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The Heart of Liberty

Page 25

by Thomas Fleming


  My father met him with his usual grave courtesy. “How do you do, sir. My name is George Kemble.”

  Major Moncrieff was not the jolly visitor to Liberty Tavern. He was a very angry professional soldier now. “I don’t give a damn what your name is,” he said. “Take us to your barns. We are here by order of His Majesty to pay you good money for your produce and we get ambushed on your property. You had nothing to do with that, sir?”

  ”I have done nothing to encourage this rebellion,” my father said. “I personally believe the violent on both sides are responsible - ”

  “Damn you and your political discrimination, sir,” roared the Major. “I am talking about blood. Go look at the man in the lead wagon with a ball in his chest and tell me who’s responsible. Your countrymen.”

  “My father could only open his hands helplessly. “I have no control over them.”.

  Moncrieff snorted his disbelief. “I begin to think this is a damn disloyal country.”

  The Major demanded some brandy and bandages for his casualties. I was told to get the liquor and cut up one of my old shirts, while he escorted the Major to the barns. A few minutes later I climbed into the wagon and saw my first wounded men. They were not a pretty sight. The man shot in the chest was dying. A red froth hobbled on his lips; the second man, hit in the knee, had drenched his white gaiters and stockings in blood. They were both in terrible pain, writhing like damned sinners on the coals. One of the wagon drivers, a fellow with the dirtiest face and hands I have ever seen, took a healthy swig of the brandy for himself before handing the bottle to the soldiers.

  As I went back to the main house, I almost collided with a fat gesticulating figure charging around the corner from the direction of the barnyard. It was our Dutch foreman, Johannes Hardenburgh, so agitated there were tears in his eyes.

  “Mister Kemble, Mister Kemble! Dey is steal all der ducks and chicks. I can do nothing.”

  My father had returned from the barns and was being paid by the British commissary, a worried-looking little man with pinched cheeks and rabbit eyes. Major Moncrieff was watching. He gave poor Johannes no excuses, not even sympathy.

  “The Men are going to eat dinner here. We’ve got a bloody ten-mile hike home with more fighting likely. I told them to eat well.”

  “I presume I will be paid - ”

  “You are being paid for your goddamn oats and hay. But if you don’t want to see fire coming out of your barns, you will treat my men to dinner, and cook it in the bargain. It may make them look a bit more kindly on you – ”

  “This is outrageous,” my father said. “You have only to command them - ”

  “I don’t want to get shot in the back in our next skirmish, Mr. Kemble. Do you understand me?” Moncrieff said. “The men don’t like this skulking cowardly war. They came to this miserable country expecting to set things right in a single campaign. Now a lot of them begin to think they will never see home again.”

  For the next two hours, our cook and our house servants, and even my mother and sister Sally toiled in the kitchen roasting chickens and ducks. Three hundred men can eat a stupendous number of fowl. Our normally, crowded barnyard was soon as empty as Egypt after the plague.

  My father and I and Johannes Hardenburgh and his field hands carried the food out to our conquerors, who sprawled on the lawn awaiting our service. When they finished eating, they roamed about the property, looking for loot. They broke into the smokehouse, stealing at least a dozen hams and several sides of bacon. Next the cellar was invaded and innumerable jars of preserves disappeared into knapsacks. Those with ambitious imaginations dug up the vegetable garden, where unwise people tended to hide their silver and jewels. Poor old Johannes ran back and forth trying to keep track of what was being taken, crying reproofs and calling for my father’s support. But Father had retired to his study, where he sat disconsolately fingering the lawbooks and histories he had been studying since the Declaration of Independence.

  “You must get that major’s name and report him to General Howe,” cried my mother. Her face and neck were streaked with kitchen soot, yet she still wore her lofty London “head.” Her eyes rolled violently in their sockets. She looked like a refugee from the madhouse. “Didn’t you tell him who we are? Who my family is? That we are as loyal subjects as His Majesty can find in America?”

  “My dear, they do not give a damn.”

  “Will you let me join the militia now, Father?” I asked. “I don’t know, Jemmy. Perhaps you should.”

  Outside muskets banged. We rushed to the window. There was wild confusion among our dinner guests as they scrambled for their guns. Kemble and his skirmishers had crept into the orchard and opened fire on the soldiers who were digging up our garden. One of them, shot in the stomach, was half-walked, half-carried to the wagons.

  “My God, they will burn us for sure,” my father cried.

  He was right. One of the-soldiers took a pine knot from our woodpile and stormed into the kitchen. He lit it from the fireplace there and flung it into our hay barn. Major Moncrieff did not make the slightest attempt to punish him. He bawled an order. The regiment formed ranks with skirmishers on the front, flanks, and rear of the wagon train and they trudged off for camp. As we fought the flames, Kemble and his friends raced past us. I was torn between a fierce desire to join them, to share the savage excitement that glittered in their eyes, and an honest sympathy for my father, who was in the process of losing three or four hundred pounds’ worth of his property, not to mention a good portion of his health, thanks to their guerrilla daring.

  I left the fire fighters - it was a hopeless struggle, the barn became an inferno in a matter of minutes - and watched Kemble and his squad pursue the British down the road and blast away at their rear guard until they all disappeared over the first hill. I don’t know how long I stood there. I suddenly realized my father was standing beside me. “What do they hope to gain?” he asked.

  “It’s necessary,” I said, and felt within me the exultant coldness of the revolutionary, ready to sacrifice everything to the Cause.

  AT LEAST ONCE a week, Major Moncrieff rode down to Liberty Tavern for dinner with his old friend Captain Gifford. When he came alone, he ate with the family in the residence. When he brought two or three junior officers with him, Jonathan Gifford served them at the tavern in a private room. More than once, the junior officers asked urgent questions about his stepdaughter. Was she as pretty as Major Moncrieff claimed? When would he - why didn’t he - introduce them?

  From one point of view it was better to have the officers asking questions about Kate than about Kemble. But their interest in Kate put Jonathan Gifford in another quandary. He had no desire to keep Kate in social isolation. She was alone too much as it was. Although she had physically recovered from her lashing, it seemed to have left her with a tendency to melancholy. She spent most of her time reading. The only person she saw, except for her father and brother, was Caroline Skinner, who invariably arrived with an armload of books. Captain Gifford had been a little staggered to discover that Kate, who had never looked at anything weightier than a novel or a magazine, was reading John Locke and the French political philosopher Montesquieu and the English radical James Burgh and the political-sexual exposés of Junius, the still unidentified mystery man whose scathing public letters revealed to a shocked world the depths of English political and moral corruption. He said nothing against this, either to her or Caroline, but he found himself wondering if it would not do her more good to be reassured that she had lost none of her feminine charm.

  “Would you like me to invite some of the regiment’s junior officers to dinner? Moncrieff has them almost crazy to meet yen,” he asked one evening.

  Kate shook her head. “It would only cause you trouble Colonel Slocum will call you a traitor. Kemble will call me one.”

  “Slocum is already calling me a traitor because I serve Tories and British officers. Kemble is only a step behind him. But there is damn little business from W
higs these days. What else can I do?”

  “I hope you are not thinking of changing sides, Father.”

  “What?” Jonathan Gifford said, not sure he had heard his daughter correctly. The determined look on Kate’s face reminded him of someone. Kemble? No, Caroline Skinner.

  “Changing sides, Father. If you are, I would not be able to follow you. The more I study the subject, the more convinced I am that we - the Americans - are in the right.”

  Caroline had changed Kate into a revolutionist. Her melancholy was a by-product of this change. It made her regret even more keenly her reckless leap into love with Anthony Skinner.

  “I’m not changing sides, Kate. I’m glad to see you have such strong opinions. That means there is even less reason to worry about having dinner with a British officer or two. A girl your age shouldn’t spend all her time reading political philosophy.”

  Kate threw her arms around him and kissed him with some of her old enthusiasm. “You are a dear to worry about me.”

  A few nights later, Major Moncrieff rode down to dinner with an invitation. “We are going to end the winter of our discontent with a ball,” he told Kate. “And we are desperate for eligible young ladies. Say yes or be reduced to dancing with one of my lieutenants. None of them is pretty. In fact, it’s a pretty choice which is uglier.”

  “What do you think, Father?” Kate asked.

  “I see no harm in it,” Jonathan Gifford said, wishing Kemble was not glowering at the other end of the table.

  Major Moncrieff had won a special place in Kate’s affections. An invitation from him had extra weight. But it was Kemble who made up her mind. He began lecturing Jonathan Gifford about the dangers of letting gullible women associate with sophisticated English officers.

  “Did you call me gullible?” Kate asked.

  “It is not simply you - I am talking about women in general.”

  “You mean’ we are such nincompoops, we cannot be trusted to have opinions of our own?”

  “If you want to put it bluntly - yes!”

  “Major,” Kate said, “I accept your invitation. But let me warn you that I will defend the rights of my country if the conversation turns to politics.”

  “My dear,” said Moncrieff, “if you look at my lieutenants and captains the way you are looking at me now, it wouldn’t surprise me if the chuckleheads deserted to Washington in a body. If I was twenty years younger I’d go myself.”

  “I don’t have a decent dress,” Kate said. “I mean one that isn’t two years old. I don’t even know this year’s fashion.”

  “I will not tolerate your buying a London dress,” Kemble said. “That is against the law.”

  “We will supply you with a half-dozen London babies and all the cloth we can steal from the commissary,” said Moncrieff. “If necessary, we’ll buy a dress from some damn American who just got it off a privateer.”

  “A bargain,” Kate said.

  “By God, Gifford,” said Moncrieff, “I knew you’d stand up for the old regiment, even if you’ve turned half a rebel. We shall lord it over those macaronis in the guards and those pretentious chuckleheads on the general’s staff now, with the prettiest girl in New Jersey for our dance cards.”

  The daughters of a good many independence men were forbidden to attend the British ball, to the acute remorse of some young ladies. The shortage of femininity was well known and widely discussed in Liberty Tavern’s taproom. Samson Tucker, with five daughters, was a divided man.

  “God’s bones,” he groused, “I wish we could patch up a peace in a fortnight, and before the redcoats sailed home I might pick out a viscount or a baronet for one of my female tribe.”

  “Samson,” said Jonathan Gifford, “I thought you were an all-out independence man.”

  “Oh, I am,” said Samson. “You heard me say I want’m sailing home, didn’t you? But why not take a little souvenir of New Jersey with’m? I don’t see nothing wrong with having a viscount in the family. I don’t believe the honorable Congress has resolved a single word on that subject.”

  Down at the Gifford residence, the female half of Liberty Tavern’s staff was spending most of their time getting Kate ready for the ball. Major Moncrieff procured the latest London baby from New York, and Kate marshaled Bertha, Molly McGovern, and her old removed-to-Amboy New York dressmaker, Bridget Terhune, to remodel one f her 1774 dresses. This involved a vast amount of sewing and stitching. Hoops were continuing to dwindle. Sleeves were now waist length. The bodice remained low enough to shock any lady of the present generation who has forgotten how much flesh was unblushingly exposed by the leaders of eighteenth-century society. The style suited Kate so perfectly, she saw no need to seek refuge in the lace fichu that was often the resort of those to whom nature had not been generous. But she still refused to pile and powder her hair in the London style. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she inclined toward not dressing her hair at all, but combing it straight down, and tying it with a plain ribbon as a declaration of republican simplicity.

  On the night of the dance, I drove my sister Sally over to Liberty Tavern in our chaise. She - or more exactly, my mother - had also accepted an invitation to the dance, and we had spent hard money we could not spare to buy her a dress in New York. We arrived to discover Kate and Kemble arguing furiously in their parlor. Kemble refused to believe that Kate had created her dress out of one of her old ones. He was examining it like a customs inspector, demanding to know where the lace, the ruchings, the rosettes had come from. Kate was telling him to go to hell, it was none of his business.

  “Listen to him,” she said to me and Sally. “He doesn’t even notice my hair.”

  My sister, with her “head” piled a foot and a half high, and wrapped in gauze spotted with paste jewels, was goggle-eyed. “Oh, I wish I could do the same thing,” she said. “This damn thing itches so. And I think it’s ugly.”

  “It is,” I said, not even looking at her. I Was gazing in rapture at Kate. Her dress was a dark green that both matched and modulated the green of her eyes. I saw not only its beauty, but exactly what she was trying to do - show the British that an American girl could both equal and defy London fashion. I tried to explain this to Kemble after the girls left. But he declined to listen to me.

  “Going to that dance is an act of treason,” he said. “It will give those damn British officers a chance to spread their charm. You don’t seem to understand the real issue in this Revolution, Jemmy. England was corrupting America, seducing her step by step into their rotten luxury and knee-bending to aristocracy. She’s still trying to play the game. It sickens me to see my sister - and your sister - succumbing to it.”

  I was awed into silence by Kemble’s intensity. I even managed to work up some indignation against my sister. But my heart could not muster even a flicker of wrath against Kate. I was still half in love with her in a distant hopeless way. Perhaps it was then that I began to separate myself from Kemble, to begin to see the Revolution with my own eyes.

  Major Moncrieff and six dragoons arrived to escort Kate and my sister Sally to the ball. In New Brunswick Kate was relieved to discover a surprising number of American girls in the company. The four Misses Van Horne, whose parents were considered staunch Whigs, were a picturesque enclave all by themselves, wearing dresses that were obviously just off a ship from London. Kate had gone to school with one of them in New York. When the girl caught sight of her she nudged one of her sisters and in a moment they were all staring at her as if she were a traveling curiosity. Kate found herself flushing angrily. Her whipping was obviously still hot gossip for the hypocrites.

  Before the ball began, the officers staged a play. It made outrageous fun of all the American generals, from George Washington to William Maxwell. Washington was pictured as a dumb, drawling Virginian with a sword so huge it dragged along the ground. He was unable to make up his mind about anything. In one scene, he deliberated for a good ten minutes about whether to feed his horse first and have dinn
er afterward or vice versa. The innkeeper became so exasperated, he finally told the General to go eat hay with his horse. General Putnam was portrayed as a roaring madman making incomprehensible speeches about liberty, and writing letters so badly spelled he could not read them himself one minute later. William Maxwell was drunk from the moment he staggered onstage. He produced a bottle at a mock council of war and got all the rest of Washington’s generals drunk, too. The audience roared with laughter over all this wit at American expense and Kate found herself laughing too, but not wholeheartedly.

  At the ball after the play, the officers of the King’s Own Regiment swarmed around her. She did not miss a dance. Major Moncrieff, who had been secretly designated by Jonathan Gifford to act as a chaperon, watched on the sidelines, beaming. Everyone was so gallant, so full of attentions, so deft at amusing small talk that an argument about politics became remote, fanciful. Kate had to remind herself that these men were the enemy, that they had given orders to fire the guns that had killed John Fleming and hundreds of other Americans.

  For the first time Kate began to understand how her mother had fallen in love with one of these officers. So many of them represented a world of culture and luxury and privileged wealth, a faery world infinitely beyond the humdrum natural beauty of the New Jersey countryside. She also understood for the first time one part of her attraction to Anthony Skinner. With his endless talk of London and living in style, his fascination with rank and titles, he was a colonial imitation of these glittering gentlemen in red coats.

  Thinking these thoughts behind her mask of gay chatter, Kate felt a clutch of self-doubt. Was she doomed to imitate her mother down to the final fatality? She was dancing a gavotte with a muscular captain. It was a dance that traditionally permitted another admirer to break in. A familiar face appeared above the Captain’s shoulder. Anthony Skinner touched his arm.

 

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