Meanwhile, Kemble began making regular trips between Liberty Tavern and New York. Each time he wore a different disguise - a brown or a black wig, a Quaker’s plain brown homespun and broad hat, a German-Swiss farmer’s black boots and a bright waistcoat, a Dutch burgher’s red cloak. He concocted most of his disguises himself and soon became an expert. From locks of Kate’s hair he constructed mustaches in the German style which he glued to his upper lip. He stuffed the linings of his coats and breeches with wool to make him look fatter, and added inches to his height by reconstructing the inside of his boots. In a month or two be had perfected a half-dozen accents.
Sometimes he would put on his latest disguise and visit Liberty Tavern’s taproom, fooling everyone, even Barney McGovern. One day he appeared as an Irish tinker with a mop of red hair that spilled into his eyes and side whiskers in a style Barney had not seen since he left Ireland. Kemble had copied them from an old print that hung on the wall in Barney’s cottage. They talked for fifteen minutes and Kemble convinced Barney that he was from his home village, Ballymahon. Of course he was using information he had gleaned from Barney over the years.
The tinker was so good, Kemble made him his favorite disguise. Most of his contacts in New York were with an Irish tailor named Horace Monaghan who made uniforms for General Clinton and his staff and picked up juicy bits of gossip while measuring them.
Yet for all Kemble’s skill, these trips to New York were no joke. He was in deadly danger every moment. There were at least a hundred loyalists from our neighborhood in the city who might penetrate his disguise by recognizing his voice, his walk, the shape of his aristocratic nose. For someone with Kemble’s fragile health, the physical hardships alone were dangerous. He traveled on foot through rain and sleet, sleeping in cold barns. He came back from every trip exhausted, racked with a cough which made Dr. Davie look grave and his father haggard. But there was no hope of persuading him to stay home. He had found a new way to serve the Cause that satisfied him strangely.
Now I realize that Kemble’s disguises were a kind of flight from the man he had to face each morning in the mirror with the memory of that Monmouth ravine in his eyes. Jonathan Gifford had restored Kemble to the Cause, he had tried to share with him the pain of guilt and failure, to tell him these things were inevitably part of war and revolution. But Kemble’s mind had been molded by too many American influences. He could accept the forgiveness of others but he could not forgive himself. So he fled into disguises, into the solitary life of the spy, into constant flirtation with death. He soon discovered that others caught in the vortex of the war were possessed by even more dangerous demons.
IN THE SUMMER of 1779 a young Irish girl, her skirts brown with the dust of the road, wandered into Liberty Tavern. She had the face of an innocent child and the body of a mature woman, hair black as the night, and exquisite hands and feet. I know not what part of the feminine anatomy will be fixed upon as the sign of beauty by the generation that reads this book. But ours placed great stress on these extremities. They were supposedly proof of aristocratic blood.
There was no hint of aristocracy in the story Margaret O’Hara told. She was the wife of a veteran sergeant who had been captured in the storming of the British fort at Stony Point on the Hudson - the only victory of consequence won by the Americans in 1779. Rather than starve or sell herself in New York, she had paid a boatman to ferry her from Staten Island to the Blazing Star landing in Woodbridge. With the American army nearby, the tavern was crowded with hungry officers every day. Molly McGovern declared she could use another hand in the kitchen. Jonathan Gifford agreed to hire the girl. Her face and figure made her a favorite waitress and she was soon walking out with several young officers. Barney McGovern lectured her sternly about the dangers of such attachments. They would use her and discard her.
“Isn’t that the way of men everywhere?” she replied.
A few days later, Lieutenant Rawdon was strolling beside the brook with Kate. Margaret O’Hara was washing some sheets in the swift-running water. Kate said hello and got a perfunctory smile.
“Extraordinary,” said Rawdon, looking over his shoulder. “That girl. I’m sure she is my cousin’s mistress. Is her name O’Hara?”
“Yes.”
“What in the world can she be doing here?”
Unfortunately Jonathan Gifford had left the previous day on a trip to Little Egg Harbor to buy liquor and wine for the coming winter. Kate told Kemble what Rawdon had said. He quickly answered the Lieutenant’s question. “She’s probably a spy.”
Kemble summoned Margaret O’Hara to his father’s office. She came wearing a dress soiled from kitchen work. Her face was flushed with the heat of that hot place compounded by the July day.
“Lieutenant Rawdon says you are not the wife of a sergeant but the mistress of the Adjutant General of the British army, his cousin, Lord Rawdon.”
“I was,” she said. “But he discarded me when I did not get on with General Clinton’s mistress, Mrs. Baddelly. She’s as Irish as I am. But I’m twice as proud.”
Kemble found these words astonishing - and strangely moving. The girl seemed to mean what she said. How could she talk about pride, standing there in her soiled kitchen smock?
“What brought you here, then?”
“I was taken up by Major Beckwith. In his English way he decided I could be useful as well as pleasurable, I suppose. He sent me here with the assurance that your father was a secret friend and would protect me. I am to learn what I can from the soldiers, and await instructions. I gave your father a letter from one of his friends in New York the day I arrived.”
Two years ago Kemble might have lost his head at this news and suspected Jonathan Gifford of treachery. But he no longer had any doubts about his father’s commitment to the Cause. This freed him to concentrate on the woman before him. She disturbed him profoundly. Her honesty stirred a wish to protect and rescue her. By instinct Kemble was a savior, tormented by the world’s disinclination to be saved.
He said he would talk to his father when he returned. Then he sprang from his chair and paced the room. “Why are you doing this for them? When they have treated you so badly - and treated your country - ”
“I knew perfectly well what my fate might be, Mr. Stapleton,” she said. “I chose it in spite of my mother’s tears and my father’s curses. It was better than a cold cabin in a Mayo bog. All my brothers were outlaws. Why should not I become one such,, in my own way?”
“But now you are in a free country,” Kemble said “There is no need - ”
“You have no more use for us than the English so far as I can see.”
“That’s not true.”
She knew precisely what his words implied. She accepted them with a cool smile. “Be that as it may. I have made my bargain.”
Kemble’s agitation brought on a coughing fit. Margaret O’Hara hurried to the taproom and returned with rum and water. As she handed it to him she saw bright red flecks of blood staining his handkerchief.
“Oh, dear God,” she said.
“You must tell no one about that. Promise me.”
“You have an O’Hara’s promise. That was once worth more in Ireland than a monk’s vow.”
“In what way?” said Kemble, betraying his ignorance of Ireland. Anger blazed on Margaret O’Hara’s face. “Ask Barney McGovern to come here,” she said.
Kemble called Barney from the taproom. Margaret O’Hara stepped back as he entered. The scullery maid vanished. Something in the way she stood, the angle of her head, transformed her.
“McGovern,” she said, “who was Liam O’Hara of Kildare?”
“Why, the greatest man in the west of Ireland,” said Barney McGovern. “He had a house twice as big as this tavern. A dozen poets and a hundred musicians lived upon him. His word was law for a hundred miles. There was not a wedding or a funeral in all that space without a gift from him. Are you - ”
“He was my grandfather.”
“Begorra, ho
w we have fallen.”
“We will rise again.”
For a moment, Kemble thought a battle cry would leap from Barney’s lips. For another moment he saw him bending his knee before her like a warrior before a princess of the blood royal. But Barney had spent too many years in the British army. He had long since resigned himself to Ireland’s fate.
“God willing,” he said.
“Whether He wills it or not, in spite of His heaven or His hell.” Kemble saw the depths of her bitterness and despair. It would have been better for him if he had fled the room, the building, the state. But he sent Barney back to work and spent the next three hours talking to Margaret O’Hara. She told him the truth. She made no attempt to disguise or excuse herself. The truth was, of course, the best possible excuse as far as Kemble was concerned. He never saw what was apparent to many others - it was no excuse to Margaret O’Hara. That afternoon she talked as only the Irish can talk - with a mad, bitter gaiety that both mocked and magnified her despair. Her story was the fall of the O’Haras - but it was also the destruction of Ireland - the methodical brutal reduction of a whole nation to beggary - done with consummate British legality.
Her grandfather had sought to remain neutral. Not one of his sons or his retainers raised their hands against British rule. But he might as well have been the greatest rebel in Ireland, for all the good it did him. Every Catholic Irishman was an enemy and their lands, their houses were prizes ripe for picking after the defeat of the old aristocracy at the battle of the Boyne in 1690. Twenty years later, Liam O’Hara was executed in Dublin Castle on a trumped-up charge of treason, sworn by false witnesses. His lands were forfeited. The remnants of the family clung to cabins on the fringe of the old demesne. In one of these cabins with mud for a floor and straw for a bed, Margaret O’Hara was born.
Not until she was a girl of thirteen did she taste meat. Her father lived in a fog of alcoholic despair. Her brothers were goaded into joining the Whiteboys, guerrillas who murdered landlords and constables in the night. Two of them died on the scaffold at Kildare before she was ten. At thirteen she became a scullery maid in the great house her family had once owned.
“When I saw how they lived, with fires to keep them warm and every kind of food upon the table, I vowed I would have it, no matter what I must do. I cursed God, cursed Him for turning His face from us when we had done nothing to offend Him. I told the priest as much when he came out of the bog to confess us. I had looked at myself in a mirror for the first time, you see, and I knew what I had to offer.”
At sixteen the landlord’s son took her to London. He dressed her in silks and satins and displayed her to his friends “like you might a blood horse.” To his dismay, she soon left him for “a real Englishman,” a member of Parliament, no less. She left him for Lord Rawdon, and he had brought her with him to America.
No stain of this sordid journey appeared on her exquisite face. Stunned with sympathy, Kemble was convinced that her spirit had somehow survived the transaction. He was wrong. The person named Margaret O’Hara had survived and so had her beauty, thanks to assiduous care. But with every day, week, month, and year of her journey, the personal hope on which the heart must live dwindled and the heart itself withered. She had sold herself to the English service and she was left with faith in nothing except their power. When Kemble began telling her there was a future for her in America, she laughed in his face.
“You will never beat them. The French have saved you for a year or two. But they will beat you as surely as they have beaten everyone else. I knew that the day I saw London. It lies there on the Thames like a great smoky monster feeding on Ireland, Wales, Scotland, America, Africa, India. They are the Romans come back to life.”
“No. We are the Romans.”
With a violence and an eloquence that momentarily silenced her, Kemble preached her a sermon on the future glory of America. The virtue and the valor of the Roman Republic would be reborn here when Americans became truly free. Every trace of Europe’s corruption would be expelled from their minds and hearts. This entire continent - this half of the world - belonged to them.
It was the first time that Kemble had spoken this way since Monmouth. Margaret O’Hara was entranced by his eloquence, and his violence stirred an echo in her own lost soul. But she did not believe a word of it.
“No wonder your father must play a double game. With a son like you, there is no other hope of saving his head.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
A tremor passed through Margaret O’Hara’s body, a softening smile illumined her face. She touched her fingertips to his cheek. “You are as wild a lad as I’ve ever seen. I think you are a match for me. Don’t lock your door tonight.”
“There is no need - ”
“Need? Who speaks of need? I only think of pleasing myself - and perhaps you.”
“Don’t come - if you won’t speak of love.”
“We will speak of that too. Of its impossibility.”
The word “love” had been ripped involuntarily from Kemble’s throat. Most people - particularly passionate intellectuals such as Kemble - have only fleeting glimpses of their real motives. Much of what takes place in a man’s spiritual self - or a woman’s - remains obscure to him, although the real nature of his innermost desires and fears can become visible to a person who knows him well. I am convinced that for Kemble, Margaret O’Hara was a chance to love a woman like his mother - a chance to prove to himself that it was possible to succeed where his father had failed.
I am sure that Kemble had never known a woman before. With all their freedom in riding and walking out and dancing the night away, American girls were extraordinarily skillful at avoiding the final concession until they were certain they were dealing with a future husband. Only scoundrels deceived them and they were comparatively few in our circle. Kemble, with his altitudinous devotion to honor and virtue, was certainly not one of them.
In his room he was assailed by a fundamental masculine doubt. What if he could not please this wild creature? For a while he was tempted to lock the door. Then he thought of the cold cabin of her childhood, remembered her despairing anger, and told himself that America - that he - must and could save her. He would prove the possibility of love to her. He left the door unlocked.
A few minutes past midnight there was a knock. Kemble opened the door. Margaret O’Hara stood there, with two cups of steaming liquid on a tray. In the dim light of the room’s single oil lamp, the dark hall behind her, she looked like a priestess. On her head she wore a fresh lace cap. Her dress of blue silk was as pressed and clean as a ball gown. A rich perfume filled the room as she entered it. The scullery maid was no more. This was another woman.
“I have brewed us some of my favorite tea. ‘Tis better than whiskey.”
Even her voice had changed. It was soft, almost a whisper. “‘Twas vanity that made me bring this dress. I knew it was dangerous. No sergeant’s wife could ever afford it. But something told me I might have a use for it. I always listen to such voices.”
“Is that what brought you here - another voice?” Kemble said.
“Yes,” she said. “Your voice.”
The tea tasted strongly of herbs. Kemble asked her what was in it. She smiled and said it was her secret. An old Irish formula inherited from the Druids. “Drink it slowly,” she said. “You can be sure it does no harm. It only brings joy. Or makes it possible,”
“What if you are a witch?” Kemble said.
“And perhaps you are the devil.”
By the time Kemble had finished his tea, a strange lightness; a sense of air charged with electricity, began flowing from his fingers and his lips down through his body and up into his brain.
“What is it? What is in this?”
“I told you. Joy, or at least the chance of making it possible for a little while. It’s a kind of escaping.”
“I like it.”
“From now till morning we shall forget such things as time and war a
nd revolution, England and Ireland and America. There shall only be the two of us in our dream.”
“That’s not the kind of love I want,” Kemble said.
“Let us try it and see if you ever want any other kind. But first we must read the leaves.”
She took his cup from his hand while dark memories welled up in Kemble. This had been one of his mother’s favorite superstitions. She had kept him in a perpetual state of anxiety, seeing in the tea leaves a tragic death for him one day and great wealth or great fame the next day. As Margaret O’Hara bowed her head over the cup, Kemble heard Sarah Gifford’s voice, felt again the aching mixture of love and awe and fear.
“I see a great victory in your future. Marching men by the thousands, and you in control of them. And then I see - ochone.”
“What?” said Kemble, with a smile. He no longer cared about the future. The herbs were working their subtle magic in his body. He felt free, freer than he had ever remembered feeling. It was a freedom without fearing or even caring about tomorrow.
“I see a great hurt, sorrow and - ”
Kemble picked up her cup. “Strange, because I see in your cup the very opposite. A defeat where you’ve never been defeated before. And the discovery of something you don’t believe in - happiness.”
Margaret O’Hara became very serious. “It is bad luck to laugh at the leaves. They never lie - especially at a time like this.” “Who’s laughing at them?” Kemble said. “I believe in what I see - just as much as you. I think you are afraid of Americans. Afraid of this happiness we talk about.”
“No, oh no,” Margaret said, leaning toward him. “It is your wildness I fear. You are as wild as the Irish at the heart of you. I see it now leaping in you, freed by the sweet drink. You hold it back by the force of your mind, but once let go you may never bind it again. Does that concern you?”
The Heart of Liberty Page 43
