The Heart of Liberty

by Thomas Fleming

  He took her on a tour of the island, which was only two or three hundred yards wide. Three narrow channels ran out to the river and the sea. “We are as safe here as we would be on Staten Island,” he said. “But it is not as healthy. Already we have three men sick, out of the thirty I brought with me.”

  Kate could see - and smell - what he meant. The ground was so spongy, water sprang up with every step they took. The air was thick with the stench of the swamp’s decay and the human waste of his men. Anthony led her back to his tent and plunged into a bitter denunciation of British generals. “They won’t listen to Americans, they have their own plans and the Americans can go to hell and be done with it, that’s what it amounts to.” He was even more vehement in his denunciation of Oliver De Lancet, the wealthy New York merchant. “He is the only loyalist the generals consult. His friends are made colonels and majors and our people are left biting their thumbs.”

  “Goddamn it!” He slapped a mosquito that had penetrated his breeches to his thigh.

  “If things are as bad as you say, are you thinking of coining back to – ” Kate caught herself before she said “us.” She was momentarily stunned by the implication.

  “And become one of Colonel Slocum’s lackeys? No thank you. We’ll win, Kate, in spite of the stupidity of the generals.”

  “Damn.” He swung at another mosquito, this time on his calf. “But for the time being, New Jersey will have to take care of itself. The generals say they need every man to beat Mr. Washington out of New York. With two regiments I could hold this colony from here to Cape May for the King. But you can’t expect people to risk anything for you when you offer them no protection from people like Colonel Slocum. That man is doing us more harm than anyone else in New Jersey.”

  “Jesus!” He slapped another mosquito from his neck. Kate brushed a buzzing brother from her cheek. It was not what she had imagined, this, rendezvous. She had seen them in some snug, dry cottage in the pines, the air rich with tangy green scent, a blaze roaring in the fireplace. They talked about their love, the consolation and strength they drew from it. Instead, she was listening to a political speech, while mosquitoes buzzed and mud oozed around her boots and ripe odors crowded her nostrils.

  Anthony introduced her to his officers. There were five of them, two captains and three lieutenants. She knew one of the captains, George Kennedy. He was a short, personable redhead from Shrewsbury, an excellent dancer. They joked about the last time they met, at a ball in Liberty Tavern’s assembly room. Almost all the enlisted men were from Shrewsbury and Middletown. Some of their faces looked familiar. She had probably seen them in the tavern. They squatted around a fire, cooking their dinner, while Kate chatted with the officers. She noticed how often the men looked over their shoulders at her and exchanged whispered remarks. For a moment she felt enraged, but this passed quickly to an intense sadness.

  Ever since her mother’s scandal, Kate knew that nasty remarks about her virtue were common in the neighborhood. Was she confirming all the rotten things the hypocrites said about her? Let them think what they please, she told herself darkly. Perhaps she would share her mother’s fate. Perhaps she would gasp out her life here in this swamp, as her mother had died in Antigua. For a few minutes she found a gloomy pleasure in the possibility, while Anthony returned to politics.

  “There’s scarcely a man in Shrewsbury who isn’t for the King,” Skinner said. “But everywhere to the north we are being destroyed. Slocum’s men hunt us down day after day, take away our guns, make us post bonds that will cost a man his farm if he forfeits it.”

  “Will we stay here tonight?”

  The officers stared at their feet, at the sky. Until Kate spoke, Anthony Skinner had no way of knowing her intentions. They might have parted with a kiss, like thousands of other lovers whose lives were interrupted by the Revolution. But Kate, tormented by the gap between reality and expectation, refused to accept the loss. She would make up the difference, repair the deficiency, out of her own self.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” Anthony Skinner said, and retreated to his tent with Kate. “My dearest,” he said, kissing her hands. “I was hoping you would give me a sign. I can offer you nothing, Kate. Only the hope of victory. A future as uncertain as a bullet’s flight.”

  “I’m not in love with victory, with the future, Anthony. I love you.”

  Did he understand? She let him untie the knot at the top of her bodice and fondle her breasts. They exchanged the deepest of kisses while Kate dreamt a separate dream. The future did not matter. What mattered was this moment. She was giving her love to him in its ultimate purity without hope or wish for any kind of gain, not even marriage, that sham reward that most women demanded to their sorrow.

  “We can’t stay here, not now. I would not let you spend a single night in this pesthole,” Anthony said. “We’ll stay at the tavern in Shrewsbury. The men will patrol the roads. We’ll have a decent supper. A wedding supper.”

  Anthony Skinner ordered George Kennedy and the other captain, Enos Ruecastle, a lanky man who had a cast in his eye, to muster ten men and join them. They boarded boats and punted up the river with a strong tide to the Shrewsbury Town landing. There, to Kate’s amazement, a British sloop of war was tied up, the royal ensign rustling in the evening breeze while sailors loaded her with fresh fruit, beef, pork, barrels of cider, copper cans full of fresh milk. Anthony Skinner strode up to a young officer who was supervising the work. “Damn it, Lieutenant, I told you not to do this business at the public dock. You are going to bring a regiment of rebels down here to terrorize the town. There’s a half-dozen coves between here and the sea you could use just as well.”

  “Too bloody much work for my men, lugging all this stuff across broken ground and into small boats,”

  “What’s more important, the safety of the town - ”

  “Look, Skinner - that’s your name, isn’t it? - you have no authority over me. My orders are to get as much fresh provisions as I can carry, and pay hard money for them. That’s what I’m doing and I haven’t heard a word of complaint from any man with cash in his hand. Is that what you’re looking for?”

  “You English son of a bitch - say another word and I’ll pitch you into the goddamn river.”

  Anthony Skinner was close to six feet tall. The Lieutenant was not more than five feet three. But the little Englishman sneered at the threat.

  “That’s just like you damned Americans, full of fine talk about loyalty to the King one second and ready to murder one of His Majesty’s officers the next. I dare you to touch me, sir. I will have that gold braid stripped off your coat before sundown tomorrow.”

  Anthony Skinner and his friends growled, cursed, and walked away. Kate could not believe it. They were afraid of the Englishman. “Load up and be damned,” Anthony shouted as he left the dock.

  “You can tell your friends I’ll be damned if I’ll pay this kind of money again. We shall have fair prices once we get our hands on New York and Long Island. Then you Jerseymen can suck eggs.”

  The Shrewsbury tavern was a dingy little place about one fourth the size of Liberty Tavern. Anthony Skinner told the disheveled, balding landlord to lock the front door. They wanted privacy. He dropped a half-dozen guineas in his hand to pay for any business lost. But the atmosphere in the taproom was not very festive. The English Lieutenant had cast a pall over Kate’s wedding supper. Captains Kennedy and Ruecastle got drunk and alternately damned the British and the rebels. Anthony tried to rally them by talking about the power and strength of the British army.

  They discussed the chances of raising a regiment around Shrewsbury. George Kennedy was pessimistic. There were too many Quakers preaching sermons against fighting for either side. Anthony insisted they could do it by paying hard money and giving away good British muskets. In two weeks they would have enough volunteers enlisted to defy the rebel militia. He saw Shrewsbury becoming an island of resistance to which New Jersey loyalists could retreat.

  Kate listene
d patiently for an hour. Captains Kennedy and Ruecastle kept getting drunker, and Anthony kept making speeches to them. Finally she stood up. “I think I will go to my room. Perhaps we can have supper there.”

  “Yes. Good idea. I’m sorry, Kate,” Anthony said. “I know how little use you have for all this politics.”

  Captain Ruecastle heaved himself to his feet and offered a toast. “To the fairest flower of New Jersey. May all our sweethearts be as loyal and true.” His wayward eye gave him a shifty look that seemed to cast doubt on the sincerity of his words.

  “I’ll join you in twenty minutes, Kate,” Anthony said as he escorted her to the door. “I must get things settled for the night.”

  He kissed her hurriedly on the neck and called for the innkeeper’s wife. She was a sloppy, toothless woman who wheezed anxiously about the danger of Skinner staying overnight at the inn. She brought some cold mutton and cider with her as she escorted Kate to the room - the last at the end of the second-floor hall. Kate tried to remember the fierce joy, the icy anger she had felt when she walked down the hall in her father’s tavern with the implements of Anthony’s escape. The rope had been wound around her waist like the cincture of a nun. The hammer had been beneath the copper cover of the main dish on the tray, another symbol, this of her hard cold resolution. Now everything was darker, more confused. This murky hall lacked the brightly burning brass oil lamps of Jonathan Gifford’s well-appointed inn. Both her heart and her mind lacked the passionate clarity, the ecstatic simplicity she had imagined for this moment.

  In the room she drank some of the cider, nibbled at the mutton, which was moldy, stripped off her clothes, and slipped naked beneath the sheets. It was not the wedding or the wedding night she had imagined, either. A year ago she had seen herself marrying Anthony in her father’s garden on a Sunday in July, the white and red and pink and yellow roses nodding their benedictions. Then music and feasting in the tavern’s assembly room, farewell dances with a dozen and a half old beaux, ending with her father’s favorite farewell toast: Here’s to all them that we love.

  Downstairs, Anthony Skinner and his captains began roaring out a parody of a liberty song.

  “Come shake your dull noodles, ye pumpkins, and bawl,

  And own that you’re mad at fair liberty’s call;

  No scandalous conduct can add to your shame, Condemned to dishonor, inherit the fame.”

  Was it eight o’clock? Kate touched the talisman and prayed to the angel Monachiel, ruling spirit of love. Did she really believe in him? He had proved a poor protector of her mother. The darkness filled the room like water. It seemed to flow into her mind, even her body, filling her with doubt, dread. She thought about the strange and violent things her mother had said to her. A woman isn’t born, she is whelped. That is the only conclusion you can draw from the way men treat us. And her favorite advice. Be sure your husband loves you with his whole heart. Her mother was always talking about love. But not once did Kate ever feel the presence, the reality, of Sarah’s love. Even as a child, Kate’s hugs and kisses were dismissed, repelled. It was Kemble who always got the attention, always won the praise for his intellect, his recitations, his horsemanship. Meanwhile, Sarah Gifford inflicted on her daughter all the tortures suffered by young girls in the name of fashion. From her sixth to her thirteenth year, Kate wore an iron collar around her neck connected to a backboard strapped to her shoulders. Every night she did her lessons standing in stocks with the same collar around her neck. The goal was a perfect posture, absolutely necessary, her mother used to say, to get a man.

  Looking back Kate wondered if her mother had hoped to make her cold and hard so she could deal with men as they dealt with each other. If so, the plan was a failure from the start because Kate already loved a man who seemed to contradict all the things her mother said: her stepfather. At least, she had loved him until that moment by the Shrewsbury, when she saw how hard and cold and savage he could be. He was the creator of the silence that had enveloped their house, the icy silence that had driven her mother to Antigua. But how had it happened in the first place? What was the flaw, the failure that had destroyed their love? Was she acting out another chapter in the story, as her mother had acted out her parents’ failure? What blind fate had led her back to Shrewsbury? Was that her own voice that spoke this afternoon? Or her mother’s tormented spirit?

  Downstairs the singing died away. Footsteps came down the hall. Anthony stood in the doorway, a candle in his hand. “Kate,” he whispered. “Have you gone to sleep without me?” “Of course not.”

  “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t blame you. But those fine fellows have to be caressed, fed, and watered, like the cattle they are. They’re discouraged and ready to quit the business, the moment anything goes wrong. For the first time I see how much a general or a politician must lie. If he is honest about his feelings, he undoes his followers!”

  “Anthony. How many times do I have to tell you I love you - not your damn politics.”

  “This isn’t politics, Kate. It’s life and death. War. There’s nothing more important - to both of us.”

  “I don’t care. I love you in spite of life and death and war. I want you to love me the same way.”

  Anthony put the candle down beside the bed and raised the covers. For a long moment he gazed at her nakedness. “I’ll try, Kate,” he said. “I’ll try.”

  They were happy that first night. They lived on the capital of Kate’s wish, although Anthony Skinner must have known that it was impossible. Perhaps not. Perhaps Anthony had not become the hypocrite into which he was maturing. He was almost as young as Kate and he shared the opinion of most loyalists in the summer of 1776 that the British army was unbeatable. At the very least he may have tried to create for a few hours an ideal island, free of mosquitoes and stench and halfhearted followers, where he and Kate could live and love.

  The power of her wish freed Kate from the fear and shyness that so often make a wedding night something less than glorious. She was as passionate as any French or Spanish mistress in fiction. In the dawn Anthony Skinner knew that he had been given something rare and precious. He tried in return to make Kate part of the dominant emotion in his life - his ambition.

  “Before the end of the year, Kate, we’ll sit down to dinner in a mansion twice the size of Kemble Manor. Perhaps Lord Stirling’s palace at Basking Ridge. The rebels have forfeited their estates, if not their heads. I’ll be first in line, Kate. No man will have done more to hold this colony for the King.”

  He kissed her neck and throat one more time and got up to dress. “You’ll wear jewels and gowns to match any lady in London, Kate.”

  For a moment she tried to believe it. She loved London clothes as much as any American girl - perhaps more because she wore them so well. But this talk of ruling New Jersey collided too directly with the other man whose presence still loomed large in her life.

  “My father says you’re playing a loser’s game. You can’t possibly win.”

  “Damn your father. It’s he that’s playing the loser’s game. And goddamn him for persuading my old man to play it with him. They’re finished, Kate, all the old ones are finished. They don’t know it because they haven’t seen what I’ve seen on Staten Island. It’s the finest army ever sent from England, Kate. They’ll smash Washington’s vermin to pieces.”

  He was using almost the same phrases that he had recited to the morose captains last night. Kate was too intelligent not to notice it. He saw the dismay on her face and thought she was disturbed by his return to politics.

  “I’m sorry, Kate. I know it’s all a bore to you.”

  Someone came running down the hall. “Colonel,” said a stranger’s voice, “we just got word. Slocum’s on the march with two hundred men.”

  “Goddamn that fellow,” Anthony said. “Where is he?”

  “Well past Red Bank. No more than a half hour away.”

  Anthony turned to Kate, anguish on his face. “We must run for the swamp again. We can’t ma
ke a stand with our handful. You’d best get on the road yourself.”

  “Why should I be afraid of him?”

  “He’s a vicious man, Kate.”

  He pulled on his boots and shrugged into his green coat. He took a crumpled letter from an inner pocket, and handed it to Kate. “Give this to my father on your way home.”

  He gave her a farewell kiss and was gone. Kate lay there, trying to recapture the man who had loved her during the night, trying to understand why he had reverted in the dawn to the man she had met yesterday in the swamp, the harassed angry soldier-politician. She saw - or at least half-saw - his attempt to unite his wish and her wish. But the ‘naked confession of his ambition also repelled her. All his talk about duty and loyalty to the best of kings did not harmonize with this desire to make a fortune from the rebels’ confiscated estates.

  She was gripped by the appalling suspicion that she had given her love to a man who neither understood it nor cared about it. For a moment she was shaken by a helpless, pointless anger; it ebbed into a deep dull sadness. It was her fate, she told herself, a woman’s fate. Beneath her outbursts of temper, her impudence, her seeming independence, Kate had a low opinion of her worth as a person. Like many beautiful women she did not think of her beauty as a reason for pride. Her looks were accidental; if anything, they complicated her life, making her attractive to men for reasons she deemed superficial. Praise of her snowy breasts, her glowing hair, had nothing to do with the Kate she knew, a rather indolent girl who had grown up perpetually compared to her brilliant brother. Her mother’s disgrace had inflicted another wound.

  The landlady pounded on the door. “What in God’s name are you doing, miss? You’d best get on the road before the devil Slocum arrives.”

  “All right. All right,” Kate said. She dressed and within ten minutes was mounting her horse in the tavern yard.

  “He’s coming direct down the main road,” the landlady said. “I would go roundabout if I were you, miss.”