The crowd sent up three treasonous cheers with the greatest enthusiasm. Malcolm could not believe his ears. We continued down St. Martin’s Lane to Slaughter’s Tavern, where we asked for Peter Van Ness.
“The American poet?” said the smiling proprietor. “He’s no doubt hard at work upstairs.”
We mounted to a room in the rear of the third floor and discovered our once hard-eyed young New York attorney had in fact become a poet. He wore a loose-fitting kimono and skullcap, making him look more like a Jew than a Dutchman. His desk was littered with books; a skull peered at us atop one pile. He was pleasantly surprised to see us, but treated us more like creatures from another life.
“New York seems so far away and long ago,” he said.
Malcolm’s case against Georgianna Stapleton? Oh yes, he would give us the name of the barrister he had hired. He had heard nothing from him for months—perhaps a year. Van Ness was far more interested in telling us that he was publishing a book of poems and through one of the many literary men who drank at Slaughter’s, he hoped to win the approval—and generosity—of the great Tory politician Lord Bolingbroke. There was a very good chance that Bolingbroke might soon become prime minister—which would mean fame and limitless fortune for his protégés.
I strongly suspected literature had stolen our lawyer’s wits. He read us several poems, which extolled the “rustic peace” of the American forest, the unspoiled beauty of the Hudson or the Mohawk River. I did not associate peace or beauty with either place. For me the forest would always be haunted by terror and death—and the Hudson and the Mohawk were no more than tedious highways. Van Ness called his poems Iroquois Odes—a title which had already won him a publisher, but which struck me as absurd.
Restraining my sharp tongue, I let Malcolm congratulate Van Ness and wish him every success. He gave us Georgianna Stapleton’s address and the name and address of our English lawyer. Malcolm decided to visit his brother first. We trekked back down St. Martin’s Street and along a dozen more streets to Golden Square, a splendid set of four-story houses around a fenced green park. Strollers readily guided us to the house next to the Portuguese Embassy.
A maid led us to a well-furnished parlor, with a marble mantel and overdoors enriched by scrollwork and flowers. Georgianna Stapleton swept into the room in a dress which was the equal of anything I had seen in Amsterdam. It was a rich damask, embroidered with golden lace, cut low in the front to display her splendid breasts.
“Stepson!” she said, boldly kissing Malcolm on the mouth. “And his commercial wife. What brings you to London?”
“My wife is here to do business on behalf of her store in New York, madam,” Malcolm said. “I’m here to see my brother and discuss the matter of my father’s estate with him—and perhaps with you.”
“Jamey left London for the Scottish border six months ago. We’ve bought him a commission in the army.”
“He’s only fifteen,” Malcolm said.
“Most ensigns are fourteen,”43 Georgianna said. “Governor Nicolls thinks it will be the making of him. Jamey wanted to go.”
“Is it part of your plot, madam, to hope for his early death, so you can completely loot our estate?”
Infuriated, Georgianna returned this insult to Malcolm with interest. “Once and for all, let’s make a few things clear. Hampden Hall was not built with your mother’s money. When she died that was all gone, thanks to your father’s feckless ways. I procured him credit to build the house and play the rich man. Whatever money I spend from his estate, which is still up to the chimneys in debt, I’ve earned it. You might even say I’m still earning it, since without Mr. Nicolls’s intervention, it would have been sold for its debts long ago.”
“I don’t believe a word you say, madam,” Malcolm said. “I never have and never will.”
Georgianna’s smile became a sneer. “Still a booby, aren’t you,” she said. “Do you think you can win a war with us? Mr. Nicolls sits in Parliament for the Duke of Newcastle. He and his brother, Henry Pelham, will soon be running the country. This Patriot stuff is so much moonshine.”
While Malcolm fumed, my ever-active brain was concluding that Georgianna Stapleton’s comments about the estate had a ring of authenticity. This was a woman who had rescued herself from the pit of poverty by her wits and beauty and she was clearly proud of it. There was a mystery here—a mystery I had long sensed about the late George Stapleton—and I did not know the answer.
We left Georgianna’s house after she and Malcolm exchanged more warm words about her treatment of Jamey—and she triumphantly informed me Robert Nicolls was about to marry a Miss White, who had a dowry of one hundred thousand pounds. A furious Malcolm rushed to Old Palace Yard with me gasping in his wake. He was much too angry for me to discuss my intuition about Georgianna. In the Yard, we quickly located our lawyer, Thomas McDuffie. He was a small morose man, whose office was cluttered with dust-covered lawbooks.
“Stapleton? Stapleton?” he said, his snub-nosed face a blank. It took a paragraph of explanation for Malcolm to refresh his memory. “Oh, the American will! A very difficult case, young man. I’ve applied for a writ of mandamus, which would have returned the matter to a court in your colony, but the will has been filed and executed here as well as in New York, which complicates the matter—”
McDuffie paused and his eyes drifted from Malcolm to me. “Let’s be blunt. How much money are you willing to spend to settle this?”
“What do you mean?” Malcolm said.
“I mean a bribe or two. Or maybe three.”
“I will pay no man a bribe. With Walpole down, won’t there be a restoration of honesty and integrity here?” Malcolm said.
McDuffie regarded him with the sort of kindly smile people give harmless lunatics. “When that day comes, you may also look for Jesus Christ and a brace of Archangels to sail up the Thames. It will be the advent of the Second Coming, I assure you,” McDuffie said.
“How much money are you talking about?” I asked.
“At least two thousand pounds. Possibly three.”
“We don’t have it.”
McDuffie sighed. Hurling more legal terms at us, he made it clear that he thought we had no case. “But it was my mother’s money that was taken from me,” Malcolm said. “I heard her say a hundred times that the land was bought with her money and it would come to me—”
“Do you have a copy of a marriage settlement?” McDuffie asked. Malcolm shook his head. “Where did your mother come from?” McDuffie asked.
“The Scottish lowlands. The town was called Thornhill.”
McDuffie became almost cheerful. “In Dumfries. My home county. What was her maiden name?”
“McCullough.”
“Was she related to the McCulloughs?”
He rapidly explained that the McCulloughs were the most powerful family in that part of Scotland. They had led a revolt in 1715, which had attempted to place James Edward Stuart on his father’s throne.
“I never heard her mention such a thing,” Malcolm said.
“She wouldn’t, by any means. Half her family was wiped out in it. I lost a few of mine. The McDuffies were retainers of the laird, David McCullough. He was a thorough Jacobite.”
“She taught me nothing but loyalty to the king!” Malcolm said.
“But did she say which king?” McDuffie said, with a lively sneer. “There’s a good many of us who toast the king and then pass our tankards over the nearest water glass to signify which king we mean.”
I was enjoying this more and more. But I said nothing. I could see Malcolm was all but undone by the idea that his mother may have been a Jacobite. McDuffie decided Malcolm should go to Thornhill and consult his mother’s family. If they could testify to a marriage settlement which restricted the disposition of his mother’s money, it might affect the validity of his father’s will.
Back in the White Horse Inn, I urged Malcolm to head for Scotland as soon as possible. It was costing us a pound a day to live i
n London. The less time we spent here, the better. He agreed without enthusiasm. Neither of us imagined McDuffie was sending him north to make the most demoralizing discovery of his life.
SEVEN
IN NEW YORK, CLARA’S LIFE WAS moving down another path, crowded with the faces and voices she encountered each night at Hughson’s. Primary among them was Caesar, who seemed to take savage pleasure in mocking her silent reproaches by recruiting in front of her eyes for his plot to seize New York. Lately he had been buying drinks for six Africans who had been captured aboard a Spanish merchant ship taken by a privateer off Cuba and sold as slaves in New York. They maintained they were free men and should be held as prisoners of war for exchange, just as white sailors were. But no one paid any attention to them. They had been bought by George Fowler to work in his distillery.
Clara’s pity for them knew no bounds. Especially for Antonio, the youngest and boldest of them. He was a handsome fellow, straight-backed, with broad shoulders and fierce warrior eyes. He told her in his halting English that he had been engaged to marry a woman whose freedom he had bought with his earnings as a sailor. Now she was weeping for him in Cuba, while he faced a lifetime of slavery here in New York.
“Clara’s been praying for you every day since she heard your fate,” Caesar said.
Antonio glared contemptuously at Clara. “I say no prayers to her God or any other god,” Antonio said. “Why should I pray to a power that’s condemned me to slavery a thousand miles from my home?”
“If you took up arms and won your freedom,” Caesar said, “you wouldn’t have to pray to any god.”
“You mean kill old Fowler?” Antonio asked. He was not taking Caesar seriously. “Don’t they hang people in New York for that sort of thing?”
“They wouldn’t hang you. If all goes well, they’d all be dead—or our prisoners. Others would act with you. Are you interested?”
“Of course I’m interested,” Antonio said. “I’d gladly kill old Fowler and his whole miserable family and many more.”
Caesar smiled mockingly at Clara. See? his smile said. See how I’m going to win my freedom?
Three hours later, Caesar was back in the taproom. The shutters were closed, all the lights out except a lone candle. On the bar were a dozen silver forks and a silver plate and a lush black bearskin coat—Caesar’s swag for the night. With him was his button-nosed moon-faced helper, Cuffee. He was wearing his usual expensive clothes—castoffs from his master’s wardrobe. His owner was one of the city’s wealthiest men, Adolphus Philipse.
“What do you think of this?” Caesar said.
“I don’t think anything of it. I don’t even see it,” Clara said.
“You got to admit he’s the best burglar in New York, Clara,” Cuffee said.
Clara said nothing.
“He’s going to be king of New York. Going to make you his queen,” Cuffee said. “You is all he talks about when he’s drunk.”
“Shut your mouth for once, Cuff,” Caesar said.
Clara said nothing. She was keeping her promise of silence. But she had stopped teaching Caesar to read. She had refused to let him touch her again. She was letting Caesar go his own destructive way—hoping—occasionally praying—that he would change, that his desire for her would persuade him to abandon his mad scheme to conquer New York.
Sarah Hughson’s heavy steps echoed on the stairs. Sarah’s hair was down, she was wearing a green nightrobe and little else. Her cheeks were flushed. There was not much doubt that she had just finished a tumble with her husband. How she loved that big stupid lout. It was a puzzle, how an intelligent woman could become all but enslaved by desire. Was Catalyntie the same way with Malcolm in private—forever gazing hungrily at him? The thought made Clara flinch. She almost wished she had not been born a woman.
Sarah Hughson gazed admiringly at the loot. “Good stuff,” she said. “Where did you get it?” It was always important to know where stolen property came from. It made disposing of it far less risky.
“Fowler’s. Her upstairs maid left a back window unlocked. I’ll take care of her.”
“Good. I’ll give you three pounds for the lot.”
“Four. The coat alone is worth five pounds.”
“All right. Tell Mary to put it away in the usual place, Clara. I’ll give Caesar the money from the drawer.”
Sarah Hughson counted out four pounds in Spanish gold dollars, the common medium of exchange in New York. Tomorrow, John Hughson would sell the silver plate and candlesticks to a ship captain sailing for the West Indies or England. The bearskin coat would sell in Boston, with a coastal shipper. Everyone profited. Only the very rich owners, George and Eugenia Fowler, were the losers.
Was that wrong? Clara wondered again, after Mary Burton had put the goods away in the secret room beneath the stairs. Eugenia Fowler was a despicable woman. Her husband made a fortune selling cheap rum to New York. He gave little to the poor. He was a friend of Johannes Van Vorst. Why not steal from him?
As Clara walked home to Maiden Lane in the warm spring night, the question ached in her mind. She found John Ury reading a book by the light of a single flickering candle. He seldom slept more than four hours a night. He had nightmares from his years as a priest on the run in England. Impulsively, she asked him what he thought of Caesar’s thievery.
“There are some philosophers who argue that people living under tyranny can resist it by any means in their power,” he told her. Since slavery was the greatest of all tyrannies, Caesar’s petty crimes could easily be justified in the eyes of God.
Not for the first time, Clara was struck by how much more loving and forgiving Ury’s Catholic God was than the stern deity the Protestants worshipped. The Protestant God forgave no one and demanded ferocious punishments for sin. The Catholic God forgave sins again and again in the ritual of confession. Surely this was closer to the spirit of Jesus, which both churches claimed to represent.
But was any of it true? To guide her, Clara depended on her orenda, the inner voice that separated spiritual truth from falsehood. Over the past four months, she had felt great power flowing from this priest. She had become convinced that he was a holy man. Not once had he suggested she give herself to him. He remained immune to the invitations of the whores who crowded Hughson’s taproom.
Mary Burton, still one of Clara’s boarders, set out to seduce him. Ury ignored her thinly veiled invitations to sleep with her. Finally, Mary wept and said she loved him and wanted to marry him. It revealed a startling degree of ambition in Mary’s misshapen soul. Few slatterns like her ever dreamed of marrying a man as well educated and well born as John Ury.
Ury patiently explained to Mary that he had chosen not to marry, so he could preach the gospel more fully. “There are two kinds of love in this world, my dear Mary,” Ury said. “One the ancient Greek philosophers called eros. This is the love most men and women know—the love of passion and possession. The other nobler love is called agape. That is the love Jesus preached. It is purely spiritual. It seeks nothing for itself.”
“Sounds loony to me,” Mary said.
To Clara the concept of the two loves was like a burst of brilliant light in her mind and heart. For the first time she understood herself and her place in the spiritual order of things. She understood her youthful fascination with Jesus. She understood why she and Ury shared a special sympathy for the slaves and whores of the city.
“I’m beginning to think I’d like to know more about your Catholic God,” Clara said. “Is there any point in praying to Him? Why did He create so many different races? Why does He permit wars and slavery?”
Ury impressed her by admitting he did not know the answer to those deep questions. He could only tell her that prayer had enlarged his soul and filled him with love for his fellow men and women. Ultimately, he only knew that God had called him to follow in Jesus’s footsteps. That was the heart of his priesthood.
From his trunk Ury drew a book about women from Spain and other Catho
lic countries, who had been given special gifts from the being he called the Holy Spirit. He suspected Clara possessed similar gifts. But first she would have to accept baptism and make a confession of faith. Clara resisted until Ury assured her that she could continue to believe in the Manitou, the Master of Life, the Evil Brother, and the other gods of her Indian faith. These were simply different ways of recognizing the Catholic God’s presence in the world.
In a ritual witnessed by Sarah Hughson and her husband, Clara permitted the priest to baptize her. He trickled water through her hair and anointed her forehead with sacred oils. She felt no different after the ceremony. That night, at Ury’s urging, she knelt at the window of her room and opened her mind and heart to God. The priest had told her to seek nothing, to ask no favors, simply to imagine herself as a lover waiting for her beloved.
The stars blazed in the inky depths of the heavens. She had read another book Father Ury had given her, by an Italian follower of a man named Galileo, describing the wonders of the universe. The earth was not the center of creation as it seemed but merely a speck in an immense abyss, with the sun and other planets and the moon for companions and the stars at a distance beyond imagining. This God was infinitely greater than the Manitou of her childhood. She thought of Jesus, his mysterious life, his brutal death.
Suddenly a woman’s voice whispered in her soul: forgive. A strange sweetness flooded her flesh; a mixture of music and forest sounds murmured around her. The raucous clamor of the city vanished. She was alone on a vast river, winding through a forest of brilliant green trees. Deer and bear and wolves gamboled on the banks, unafraid. In the distance she heard a woman singing a sweet sad song in a language she did not understand.
All the pain of the past, her parents’ violent deaths, the lost child, Malcolm’s sad transformation, Catalyntie’s corruption, the sufferings of the whores and the slaves vanished like smoke from a spent fire. She was filled with an incredible sense of glory. She stood on a cliff, looking across a tremendous continent, peopled with farms and villages and teeming millions of white and black and red and yellow-skinned people. Within her the voice whispered: Heed me, O daughter of the morning.
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