Again, Beckford translated. Knyphausen smiled wryly. “I thought Colonel Simcoe had absolute confidence in his men,” he said.
Now Beckford’s smile contained an unmistakable edge of mockery, authorized by Knyphausen. His translation - and perhaps the smile - caused Simcoe to become even more defensive.
“I trust them in the mass,” he said. “But they’re still Americans. You can never be sure when a man’s rebel relations will confuse his loyalty.”
“What does Major Beckford think?” Knyphausen asked in German after he heard the translation of Simcoe’s reply.
It was delicious, Beckford mused as he took a sip of his rum, how Knyphausen set up Simcoe like a decoy duck without the slightest intention of doing so maliciously. Beckford had carefully inserted in Knyphausen’s mind, earlier in the week, the idea of first attacking an American outpost. After four years as an aide he had become expert at advancing, with just the right degree of vagueness and humility, ideas that the general soon adopted as his own.
“I was most impressed with the vigor, the rate of fire of Colonel Simcoe’s men tonight,” Beckford said in rapid German. “Their discipline, their timing, were excellent. But I must agree with Your Excellency. Admirable as these rehearsals have been in their planning and attention to detail, there is no substitute for the sound of real bullets in the dawn. By now I fear the men may have even grown used to hearing muskets fire, seeing them flash, without danger to themselves. An attack against an American outpost is just what they need. I request permission to join such an expedition.”
“Permission refused,” Knyphausen snapped. “I cannot risk my most valued subordinate on a scheme that I still view with misgiving.”
“I assure Your Excellency that General Washington will be treated as a prisoner of war. I thought Your Excellency was pleased that we were presenting a plan with none of the disagreeable overtones of an assassination.”
“I am, I am pleased,” Knyphausen said. “But as a soldier, I still wish your king would send us enough men to give Washington and his army a sound thrashing.”
The general was a fighter. Beckford could almost hear artillery rumbling in the German phrase for a sound thrashing: tüchtige Prügeln.
“I share your sentiment totally, Your Excellency,” Beckford said. “But I assure you again that the King will be as grateful, perhaps even more grateful, to the man who ends this rebellion swiftly, no matter how he does it.”
“I know, I know,” Knyphausen said.
Simcoe could only stand between them like a deaf mute while all this guttural German flowed past him. He became more and more nonplussed. “Aren’t you going to translate any of this, Beckford?” he asked.
“We were discussing the overall strategy, Colonel,” Beckford said. “You must realize that your stroke has to be coordinated with political overtures to certain members of Congress.”
“Yes, of course,” Simcoe muttered.
“Tell Colonel Simcoe I give him the choice of the American posts at White Plains or Paramus,” Knyphausen said. “When he decides, he may present his plans to me. Good day.”
As Beckford translated this farewell, Knyphausen bowed stiffly to Simcoe and stalked from the room. Simcoe glared after him. “Tell me the God’s honest truth, Beckford. Is he as stupid as he acts?”
“I prefer not to answer that question, Colonel,” Beckford said. “Before you lose your temper, let me tell you with all due respect that I agree with the general, from an intelligence point of view. I’m quite certain that Washington’s agents have already told him that you’ve issued winter uniforms to your picked force. There’s a great deal to be said for using these men to beat up the American posts at Paramus or White Plains. Washington and his intelligence people will stop worrying about what we’re going to do with those white uniforms and conclude that we’ve embarked on a program of such winter raids. They may even rush men to their outposts.”
“I don’t agree with you. I think they’re just as likely to see it as a good reason to double the size of the general’s Life Guard and revive their discipline.”
“You’re forgetting what I told you, Colonel, about our ability to corrupt the Life Guard. At the moment, we’re having some difficulty communicating with our chief agent in Morristown. A reason in itself for delay. Several days ago, our courier was murdered on the town green. We must assume it was on Washington’s orders. We want to be very sure they haven’t penetrated our network. There’s a curious Yankee parson snooping about. I’ve arranged to eliminate him, to reassure Twenty-six.”
“Reassure Twenty-six,” snarled Simcoe. “Why? So he can sit snug in some farmhouse and send you moonshine about Washington’s Guards? Damn me if I ever saw tuppence worth of value for the thousands of pounds you fellows spend on your precious intelligence. I never met a spy yet who wasn’t a lying whoremaster, ready to sell you out to the other side for a piece of ass or a better offer.”
“It is a devilish business,” Beckford conceded. “But I still think it will pay handsomely if we can coordinate your attack with the night our men mount the guard.”
“Pigshit,” snarled Simcoe. “We don’t need them.”
“Then there’s the problem of maneuvering your cannon if the snow melts. This major I have arriving imminently via our escape route will soon have an alternative-”
“This snow won’t melt for a month, two months,” Simcoe said.
“It may take that long to get General Knyphausen’s approval of your plan to attack an outpost,” Beckford said. “It’s hard for a regimental commander to grasp the amount of paperwork that engulfs the commander of an army. Courts-martial, quartermaster returns, reports from the medical departments, the provost marshal, the engineers - all compete for his attention. Now His Excellency has to report to two governments, Hesse-Cassel and London. And everything submitted to him in English must, of course, be translated first. He doesn’t trust anyone to do it to his satisfaction except me.”
Simcoe subsided. Was he beginning to understand that Walter Beckford was not going to let anyone walk away with the coup that ended the rebellion? Beckford hoped so. He was a reasonable man. All he wanted was his share of the glory.
“Give the general my deepest respects, Major,” Simcoe said. “Assure him I’ll have a plan of attack on your desk for translation in a week’s time.”
“Good.”
At the door, Simcoe could not resist a parting shot. “I hope that spy who got killed was not your midnight beauty.”
“No,” Beckford said, “it was only a Negro.”
“The Yankee parson will get here tomorrow about noon?” John Nelson asked.
“If he comes,” Flora Kuyper said.
“He’ll come. Beckford says he’s been sniffing around Morristown like a bloody hound in search of a scent. You’re the bait, my pretty girl. We’re the trap.”
Beside Nelson stood his huge companion, Wiert Bogert, with his expressionless boy’s face and blank blue eyes. “The bastard’s close to his last sniff, by God, John,” he said.
Flora never saw these two without a shudder of revulsion. The burned flesh on Nelson’s neck, curling up his throat to the jawline, made him look like a rotting corpse, restored to mad destructive life, Bogert was a murderous machine, empty of every feeling but hatred for the rebels.
The two had appeared out of the twilight that evening to inform her that they had four escaped British officers with them, badly in need of a good dinner. Flora had hosted similar dinners a half-dozen times in the previous six months. Her house was the last stop on the Liberty Turnpike, as the British called the escape route devised by Walter Beckford with the help of American loyalists. Traveling almost entirely by night, wearing their uniforms so they would not be shot as spies if recaptured, the escapees went from safe house to safe house in a month-long trek from prison camps in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Charlottesville, Virginia. The journey across New Jersey was the hardest because many roads were patrolled by Washington’s troops. H
ence Beckford’s use of Bogert and Nelson as escorts.
Flora Kuyper’s role as mistress of a safe house enabled her to maintain her wine cellar and keep her barnyard stocked with chickens, geese, and pigs. The British army had issued strict orders to loyalist marauders that the Kuyper farm was off limits to their thievery. There was nothing especially unusual about such directives. In the five years since the war had begun, hundreds of New Jerseyans had quietly made private truces with the enemy. The practice was called “taking a protection.”
Nelson’s question about the chaplain, Chandler, had taken Flora by surprise. Beckford had ordered her to invite him to preside at Caesar’s funeral. She had obeyed, vaguely expecting some additional instructions. Did he expect her to seduce him, too? she wondered. Now she realized Beckford planned to kill the man.
“Is he an agent?” she asked Nelson.
“How the hell do we know? We just obey the major’s orders, like you, my pretty.”
“I hope you’ll kill him elsewhere.”
Nelson grinned. “Don’t you worry. We’ll wait for the bastard a mile down the road at least. Take his money, which will be nothin’ but filthy Congress paper, alas, to make it look like it was ordinary murder for profit. We got our orders from the major. Under no circumstances must Mrs. Kuyper be involved. The way Beckford moistens his lips and rolls his tongue around the inside of his mouth when he says your name. It’s enough to make a man envious, Mrs. Kuyper. No matter how hard we try, we’ll never quite render the major the kind of services you supply. Is it true what we hear, that you’re the doxy who persuaded him to give up boys?”
“Shut your filthy mouth,” Flora said. “Tell your officers that dinner will be served in an hour. I’ll send something out to the barn for you and your friend.”
What did one more death matter? Flora asked herself, hurrying out to the kitchen. Beckford could be right. In his letter, the chaplain seemed no more than a naive enthusiast. But that kind of man might be more dangerous than a cynic like Congressman Stapleton.
In the kitchen, Flora told Nancy about their unexpected dinner guests. Her solemn black face betrayed no emotion. She simply raked up the fire in the big cooking hearth and went to the door to call her daughters, Sallie and Ruth, from the slave quarters beyond the barns. Nothing disturbed Nancy’s equilibrium. She was a woman of faith. Watching her move briskly about the kitchen, laying out eggs and spices, flour and milk for a custard pie, deciding a shoulder of beef would satisfy four hungry soldiers, Flora found herself yearning for Nancy’s serenity. But such simplicity was beyond her reach forever now. For a moment she stared at a carving knife on the bare oak table. A quick pass of that shining steel across her wrist and she would no longer see Caesar in the cold barn while she pressed her lying mouth against the lips of men like Hugh Stapleton. She would no longer dream of Henry Kuyper’s contorted face. She would no longer have to fear a future in which Walter Beckford or William Coleman - Twenty-six - would own her.
Perhaps she would do it tonight, in the bath. Let her treacherous blood mingle with the warm water. Let the bewildered chaplain bury her beside Caesar. Perhaps, as a farewell gesture of defiance to Beckford and Twenty-six, she would leave a note, warning the chaplain that his life was in danger.
“Mistress, why don’t you lie down?” Nancy said. “Take one or two drops of your laudanum. I’ll rouse you in plenty of time for dinner.”
“No,” Flora said. “I must dress.”
Nancy’s shrewd eyes studied her. “You got to find forgiveness, mistress,” she said while Sallie and Ruth bustled at the other end of the kitchen, out of earshot. “You got to find forgiveness for yourself and Caesar now. The Lord’s punishment has fallen on him, justly, we both know. But I believe you have a right to His forgiveness, I truly do. I think you could find it if you had someone to help you lift your heart to the Lord. Maybe this preacher that’s comin’ . . .”
Flora shook her head. Nancy and Cato saw her with their slaves’ eyes. They thought she was a kind mistress who had been seduced and corrupted by Caesar and his mad, murderous hunger for freedom. They only saw and pitied the Flora who paced the house in the night, silently weeping. They did not understand or question her obedience to Walter Beckford; that concerned politics, matters beyond their slave world. As Christians, they only grieved at its harm to her soul. They had no idea of the depth and breadth of Flora’s mourning, how far it transcended Henry Kuyper’s pathetic demise. They could not even imagine that she was about to become an accomplice in the murder of the man of God they hoped would comfort her.
Upstairs, Flora dressed with her usual care. She chose a gown of deep purple, its skirt and sleeves trimmed with gold braided silk. For a while she tried to read her favorite poet, Francois Villon, to compose her mind. But Villon was a world. What one found in him depended on the state of the reader’s soul. His reckless mockery of all things sacred and respectable, which had once exhilarated her, was negated by his obsession with death. Suddenly she found herself reading again and again the Ballade de la grosse Margot, Villon’s testament to a prostitute. She flung the book aside and paced the room, weeping.
A knock on the door. Sallie informing her mistress that dinner was served. Flora dried her eyes, took three drops of laudanum to steady her nerves, and descended to greet her guests. They had done their best to brush and clean their uniforms for the occasion, but their red coats and white breeches still showed the effects of a month of sleeping in barns and trudging through woods to escape American patrols. Three of them were young: a husky captain named Tracy with a hard, sensual mouth, and two lieutenants, an apple-cheeked baronet named Gore and a bulky, red-haired Scotsman named MacKenzie. The fourth man, Whittlesey, was a balding, gray-faced major with quizzical, kindly eyes. He reminded Flora of a priest she had known in New Orleans.
The younger officers were eager to talk about their adventures on the Liberty Turnpike, in particular the discovery that their American guide, a man named Grey, was a double agent. “Major Beckford’s fellows, Nelson and Bogert, arrived just in time. The scoundrel would likely have turned us over to the first militiamen we met,” Lord Gore said.
“What did you do with him?” Flora asked.
“We did nothing,” Captain Tracy said. “Nelson and Bogert took him into the woods their first night with us and came back without him.”
“How terrible,” Flora said.
“Major Whittlesey rather agreed with you,” Lord Gore said. “Personally, I would have been happy to cut the beggar’s throat myself.”
“And I,” said MacKenzie. “In Scotland we know how to deal with traitors.”
“I merely said I disliked killing a man so callously,” Major Whittlesey said. “Then bragging about it.”
“In war, Major, it’s necessary to use crude instruments like Nelson,” Lord Gore said.
Captain Tracy began telling Flora how eager he was to meet the Americans in battle again. “One good push, that’s all it will take, and their Congress and committeemen and militia will come tumbling down. In Pennsylvania, everyone’s sick of the war.”
Lord Gore and MacKenzie, who had escaped from Charlottesville, concurred. Gore had another idea to hasten the American collapse. “The Negroes are their Achilles’ heel. We should arm them to fight their rebel masters.”
“And how do we get the guns back from them?” asked Major Whittlesey. “There’s no point in winning the war by turning half this continent into Africa. In fact, there’s no point in winning the war by burning as many houses as I’ve seen in ruins here in New Jersey. What have we won if we turn the country into a desert? No, my young sir, we must somehow break up Washington’s army. That done, the war will be over without another house burned, another innocent family ruined. I’d never have undertaken this long march from Lancaster without Major Beckford’s assurance that I could give essential service to accomplish this.”
“Are you going to perfect your repeating rifle, Major?” Tracy said with a teasing grin. “So Bec
kford can march down to Morristown and scatter Washington’s army with a corporal’s guard?”
“Most of us dream of lasses,” Lieutenant MacKenzie said. “The major dreams of machines.”
Lord Gore, whose choirboy looks concealed a hunger for vengeance, pursued his argument with Whittlesey. “I dare say most of those burned houses didn’t belong to innocent families. Taken in the mass, the Americans are the greatest villains on earth. Ten times worse than the Irish. I concede the wisdom of a swift stroke to behead the rebellion. But once that’s accomplished, I think we should free the slaves and set up one or two colonies of loyal blacks here in their midst, as we planted the Scots Protestants in Ulster to make the Irish behave.”
“I’ll drink a toast to that,” Flora said, raising her wineglass. “Tonight, you’ll be sharing the barn with the body of a black man who would have welcomed such a plan. He was a spy for His Majesty, inside Washington’s army. They found him out and murdered him in the most cowardly way.”
“That makes me feel better about the way Beckford disposed of Mr. Grey,” Major Whittlesey murmured.
“I think it’s you who deserve the toast, madam,” Captain Tracy said, raising his wineglass. “No doubt you set the fellow to the business and guided him in every step.”
“Hear hear,” said Lieutenant MacKenzie, seizing his glass. Flora had to sit there, smiling and modestly bowing her head before the salutes of His Majesty’s officers.
Captain Tracy, a cavalry officer who had been captured in 1778, poured himself another glass of wine and began looking at Flora with eyes that suggested amorous ambitions. “I wish there were more women in America with your courage - and beauty, madam.”
Flora ignored the compliment and turned to Major Whittlesey. “Do you think it possible that the King would create colonies of free blacks here in America?”
“Not likely,” Whittlesey said. “They’re property. Those who belong to rebels will be confiscated and sold to help pay the cost of this damned war. But we may settle the German troops and some of our officers and soldiers here on confiscated lands. They and their children will be a sword at the Americans’ throats until they forget their rebel ways.”
Dreams of Glory Page 10
