There seemed to be only one somewhat forlorn hope—Malcolm’s lawsuit to recover his New Jersey lands. This prime topsoil, five square miles in extent, already in cultivation, could be borrowed against almost indefinitely. We decided to go to London and prosecute the case personally. After years of legal paralysis, it seemed hopeless to try to accomplish anything at a distance.
I also needed a London merchant to back me in New York and ship me goods at prices that would let me meet the competition. Much as it pained me, I saw it was time to take my grandfather’s advice and submit to English power.
When I told Malcolm this side of my plan, he laughed sardonically and said: “Don’t tell me you’re going to start obeying the law.” Our economic debacle on the Mohawk had shaken his confidence in me. He still yearned for Clara. We were far from a happy couple.
Malcolm went off to search the wharfs for a ship to England. I wrote an ad for the Gazette, advertising the Mohawk lands for sale or rent—and went over to the Universal Store to discuss with Duycinck the possibility of hiring Mrs. Hughson to manage the place while we were in London. She had two daughters who were old enough to work as clerks. She seemed to be making a success of the tavern she owned with her husband and Clara.
Duycinck declined to say yes or no to the proposal. “Why so doubtful?” I asked.
The little hunchback squirmed and twisted his face. “There are certain points to her character I’d rather not discuss,” he said.
“That’s not good enough. Tell me the truth or—”
I had reduced terrorizing Duycinck to an art. He capitulated instantly. “She’s a fence, madam. She and her husband deal in stolen goods. I bought some stuff from them. But I stopped. It made me too nervous. I could feel the hemp around my neck.”
I was stunned. I knew there was random thievery in New York but I never realized it was a business. “Does Clara know?”
“I think so. I’ve never discussed it with her. I’ve never discussed it with anyone.”
“I’m glad you stopped,” I said. “But why did you start? Did you have so little confidence in me as a businesswoman?”
“Your success or failure had nothing to do with it, madam. I sold the stuff off the books and kept the money for myself.”
I was deeply, painfully hurt. I had come to regard Adam as a trusted friend as well as an employee. “What have I done to deserve such treachery?” I said.
Adam tried to play the man at first. “You don’t pay me enough to satisfy my appetite for good rum and pretty girls,” he said.
He crumbled under my accusing stare. I paid him very well and he knew it. “Maybe this hump on my back makes me a kind of outlaw,” he said.
The fact that the little fellow confessed his own guilt to protect me from Sarah Hughson was to his credit. “I wish I could pay you more,” I said. “But we’re closer to ruin than to prosperity at present. You know that. Still, in return for your somewhat peculiar honesty, the rest of your indenture is canceled forthwith.”
“I’ll spread the news when I celebrate tonight. Catalyntie Stapleton has a woman’s heart—even if she wields a wicked scalping knife.”
“That was a terrible mistake. I think it’s changed Malcolm’s feeling toward me.”
“I’ve told Malcolm he should have scalped that swine Van Sluyden for you.”
It was bewildering to discover that this little man, a total cynic about most people, admired me. I thanked him for his support and turned to go.
Adam seized my arm. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone—even Clara—what I said about Sarah Hughson. Her behemoth of a husband might wring my neck.”
“I don’t know what to say to Clara.”
“Nor do I,” Adam said.
Back at the house I found Malcolm waving a newspaper. He had located more than a ship. A fine brigantine, Raleigh, was just in from London. She would be sailing as soon as they loaded a cargo of grain. The captain had brought the latest London papers and they were full of momentous news. Malcolm read the story aloud to me from his favorite paper, The Craftsman.
“The time of the Patriots has come. The Great Corrupter has finally been called to account by our gracious King. Prime Minister Walpole has been forced to resign his place and the nation and the empire confidently expect that with him will go the army of vipers, bloodsuckers, thieves, and arsekissers who have so long disgraced the halls of our government. Not a few citizens hope the Great Thief himself will be placed on trial for his innumerable peculations and treacheries—but that is probably too much to expect from our benumbed benighted age. Perhaps, once the Patriots sweep out the accumulated filth of Walpole’s reign, there will come a time for retribution. But for the present, let us simply rejoice in the nation’s salvation.”
Malcolm was ecstatic. He saw a divine intervention in our favor. Justice was returning to the British Empire and he would be one of the beneficiaries. Remembering how much my Dutch friends admired Walpole, I was not so sure the change was for the better. But I had learned to hold my tongue in matters political.
I decided to take five-year-old Hugh Stapleton to London with us. I persuaded our cook Shirley’s daughter, Amelia, to come along as his nurse. To manage the Universal Store, I enlisted the wife of my old friend Guert Cuyler. She was a buxom intelligent Dutchwoman named Sophia, who was eager to try it. Her mother had managed a store for her late father, Harman Kierstede, a successful merchant of my grandfather’s era.
As we began packing for our trip, we were interrupted by a visitor—our old friend Captain Hartshorne. The doleful countenance, dirty coat, and tattered wig that had characterized him at Oswego had vanished. He was dressed in the latest style, a bright blue waistcoat, a mauve swallowtail coat, and buff breeches. The silver buckles on his shoes must have cost him a year’s pay. A new optimism pervaded his fleshy face.
“I’m on my way back to old England,” he said. “I thought I’d give my friends the Stapletons a call.”
Malcolm was delighted—and soon learned the reason for his military father’s transformation. The death of Hartshorne’s bachelor uncle—his father’s brother—had left him a fortune almost as large as the one he had gambled away ten years ago. He was to receive it only if he swore a solemn oath in front of a clergyman never to touch cards or dice again. Malcolm easily persuaded the captain to join us aboard the Raleigh and insisted on putting him up in one of our spare rooms until we sailed.
This hospitality proved useful. A day or two later, another knock on the door introduced us to one of the most attractive young men I had ever seen in New York. William Johnson was about six feet tall, with a muscular physique that emanated vitality and a convivial Irish manner that more than matched his handsome face. He had seen my ad about the Mohawk store and was interested in managing it. He had plans to settle on the river to supervise the settlement of some lands belonging to his uncle, Sir Peter Warren. With Captain Hartshorne on hand to explain the politics of the fur trade and glorify Malcolm with a recitation of the Battle of the Bracken, the young Irishman was quickly convinced that he had found friends and business partners. Naturally pugnacious, like most of his race, he had no fear of the Albany conspirators, if they had the stomach for another foray against the store. He had a half dozen relatives with him, all of whom knew how to use a gun.
With our businesses in good hands, Malcolm and I sailed for England aboard Raleigh. The captain was a garrulous old salt named Jones, who predicted England would be at war with France within the year. Malcolm spent much of our six weeks at sea discussing with Hartshorne the fall of the Great Corrupter, Walpole, and the transformation they were both sure it would make in English politics.
I remained skeptical. I had no faith in moral transformations—especially English ones. I spent the voyage teaching little Hugh arithmetic. By the time we landed, the boy could add, subtract, and multiply simple sums and Hartshorne declared he was a prodigy.
Hartshorne’s predictions of a political resurrection had Malcolm in a state of
wild excitement as we glided up the winding Thames with the incoming tide, admiring the neat green fields and handsome houses that dotted the countryside along the river. Compared to forested mountainous America, England was one vast garden. It all looked so peaceful, so well ordered, I was almost ready to believe Hartshorne’s optimism.
Soon London appeared on the horizon. The dome of a great church, identified by Hartshorne as St. Paul’s, rose above the numerous spires of lesser churches. Malcolm stayed at the rail with Hartshorne while I retreated to the cabin to pack our trunk. Through an open porthole I overheard my husband say: “You can’t begin to realize how much it will mean to me to have a decent competence of my own to put me on an equal footing with my wife.”
“No doubt, no doubt,” Hartshorne said. “She does seem a bit strong-willed.”
The words stung. So this was all I had to show for my years of trying to persuade him to love me—paying his tavern bills and the cost of keeping him in good clothes to play the politician in New York. He still resented my insistence on managing our finances. A bitterness crept into my heart that I found impossible to wish away.
With Hartshorne as our guide, we landed at a wharf not far from the remains of the old royal palace of Westminster.38 Pointing downstream to where boatmen were ferrying people back and forth between two landings, Hartshorne remarked that it was the route King James II used to escape to France when he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. “They say he dropped the Great Seal in the river midway across,” Hartshorne said.
Not far away were the twin towers of St. Stephen’s Chapel, where Parliament met. The residence of the Speaker of the House of Commons was a huge stone pile, more imposing than the chapel. We hired a coach from a nearby inn and drove down a wide street full of majestic old grey stone buildings around which numerous taverns clustered. “This is New Palace Yard,” Hartshorne said. “The law courts. You’ll no doubt be spending a lot of time here.”
Next came narrower streets lined with cross-timbered houses which Hartshorne described as “ancient.” The streets had picturesque names, such as “Thieving Lane” and “The Little Sanctuary,” so-called because it was once a place where fugitive criminals could escape arrest. It was still populated by “the worst sort,” Hartshorne said, adding it was “not a place to frequent after dark.” A glance at the ugly faces and ragged clothes of the passersby readily convinced us that the captain knew whereof he spoke.
We progressed up King Street to Whitehall, site of a palace which had burned down forty years ago, prompting the royal family to move to St. James. The nobility rushed to buy the land and now it was populated largely by “great folks,” Hartshorne said. He pointed to spacious threestory mansions in red brick or ochre, some overlooking the Thames, and reeled off the names of their owners—all dukes and marquises.
Soon we were in the heart of the city, and the streets and names became a blur. London was immense. Hartshorne said it had upward of six hundred thousand people. Three Amsterdams, I thought. Around us traffic thickened, a confusion of coaches and wagons and open carriages and a sprinkling of sedan chairs. These enclosed little houses made of leather, carried on the shoulders of two sturdy men, shocked Malcolm. “I didn’t think you could get free Englishmen to do such degrading work,” he said.
“Hunger is a great persuader,” Hartshorne said in his offhand way.
I was fascinated by the incredible number of shops, each with a colorful sign swinging from it. When we passed through Leicester Square, Hartshorne pointed to the huge mansion at one end as the residence of the Prince of Wales. In front of it were four crude wooden shops. Elsewhere, whole streets of shops were devoted to a single industry, such as snuff or candle making or cabinet making.
On Holborn Street, our carriage was brought to a halt by an enormous crowd following a man and woman standing in a cart. There were women with young children in the procession, as well as couples smiling and chatting as if they were going to a play. “Someone on their way to be hanged at Tyburn,” Hartshorne explained. “It’s only about a half mile off, on the Oxford-Bayswater Road.”
He leaned out of the carriage and asked a man selling sweetmeats what crimes the offenders had committed. “Thievery” was the response. “They was in service. Caught them with a half dozen spoons in their pockets.”
“How many have they hanged this month?” Hartshorne asked.
“It’s been brisk. Twenty-five!” the man said. “I’ve sold out me tray almost every day.”
“Twenty-five in a month?” Malcolm said. “We don’t hang five in a year in New York.”
“Maybe you should multiply that number a bit,” Hartshorne said. “The town would be a lot more quiet.”
Finally we reached our destination—the White Horse Inn on Piccadilly, which was run by a Hartshorne relative, John Williams. He was a short rotund man with a red nose and vivid red dewlaps under his chin that made him resemble a rooster. He regarded Hartshorne with amazement, as if he had come back from the dead.
“I thought your head would be decorating some redskin’s lodgepole long since,” he roared.
Hartshorne introduced Malcolm and me as his “American” friends. Williams stepped back to get a better look at Malcolm’s bulk. “Are they all this size?” he said.
Hartshorne shook his head. “They come in all shapes, like us,” he said. “His mother was Scottish. I think that’s where the size originates.”
Hartshorne said we were all eager to hear the latest news about the political situation. Had the Patriots formed a government? Was Walpole’s army of placemen about to join him in headlong retreat?
Williams shook his head and beckoned us into his empty taproom, where he opened a bottle of sherry to celebrate our arrival. “There’s naught but trouble in the wind,” he said. “The Patriots is fighting among themselves and Walpole’s army shows no inclination to retreat.”
He began discussing Parliamentary politics, with a profusion of names and nicknames that left even Hartshorne confused. Malcolm looked completely bewildered. Though I paid little or no attention to politics, I was able to grasp the essence of the story. Walpole had left behind him two major generals in his political army, the brothers Pelham. The elder was the Duke of Newcastle, who had immense estates and influence in the north, around the city of that name. With twenty-five thousand voters among his tenants, he controlled a formidable bloc of seats in Parliament. As secretary of state, he had vast numbers of government jobs in his control. His brother Henry, as paymaster of the forces, had access to millions of pounds for bribes.
“But the country gentlemen,” Hartshorne said. “What’s happened to them?”
“Tories, most of’m. The king won’t let one of’m in the cabinet. He claims they’re all Jacobites at heart. He may be right.”
“I thought the Patriots would end that old quarrel between the parties,” Hartshorne said. “To me the names Whig and Tory are meaningless.” 39
“You’ve spent too much time in America,” Williams said. “They’ll be Whigs and Tories as long as James Edward Stuart is sittin’ across the channel, backed by French money and politics.”40
“You mean the Tories are loyal to the Pretender?” Malcolm said. “There are still people of that persuasion in England?”
“Hah!” Williams said. “I’ve had my windows broke once a week since Walpole went down. There’s plenty in London who are ready to throw rocks at my sign. But it’ll swing as long as I’m proprietor and my son after me.”
“The White Horse is the emblem of the House of Hanover,” Hartshorne explained to an amazed Malcolm Stapleton. Thanks to my thorough grounding in recent English history from Harman Bogardus, I knew this was the family of the current king, George II. The British had imported them from Germany when William of Orange failed to produce an heir.
The next morning we rose early and with directions from our innkeeper set out for St. Martin’s Lane, where our lawyer, Peter Van Ness, had rooms. As we strolled down this narrow
winding street, past numerous shops of cabinetmakers and other craftsmen, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a riot. A mob of several hundred people had gathered before a brick house with barred windows in the basement. On the sidewalk lay about a dozen women, most of them apparently dead. Friends and relatives wept over them.
“Murder the bastards!” screamed one woman. A rock sailed through the air and demolished a window on an upper floor.
Malcolm asked a ruddy-cheeked older man on the fringe of the crowd what had happened. “The constables was drunk last night and they gathered up all the streetwalkers they could find and stuffed them into the loft of the Round House here with all the doors and windows shut,” the man said. “There wasn’t enough air in the place to keep a canary alive. They was piled on top of each other like logs. The poor women died like pigs in the slaughterhouse. Is this arbitrary power at work or ain’t it? What a hell of a country!”41
His words worked him into such a rage, the old man pried a paving stone out of the road and demolished another window of the Round House. “Burn it around their ears,” he howled.
The mob stormed into the house and began throwing furniture out the windows. Soon flames and smoke swirled from the top story. Bells clanged and tradesmen rushed from their shops. Down the street came a bright red fire engine, pulled by a half dozen men. New York had bought two of these machines, which were a great improvement on buckets.
At first the crowd refused to let the firemen into the house. A magistrate appeared and threatened to read the riot act. That would enable the authorities to call for the army. The mob fell back and sullenly allowed the firemen to run their hoses into the building. Malcolm volunteered to help work the pumper that sent the water gushing up the hoses to douse the flames.
The old man Malcolm questioned now began to harangue the crowd. “This wouldn’t happen in a country with an English king. We’ve got a king who speaks better French and German than English. Three cheers for the true king over the water!”42
Remember the Morning Page 31
