellhole and free you.”
“’Tis for naught, mum. I will not leave this tiny closet.”
“But the tribunal is a farce. The king’s men are rehearsing witnesses.”
“Your pirates will have to tear into my hide before I move. I’m a scholar, mum. I shall beat the British and their bloody laws. Promise to recall the pirates.”
She would not promise, but I kissed her again.
I was most perturbed. Mum was a spinster, waiting for a man who had Martha Custis, Mount Vernon, and a war that only he could win. I cannot forget that night of vingt-et-un, when George Washington was both David and Goliath, a lone farmer inside a British arsenal, but Goliath nonetheless, larger than any man’s life. ’T was Washington who drove his men back into battle with his curses and his war cries and the example of himself when they tried to flee the British, Washington who took the enemy’s fire while he was on his horse, with lead balls slapping against the skirts of his war cape like troublesome bees. He should have been unsaddled—shot right off his horse—but he was never maimed, never touched. His own officers would shut their eyes when he rode into battle, fearing they would soon have to mourn their commander in chief. But he would return after chasing redcoats into the woods—Goliath in a wig. And Mum could only sing to him now with silver bullets.
But I had another bullet in mind.
“Mother,” I s
aid. “The Fiend is after Clara.”
“I know a hundred fiends, a thousand.”
“There is but one—Major André. And he will hurt her.”
“No more than he hurts me. André makes use of us, pays seventy pounds per season. We are inscribed in his books.”
“His books be damned,” I said. “He will burn down the nunnery one day, with all the nuns inside.”
“We are more valuable to him than he is willing to admit. André believes that if he presses you, I will light Aladdin’s lamp and lead him to Washington’s treasure—there is no such treasure. And I will not play cat and mouse with him over your life.”
“But the game has already begun. And you cannot remove me from it, not with all your pirates.”
“They will drug you and your jailers,” she said. “They have my instructions.”
“Then the first moment I rouse myself from your drug, I will return to my cell. I like it here.”
“You are not my son,” she said.
“Gert,” I told her. “I’m afraid I am.”
We kissed like a pair of babbling idiots until the guards knocked on my door.
“Time’s up, time’s up,” they both shouted. “Order of the king.”
But the queen of Holy Ground was not about to yield, not yet.
“Johnny, one more kiss…for your scapegrace of a mother.”
“You will not malign yourself,” says I, “not while the king’s own clock is ticking. Any lad should count himself lucky to have you for a mum.”
“You mock me,” Gert said, tho’ she was purring like one of her own parlor cats.
“Come on, come on,” shouted the two yobs. “Quit the blather before we ruin you, old son.”
“What?” says I, leaning into their loutish faces. “And deprive Major André of his prize prisoner? He’ll whip you like a pair of whelps.”
I’d given them a bit of food for reflection. And whilst they scratched their jaws, I spun Gertrude in my arms ’til I was as dizzy as a kite in the wind.
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