“Malcolm!” Clara raced after him, ignoring my call. She caught up to him as he was turning into an alehouse. An ugly red-faced woman sat at a table, slurping liquor from a mug. “Malkie!” she chortled.
For Clara, it was a vision of the way the Evil Brother was devouring the lost warrior. Malcolm’s soul had been far more damaged than her woman’s body by the debacle of their aborted child in Hampden Hall.
Clara dragged Malcolm back into the street. “What happened to us was terrible,” she said. “But I want you to know I forgave you long ago. In my heart you’re still the warrior, the soldier I dreamt of loving—and I still love.”
Malcolm turned away, as if the mere sight of her was unbearable. “I should have brought you up the Mohawk and lived where there are no laws. I was a coward.”
“That’s impossible … you … a coward,” Clara said. “There’s no man who could make you a coward. You were overwhelmed by your god, speaking in your father’s voice. I think he’s a false god. But he was still … god. Perhaps a face of god. I begin to think he wears many faces, just as men do.”
Malcolm listened mutely, understanding but not understanding. The words did not touch his heart. He was still irretrievably lost to the world of the spirit, to meaning, hope, love.
“Clara!” I stood at the head of the narrow lane, determined not to let Malcolm seduce her again. “I’ve hired the bateaumen. We leave in an hour.”
“Where are you going?” Malcolm asked.
He shook his head angrily when Clara told him our plans. “You’d better select the right men. Otherwise you may never be heard from again.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a dirty game being played along the Mohawk,” he said. “Some people in Albany are in it.”
His words were almost an echo of what Duycinck had said to us coming up the Hudson. Perhaps that made me more inclined to ignore them. “Clara!” I called. “We mustn’t waste a moment—”
I wanted to reach the Indian country as soon as possible to meet the hunters as they returned with their furs from their winter of trapping in the woods. Back at the Crown Tavern, as we packed our clothes and Duycinck railed at me for dismissing Malcolm Stapleton, Clara wondered if we should take his warning seriously.
“I have an answer to that,” I said. From my trunk I drew three pistols. I gave one to Clara, one to Duycinck, and kept one for myself.
“You expect me to shoot someone?” Clara said, fingering the carved stock, the stubby ugly barrel.
“I expect you to try, if it comes to that,” I said.
In an hour we were jolting overland to Schenectady in wagons with our trading goods and bateaumen. By afternoon we were heading up the Mohawk in a bateau manned by six oarsmen. As we struggled against the swift current, the bateaumen began talking in a language we did not understand.
“What are they saying?” Clara asked me in Seneca.
“I don’t know. It’s French,” I said, suddenly regretting my failure to study the language more diligently during my time in Madame Ardsley’s finishing school with my Van Vorst cousins.
I asked our boss boatman, a thickset Dutchman named de Groot, why they were speaking French. “We go up the lake to Quebec as often as we go up the Mohawk to Oswego,” he said.
“The lake” was the Lake of the Sacrament,29 the long narrow inland sea north of Albany that stretched almost to the Canadian border. “I thought trade with the French was forbidden by law,” I said.
“North of Albany, nothing is forbidden,” de Groot said. “Their money is as good as yours.”
They went back to talking French, leaving me with a growing suspicion that they were saying things they did not want us to hear for the worst possible reasons.
When they hauled ashore to cook an early supper and answer nature’s calls, Duycinck, who had been riding in the prow of the bateau, strolled over to me and Clara and said in a low voice: “My French isn’t very good, but I heard enough to tell you this—they’re going to cut my throat tonight and throw me into the river. They plan to enjoy you and Clara for a while—and do the same thing with you. Then they’re off to Montreal with your trading goods. They’ll come back to Albany with a story about an Indian raid. You couldn’t have found a worse set of villains if you advertised for them.”
“That’s why I gave you a pistol,” I said, struggling to control my pounding heart. “We’ll fight them.”
“Have you ever tried to shoot a man with a pistol? You can’t do it at more than ten feet. A musket can kill you from fifty yards.”
“Then they’ll kill me,” I said. “I’ll die here if that’s my fate. But I won’t give up those goods! My life is in those goods!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Duycinck growled. “You can always buy more goods. You’re a bloody heiress. If you want to live, we’ve got to disappear into the woods.”
I shook my head. “I’ll die here. Before I go back to New York and listen to them laugh at me for a fool.”
“Talk to her,” Duycinck said to Clara. “I’m running at first dark. If you want my company, come along. I’ve got a compass. We can get back to Albany in a day or two.”
“Damn you for a cowardly son of a bitch!” I said.
The little Dutchman was hurt. “Adam’s not a coward,” he said. “He’ll fight as bravely as the next man if he thinks he’s got a chance of winning. But one crookback and two women armed with pistols against seven brutes armed with muskets is not what he computes as a chance.”
He strolled off to snatch a piece of venison from the fire. “He’s right,” Clara said. “It makes no sense for us to die here.”
“It makes sense to me,” I said.
“Then I’ll die with you,” Clara said. “I owe you my life. You can have it now—or any time in the future.”
I gazed at Clara through a blur of bitter tears. Duycinck was right. The pistols were useless. “We’ll go back to Albany and find some honest men,” I said. “I can’t—I won’t—let them rob me as if I were a child.”
“Do you want some dinner?” de Groot called. Now there was no mistaking the malice in his leering smile.
“Pray to the Master of Life,” Clara whispered. “Nothing else will save us.”
I was too angry to pray. While we ate, more French flew between de Groot and the other boatmen and rage condensed like a chunk of ice in my body. As our escorts chomped on their venison and bread, I conceived a plan. I would not flee into the woods like a frightened rabbit. I would take a witness back to Albany with me.
Among the goods piled in the center of the bateau was a canoe, which we planned to use to travel down Lake Ontario to visit the village of Shining Creek, after we finished our trading at Oswego. I drew Duycinck aside and told him what I wanted to do with it. He called it madness at first but finally agreed to my plan. A canoe ride back to Albany was far more appealing than an overland trek.
As twilight deepened and the boatmen busied themselves setting up tents, I ordered the youngest of them, a short, button-nosed boy of sixteen or so named Brunck, to unlash the canoe. I said Clara and I disliked venison and wanted to fish for supper in the middle of the river. Brunck told us we could catch more fish in the shallows by the shore. The sneer on his face bespoke his contempt for female stupidity.
“Unlash it anyway,” I said.
He muttered something in Dutch about the canoe soon changing owners. The moment he got the craft in the water, I drew my pistol and put it to his head. “Get in,” I said. “Don’t make a sound, if you don’t want a bullet in your skull.”
The terrified Brunck cowered in the bottom of the canoe. Duycinck and Clara sprang into the craft and I shoved it into the current. Within minutes we had vanished downstream in the gathering darkness, Brunck in front paddling literally for his life, with my gun at his back, and Clara wielding the other paddle in the rear.
We reached Schenectady by midnight, snatched a few hours’ sleep and hired a wagon to take us to Albany in the dawn
. At 9:00 A.M. I paraded the sullen Brunck up State Street to the courthouse at gunpoint while dozens of Albanyans gaped. I demanded to see a magistrate. In ten minutes we were standing before a thin-lipped older man named Oloff Van Sluyden.
Judge Van Sluyden’s eyes were not friendly from the moment he saw us. When he heard my name, he grew visibly hostile. He listened with barely concealed contempt to my story of premeditated murder and theft and asked young Brunck in Dutch: “Is there a word of truth to this?”
“Not a word,” said Brunck, readily picking up the signal. “It’s all female moonshine. They ran off when one of them got it into their heads that we was in love with them. An uglier pair of whores I never seen. You couldn’t have got me to stick one of’m for a hundred pound.”
“Do you have a witness to this attempted battery?” Judge Van Sluyden asked me.
Duycinck told his story. The judge looked sourly at him. “You’re in this woman’s employ?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Is this a scheme to defraud these poor fellows of their wages?”
“No, Your Honor. I’m ready to swear—”
Judge Van Sluyden was too busy working himself into a rage to let Duycinck swear to anything. “Do you think you can go to Oswego with an order from me to repossess your goods and clap honest men in jail—on hearsay evidence like this? Get out of here before I arrest all three of you for vagrancy and false testimony and give you a hundred lashes each at the whipping post!”
Outside, I stared down State Street in the thin March sunshine, while Duycinck urged me to go back to New York. The whole thing was unspeakable, intolerable. But what could a woman—or two women—do about it? We needed a man’s protection—or help. A man might persuade some other honest men to do something about de Groot and his thieves. But where could I find this paragon in a town where we did not have a single friend?
“It’s exactly as Malcolm warned us—a dirty game with some in Albany in on it,” Clara said.
Malcolm Stapleton. The vision of that morning when he defeated Bold Antelope leaped in my memory. Was he capable of helping us? He looked like a dirty dissolute sot. That could simply be evidence of his poverty. He was still a pine tree of a man. Could I ask help from someone whom I had told to his face I considered lower than the worst scum in Albany?
No—but Clara could ask him. Maybe there was something to be said for a forgiving heart, after all—although I still vowed never to tolerate one in my body.
I outlined the proposal to Clara. “Cry a little,” I said. “Appeal to his manhood.”
Clara curtly told me she would not have to descend to such hypocrisy. In a half hour, Malcolm Stapleton stood on the wharf. “Do you have any money?” he asked me.
“Not a great deal,” I lied.
“You’ll have to pay more than bateaumen’s wages if you want men to risk a bullet in the belly for you,” he said.
“Does that include you?” I said.
“I don’t want a farthing of your miserable money. I’m doing this for Clara’s sake. She’s told me what you’ve done for her. There must be some good in you, even if it escapes me.”
I swallowed this insult and agreed to pay triple wages to any man Malcolm persuaded to join us. In an hour he had three men on the wharf, each armed with a long gleaming musket and a cartridge case with thirty rounds of bullets and powder. I can still remember their names: Peter Finch, Andrew Berner, and Michael Malone. They were all younger than Malcolm. “I can vouch for these fellows,” Malcolm said. “We’ve spent time in the woods together, learning to be rangers. When the war begins with the French, we’ll be the first to fight.”
“Why should we have a war?” I said.
“The French want one. They see no other way to stop the English from spreading over this whole continent. But you’ll never hear that from anyone in Albany. They’re making too much money trading with the murdering bastards.”
I marveled at the confident way Malcolm spoke. Despite his sloppy clothes, he was much more than a dispirited vagabond. Clara’s would-be soldier had become a man during his adventurous year in the north. But I stopped short of endorsing his readiness to fight the French.
“Let’s regain our goods and worry about a war some other time,” I said.
“These men don’t give a damn for your goods—or your money, for that matter,” Malcolm said. “They want to deal with de Groot and his gang of traitors. Right, men?”
A growl of agreement came from Peter and Andrew and Michael. “They’re patriots, sick of the way the king’s interests are being sold by the greedy politicians in this traitorous town.”
I had the good sense to say nothing to this speech. I saw its galvanizing effect on Malcolm’s three followers. I also realized that Malcolm Stapleton had acquired some interesting information about the way things worked in Albany. I had never forgotten my grandfather’s suspicion that my parents and the others had been murdered by men in Albany who profited from their deaths.
We hired horses who carried us to Schenectady in a few hours. By midafternoon, we headed up the Mohawk in a large canoe. We traveled at twice the pace of the heavily laden bateau we were pursuing. By dark we had reached the campsite from which Clara and I and Duycinck had fled. “They can’t be more than ten miles ahead of us,” Malcolm said. “Twenty at the most. Let’s keep going.”
Far into the night the men bent to their paddles. Finally Malcolm ordered them ashore and sent Peter Finch up the riverbank on foot. He came back in an hour to report he had located de Groot’s camp. “We’ll attack at first light,” Malcolm said.
“Are there enough of us?” I said. De Groot had six men.
“There’s enough,” Malcolm said.
We slept in relays until the first hint of the sun began greying the eastern sky. Malcolm assembled his men. He told Clara and me to stay with Duycinck, guarding the canoe.
“I’m coming with you,” I said. “I’ve got a pistol. I want the privilege of killing that son of a bitch de Groot.”
Malcolm shrugged and put me at the end of his little column. For an hour we followed the river until Peter Finch, in the lead, held up his hand. We filtered into the woods on two sides of de Groot and his bateaumen, asleep in three tents in a clearing by the river.
The sky was brightening but Malcolm ordered everyone to stay among the trees until he gave the signal to attack. “What are you waiting for?” I said.
“Enough light to aim a gun,” Malcolm said. The light along the river was still grey and thin.
A half hour later, as the sky began to redden, Malcolm borrowed my pistol, aimed it in the air, and pulled the trigger. The bateaumen came tumbling out of the tents, led by de Groot with his musket in his hand. “Get down to the river,” he called, crouching low. “Form around the boat.”
“De Groot,” Malcolm called. “I’ve got men all around you. Anyone who tries to launch that boat will be shot down without mercy. We’re here to regain Miss Van Vorst’s stolen goods. We don’t want to kill anyone unless you make it a necessity.”
“It’s Stapleton, goddamn him,” de Groot said to the men around him. “Here’s my answer, you English son of a bitch.”
He fired his gun in the direction of Malcolm’s voice. The bullet hissed through the trees a foot away from me. So that is what death in battle sounds like, I thought. It did not frighten me. I liked it. I liked being exposed to the sort of danger men claimed no woman could endure.
The bullet did not frighten Malcolm either. He took careful aim and pulled his musket’s trigger. The crash deafened me and the gush of acrid smoke from the barrel almost blinded and choked me. Other muskets were booming from the woods. The men around de Groot fired back but soon three of them were sprawled on the green grass, dead or badly wounded.
Another bateauman raced up to the Dutchman clutching a bloody arm and shouted: “It’s death down by the boat. They shoot anyone who goes near it.”
“Load and follow me,” de Groot shouted. He and three o
thers still on their feet raced toward the woods on the north side of the clearing. Malcolm fired another round and dropped the last man as he entered the trees.
Peter Finch crept through the trees to join me and Malcolm. “Should we go after them?” he asked, his eyes shining with excitement.
Malcolm shook his head. “De Groot would have all the advantages on the run in the woods.”
He sent Michael Malone back to bring Clara and Duycinck up to the clearing in the big canoe. Matter-of-factly, we buried de Groot’s four dead men in unmarked graves. Malcolm turned to me and said: “You’ve recovered your property. Now what? Have you had enough of the north woods? Is it back to safe comfortable Manhattan Island?”
“I’m going to Oswego,” I said. “Will you come with me? You and your men?”
“From what you told me about my father, I should go back to New York as soon as possible—”
“Then Clara and I and Adam will go on alone. I think you must know by now our fate is in these goods. We’re as determined as any soldier to conquer or die.”
“Let me talk to my men,” Malcolm said.
While Malcolm conferred with his recruits on the other side of the clearing, Clara glowered at me. “He should go back to his father.”
“Why should you give a damn for him or his father after what they did to you?” I said.
Before Clara could answer me, Malcolm sauntered across the clearing. “How much will you pay?” he asked.
“I’ll double the wages you’re getting, which are already treble.”
The thought of risking so much money almost made me ill. But I needed this glowering giant’s protection. In my mind he was still lower than the lowest scum in Albany for what he had done to Clara. But he was a fighter—and that was what I needed to survive in this vicious northern world, where nothing was forbidden.
As we took over the bateau and prepared to resume our journey up the Mohawk, I noticed Clara gazing at Malcolm. He was issuing crisp orders to Duycinck and Peter Finch, who would lead the way in the canoe. He wanted them to stay alert for any sign of de Groot and his two friends. They were more than capable of ambushing them.
Remember the Morning Page 15
