For a moment Birch’s temper rose. It did not sit well with any officer, above all a general, to learn that his own intelligence service had been spying on him. As for being lectured on his drinking habits, this was something not even the lowliest private would tolerate. Getting drunk was an Englishman’s proof of his liberty. It was practically guaranteed in the Magna Charta. But the present opportunity was so large, so historic, Birch swallowed his outrage. “You have my promise,” he said. “What would you like for breakfast?”
“Some coffee will do for me,” Beckford said.
“My taste precisely.”
Birch bellowed for his batman. When the coffee was served he took a decanter of brandy from the sideboard and dosed it liberally, by way of defying Beckford’s ban on alcohol. “Our last potation,” he said, “until we raise our glasses to our prisoner, General Washington.”
“Agreed,” Beckford said. They drank the doubly scalding brew. “Now let’s get down to business. How many horsemen can we muster?”
“Four hundred, give or take a dozen.”
“Admirable. You must select forty of the most dependable troopers for an advance guard. They should be men hardy enough to give no quarter to anyone they meet on the road, man, woman, or child. We must use terror to guarantee the militia makes no attempt to block our return.”
Birch nodded. “What about the reserve horses we talked about?”
Beckford took a detailed map of northern New Jersey from his cloak. It had been drawn for him by a lieutenant of the engineers, who had ridden the roads himself under the protection of Wiert Bogert and John Nelson. Beckford pointed to Great Rock Farm. “The horses will be waiting here, in a large barn guarded by my men.”
“Why take such a roundabout route? There’s the shortest and most direct way,” Birch said, running his finger from Elizabethtown to Morristown.
“That route is guarded by a regiment of Continentals in Elizabethtown,” Beckford said. “And it requires us to use a pass through the mountains, where a company of men can hold the road. This way” - he ran his finger from the fort of Powles Hook, up the shore of the Hudson, across the New Bridge to Hackensack, and across Bergen County to Boonton, then south on the Warwick Road to Morristown - “offers us a route guarded only by militia. We avoid the mountains and appear on the road that they worry least about.”
“You’re coming with us, Major?”
“Of course.”
They clinked their brandy-laden coffee cups once more and Beckford strolled back to his house on Jane Street. Birch was a fool, but he was a necessary part of the machinery of war. A man had to be something of a fool to lead a cavalry charge.
In his study, Beckford summoned his batman, Kiphuth, to make a fire while he wrote a letter to Flora Kuyper.
This order must be obeyed the moment you receive it. Send your most reliable servant to Morristown with an urgent request for Congressman Stapleton to visit you tomorrow, without fail, I will join you at the house about noon.
Beckford
The major gave the letter to Kiphuth and ordered him to take it to John Nelson at the White Horse Tavern immediately.
The batman had just departed when the Reverend Caleb Chandler came down the stairs looking as haggard as he had when he arrived. Espionage obviously did not permit him to sleep soundly. “Good morning,” he said. “Am I to return to Morristown today?”
“Tomorrow. You must wait for Bogert and Nelson to return and escort you across the Hudson.”
“Is there another message for me to carry?”
“No. We no longer need to send messages, Mr. Chandler. But I want you back in Morristown in the hope that you can play some part in the mutiny that will take place there in a few days. You can add to the confusion by siding with the soldiery and urging them to further defiance of their officers.”
“A mutiny? That’s your plan?”
“Yes,” Beckford said. “That’s our plan. You seem inordinately interested, Chandler. It reawakens suspicion in my mind.”
“I . . . I was only expressing my surprise. At the mutiny. Let me congratulate you. The army is ready to revolt. They’ll join you in hanging a congressman from every tree in Morristown.”
“If you’re playing a double part, Chandler, now is the time to quit the rebels. A successful mutiny of your Connecticut brigade will be worth a thousand pounds. Do you hear me? A thousand pounds.”
“I’m deeply grateful. But to prove my loyalty to you, to His Majesty, I’m prepared to play my part for nothing.”
“I insist on being generous. You may go now.”
Caleb Chandler retreated upstairs and Beckford lay down on his bed in the room next to his study. He dozed for a few hours and awoke at Kiphuth’s knock. “Major,” the batman said in his precise German, “the American painter, Mr. Stapleton, is in the parlor.”
“Tell him I’ll be down in a moment.”
Beckford found Paul Stapleton setting the half-finished portrait on an easel. The major admired the skill with which Paul had subtracted flesh from his face and belly. He looked like the hearty young man who had loved Paul in London ten years ago. “It’s magical, the way you recall the past,” he said. “It’s almost like seeing a ghost of myself.”
“I paint to please, Major,” Paul said.
“Remember, there must be some severity in the eyes,” Beckford said. “A sense of command about the mouth.”
“I’ll do my best to disguise your true character, Major.”
Beckford laughed. Paul’s sarcasm no longer stung. He was armored against him now. Paul was part of his childish past. “In a day or two you’ll see my true character.”
“We haven’t decided on an appropriate background for this masterpiece,” Paul said. “How about the Battle of Long Island?”
“Piffle,” Beckford said. “I was a nobody then. A very junior captain. I have something else in mind. A mansion in flames, a rabble of Americans fleeing from a half-dozen huts in its vicinity.”
“Something like this?” Paul said, rapidly blocking out the scene on his sketch pad.
“Exactly. With British soldiers - cavalry - charging the peasants.”
“Easy enough. But I don’t know the incident. Is there an account of it I might read for detail?”
Beckford laughed again. “Not likely. It hasn’t taken place yet.”
Paul Stapleton gazed at him for a moment. A slow smile spread across his face. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Maybe you’re a great man after all, Becky.”
“Let’s get on with it,” Beckford said.
He sat down at one of the parlor’s west windows and fixed his eyes on the frozen Hudson and the shore of New Jersey, the beckoning edge of the continent. Suffusing his profile with determination, he concentrated on the future. He saw the painting in the gallery of the Royal Society in London, admired by awed visitors, including His Majesty, King George III. So that’s how Beckford did it, they would murmur. But how could he fail? Look at that expression on his face. There was a man born to rule.
“You have a part to play in this final act, Paul dear,” Beckford said. “At long last you’ll see the point of your dreary interviews with Major Stallworth, feeding him all that useless information you supposedly picked up painting portraits. Tomorrow morning I’ll have some papers for you to take to that safe house in Elizabethtown.”
“Oh?”
“You can say you stole them off my desk. They’ll detail an attack from Staten Island. There will actually be a diversion by the Queen’s Rangers, designed to keep the Americans looking in the wrong direction.”
“I’m at your service, Major,” Paul said, continuing to paint.
“Precisely,” Beckford said. “I hope you not only mean that, but understand it. You were once rather dear to me, Paul. But those days are gone, beyond recall. I’ve always been aware of the possibility that you were doubling me instead of Stallworth for the past three years. If you double me now, I’ll have you killed. One way or another, I’ll ha
ve you killed. Do you hear me, Paul?”
“I hear you,” Paul said.
“Congressmen? Congressmen?” bawled the ragged Connecticut soldier. “Hey, lads, some fucking congressmen have come to inspect us!”
Congressmen Schuyler, Peabody, Mathews, and Stapleton were spending their first day in Morristown making a tour of the jockey Hollow encampment. They had been growing more and more solemn as they trudged from one brigade to another, seeing again and again gaunt men with empty bellies and improvised uniforms. Colonel Alexander Hamilton, General Washington’s aide, was their guide. Without consulting a note, he recited the number of men lacking shoes, coats, breeches, even guns, in each regiment.
Neither Colonel Hamilton nor anyone else was prepared for the reception they met on the parade ground of the 2nd Connecticut Brigade. Within sixty seconds they were surrounded by a mob of several hundred angry men.
“How do you know they’re congressmen?” someone yelled.
“From the fat on’m,” roared someone else.
“Hey, be any one of you plump turkeys from Connecticut?” demanded another voice.
“What does it matter? They’re all alike, swilling in Philadelphia while we starve,” shouted a man with a face as dirty as a blacksmith’s.
“Where are your officers?” Colonel Hamilton snapped. “Get back to your huts.”
“Our officers are down at Red Peggy’s getting drunk, like as not,” bellowed the dirty-faced man.
“They are not,” shouted a captain and two lieutenants, trying to fight their way through the mob. “Form on the parade ground. Disperse this mob and form.”
“Blow it out your asshole,” howled a voice on the far side of the crowd.
The officers began smashing to the right and left with the flats of their swords. A half-dozen more officers came running from their huts and joined the assault. The press around the congressmen was broken and the soldiers sullenly drifted away. The visitors hastily departed for the nearby camp of the 1st Connecticut Brigade, where they were introduced to the acting commander, Lieutenant Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs. He told them the same story they had heard everywhere. Given the opportunity, the whole army would go home tomorrow. The men were disgusted with no pay, poor provisions, and worse clothing. Meigs told the congressmen this in his laconic country manner. Standing beside him was another Connecticut lieutenant colonel, Ebenezer Huntington, who had a much different style. The son of a wealthy Norwich merchant, Huntington had a cosmopolitan swagger. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I used to glory in the name American. Now I’m ashamed of it. The abuses that this army has suffered at the hands of this country beggar description. Tell that to your colleagues in Philadelphia!”
At the end of the tour, the congressmen rode back to O’Hara’s Tavern, on the Morristown green, in Hugh Stapleton’s sleigh.
“Something must be done and done quickly,” murmured usually optimistic John Mathews of South Carolina.
“By God, I wish I could persuade some great men from New England to come down here,” growled Nathaniel Peabody of New Hampshire. “They’d stop talking through their sainted noses about General Washington.”
“Can I believe my ears? We’ve converted Yankeedom?” Stapleton said.
He had already discovered Peabody did not fit his fixed image of the New Englander. He was a sophisticated, skeptical man with a wry sense of humor.
“There’s an old saying: Seeing is believing,” Peabody said.
The four men debarked from the sleigh and hurried into O’Hara’s Tavern. The proprietor rushed up to Congressman Stapleton waving a note. “A black fellow left this for you not an hour ago, sir,” he said, “He’s waiting in the stable for your answer.”
While his fellow congressmen warmed themselves before the huge fireplace in the tavern’s taproom, Hugh Stapleton read the letter and felt another kind of warmth stir his blood.
My dearest:
I beseech you to come see me soon. Tomorrow if you can.
Something has occurred which may enable us to obtain the happiness we have discussed much sooner and with more ease than either of us has dreamed possible.
Flora
Hugh Stapleton excused himself and walked out to the stable. Cato stood beside Flora’s horses feeding them oats from his hand. “Tell your mistress I’ll be there at noon,” the congressman said.
For the rest of the day and night, Hugh Stapleton was a divided man, bodily present in Morristown at General Washington’s dinner table, nodding sagely at the exhortations Congressman Schuyler was issuing on the army’s behalf, listening with apparent attention as Washington described the kind of help he needed from Congress - a consistent supply of hard money, a new enlistment policy, a committee that could plan with the army the amount of men and money needed for the next campaign, and do something about getting both in hand before summer. “This will take hard work, gentlemen, damn hard work,” Washington said. “I hope you plan to stay for the rest of the winter.”
“That’s the least we can do,” Hugh Stapleton said.
The words rang in his ears with a hollow clang. They were pure fraud. He was a total hypocrite. What would the other soldier in his life, the late Malcolm Stapleton, have said about a son who lied that way? Hugh Stapleton saw that the love note in his pocket and George Washington, somberly presiding at the head of the table, were two contradictory futures. The congressman had gone too far, he had made too many promises to himself, to others, to resist Flora Kuyper’s invitation. The realistic side of his mind told him it would take months of wrangling with the army’s enemies in Congress to translate Washington’s words into action. A woman with no interest in politics would hardly accept politics as an excuse for delaying the happiness she had been so confidently promised. But from another part of the congressman’s mind or body rose a wish for some way to voice his regret, to explain himself to the soldier at the head of the table.
No explanation was possible. Stapleton did not say a word for the rest of the night. He and his companions shrugged into their coats for the cold walk back to O’Hara’s Tavern. Washington stood at the door and shook each man’s hand as they departed. Hugh Stapleton was the last man out the door. Washington gripped his hand for an extra moment and said, “Mr. Schuyler told me about the speech you made on our behalf. You have my gratitude. Eventually I hope you’ll have your country’s gratitude.”
“Thank you, General. I . . . I merely wished to be of some service. It was - is - the least I can do.”
The least and the last, he thought.
Washington cleared his throat. He seemed suddenly uneasy “There’s another matter I’ve wanted to discuss with you. A thing of some delicacy. Perhaps we could meet tomorrow morning.”
“I . . . I’m afraid that’s impossible, General. I must make a flying visit home. My . . . my wife is ill.”
“I’m sorry. The next day, perhaps. Ask Colonel Hamilton to arrange a time.”
The next morning Hugh Stapleton was up at dawn, gobbling a hasty breakfast, impatiently asking inn-keeper O’Hara why his horses and sleigh had not been ready at 6 a.m. in accordance with the orders he had left the night before. By 6:30 he was whipping his two black geldings down the road to Bergen so swiftly their bells fairly clattered out the opening bars of his old favorite, “The Good Fellow.”
By noon he was past Newark, skimming down the packed snow of the new road across the marshes to the heights of Bergen. For the first time the gray clouds that had dominated the sky for so long had broken, and ragged sunlight gleamed on the white silent world of winter. The congressman was egotistic enough to think it was an omen of his coming happiness.
The messenger of the day before, Cato, met the congressman at Flora Kuyper’s door and bowed him into the familiar center hall. The air was rich with the scent of burning cedar. Flora appeared in the doorway of the parlor, wearing a dark blue gown with the skirt modishly bunched and flounced and looped. The loops exposed a scarlet flash of petticoat at the front, and beneath t
he petticoat hem peeped a delicate ankle, in white silk stockings with gold clocks. “My dear friend,” Flora said, “I’m so glad you could come.”
To the congressman’s eyes her smile promised everything. He swept her into his arms. But she avoided his kiss and slipped from his grasp. “There’s someone here, whom you must meet,” she said. “To whom I referred when I mentioned achieving our happiness. He’s an old friend of mine from London.”
She took Hugh Stapleton’s arm and led him into the parlor. A fat man wearing the red coat and white breeches of a British officer rose from a wing chair, a confident smile on his spherical face. “Mr. Stapleton, I’m Major Walter Beckford, aide-de-camp to General von Knyphausen. You don’t know me, but I’ve often heard your name. Your brother, Paul, and I were good friends in London.”
“And in New York for a while, I believe,” Congressman Stapleton said.
“I, too, met Major Beckford in London,” Flora said. “When the war began, we renewed our acquaintance. He offered me his protection.”
“There’s no need to be discreet, my dear,” Beckford said. “Congressman Stapleton is a man of the world. He knows what a dunce your husband was. Without me this farm would be a burned-out ruin. In return, Mrs. Kuyper has assisted us in small, harmless ways, such as arranging this meeting.”
“I understand, of course,” Stapleton said. But he realized that he understood very little. He could be certain of one thing. Major Beckford was not risking his safety within the American lines merely to exchange polite compliments.
“Would you like some wine?” Flora said, her manner still strained.
“Sherry, thank you,” Stapleton said.
“The same,” Beckford said.
Cato served it promptly. He had obviously been waiting in the kitchen for the signal. Beckford raised his glass. “To peace,” he said. “And the happiness of both England and America.”
Dreams of Glory Page 28
