Dreams of Glory

by Thomas Fleming

  Hannah sat down on the edge of a wing chair. God was turning Dominie Freylingheusen’s sermon, her early-morning meditation about pride and strength, into cruel comedy. “I . . . I don’t know what to say,” she murmured.

  “I must ask your permission to search Mr. Stapleton’s papers for anything that may shed some light on his capture. General Washington feels we should continue to call it that until we have solid proof to the contrary.”

  “Yes,” Hannah said, certain that no documentary proof was necessary. The proof was in her memory of Hugh’s self-pity, his boredom, his disillusion with Congress, his antipathy to contumacious Yankees.

  “I’d like to take the papers back to Morristown so I can examine them in detail.”

  “Of course.”

  She ordered Pompey and his son Isaac to bring a trunk down from the attic. As they filled it with Hugh’s letter books and ledgers from the West Indies and records of his privateering and mercantile ventures in Philadelphia, Hannah glanced hurriedly at them and was amazed at the profits. Hugh was incredibly richer than he had ever intimated to her. Another example of the distance that had grown between them.

  Colonel Hamilton departed, his sleigh sinking into the softening snow under the weight of the trunk full of papers. As the rest of the day drifted listlessly into dusk, Hannah realized that Paul had not returned from New York. Had he deserted her, too? Had he joined his brother in a joint decision to “improve some moneys”? That would be unbearable. God would not permit it. He would not allow her to be humiliated twice by these devious hardhearted Stapletons. Her misery multiplied, as she remembered her morning thoughts about becoming part of the family. She was trapped here, with no retreat, no refuge. She could not go home to beg crumbs from her father’s table, to accept his condescending affection.

  She got out Paul’s unfinished portrait of her and set it on an easel. Was that woman a fool? Was that radiance in her eyes, on her face, a clever lie? She could not believe it. But where was Paul? Drinking with his former lover, Beckford, and his traitorous brother, Hugh, and the mysterious woman from Bergen, laughing at love and loyalty?

  Little Malcolm came in to say good night. “When will Father come home again?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hannah said.

  “He promised me a sleigh ride. Now the snow’s melting.”

  “I’ll ask Pompey to give you one tomorrow.”

  “I want it from Father.”

  She tousled his blond head and hugged him, whispering, “I hope he’ll come soon.”

  She would accept Hugh, she would try to love him in spite of the woman in Bergen, Hannah told herself. If only he had not deserted to the British. That was all she wanted now. His loyalty.

  About an hour after Malcolm went to bed, Pompey came into the parlor, where Hannah still sat staring disconsolately at Paul’s unfinished portrait. “Mistress,” he said, “they in the barns again.”

  “There’s nothing we can do about it. Lock the front and back doors. Tie Achilles on the porch.”

  “I’d like to fight them just once, mistress.”

  “No. They’d kill us all, Pompey.”

  Before Hugh left, he had apparently commissioned Pompey to guard the house, without bothering to consult her or Paul. Tonight, as usual, she insisted on limiting the old soldier to defensive measures. A half-hour later, Achilles began barking. Suddenly his deep bass became a strangled yelp. With a tremendous crash the front door splintered around the lock and burst open. Wiert Bogert lunged into the hall, seeming to fill it from floor to ceiling. He was dragging Achilles by the tail. Blood oozed from the dog’s slashed throat. “Hello, liddle lady,” he said. “Here’s your mutt.”

  Behind Bogert came John Nelson, herding the farm’s eight male blacks, including a very disgruntled Pompey, into the kitchen. Returning to the parlor, Nelson gave Hannah his shark’s smile. In the firelight, the scars of his tarring and feathering writhed up his throat. “We’re here with marching orders from your husband,” Nelson said. “He’s joined the King’s side and expects you to cooperate with us. We’re going to collect twenty or thirty horses from loyalists hereabouts and put them in your barn for use later tonight. Until then this house will be under guard. Anyone, black or white, who tries to sneak off will be shot. Is your brotherly protector, Mr. Stapleton, here?”

  Hannah shook her head.

  “Maybe Beckford’s put him to work, too. About time, I’d say.”

  “You understand all that, liddle lady?” Bogert said.

  Hannah nodded, still unable to speak. She sat there for another hour while Pompey disposed of Achilles’s corpse and wiped the blood from the hall floor. Something very important was obviously about to happen. Hugh’s desertion, Paul’s disappearance, were connected to it. But what could she do about it? She found herself despising her helplessness, almost hating her womanhood.

  A light rain pattered against the windows. A pathetic, dismal sound. As it began to penetrate, almost absorb her mind, the front door crashed open again. Wiert Bogert loomed in the hall. “Get in here and stay,” he ordered. “You don’t go near d’barn again. John in command here.”

  Bogert shoved Paul into the parlor and returned to the barn. With a violent shiver, Paul threw off his hat and cloak; both were drenched. His breeches were equally soaked; his stockings were matted with wet snow from the road. Hannah threw her arms around him. “I’ve been praying and praying for you to come,” she said.

  “That explains why I’m here,” he said in his wryest voice. “I’m in the grip of omnipotence.”

  She noticed he was not returning her embrace. She stepped back, puzzled. “Where have you been?”

  “This morning I was on the outskirts of Elizabethtown,” he said, “where I was supposed to leave some papers with a certain Colonel Dayton. Papers that would set the Americans running to defend the place. To no purpose - the attack is coming from the opposite direction. All the way down there I kept thinking about Hugh going over to them. I suppose you’ve heard about that.”

  Hannah nodded mournfully.

  “It was proof, if I needed it, that the British were going to win. I stopped in a tavern and began getting drunk. I couldn’t stand the idea of Hugh outsmarting me. I found myself wanting to be on the winning side, too. I wanted to show my bastard of a brother I could be as shrewd and despicable as he is.”

  “Paul, dearest,” Hannah said, almost weeping. “Such hatred can only wound thee, not him.”

  Paul strolled over to the half-finished portrait and adjusted it on the easel. “That isn’t the message I got on the wings of your prayers. When I came out of the tavern, I buried the papers in a snowbank. I went into Elizabethtown to tell Dayton the truth. I couldn’t find him, so I left a message with one of his aides and came back here because I thought you might need me.”

  “I love thee for it,” Hannah said.

  Paul tossed his head, denying, as usual, the possibility that anyone could love him. Simultaneously, Hannah realized he was right, her words were not entirely true. She could never love Paul the way she had loved Hugh. She loved Paul’s love for her, she loved his muted wish to be his father’s son, she loved his artist’s gift. When she said I love thee she added: for it. For this final act of courage and affection. There was something even worse in those words. She was saying them because she knew they were what Paul wanted and needed to hear. She was using that sacred word, “love,” to bolster this man’s fragile commitment to his country.

  “Only when I got here did I realize that the farm was part of the plan. No doubt Hugh volunteered it. Becky’s very thorough.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  “Seize General Washington. Becky’s coming out with the cavalry tonight.”

  “We can’t get a message to Morristown without a horse,” Hannah said. “What can we do to stop them?”

  Paul walked over to the window. “Set fire to the barn. Destroy all the fresh horses.”

  “Yes,” Hannah said.
“Yes.”

  “One small drawback,” Paul said. “Nelson has a half-dozen men out there besides Bogert. They’ll kill us if we try it.”

  “We’ll fight them,” Hannah said. “Pompey, Isaac, the others will help us. We’ve still got your father’s guns.”

  “I’ve never shot one in my life.”

  “Pompey knows how. He’ll teach us.”

  “You’re insane,” Paul said.

  “It’s for my sons as much as for me. Your father’s grandsons. No matter what happens, they’ll know they had a mother and an uncle who weren’t traitors.”

  “Insanity,” Paul said. “Let’s get the guns. Who’ll set fire to the barn?”

  “I will,” Hannah said.

  In her dreams, Flora Kuyper heard the church bells of London once more. Or was it the single bell of the Ursuline convent on Chartres Street in New Orleans? She seemed to stand with her face pressed to the glass front of a shop. On the display counters were silver bowls and pitchers, sea-green and sky-blue china, gold bracelets studded with diamonds, silk shawls with cloth of gold woven through them. She heard her mother’s voice saying, Do you want these things? Then do as I tell you.

  The dream dissolved, and she was alone in a nun’s cell, wearing a dress of coarse cloth, tied at the waist with a crude rope. Somewhere the bell continued to toll. She had fled the temptations of the world. But the rope ran out the door and someone was pulling on it, dragging her like a fish on a line down a dark corridor to another room, overlooking a courtyard of the barracks beside the Place d’Armes. A heavy man with a sad bruised face stood against the red-brick wall. Guns boomed and blood fell like a curtain down his forehead. Father, Father. She flung aside her nun’s robe and ran naked down the corridor again to the shop window. She pressed her whole body against the glass, weeping. She looked down and there were hands on her breasts. The hands grew arms. She turned and saw William Coleman, smiling. She reached up to touch the curve of his cheek, to trace the memory of his smile with her fingers. She awoke weeping.

  Wrapping herself in a blanket against the cold, Flora sat by the window, watching the world take shape. The huge old oak on the east lawn was the first thing to appear. Then the road beyond it, then the stone fence that marked the boundary of her property. Then the graves beneath the oak. Caesar lay there beside Henry Kuyper. Were they watching her now? Or was death an utter forgetting, an absolute blankness? She did not want to believe that. She wanted to believe that her father still existed somewhere, somehow, in the darkness, still caring for her. He alone had been content to wish her happiness. All the others, until Caleb, had insisted on owning, using Flora.

  If William had permitted her to have the child in London, perhaps their life, or at least her life, would have changed. She would have had a purpose, a meaning beyond the world’s traffic of use and abuse.

  Perhaps Caleb was her child. There was something about him that awakened maternal feelings in her. But he was also a man. She remembered the baritone voice, turning her tentative French love song into an affirmation, vibrating with praise of New England’s warrior God.

  Perhaps Caleb was simply new. He made the world new. This sewer of a world, where one’s worst expectations invariably proved correct, where the worst motives invariably prevailed. Caleb resisted such things; he defied them with a promise of unspoiled hope, of faith in himself, in her. He made her new again. He made her almost believe she could unlive the other memories, the degrading nights in London, the furtive afternoons in the barn with Caesar. Wounds in her womanhood, in her soul.

  But William Coleman was more than a wound. He was more than acts, postures, degradations. William was birth and death. He was fundamental. She had known it for a long time. Even before their London world collapsed, every time she had asked the cards about their future, the Queen of Spades had confronted her. It was this sense of fate that had paralyzed her as much as her love for him.

  William had taught her the power of love even when it was corrupted. He had murdered her heart and resurrected it by lacerating his own icy heart, in the end sacrificing it before her eyes like some weird God. It was impossible to forget his anguished reaffirmation of his love for her in Newgate Prison on the day they thought they were going to die.

  Yet she had permitted Caleb to take her token, the bearded Queen of Hearts, and set out for Morristown to destroy William. Perhaps her dream had been trying to tell her that this decision was inevitable, that there was no way to escape his corrupted love except by killing him. Until she heard the truth about Caesar’s murder, she had not believed William deserved death. Suffering, but not death. Now she believed it, wanted it, with only one reservation. She would not inflict the blow. In memory of that day in Newgate, she would not condemn him. She would simply turn her face away.

  The cards had told her that Caleb would succeed. Last night she had turned up a Queen of Spades and a Queen of Hearts. Death and love in swift succession. She wanted him to succeed. She wanted to stop dreaming about William Coleman.

  The red sun was rising into a cloudless sky. The glow tinted the brown spires, the gray roofs of New York. The city, image of the real world, was taking shape in the dawn. Major Walter Beckford waited there with his men and guns. Hugh Stapleton was there, too, locked in a prison cell.

  She hoped Caleb would forgive her for Stapleton. She had sensed in their last conversation Caleb’s yearning to return to his devotion to America. He wanted to bring her with him. But his attempt to invoke her father’s love of freedom only confused her. England and its liberty were what her father had loved. How could the slaveowning Americans with their liberty slogans revolt against their mother country without convicting themselves of hypocrisy? They had thought their distance from England would make it easy for them to revolt. Now that it was proving to be a difficult, dangerous business, only a handful of the most stubborn rebels clung to the cause because for them, defeat would mean death. Flora did not want Caleb to be one of this remnant. His mind had already accepted the hypocrisy of the rebellion. She would not permit his heart to seduce him again. She would see that it remained loyal to her, a woman without a country. She told herself her own disloyalty was a virtue, not a flaw; it reinforced, purified their love.

  Out on the road, Flora saw a horseman riding hard, outlined against the red dawn sky. He slowed as he came to her gate, and trotted up the path to the house. He was wearing an American army uniform. Flora heard the crack of the brass knocker on the front door, Cato answering it. She rushed to the head of the stairs, where the word “letter” drove her back to the bedroom. She remembered the last letter that had been delivered by a man in an army uniform. It had told her that Caesar was dead.

  Caleb? God would not permit it. The cards had forbidden it. Cato slowly ascended the stairs and knocked on her door. She told him to come in. “A soldier left this, mistress. Turned and rode away, though I offered him breakfast,” Cato said.

  The letter was addressed to her. She tore it open. It was a hasty scrawl, written on a piece of dirty paper. But it was Caleb’s handwriting.

  My dearest: This will be brought to you by one of Coleman’s men. He has me prisoner in Red Peggy’s grog shop. I’ve told him that I’m a servant of the King. He does not believe me. Only you can save me.

  Caleb

  “Bad news, mistress?” Cato asked.

  “Yes,” Flora said. “Get out the horses and sleigh. We’re going to Morristown. As fast as possible.”

  “It’ll be slow on the road, with the snow melting,” Cato said. “Hard work for the horses.”

  “I don’t care if it kills the horses. I want to go at a gallop.”

  Ignoring Nancy’s plea to eat some breakfast, Flora was on the road in a half-hour. In spite of her demands, Cato refused to hurry the horses. “They’d be dead before we got to Newark, mistress,” he said. “Then what?” She settled for a steady trot.

  As they advanced into the countryside beyond Newark, they began passing other sleighs on the road. The
distant clang of church bells explained them. It was Sunday. Flora looked into the solemn faces of farmers and their wives and wondered if God listened to their prayers. He had so long, so persistently refused to answer hers. Perhaps it was because she had never truly renounced William Coleman in her heart. She had never asked God to forgive her for that morning in New Orleans when she had crept out of her mother’s house to meet William in the dawn.

  If that was what God required for forgiveness, she was ready to surrender. She would willingly amputate whatever part of her heart or soul William Coleman still possessed. She would not only offer it to God as a mute sacrifice, she would renounce William to his face. She would threaten to expose him to the rebels if he refused to spare Caleb. She would confess, no, declare, her love for Caleb and her detestation of the very name William Coleman.

  By the time Flora’s sleigh reached Morristown, the bright sun had vanished behind squadrons of scudding gray clouds. It would snow or rain tonight, depending on how far the temperature dropped. Cato asked directions at O’Hara’s Tavern and soon found the Vealtown Road. In a half-hour, the sleigh stopped before Red Peggy’s nondescript frame house. Flora went up the steps into a dim hall. From the left came the sound of voices. She opened a door and stepped into an equally dim taproom. A half-dozen men were sitting at tables. There was no one at the bar except a woman who was obviously Red Peggy. Her fiery hair glistened in the half-light. The bar, tucked into a corner of the room with no window near it, was especially dim. Flora could see little of the woman’s face except her red lips and rouged cheeks.

  Before she could take a step, Red Peggy said, “Down the hall, miss. The second door on the left. You’ll find the gentleman you’re looking for.”

  The drinkers stared at her. They were all rough, bulky men in homespun. They looked vaguely menacing. Flora backed into the hall and found the second door on the left. It was unlocked. She stepped inside and confronted an incredible sight. There, wearing Red Peggy’s gingham dress, his lips, his cheeks still caked with rouge, his red wig tossed on a nearby table, was William Coleman, agent Twenty-six.