Dreams of Glory

by Thomas Fleming

  “Wouldn’t that discourage other loyal traders?” Caleb said, trying to sound like a thorough King’s man.

  “Nothing’ll discourage them as long as the money’s at the end of the road,” Nelson said. “That’s what we’re all in this for, right, Parson? The King’s shilling?”

  “I’m here because I believe the King can rescue America from ruin.”

  “Listen to’m,” Nelson hissed. “I was that way in 1775, Chaplain, but when I seen the way this war was being fought, I decided, Nelson, it’s every man for himself. Why shouldn’t you try to get as rich as a bloody commissary or a secret service director? That’s all they’re doin’ here. Gettin’ rich. They ain’t fightin’ a proper war like we did against the Frenchies. If they was, they’d have hanged, drawn, and quartered old Washington in London four years ago.”

  Eventually they turned south and reached the rugged bluffs above the Hudson. They descended a winding slippery path and crossed the river on the thick, silent ice. On the other side, they exchanged the sign and countersign with a British sentry and soon reached the door of a safe house kept by Major Beckford on Bowerie Lane, on the outskirts of New York.

  There, Caleb’s escorts left him and a surly soldier with an Irish brogue showed him into a sitting room. A fire burned briskly in the fireplace. Caleb stood before it, grateful for the warmth. The door opened and a fat, ruddy-faced man wearing an officer’s red coat entered the room. Caleb disliked the arrogance on his face. “The Reverend Chandler?” he said.

  Caleb nodded,

  “I’m Major Walter Beckford. You’re under arrest as a spy.”

  Caleb remembered Stallworth’s warning: They’ll run you through a gauntlet worse than the one I’m giving you. The memory offered neither comfort nor reassurance. Worse, there was no way to tell if this was only a test.

  “You can’t be serious, sir,” Caleb said. “The mere suggestion is a travesty. I’m here to offer my services to you and His Majesty.”

  “Do you think you’re dealing with children, Mr. Chandler?” Beckford said. “We’re aware of almost everything Mr. Washington and Mr. Stallworth attempt. You were sent to Flora Kuyper’s with orders to persuade her - knowing the utter lack of morality that characterizes this rebellion, perhaps even to seduce her - and thus insinuate your way into our service as a double agent. Did you enjoy our little Flora? She’s quite a piece.”

  “My feelings for Mrs. Kuyper,” Caleb said, struggling to control his panic, “are of the purest sympathy and admiration. If I ever merit her - her favor, it will be within the bonds of holy matrimony. She has done nothing but help me confront in myself what I already half knew - what thousands of my countrymen half know - that our revolution has become a travesty of the glorious hopes of 1775, and there is no recourse for America but the King’s forgiveness and protection.”

  “They teach you pretty speeches in Morristown,” Beckford said. “I’ll give you a chance to recite some of them tomorrow, when we hang you. Guard, take him away.”

  Two ugly soldiers with fixed bayonets strode into the room. “I demand a trial,” Caleb said. “The right to call witnesses, including Mrs. Kuyper, who will attest-”

  “She’ll attest to whatever we tell her to. You’ll have a trial. A military court will judge you guilty in five minutes. We have the proof, Chandler, from our agents in Morristown.”

  “My proof is here, in my heart,” Caleb cried, pounding his chest.

  “You should have been an actor,” Beckford said.

  The two soldiers marched Caleb through the dark snowbound city to the three-story stone Provost, the most infamous of the several British prisons in New York. He was shoved into a bare cell, with straw for a pallet, and left to spend the night trying to choke down his terror. His anguish was not assuaged by the conduct of the provost marshal, William Cunningham, who came in drunk from dinner and proceeded to beat and kick several other prisoners. The place echoed with the screams of the victims. Later, Cunningham stopped outside Caleb’s cell and asked his identity. “A Yankee spy?” the provost marshal said. “I’ll look forward to putting a hemp collar on him tomorrow or the next day.”

  Caleb lay on his bed of dirty straw, thinking of Flora’s description of her execution day in London. He had been sympathetic, of course, but how pale sympathy becomes when the listener is far removed from the experience.

  At dawn, the cell door opened and a small, shabby man in black introduced himself. “I am the Reverend Jonathan Odell,” he said. “Major Beckford, out of sympathy for your clerical status, has asked me to minister to you. Although we’re of different churches - I am an Anglican priest - we share a common faith in Jesus Christ. The major thought you might find your mind eased by telling me the truth.”

  Caleb gasped out another explosion of lies and half-truths. “My mind will not be eased because the truth is that I am about to die for my loyalty to the King. For my discovery of that loyalty in my heart through the love of a brave woman. Major Beckford is so far gone in cynicism, or hatred of Americans, that he can’t believe such a thing could happen. You can’t help me, sir, unless you can change his mind about murdering me. Failing that, I ask you to tell my story to the world and see that Beckford receives the punishment he deserves.”

  “The major is only doing his duty, as I’m doing mine,” Odell said. “We have proof that you’re a rebel spy. Your one hope of life is to tell us everything you know of your army’s secret service. Even if you know very little, a sign of repentance may go far with the court-martial officers. They don’t want to hang a clergyman.”

  Caleb struggled for breath. For a moment he lost touch with the world he had discovered in Flora Kuyper’s arms. He reverted to the terrified fourteen-year-old, begging the Reverend Joel Lockwood to help him win God’s forgiveness for his sinful, lustful nature. He deserved damnation for the sin he had committed with Flora Kuyper. This doleful man of god was trying to rescue him from that fate and its grisly counterpart in this world - the gallows. Why was he trusting Flora Kuyper, a woman who admitted infidelity, adultery, with not one but a half-dozen men? She fucks for the King. Stallworth’s words whined like a passing bullet.

  Then Caleb remembered John Nelson’s truculent argument with Flora last night. Her anxious evasive replies. She had saved his life. Before treachery, before lying began, she had refused to let him be murdered. The existence of this act of primary generosity steadied him. He continued the masquerade.

  “I can only say that I’m innocent and have nothing to confess but love for a lady who convinced me to risk my life for the King.”

  Odell sighed. “It’s sad to see what rebellion can do to a man’s soul.”

  The clergyman departed. The iron door clanged behind him. A half-hour later, Major Walter Beckford appeared. “Well, Chandler,” he said, “you have one last chance. Will you confess?”

  Caleb only shook his head. Beckford looked annoyed. He consulted his pocket watch and paced the cell for several moments. “I suppose you’re encouraged by Mr. Odell’s inept performance. I was outside, listening to him. You think because he admitted we dislike hanging a clergyman you can continue to bluff me. You’re wrong, Mr. Chandler. Unless we get a complete confession from you - names, tokens, places of rendezvous, including, if it happens to be the case, Mrs. Kuyper’s guilt - you’re a dead man.”

  “Mrs. Kuyper is responsible for my decision to come here. I responded to her courage, her example. To her arguments on behalf of the King. If you call that guilt, Major, I wonder about your loyalty.”

  “Mr. Chandler, you’re almost amusing,” Beckford said. “We’ll let you think things over aboard the Jersey for a month or two. Then we’ll talk again - if you’re still alive.”

  It was a sentence of death, without entangling legalities. By now stories of the Jersey’s horror had crept through every town in Connecticut. It was a prison ship, primarily for American sailors captured while privateering. The few who emerged from it alive, exchanged for British sailors, were walk
ing skeletons, who often died before they reached their homes.

  About 10 a.m., two soldiers escorted Caleb to the Brooklyn ferry landing, where a sleigh was waiting for them. Riding behind two horses on the ice covering the East River accentuated the feeling that he was caught in a waking nightmare. In a half-hour, the sleigh reached the hulk of the Jersey, tilted ten or fifteen degrees in the ice of Wallabout Bay, near the Brooklyn shore.

  Caleb mounted the ladder to the deck, where he was handed over to his jailers. A grimy Scotsman in the captain’s cabin recorded his name in a large ledger, writing beside it, “suspected spy.” He was then hustled down the ladder to the main hatchway where two more Scotsmen searched him and ordered him below. He descended the almost vertical ladder and found himself in the nether world of the Jersey.

  Around him, their heads to the hull, lay gaunt men in rags. Some shivered and shook with fever, clutching tattered blankets to their throats. Most were listless as corpses. They stared indifferently at Caleb like phantoms in the Hades of the ancient Greeks, no longer interested in the world of the living. Around them rose a stench worse than anything Caleb had ever encountered at Morristown, a compound of urine and excrement and human sweat and rotting garbage. Pervading it, somehow worsening it, was a dull, terrible cold. There was no fire anywhere on the ship. The temperature was not much above the zero mark at which it hovered outside. Only the cutting wind was absent.

  “News, mate?” called one man, shoving himself to a sitting position. “Any news of a peace treaty?”

  Caleb shook his head. A man wandered past him, jabbering to someone. “Father,” he said, “I’ll do the milking this morning. It be too cold out there for you.” In the gray light spilling down the hatchway, Caleb saw the reason for the man’s delirium. His face was covered with the oozing sores of smallpox.

  Caleb retreated into the darker section of the hold, where he found an open space along the hull. He settled against the timbers and felt their cold penetrate his cloak. A voice beside him asked what ship he was from. “No ship. I’m a civilian,” he said. “Captured in New Jersey.”

  “There’s more like you down on the next deck.”

  The man on the other side of Caleb was racked by a fit of coughing. He groaned, struggling for breath. “I doubt my shipmate will last the night,” said the first prisoner. As his eyes adjusted to the semidarkness Caleb was able to see him. He was about seventeen years old. Most of his hair had fallen out; his neck was withered like an old man’s. The skin on his face, his hands, seemed almost transparent, the bones beneath it were so visible.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Six months, I think. What day is it?”

  “February 18, 1780.”

  “Ten months. When my shipmate goes, I’ll be the last of our crew. There was twenty-six of us from the privateer Independence. Most died in the summer.”

  Toward the end of the afternoon, the prisoners received their rations. Meat, bread, and some faintly flavored water supposed to be coffee. “Fire, we must have fire to cook,” several men shouted to the guards as they passed the hatchway, where the food was handed out.

  “You’ll have to dine on raw meat like the animals you are,” the guard said. “There’s no fuel to be had. Many a loyal man in New York is doing the same thing.”

  The meat had a nauseating smell. As Caleb lifted it to his mouth something moved beneath his finger. He saw a maggot shoving its head from beneath the slimy mass. He flung the meat aside, gnawed morosely on the bread, and drank the cold, watery coffee. A few hours later, the day faded, and darkness engulfed them. The man next to Caleb kept struggling for breath and at last descended into his death rattle. Cries of delirium, groans of the dying, drifted from other parts of the ship. Again and again, Caleb found himself fighting back surges of terror.

  In the morning, the hatches were flung back and the guards awakened the prisoners with the shout: “Rebels, turn out your dead!”

  The boy next to him joined a six-man working party of fellow skeletons. They made the rounds of the ship, taking away a dozen bodies, including the man next to Caleb. It took the strength of all seven to lift a single corpse. When one of the working party collapsed, Caleb took his place. They had to struggle to drag the bodies up the ladder to the top deck. As they deposited the last one Caleb glanced down at his coat. It was crawling with lice. He looked at his hands. They were swollen with bites. “I’ll pick you clean if you do me,” said the boy. “That’s how we pass most of each day. If you don’t get them, they suck the blood out of you.”

  For the next three days Caleb endured this ordeal. Hunger settled into his bones and he began to eat the maggoty meat. It produced violent cramps and fever. On the morning of the fourth day, as they carried the night’s usual harvest of dead to the top deck, he was summoned to the captain’s cabin. There stood well-fed Major Walter Beckford, a mocking smile on his face. “Well, Chandler, are you still a loyal servant of His Majesty?”

  Caleb had to resist an impulse to spring at his throat. “Yes,” he said. “And your enemy, who’ll haunt you when I die.”

  “Mr. Chandler, I am, appearances to the contrary, a humane man. I don’t wish to kill you, and you have done no spying worthy of the name. Tell me what you know, and I assure you that I’ll arrange for you to be released on your promise to remain neutral for the rest of the war.”

  For a moment Caleb almost succumbed. Why not accept defeat, go home to Connecticut, and try to forget this nightmare? Then he heard Stallworth’s voice: The same gauntlet. How could he trust Beckford? Once he confessed, he was his creature, to hang or abandon in this hell ship.

  Caleb shook his head. “I’ve risked too much to serve His Majesty. I won’t yield to your perverse hatred of Americans, Major.”

  Beckford smiled and held out his hand. “Mr. Chandler,” he said, “welcome to the gratitude and protection of King George the Third.”

  “Say, Stapleton,” drawled Congressman Samuel Chase of Maryland, “did you hear what that slimy bastard Tom Paine called me t’other day? A voluptuary! How’s that, eh? A voluptuary! Just because a female can’t look into his ugly phiz without losing her dinner, he calls me a voluptuary. How are things in New Jersey, Stapleton? Were you overwhelmed by the rising spirit of patriotism? Did your constituents pledge to you their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor? Hah?”

  “They did better than that,” Hugh Stapleton said. “They told me if I didn’t find a way to raise our paper dollars to par with specie in three weeks, they’d reenact the Crucifixion.”

  Chase chuckled. “Where have you been hiding, Stapleton? We’ve missed you.”

  “Some business I couldn’t afford to pass up came my way.”

  Chase chuckled even more knowingly. He had replaced Benjamin Harrison of Virginia as the Falstaff of Congress. Chase’s shape was virtually spherical, and his complexion was not much different from the color of the brimming glass of French claret he had in his hand. The two congressmen were sitting in the Long Room of the City Tavern, the best hostelry in Philadelphia. A huge fire leaped in the massive fireplace. Delicious odors drifted from the kitchen. The Continental Congress had just adjourned for the day and the room was rapidly filling with delegates.

  Hugh Stapleton preferred the company of cynics like Samuel Chase because he could speak frankly to them. When he had returned to Philadelphia two weeks ago, Robert Morris, the city’s leading merchant, had invited Stapleton to join him in buying out an importer who had just gone bankrupt and was desperate for cash to pay his creditors. Morris, busy with a dozen other ventures, had let Stapleton conduct the time-consuming negotiations and take title to the man’s warehouse. It was a tribute to Stapleton’s increasing reputation as a businessman.

  Limping across the room toward them now was Philip Schuyler, who had been Congressman Stapleton’s fellow guest at General Washington’s dinner table in Morristown. “Mr. Stapleton,” said Schuyler, “I’ve been looking for you in Congress. Have you just arr
ived in town?”

  “More or less.”

  “I’ve been laid up with an attack of the gout myself. I’m anxious to have a talk about the army. I received a letter from General Washington today. Things are no better in Morristown.”

  “I’m at your service,” Hugh Stapleton said, although he had no desire to discuss the army or anything else connected with the government of the United States.

  Schuyler gave Chase a rather chilly nod and sat down with several Carolinians at another table. “What’s this, are you turning soldier, Stapleton?” Chase said. “Schuyler enlisting you? Livingston, come help me save Stapleton from Schuyler’s clutches.”

  Robert R. Livingston of New York, one of the great landholders in the Hudson River Valley, joined them. The elegantly dressed aristocrat was trailed by a half-dozen other congressmen from the middle states. It reminded Hugh Stapleton of the way the English lords promenaded in St. James’s Park or at Ranelagh, followed by their crowds of retainers. In his most condescending tone, Robert Livingston told Stapleton that Philip Schuyler had been “hectoring” his fellow congressmen as if they were privates and he was still a general. “He’s simply not a politician,” Livingston said.

  After eighteen months in Philadelphia, Hugh Stapleton was inclined to think such a remark was a compliment. But he did not contradict Robert R. Livingston. Few people did. “What has been happening in Congress?” Stapleton asked.

  “Nothing but declamations from the fanatics of Yankeeland,” Chase informed him. “They say every man who has earned a dollar from the revolution is a traitor. Death to aggrandizers and monopolists! I tell you they’re enough to make me think Maryland’s greatest mistake was joining this confederacy.”

  “The radicals here in Pennsylvania echo the Yankees’ cry,” Livingston said. “They’ve threatened Robert Morris and other merchants on the street.”