The Heart of Liberty

by Thomas Fleming

  “You heard what the General said,” replied Leary, “‘tis sold. The sale is over. Here’s the new owners.”

  He pointed to Slocum and McIntosh.

  “This is a goddamned fraud,” Jonathan Gifford said. “What was the sale price?”

  “Two thousand six hundred dollars.”

  About one fifth of what the manor was worth. Kemble had seen his father almost lose his temper in the past. It had been a frightening sight. But nothing in his previous experience compared to the rage that was suffusing Jonathan Gifford’s face now.

  “We know why you’re here, Gifford,” Slocum said. “You’re playing a little game with your friend the Squire in New York. You protect his property over here in case the Americans win, he protects your neck in case the British win.”

  “That is a damn lie. It is Mrs. Skinner I am trying to protect.”

  There were several guffaws. “Why, that’s one piece of old Skinner’s property you can have, Gifford. Maybe you’ve already got it. You spend a lot of time with her, from what I hear.”

  Another explosion of guffaws. Jonathan Gifford stood, head slightly lowered, enduring the derision. In a low strangled voice he asked Commissioner Leary to let him examine the papers covering the sale of Kemble Manor. Leary’s eyes darted uneasily to Slocum, who gave him permission with a nod.

  “They are all in order, Gifford,” Slocum said. “Perfectly legal. There ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.”

  Leary opened a small battered trunk beneath his chair and fished out a sheaf of documents. Jonathan Gifford paged through them carefully. Then with grim deliberation he ripped them into ten or twenty pieces and threw them into the air.

  Slocum was on his feet roaring, his followers likewise. But they stopped in mid-lunge. Jonathan Gifford had a pistol in each hand. “This is the only language a swine like you understands, Slocum.”

  With his left-hand pistol, he gestured to Leary. “Get behind your bar, Commissioner, and reopen this meeting. I want to make a bid on Kemble Manor.”

  Leary looked as though be might faint. His feet remained glued to the floor. Jonathan Gifford placed the muzzle of the pistol under his nose. “This gun has a hair trigger, Leary. It could go off by accident any second.”

  With a gasp of terror, Leary scuttled behind the long plank table that served as his bar.

  “Where is the secretary?” Jonathan Gifford asked Slocum. Not a man spoke.

  “Kemble, you will act as secretary.”

  Kemble took a seat at a table. He found fresh paper and ink in Leary’s trunk.

  “Open the sale, Commissioner.”

  With a gulp, Leary obeyed. Jonathan Gifford bid ten thousand dollars for Kemble Manor. McIntosh offered fifteen. Jonathan Gifford offered twenty. McIntosh offered twenty-five. Jonathan Gifford offered thirty.

  Whining mightily, the Scotsman quit the contest. Jonathan Gifford posted bonds for thirty thousand dollars, giving Liberty Tavern and its surrounding acres as surety. He was risking everything he owned in the world. Kemble and Barney were looking at him with disbelief on their faces. How could he explain it to them? It was impossible. A prudent man did not risk everything he had spent his life painfully saving and building because a woman once said to him: I am for independence. True, he was protecting Kate and Kemble’s inheritance, too, but that could be regained in the courts. He was not thinking about them. It was the pride and the loneliness and the courage of that small straight-backed woman whom he could never touch, it was for her and no one else that he was risking everything.

  He was also making a powerful enemy. But any anxiety on that score vanished in the rage that engulfed him when. Slocum began shouting. “You’ll hang for this, Gifford. Everyone swears you’re a British agent. We’ll hang you for it.”

  “Slocum, you keep trying to insult me. You can’t do it. A gentleman cannot be insulted by a swine. But you have also insulted the reputation of a lady whom I happen to admire. For that, you will answer to one of these pistols. The other is ready for your hand, wherever and whenever you are ready to meet me.”

  Slocum looked around the room. It was a test of his courage that he could not dodge, if he wanted to keep his reputation as a soldier. “I am ready whenever you are, Gifford. One of these gentlemen will inform you where and when,” he growled.

  With another wave of his pistol, Jonathan Gifford persuaded Commissioner Leary to sign the papers, confirming the sale of Kemble Manor. “We will take these with us,” he said, stuffing the documents in the inner pocket of his cloak, “and return copies to the commissioner in a day or two. In the meantime, General Slocum, I will look forward to hearing from you.”

  “You shall, Gifford. And I hope every man here will resolve if I fall to take proper revenge on this British assassin.”

  The news that Jonathan Gifford and General Slocum were to fight a duel spread through our district as rapidly as a battle report. Only Caroline Skinner in her isolation at the manor house failed to hear of it. Jonathan Gifford did not mention it when he visited her the following day and told her she no longer needed to fear eviction. “I am your landlord now,” he said with a smile.

  He gave her a much laundered version of his clash with Slocum and his crew. He did not even bother to mention the astronomical price he had been forced to pay. But Caroline’s first question was the cost. She was hoping she could pay off the debt with the profits from the next harvest, if all went well. When she heard $30,000, she cried out in shock.

  “Mr. Gifford, that is three times what the place is worth.”

  “We only have to pay fifty per cent in cash,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “I can easily raise the money in Philadelphia. If you do as well with your hired hands next year and the year after, we should be able to pay it off.”

  “But if I don’t - if the weather - ”

  “Land values will boom after the war. We could sell off part of the farm.”

  “But if prices fall and the state demands the money you would be forced to sell everything you own.”

  Her voice dwindled away as she grasped the full meaning of those words.

  “Life is a risky business,” Jonathan Gifford said. “We can only do what we think is right and abide the consequences.”

  As usual, she begged him to stay for supper. Also as usual he pleaded business at the tavern and retreated. Upstairs in her bedroom, Caroline Skinner gazed into her mirror. Two dark red spots of color glowed in her cheeks. “He did it for you,” she whispered wonderingly to that face which had always seemed plain and uninteresting to her, “he did it for you. He loves you.”

  For a moment she danced about the room, hugging herself in wild exultation. But in another moment she plummeted from this height to the deepest despair she had yet known. He loved her. But he would never admit it. He would never speak the words as long as Charles Skinner was alive.

  That evening she sat down to supper at the table loaned to her by Jonathan Gifford. Charles Skinner had taken with him to New York the ormolu clock, the red and blue china vases, the fretted Chippendale mahogany sideboards and cabinets which had once made theirs the most opulent dining room in New Jersey. Caroline was so dazed by the shock she had just received, she paid no attention to the meal, which was one of Sukey’s better efforts, a fish chowder full of succulent lobster and crab meat, clams, oysters, eels, and other denizens of the deep.

  “Didn’t you like it, mistress?” Sukey asked, as she removed Caroline’s almost untouched plate.

  “It was very good, Sukey. But I have no appetite today.”

  “I suppose you are worried about Captain Gifford.”

  “How - how did you know?” Caroline asked.

  “I was over at the Talbots’ today, teaching their people to read. One of them - the one I told you I liked - George, was just back from the tavern. Everybody’s talking about the duel.”

  “The duel?”

  Numbly, Caroline sat there while Sukey told her that Captain Gifford was meeting General Slocu
m at dawn tomorrow in a field off the Amboy road. “They say the General insulted you when Captain Gifford bought the manor. George asked me if it was true. I told him if he even thought such a thing again I would scratch his eyes out.”

  In anguish Caroline fled to her room and sank to her knees. She had never been devout. Again it was a reaction against Sarah, who would sin extravagantly one day and repent even more extravagantly the next. Caroline’s mastery of herself had extinguished those wild yearnings far the absolute which have become the fashion - and disgrace - of our age. But now love was loose in her soul, awakening a fervor she never knew she possessed. She prayed wildly for Jonathan Gifford’s safety. A moment later she was asking herself how she could pray for such a thing when the reason for her plea was a desire to sin - there was no other word for it in the eyes of religion - with the man for whom she prayed.

  Dear God, I cannot help it. Please accept both the sin and the prayer in the name of love.

  Until midnight, Caroline paced the floor repeating this strangest of prayers. Then, with an inner certainty that transcended all other realities she knew what to do.

  She went swiftly to the back bedroom and knocked on Sukey’s door. She was awake in an instant. “Sukey,” Caroline said, “I want you to take the horse and ride to Liberty Tavern. Ask for Captain Gifford, no one else, and tell him someone is trying to break into the house.”

  Sukey was devoted to Caroline. But this command was too strange to obey without question. “How can I get to the barn, mistress?”

  “There is no one there. I have to see Captain Gifford, I want to tell him something that - that could save his life. This is the only way I can be sure he’ll come.”

  The March wind howled through the bare trees on the drive. Caroline rushed back to her room and took a pair of fur-lined gloves and an ermine-trimmed scarlet cloak from her clothes press. She gave them to Sukey.

  “Wear these. They will keep out some of the cold. You can have them.”

  Sukey put them on but declined to accept them as a gift. “If it is as important as you say, mistress, I am glad to go.”

  A half-hour later hoofbeats came up the drive at a furious pace. In a moment Jonathan Gifford burst into the hall, a pistol in his hand. “Where is he, where did you hear the noise?” he asked.

  “There is no one - there was no one, Captain Gifford,” Caroline said. She was wearing her best night robe, light blue lamb’s wool with appliquéd dark red roses.

  The winter wind prowled the grounds outside the house. Jonathan Gifford’s face darkened. “Then why - ”

  “Because - because I had to see you Captain Gifford - I had to be sure you would come. I told Sukey - that lie.”

  “Why . . .”

  “Because I just learned that you will be risking your life at sunrise.”

  “Mrs. Skinner, please don’t – ”

  “ - for another lie.”

  “A lie?” Jonathan Gifford said.

  “You are defending - my honor, such as it is. And your own because of insults you received while acting on my behalf. You wish to prove to all the world that you acted from the purest - most disinterested motives. Captain Gifford, I think - I hope - that is a lie.”

  “Mrs. Skinner, are you out of your senses? There’s no reason - ”

  “I love you, Captain Gifford. For the first time in my life, I am in love. With you. I think - you love me too. I brought you here to confess my love - and to claim yours before you deny it - wipe it out - with blood. If you kill Daniel Slocum tomorrow in my name, we shall never be able to look each other in the eyes again. It will be Mrs. Skinner and Captain Gifford to our miserable lonely graves.”

  Explosions of disbelief, of refusal thundered in Jonathan Gifford’s soul. Memory smashed like a river in spring flood against his rock-hard will. This woman in the sunlit garden saying I am for independence; this same small woman in this hall defying her huge angry husband, saying with tears in her eyes, if you turn against me, too. Her husband’s savage words, a dry bitch with a barren womb; her bitter summary of her marriage as a business arrangement now gone bankrupt. Fighting these images was a lifetime of denial, of discipline. He heard himself, a disembodied voice in the echoing hall.

  “I have felt - ”

  The Captain was no wordsman. He took the lady in his arms. No, that is utterly inadequate. He enveloped her in a swooping, annihilating embrace that was both a capture by storm and a surrender on his part - and on the lady’s part.

  That first night they were as cautious, as uncertain with each other as newlyweds of nineteen. But though their bodies had not yet learned the lesson, their spirits sensed a union of enormous intensity and depth. Jonathan Gifford found it difficult to accept this intensity. It threatened a deep, stubborn reserve of selfhood which had enabled him to withstand the destructive spirit of Sarah Kemble Stapleton. Complicating his feelings was the way Caroline threw aside all the sobriety, the self-control that had seemed to him the essence of her character. The Captain’s youthful fondness for wild women had been cured by ten years of marriage to Sarah. He had to learn that the same woman can be both wild and sober, passionate and self-controlled.

  “Oh, Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan,” Caroline said. “How I have longed to call you that. So many times I stood by my window and whispered it to myself. Would you call me Caroline? Not once, but a dozen times.”

  To his surprise, Jonathan Gifford found it easy to do, twelve times. “And once more for good luck,” he whispered. “Caroline.” Each time the name slipped from his lips, he felt it become a kind of electrical current, a device born of some arcane science, binding him to this woman for the rest of his life. He knew in the same moment that he was putting the thing he treasured most, his philosophic calm, his peace of mind, yes, even his very soul in mortal peril because if her husband returned and reclaimed her, it would plunge him into a torment that would make his agony with Sarah seem almost a benediction.

  “When we are alone we must ban ‘Gifford’ and ‘Skinner’ from our vocabularies,” Caroline said.

  This sounds commonplace now, but it was a new idea in 1778. Only in the informal, not to say irregular atmosphere of the frontier did husbands and wives call each other by their first names.

  “It is American,” she told him with the same awesome intensity. “That perpetual Mr. and Mrs. is a stupid European custom. Oh, Jonathan, I want to love you, I shall love you with all my heart”

  “Until tonight, I did not think it was possible for me to do that. I tried once - and failed. I never thought - or hoped - I would try again.”

  “You mean with Sarah. We must not flinch from using her name, even here, Jonathan. She haunts us both. But perhaps we can lay her ghost - by laying her sister. Oh, I’ve shocked you - ”

  “No,” Jonathan Gifford said, although he was shocked. It was something Sarah might have said. She was as ribald as a Havana whore in bed.

  “My, thoughts often run to the obscene. Sometimes when I stood in company with you, I stripped you naked in my mind. It was a game Sarah taught me to play. I pretended to disapprove - you had to do that with Sarah or she devoured you.”

  “Yes,” said Jonathan Gifford ruefully, both a confession. and a fact. “I see she treated everyone the same way.”

  “Everyone who tried to love her. That filled her soul with horror - that anyone could love her. Because she knew she was a monster. So she set out to destroy that love, all the time protesting that she could not get enough of it.”

  “That’s enough about Sarah for the time being.”

  “Let’s not regret her, Jonathan, nor mourn her. For all the pain and torment she caused us, she awakened in us both, I think, the idea, the importance of love. So many people go through their whole lives without ever thinking about it.”

  “I tried to do that,” Jonathan Gifford said, remembering his army years.

  “Without this - this time with you - I could never have said - what I just said. It would have killed me.”
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br />   He saw she was forgiving the cruel, reckless woman who had been her sister. How could he do less? For the first time he realized that until he did forgive Sarah, he would never be able to love this woman - or any woman - with his whole heart. It is a strange truism that men are inclined to make one woman become the paradigm of all women in their minds and hearts - and women are equally inclined to do it with men. If that one woman has been a destroyer, a figure of darkness, she can cast a fatal shadow on all the other women in his life, past and future. The strangeness of this is redoubled when we think how readily men accept the fact that some of their own kind are scoundrels or cowards or sadists while others are loyal, honest, generous. Women are equally adept at perusing and judging their own sex without sweeping negative conclusions.

  Jonathan Gifford, a man who did not change his mind easily, struggled painfully to accept this, wisdom. From the effort came another insight into himself. “I don’t think I have - ever really believed in happiness,” he said. “A: modest contentment was all I thought a man could hope for in this world, and I had failed to win even that - until tonight.”

  He stroked her thick black hair while his other hand found her soft seat of love. “Caroline,” he whispered with no urging needed now. “Caroline.”

  They made love and dozed and made love again.

  “Oh, what gluttonous flesh-ridden creatures we are, and I am so glad of it,” Caroline said as the first traces of dawn paled the windows. “We have years of unloving and misloving to make up.”

  “Is that dawn?” Jonathan Gifford said.

  “I am afraid it is.”

  “I must go.”

  “Where?”

  “To meet General Slocum.”

  “That’s impossible! I thought - ”

  “That I would stay here in bed with you and let him give me the laugh from Amboy to Cape May? I thought, Mrs. - I mean Caroline - you knew me better. What you said downstairs - the words that brought us up here - were true. But they did not eliminate General Slocum from the scheme of things. I have a reputation to uphold - a reputation as a man. You may say it is childish, to rest a reputation on powder and ball, but we cannot completely ignore the ways of the world.”