Stallworth had said the same thing yesterday, and the day before. It was part of the process, to say something over and over, pretending it was for the first time. It made the prisoner wonder if his previous answers had been heard. It made him feel more and more trapped, desperate for a normal response.
“Tell me about your visit to Mrs. Kuyper, Chandler. How many times did you fuck her?”
“I told you - I never touched the woman.”
“Horseshit, Chandler. You admitted yesterday you thought about it. You were almost ready to tell the truth. We know she fucks for the King, Chandler. She’s probably fucking that Continental Congressman you sent to her, right now. I have to admit it, Chandler, that was a coup. Beckford must have paid you a hundred guineas for that one. Handing them a congressman that way. A sitting duck. Or, to be more exact, a fucking duck, that they can haul off to New York anytime they please.”
“I told you I didn’t know,” Caleb Chandler shouted.
Stallworth pulled a chair across the room and sat down, only inches from Chandler, jamming his knees against his legs. “Come, now, tell me man to man. I like to hear these kinds of stories. I’m a connoisseur, Chandler. I used to command the military police when we had a garrison in New York in ‘76. I used to go through the Holy Ground every morning, dragging out the drunks and an occasional corpse. I saw the ladies in their lacy nightclothes. That’s when I stopped believing in virtuous Americans, the kind of horseshit you parsons shovel from pulpits. That’s when I saw how this war would have to be won.”
“I didn’t touch her.”
“Not even a finger on those juicy tits? Not even a rub against that pussy? As dark and fine as angel’s hair, I hear it is. Tell me what it was like, Chandler.”
“I didn’t touch her!”
Stallworth abandoned his chair and retreated to the other side of the room. “That gives me even worse apprehensions, Chandler. Is it possible that Yale has produced another Williamite? We had one there in my day. We drove him out of the place. From what I hear of the school’s progress in corruption, you may have been the most popular scholar in Connecticut Hall. It would explain your seduction by Walter Beckford, the chief sodomist in the British army - a notable title, since they have so many. It would explain your indifference to Mrs. Kuyper.”
“I am not indifferent to Mrs. Kuyper. I told you I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. I-”
Stallworth went to a table in the center of the room and wrote in a book, repeating each word as he inscribed it. “Prisoner denies being a sodomite in spite of extensive evidence to the contrary.”
Stallworth shook his head. “That won’t go down well at your court martial, Chandler.”
“I want to see General Washington,” Caleb Chandler said. On previous days these words had been a demand. Now they were a whimper.
“To make a full confession? You can do that as well to me.”
“To protest this . . . this outrageous slander. These accusations.”
“General Washington doesn’t see prisoners under arrest, Chandler. He appoints a court-martial board to hear the charges and then approves, in most cases, the board’s findings. Let’s talk about your family, Chandler. We’ve been investigating them. Your two brothers were among those glorious Connecticut heroes who ran for their lives at Kips Bay in 1776. They haven’t lifted a finger for their country since.”
“They’re married men with families-”
“Maybe one of them,” Stallworth continued, as if Caleb Chandler had not spoken, “is the evil genius behind your treason. We’ve found that the traitor and the coward often go together. Are you refusing to confess out of some misguided sense of nobility? Better for you, a bachelor, to hang? We’re prepared to hang you both, Chandler. We will, too. Your silence will only delay your brother’s execution. Your whole network is exposed, Chandler. There’s no hope of protecting anyone. Only a full confession, a plea for mercy, can save you and your brothers.”
“I will never plead for mercy from you, you son of a bitch!” Caleb Chandler shouted.
“Oh?”
Defiance at this point was a good sign. It usually preceded surrender. Stallworth paced the room, pretending distress.
“All right. I’ll admit something, Chandler. I don’t want to hang you. That clerical coat you’re wearing may yet save your worthless, probably traitorous neck. I said the same thing to the Reverend Joel Lockwood. That bastard Rivington, the publisher of the Royal Gazette, would make too much capital out of the Americans hanging a man of the cloth. What better proof that the glorious cause is collapsing? I’m going to offer you the same chance we gave the Reverend Lockwood. You can live - if you agree to become a spy for us. What we call in the espionage business a double agent.”
“Joel Lockwood agreed to that?”
“For the same reason you’ll agree to it, Chandler. To save your worthless life!” Stallworth roared.
He paused to let the shock penetrate the prisoner’s crumbling defenses. “I hope your nerves are better than Lockwood’s. What I want from you is more difficult. All he had to do was go back to Connecticut and pretend to be a turncoat, then report to me everyone who nibbled at his bait. Perhaps my mistake was not offering him the consolation I’m giving you, Chandler.”
“What’s that?” Caleb Chandler asked.
“The opportunity, the necessity, to make love to Mrs. Kuyper. To plant yourself so deep in her affections, Chandler, that she invites you to become a spy for Beckford.”
“Then what happens?”
“She’ll send you to New York, where Beckford will put you through a gauntlet not much different from the one I’m administering to you. If you survive it, you’ll become Muzzey’s replacement.”
“Muzzey’s replacement,” Chandler said. The idea seemed to bemuse him.
“Then you’ll begin to think and live as a double agent. You’ll begin to prove your patriotism, Chandler, always remembering that I assume you’re a traitor. I’ll accept as proof to the contrary nothing but facts, information that’s useful to us. That moves us toward victory. Anything else, any facts that prove harmful, will move you a little closer to the gallows.”
“You’re telling me, in the name of the government of the United States, to lie to this woman, to pretend to love her, to seduce her if necessary?”
Stallworth clicked his teeth in exasperation. “Chandler, how many times do I have to tell you? Flora Kuyper’s a whore. She fucks for the King. You won’t seduce her. It’ll be the other way around, to guarantee your enthusiasm for His Majesty. You won’t be the first man to lift her skirts and you won’t be the last. The important thing is the purpose, Chandler. To get you into the network run by their agent, Twenty-six.”
Chandler barely listened to him. He shook his head, groping for another defiant answer. Stallworth sensed he was on the edge of collapse.
“Are you worried about your immortal soul, Chandler? As far as I’m concerned, the only thing you’re risking is a case of the pox. We’re not under the command of Jehovah any longer, Chandler. His name has become Necessity and His voice speaks through a cannon’s mouth. And through your lying mouth. And mine. What happens to our souls doesn’t matter, Chandler. Only one thing matters. Victory.”
For a long moment the prisoner said nothing. He was staring at Benjamin Stallworth with the same bemused expression on his face. “Such faith I have not found in all of Israel,” he said.
The voice, the eyes, did not belong to Caleb Chandler the naive Yale graduate. Those words, mocking the God of the New Testament, were spoken by a different creature, a numb, bitter cynic.
Washington was right. It was different from ordering a man to stand and die on the battlefield. But it was necessary, Stallworth told himself. Necessary. For victory.
One minute, we’re up to our eyes in the bracken, these damn green fronds so thick in our faces a man couldn’t see an inch ahead of him. Jesus, they were like hands, women’s hands lulling us to sleep there
in the twilight, the dry, dead hands of ghost women, who came back no matter how many times you pushed them away. Then I heard a chunk and I knew only one thing made such a sound, a tomahawk going into a man’s skull. The Indians were all around us. I dropped flat and saw a pair of painted legs a step away from me. I gave him both barrels in the belly and yelled. “Down, down, for God’s sake. Shoot for the belly and go for the balls with your knives. Cut off their goddamn red peckers.”
The woods exploded with shots and shouts, whoops and screams. We slashed and fired, fired and slashed, and the bracken fell around us like wheat sheaves scythed by our buck and ball. In five minutes, it was as still in those woods as in a midnight church. Not an animal, not a bird, much less an Indian, breathed lest he die. I whistled the lads to me and we counted noses. All were sound except Gus Pearce. We found him not ten feet away from me with the tomahawk still in his skull. Near and around we found ten dead Indians, whom we scalped and gelded, so their friends would know we had their souls in our packs - the scalp knot, I mean - and their courage in our bellies. Yes, we ate then private parts, just as they ate ours. The only difference was we waited until they were dead to take them. They’d roast a man living and eat them in front of his eyes. The British regulars couldn’t bear such fighting. A single war whoop turned their legs to jelly. Only born Americans could meet the Indians in their native woods.
Hannah Cosway Stapleton lay in her bed at Great Rock Farm, listening to a dead man. She did not understand why or how Malcolm Stapleton’s voice continued to echo in her skull. The stories he had told her from his warrior years fighting the Indians and French in the north woods were invariably gruesome and barbaric. One would almost think he had been going out of his way to revolt her Quaker soul, with its inherited disapproval of war. But she had abandoned Quakerism to marry Hugh Stapleton. She had listened to her father-in-law’s tales of horror and heroism with a guilty fascination. Gradually she had begun to see them as a kind of initiation; the old man’s way of telling her she was now a member of the family. The grisly details, the specific, sexual words that soldiers preferred, were also a kind of compliment, a way of telling her he believed, or at least hoped, she would be as brave, as steady in the face of war’s brutality, as a man.
She had tried, she was trying. Hannah thought, turning on her back to stare into the cold darkness of her bedroom ceiling, thicker than the windswept darkness outside the window. She was trying . . . and failing. It was so hard to control her fear. It came in waves, like a flood engulfing the farm, the house, the bedroom; finally lapping up through her body, spuming into her throat. Nothing could stop it, will, wish, not even desperate, beseeching prayer. Hardly surprising, the last failure. Prayer depends on faith. In the world around her, in her own heart, God had become an absent stranger.
The Bible said that God was love. Perhaps when love died, God vanished with it. A kind of death. No. Hannah struggled to defend herself against that enormous conclusion. Love was not dead. It was wounded, perhaps in danger of expiring. But it was not dead.
More and more, as Hannah thought about her life through half and sometimes all of a sleepless night, it divided into two dreams, one good, one bad.
The good dream began at Peachfields, her father’s estate near Burlington, on the Delaware. There she had been surrounded by love; the great house, its guardian trees, the very earth had seemed to abound in affection. As the oldest daughter, she had been her mother’s favorite. Her father’s double success as a merchant and farmer had made their lives affluent and easy. Visiting cousins, uncles, aunts from Philadelphia, all fellow Quakers, added zest to their country lives. On Sunday there was a quiet communion with a benevolent God at the meeting house in Burlington town.
That part of the good dream had ended like a novel, those delicious books that she and her sisters were forbidden to read but smuggled into their bedrooms anyway, to peruse by candlelight and compare with sighs and smiles. The handsome, well-born scion, who always solved everything by finally offering his hand to the virtuous maiden, had appeared in her own life at precisely the right moment, when she was nineteen. Hugh Stapleton had strolled up to her at the ball the town of Burlington gave for the annual meeting of New Jersey’s legislature (his father was on the governor’s council) and had boldly written his name on every line of her dance card.
He was not a Quaker, a fact that troubled her mother but no one else in the family. He candidly admitted that he was not religious, but he wanted a wife who could give religion to his children. Her father was delighted at the prospect of an alliance with the Stapletons, one of the wealthiest families in East Jersey. In 1767, Hannah had come to the mansion on Hackensack’s green, a bride welcomed by her smiling in-laws. There the good dream temporarily faltered.
The Stapletons were not a happy family. The patriarch, Malcolm, New Jersey’s leading soldier, was a huge, profane old man who drank too much and fretted over the mounting quarrel between America and England. He strongly disagreed with his frowning Dutch wife, Catalyntie Van Vorst Stapleton, who insisted a separation of the two countries was inevitable and necessary. As a trained soldier, Malcolm warned her and everyone else that the British would fight ferociously to retain the colonies and the Americans were doing little or nothing to prepare for such a struggle.
Unlike most wives, Catalyntie was not impressed with her husband’s opinions. She had a sharp tongue, which could goad him to fury at times. “You’re too English for me,” she would say, an accusation that invariably enraged him. Later she would be full of remorse and do her best to tease him into a good humor. Hannah soon sensed that their marriage had a hidden history, full of dark passages both sought to forget, with only mixed success.
Catalyntie was the founder of the Stapleton fortune, a fact that enabled her to disagree with her husband with equanimity. A shrewd businesswoman in the Dutch tradition, she had abandoned Great Rock Farm for an opulent town house in Hackensack, overlooking the river. Malcolm stubbornly insisted that he preferred the farm and spent most of his time there, supervising its operation.
Most of the farm’s workforce were slaves, which distressed Hannah until she learned that the Stapletons had a program that quietly freed two or three blacks each year and sent them to New York or Philadelphia. They could not stay in East Jersey, which was violently hostile to anyone who talked of freeing slaves, let alone those who actually freed them. Like all slave owners, the local whites lived in fear of an uprising, which free blacks might encourage. While Catalyntie provided the money that made this manumission program possible, she displayed little enthusiasm for it. When Hannah praised her generosity, Catalyntie brusquely replied she was keeping a promise she had made to a black woman named Clara Flowers, to whom she owed a great deal. They had shared years of Indian captivity when they were children. Catalyntie added that she did not feel she was accomplishing much. Free blacks would always be at risk until Americans decided to free all the enslaved blacks in the North and South, something she did not expect to happen. The war had put an end to the program.
Catalyntie had made most of her fortune selling fine furniture, cloth, silver, and china to the Dutch farmers of Bergen County, the most prosperous plowmen in America. She invested her money in a copper mine, an iron furnace, and several ships. She filled her Hackensack house with Oriental rugs, English silver, Chippendale furniture. If Catalyntie loved anything besides business, it was beauty. Hugh had inherited this enthusiasm and applied it not only to fine furnishings, but to the female sex.
Catalyntie had a profound and, Hannah now realized, unfortunate, influence on her sons. Her personality was so powerful, she often negated their father’s authority. Simultaneously, with her strong will and short temper, she tended to dominate them. Paul Stapleton had fled to Europe, ostensibly to study painting. Hugh announced that he was taking his share of the family fortune and moving to New York. Catalyntie had tried to forge an alliance with Hannah to oppose this decision. When Hannah had said she was ready to live wherever he
r husband chose, Catalyntie had eyed her with something close to disgust.
“You Quakers with your humility and meekness,” the old lady had said. “You’ll find, before long, respect is more important than holiness. You’ll never get it unless you let a man know a woman has as much right to it as a man.”
A year later Catalyntie was dead of an apoplexy brought on by an argument with a Yankee ship captain who tried to sell her a cargo of inferior British cloth at an inflated price. Hannah had felt guilty for months because her first reaction when she heard the news had been a sigh of relief.
Life in New York had been a shock to a country girl from Burlington. To Hugh, the city had long been a second home. He was untroubled by the violent contrast between rich and poor, the parading prostitutes, the drunken sailors. He loved the “ton,” as he called the high life, with its round of dinner parties and balls. He insisted on an absolute end to his wife’s Quaker inhibitions about expensive clothes and Hannah soon had one of the most dazzling wardrobes in the city. When her mother came to visit, she took one look at the array of silk dresses, lace petticoats, the dozens of bonnets, and the drawers full of silk stockings and gloves, and murmured, “Oh, my dear child, I fear for thy salvation.”
How silly, how ridiculously old-fashioned those words had sounded in 1770, only ten years ago. Hugh’s business was thriving, his ships were ranging the seven seas, she was about to give birth to their first son. For all his love of elegance and style, he was a devoted husband. He often confessed his amazement at the way he enjoyed married life, an oblique reference to his parents’ unhappy marriage. He used to call her his country titmouse and joke about the way she had learned to live with the city titmouse. Sometimes he talked bawdy; it was both shocking and thrilling to her. “How’s my favorite country tit?” he would say, catching her from behind to kiss her on the neck.
Dreams of Glory Page 15
