“I don’t know. You seem to think I have the power to hurt you.”
“You do.”
“We both have that power,” I said. “I hope we never use it. Isn’t it possible to go on from happiness to greater happiness? Do all lovers quarrel in the end, as the poets seem to say?”
“I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve ever been in love,” Robert said.
My heart leaped at those words, remembering Grandfather’s words about first love. “Moi aussi,” I said, using one of the few fragments of French I had acquired at Madame Ardsley’s.
I began to murmur my favorite English poem.
“Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.”
He answered me in a voice that was, I thought, a trifle hesitant.
“And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.”
So we returned from our first tryst, believing in poetry, hoping it would not turn into prose.
Back at Fort George, the party was just beginning to break up. We managed to get inside the gate and, hugging the shadows, skirt the governor’s house and mount the parapets again. After five minutes of lingering kisses, we descended the steps to discover my cousin Esther looking distraught.
“Catalyntie,” she cried. “Where in the world have you been? Mother was taken ill. My sister took her home and Father went with them.”
“Robert and I were on the parapet watching the fireworks,” I said.
“They ended a half hour ago,” Esther said in her nosy way.
“We were communing with the stars thereafter,” Robert said. “If there is any blame to be attached to it, I take full responsibility. I wouldn’t let your cousin return until she surrendered a kiss.”
Esther, who was half in love with Robert Nicolls like almost every other young woman in New York, shot me a look of consummate envy. I saw how right Robert was: Secrecy would redouble the pleasures of our liaison.
SEVEN
I MUST ALSO REMEMBER FOR CLARA what her love for Malcolm Stapleton was like before it became a nightmare. Memory must summon the trembling flesh, the animate blood in the pounding heart, the swelling sweetness of desire in the plangent soul. In some ways their love was a nightmare from the first, a dream stalked by the Evil Brother. But Clara chose to ignore what lurked in the shadows.
At first she saw her body as a tribe, a dancing, singing people who were too powerful, too satisfied to wage war. She adopted this great white stranger into the mysteries, the rituals, of her flesh, weaving around him the singing embrace of the Master of Life, the joy of those who have visited the world’s heart and found it good. She was a counselor, a sachem, a shaman with the power to bless all things.
For those first weeks, love was transcendent, as absolute and infallible as a new religion. They worshipped it while the woods turned crimson and gold and saffron all around them and huge flocks of birds twittered in the trees or darkened the sky with thrumming wings as they prepared to flee the coming cold. From the center of the lake they watched deer gambol on its edge, images of innocence, and saw themselves mirrored in their fearful eyes, their ecstatic human opposites, forever fearless and unquenchably proud.
Yes, ultimately it was pride that betrayed them, a mad irreverent pride that escaped its cage to roar defiance at the sober sensible world of money and laws and rules of conduct. Clara was too proud of her body, her beauty, too proud of the way she had possessed this huge male, with his fumbling stunted spirit, to see the dangers all around them as the woods grew bare. She tried to dismiss the sense of sin that tormented Malcolm. It was an idea she simply did not understand. She begged him to open his soul to the presence of the Manitou as he spoke in their bodies. It was an idea he simply did not understand.
Gradually, she saw they worshipped different gods. Her god was far more Indian than white. He dueled the Evil Brother for power in this world, but in the shadow world beyond death he ruled with perfect peace and benevolence. He urged the practice of happiness, of generosity to all things living, he rewarded courage and magnanimity and taught indifference to pain and sorrow. In his deepest heart he was a joyous god, but he expected his followers to obey his precepts without extravagant display.
Malcolm’s god was angry. He warned his followers of the awful punishments that awaited them in the world beyond death. In this world his voice was entirely absorbed by the word father. He was a commanding, a demanding, a joyless god, whose central word was duty and whose other face was law. Failure to obey him was a sin and the punishment for sin was eternal damnation in a hell of fiery torment—another idea Clara could not comprehend.
When Malcolm told her how sin turned the soul black, she laughed at him. “What’s wrong with black? Bears are black. Their coats are the warmest in the forest. The night is black but the moon fills it with golden light. Don’t be afraid of blackness, darkness. We have the power to make it glow with the happiness in our hearts.”
Sin was an empty word to her. Especially the so-called sins of the flesh. But she would learn, oh how painfully she would learn that there was such a thing as sin, she would eventually see how it deformed the soul, made it as ugly as Duycinck’s body. For now she struggled to free Malcolm from the grip of God the Father, his father as the voice of God. She urged him to find his own path, to walk down it unafraid with her beside him.
“You can’t let your father live your life for you. You must seize it and make it your own life,” she whispered in the darkness before dawn in Malcolm’s bed.
Snow whipped through the woods now. Winter had fastened its grip on the fields and rivers. Almost as soon as Clara spoke these combative words, quarrels raged. Malcolm struggled to take Clara’s advice and extricate himself from his father’s grasp. George Stapleton was adamant. His older son would study law under Judge Daniel Horsmanden in New York. He had spent five hundred pounds repairing the breach between them over his penchant for Clara. His friend Governor Nicolls had promised to appoint Malcolm to the Chancery Court the moment Horsmanden gave his approval. The salary was a thousand pounds a year. Malcolm would never have to sit on a case. For a hundred pounds he could hire an assistant to do all the work. All he would have to do is sign a few documents once or twice a month.
That was how a man got ahead in the British Empire, George Stapleton shouted. He found a place for himself, with a salary paid by the king or the province. Look at the newspaper publisher, Ben Franklin of Pennsylvania. He had made his son William the clerk of the assembly, a job that put him in constant touch with the governor and every important man in Philadelphia. Compare that certainty of a prosperous future to a soldier’s life.
“A soldier spends nine tenths of his days getting drunk in miserable garrison towns or isolated forts, exposed to the pox22 and the clap23 from local whores—and when a war comes his chances of glory are as likely to end with a bullet in the belly as a commendation from his general. The pay is miserable, the rewards dubious. Who but a fool becomes a soldier—unless he has a great lord or the king himself behind him to push his career?”
“It’s what I want to be, Father,” Malcolm said, his big head drooping.
“It’s what you’ll never be as long as I’m alive!” George Stapleton shouted.
Georgianna Stapleton watched these scenes with her enigmatic smile intact. Did she know from the start who was the source of Malcolm’s defiance? Had she extracted the truth from Adam Duycinck, who lived in terror of her ruthless temper? Perhaps. The little hunchback muttered warnings to Malcolm, advice to Clara. There were ways to prevent a child. His mother had taught him these arcane mysteries and he tried to share them. A patch of wool, dampened with a sticky substance like honey, inserted with care, could work wonders. But Clara ignored him, convinced she
was under the protection of the Master of Life.
Georgianna did not need Adam to find out what was happening. The hunchback was by no means the only servant who knew about Clara and Malcolm. In a great house, gossip about the lords and masters is as pervasive as mold and mildew. It is more likely that Georgianna was merely biding her time, waiting for the inevitable event to happen in Clara’s body.
In the spasmodic moments when Clara thought about a child, she saw it as a decisive statement of Malcolm’s love for her, a way to bind him to her in a new, conclusive way. How this would work in a practical sense never entered her mind. Living in Hampden Hall, she half imagined she was in another longhouse, where children became part of the clan, a welcome addition to the supply of warriors or future mothers of warriors. Calculation of a more practical sort was not in her nature.
If Malcolm thought about a child, he thrust the possibility aside as something too complicated, too portentous to contemplate. Like most warriors, who blunder through life with their fearful combination of naivete and loyalty and blind confidence in their destiny, he too was no calculator. Fortune has always favored the calculators, the politicians of this world, and always will. One envies them until one peers into their stunted hearts.
In December Clara realized that the blood which flowed from her womb every month in the nights of the full moon had ceased. In January the child spoke in Clara’s body with a blinding nausea that sent her fleeing from the mere sight of food. In February she told Malcolm, who clung to her and vowed that he would protect her and the baby.
In April, Georgianna Stapleton told her husband about Clara’s interesting condition. She asked him if he was ready to start a colony of mulattoes here in the wilds of New Jersey. She told him Clara was the source of Malcolm’s stubborn refusal to study law in New York. She revealed that with Duycinck’s help, Malcolm was still sending letters to London, attempting to obtain a commission in the British army.
“I will have no chocolate bastards on my property!”
George Stapleton’s furious words thundered against the beamed ceiling of Hampden Hall’s library. Malcolm and Clara stood before him like condemned criminals. It was the voice of the white God incarnate, condemning their sin. Clara was inclined to be defiant. What could they do to her? She had proof that Malcolm was her lover, proof in her belly. But Malcolm did not join her defiance. He hung his head like a penitent. Clara saw with a sinking heart the power of the father-God, the ugly idea of sin as disobedience, dishonor, disgrace.
George Stapleton raged at his son’s stupidity. Was he planning to marry this woman? If so, he was instantly disinherited. They would have to live in the forest with the Indians. No one else would tolerate a public mingling of the races. Even if he merely planned to raise his chocolate bastard here at Hampden Hall, he was equally stupid. Every slave would hate the creature. He would hate his father if he remained a slave. If he freed him, did he want him walking the streets of New York with Stapleton as his last name?
“Cato Stapleton. Can you imagine it?” George Stapleton roared. “Can you hear every respectable family in the city having a laugh on us every time they heard it?”
Fear clutched at Clara’s throat. Were they going to kill her? How else could they destroy the child? The Manitou had breathed life into her womb. How could they prevent the child from entering the world? She got her answer from Georgianna Stapleton.
“I’ll fetch Duycinck.”
Before Clara could speak, she was dragged upstairs by house Africans and flung on a bed, stripped naked and her arms and legs tied to the posts. Malcolm followed them, calling: “What are you going to do to her?” until his father ordered him to his room. Helpless, Clara watched Adam Duycinck reel into the room, propelled by Georgianna Stapleton’s arm. He carried a sack that rattled as if it were full of coins.
“There she is. Get to work on her,” Georgianna said.
“Madam—it’s against nature,” Duycinck said. “She could die. It’s what they hung my mother for doing in England. The witchcraft stuff was court nonsense. She killed babies. I knew she would hang for it someday. I told her so. I told her my humped back was no excuse. She hated God for my back, madam, and she murdered with that hate in her heart—”
“Do you want to live here in comfort—or sweat out your days aboard a king’s man of war?” Georgianna said. “I’ll have the governor deport you tomorrow for whatever charge comes readily to mind. They put the incorrigibles into the fleet, you know.”
Duycinck’s face twisted into the mask of the Evil Brother. “All right. Get her some whiskey first.”
“She doesn’t deserve any whiskey.”
“Get her some whiskey, madam! Or I’ll let you perform this murder!”
Mrs. Stapleton ordered one of Bertha’s daughters to bring up a bottle of brandy. She handed it to Duycinck. “Get to work,” she said, and slammed the door.
“Didn’t I tell you never to cross her?” Duycinck whined, gulping a tumbler of the brandy. He refilled the glass and put it to Clara’s lips. She turned her head away. “Take it!” Duycinck said. “It’s the only help I can give you.”
Clara whirled her head against the tumbler, spilling most of the brandy on the bed. “Stupid bitch!” Duycinck said. He poured himself another tumbler and drank it down.
“Mother,” Duycinck said. “Wherever your damned soul lives, ask God or Great Satan to have mercy on poor Adam.”
From the sack he drew a half dozen grisly instruments and laid them on the bed. There were knives and scissors with ragged edges to their blades and long narrow bars with sharpened points. Ripping pieces from the pillowcase, he made a gag and thrust it into Clara’s mouth, and bound it with another strip of cloth. He drank another tumbler of brandy and mumbled drunkenly: “If you’d lain with old Adam, this never would have happened.”
What came next, as Adam began probing for the child in Clara’s womb, is better forgotten. But that would be a crime against history and Clara, against the lost soul that bled into oblivion between her legs. It would be a crime against the pain that lurched madly through her mind and body like a captured bear against his cage. It would be a crime against the mystery of women’s fate and men’s laws. It would be surrender to time’s spider, who weaves years around us until we cease to struggle in their languid grip. Memory is as weak, as treacherous, as poor Adam, performing murder in a drunken haze to save himself from damnation in this world.
No no no. Better forgotten but never forgotten, the two ideas must live side by side, locked in irreconcilable conflict, like a husband and wife who hate each other forever. Eventually the murder ended, as all murders must, the blood-soaked sheets were flung into the wash, the mangled corpse was buried in a nameless grave at midnight. Clara, the victim’s only mourner, was left alone to weep away the darkness.
Duycinck hovered over her, executioner turned nurse. He forced brandy down her throat, he gave her medicines that he hoped would banish fever and infection. But both these servants of the Evil Brother ravaged Clara. For a week she writhed and sweated while nightmares stalked the room. She saw Malcolm’s innocent face, a mask of contorted grief, and screamed curses at him until the mask shattered and he fled to New York for drunken solace with the city’s whores.
Drifting along the edge of eternity, Clara received the gift of second sight. She saw Georgianna Stapleton hovering above the bed, her face a whitened skull. It was the face of the demon who inhabited her rosy beauty, her flushed cheeks, her glowing red hair. Long ago, she had made a pact with the Evil Brother; she was one of his creatures, ready to commit any act that multiplied the power of his reign.
She saw George Stapleton’s sorrowing double, a hunchbacked parody of the expostulating attorney, forever bent under some mysterious burden, perhaps the loss of his Scottish bride, Malcolm’s mother. Whatever tormented him, his eyes were crossed with secret rage at the Master of Life. She saw Adam Duycinck’s spiritual self, a tall straight-backed warrior, a man without illusions, cursing
his humpbacked reality. She saw herself, an empty shell of a woman with a barren womb, forever childless, thanks to the fever and Duycinck’s vile medicines and viler surgical instruments.
Ultimately she stood on the precipice above an immense river, watching it plunge into a foaming, thundering, spray-engulfed gorge. Behind her in the forest peered Malcolm and Bold Antelope and her Seneca grandmother, waiting for her to leap into eternity. Each of them wanted her to vanish for a different reason. Malcolm to escape the guilt of his sin, Bold Antelope to banish the shame of his defeat, her Seneca grandmother to know she had escaped the white world with her orenda unblemished, to await her in eternity.
Clara swayed there, wondering why she did not leap. Duycinck watched her, gulping brandy, alternately crying “Jump” and begging her to live, to forgive him, to love him in some impossible world beyond the stars. None of them cared, Clara thought. None of them cared for Clara beyond her meaning to their hungry souls. She would jump. She would vanish into the roaring oblivion of eternity.
“No!”
Catalyntie’s arms were around her, dragging her back from the precipice. Catalyntie, her Seneca sister, who loved Clara without qualifications, reasons, demands, laws, explanations. How could she be here? Was it her real self or a spiritual shadow, lured on the wind by the distant sound of her pain?
EIGHT
IF WINTER WAS CLARA’S UNDOING, SPRING—and She-Is-Alert’s calculating brain—were mine. Winter, far from being the season of my discontent, was the icy zenith of my happiness. In New York, when the snow began to fall—and that first winter saw the streets and roads and fields heaped with it—young people bring sleighs out of their family barns and hitch them to teams of fast horses. Off they go on parties of pleasure into the shrouded countryside.
Sleighing is one of the world’s most exhilarating sports. You zoom along the roads, two or four to a sleigh, beneath great bearskin rugs, feet encased in fur-lined boots, hands in furry mittens. Best of all, no member of the older generation, prey to ague and chilblains, has the slightest inclination to join the party.
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