Dreams of Glory

by Thomas Fleming

  Congressman Stapleton stumbled to his feet, his coat and breeches soaked. He was in almost total darkness. Only a faint light entered the cell through a slit in the door. There was no furniture, only a slop bucket; not even straw for a bed. For the first day, or what he thought was the first day - it was hard to judge the passage of time - he received neither food nor water. The cold was unrelenting, voracious. It seemed to emanate from the walls in a brutal parody of heat. Refusing to lie down in the muck, the congressman tried to sleep standing up and found it impossible. He finally collapsed into a huddled fetal ball, searching for warmth in his congealing flesh.

  He awoke desperately hungry and thirsty. He pounded on the cell door and shouted for food and water. Another Irish soldier eventually responded. He threw a piece of bread in the muck and handed him a cup of water. “Eat up, rebel,” he said. “That’s breakfast, dinner, and supper.”

  Much later, as Hugh Stapleton crouched in a corner shivering convulsively, Provost Marshal Cunningham opened the door. “Ready to sign that statement, rebel?”

  “No,” the congressman said.

  “You’re a fool, rebel,” the provost marshal said, and slammed the door.

  Was he right? Hugh Stapleton wondered. If he died in this inhuman icehouse, who would know? The British would publish a lie: Congressman Stapleton hanged himself in his cell. Something like that. His letter to Flora Kuyper would be flourished to substantiate the story. The turncoat Yankee chaplain, Chandler, would vouch for it. Hannah, his sons, George Washington, his fellow congressmen, would see no reason to doubt it.

  Worse, the war might well end in a negotiated peace two or three months after his death. Was there any other alternative to the present stalemate? He had read enough history to know that the advantage in such negotiations lay with the side that held out longest. The supplicant was always the loser. Was that diplomatic difference worth his life? Didn’t it make his death even more meaningless? Wasn’t there a very good chance that someone else in Congress, captured or free, would issue the call for reconciliation Beckford was demanding?

  For a while Hugh Stapleton clung to his personal resentment of Walter Beckford. The fat sodomite, probably with the connivance of his brother, Paul, had selected him for plucking. He would not give the Williamite bastard the satisfaction of breaking him!

  As the cold began to bite into the congressman’s bones, the cell door opened again. The Reverend Chandler, his supercilious smirk intact, introduced a middle-aged, scholarly-looking officer, Major Henry Whittlesey of the engineers. Whittlesey said the Reverend Chandler had persuaded him to make this visit. “I want you to know that many officers in the garrison sympathize with your situation and sincerely hope you’ll see the wisdom of a call for negotiations. Personally, I’ve long been hoping for a peace of reconciliation.”

  “You have an odd way of reconciling people, sir,” Stapleton said. “So far I’ve become reconciled to only one thing - an early death.”

  “I’m sure Major Beckford had no idea that conditions in these dungeons were so harsh,” Chandler said, drawing his cloak around him to ward off the cold.

  “Would you be so kind as to tell him about them?” Stapleton said.

  “I’d be happy to do so, but he’s indisposed,” Chandler said, missing the sarcasm. “Some of the cavalry officers have made a most unjust attack on him for the failure of the attempt to seize Mr. Washington. There’s even talk of a court martial.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard in days.”

  “But it won’t alter your situation, sir,” Whittlesey said. “Unless you change your mind.”

  The visit deepened Hugh Stapleton’s moral confusion. The cold soon evaporated the small satisfaction of Walter Beckford’s disgrace. Major Whittlesey was right. It did not alter his situation. Others besides Beckford wanted his signature on a call for peace. Why not sign it? Hugh Stapleton was a businessman, not a politician. All his life he had lived in comfort, ease. Who could expect him to endure this kind of torture?

  Alone in the icy darkness, the congressman groped for the answer to this question. Certainly not Congressman Samuel Chase of Maryland or Robert R. Livingston of New York. They were men of the world, they knew there were limits to a gentleman’s endurance. But the voices, the faces, of these acquaintances had no resonance. Neither did his mother’s voice: You have gotten yourself into a bad bargain, Hugh, she would say. You must cut your losses and buy your way out of it.

  Only one voice gave him a different answer, a voice that came out of the grave: Tell those limey bastards to go fuck themselves. That was what his father would do, say. But he had had the physique and endurance of a Hercules. He had marched and fought through two Canadian winters. Scraps of the journal he had published in the 1760s drifted through the congressman’s mind: With the temperature 20 below zero every man knew that even a bullet in the arm or leg meant death unless the limb was immediately amputated. The Indians and French came at us through the snow like howling ghosts. A hero. But he was dead. What did voices from the grave matter to the living?

  Wait. Another voice. General Washington: This army is America’s only protection from defeat and disgrace. He knew. He had soldiered with the British, like Malcolm Stapleton. He knew their peculiar capacity for arrogance; no different, perhaps, from other warrior nations. The price of defeat was disgrace, humiliation, no matter where or when it happened. Did Hugh Stapleton want that for his country, his sons?

  Another voice swirled out of the darkness. With it came the memory of his wife’s weary country face, glaring at him across the dining-room table at Great Rock Farm: If you care about your country, your sons, you should be urging them to resist, resist to the last bullet.

  His country? He had never had much faith in the shaky confederation called the United States, mingling hotheaded Southerners, pacifist Philadelphia Quakers, liberal New Yorkers, and self-righteous Yankees. He had never given much thought to the meaning of the word “American.” He wore it as a label, using it to his advantage in London, where it often charmed curious English ladies, abandoning it the moment it seemed inconvenient, when the word inspired unpleasant associations, such as crude provincialism.

  His sons? He barely knew them, after three years in England and the West Indies, another year-and-a-half in Philadelphia. Hugh Stapleton remembered with a twist of forlorn regret his resolution to improve on his father’s performance. Malcolm Stapleton had been away, fighting in Canada, in Cuba, for years at a time during Hugh’s boyhood. He had come home to stranger sons.

  If you care about your country, your sons, his wife had said. She suspected the truth. He did not care about either of them very much. He had been ready to abandon both for Flora Kuyper. Now, in this icy coffin in which his indifference had cast him, Hugh Stapleton tried to find some residue, some inheritance of his father’s, his wife’s caring, beneath his businessman’s philosophy of maximizing profits and cutting losses, beneath his city cynicism and sophistication.

  What had he cared about in his life, beyond “improving some moneys”? Beautiful furniture, silver, good food, fine wine. None of them traveled to this freezing hell. Friendship? It was almost always the friendship of the good fellow. Fellowship did not provide much warmth in the dungeon of the Provost. What had he loved?

  Another face: framed by hair as yellow as a fresh-cut rose, skin as smooth, glowing as one of Gainsborough’s duchesses. Hannah’s face, Hannah’s voice whispering on their wedding night: Husband, I love thee so. She had been so beautiful! How could he have forgotten the joy, the ardor, of those first years of his marriage? How had three years of piling up money, of visits to expensive whores in Amsterdam, the West Indies, so eroded his memory? Was it because Hugh Stapleton, collector of beautiful things, had simply seen Hannah as one more trophy, one more tribute to his impeccable taste? Yes, there was no question that his egotism had helped him lose the real value, the real meaning, of those years. Now, stripped of his pride, his possessions, that memory became the one
thing that gave him the strength to endure his agony.

  Although they would never know it, he would prove himself that he cared about the sons created by that love. He would accept this punishment as just, as something he deserved, for betraying that love. Through that love he would somehow manage to care about his country, that dubious proposition called the United States. He would summon caring for his sons’ sake, for Hannah’s sake.

  More days - or were they hours? - passed. A cup of water, a crust of bread in the muck, then Cunningham’s taunt: “Are you ready to sign, rebel?” Once, he did not answer. Cunningham charged into the cell and kicked him in the stomach. “I asked you a question, rebel,” he shouted.

  “No,” Hugh Stapleton gasped.

  His breathing was labored now. The cold had filled his lungs with mucus. Jolts of icy pain ran along his bones, gnawed the joints of his fingers, shoulders, knees. He could no longer bend his legs or move his fingers. Most of the time he was too weak to stand. He found it difficult to swallow, his throat was so raw. He ignored the bread and water shoved at him by the indifferent guards. His mind began to wander. He thought he was in London, Philadelphia. He excoriated the King. He addressed Congress, weeping, begging their forgiveness. When he awoke from these semi-nightmares, he forced himself to remember New York, Hannah in her green paduasoy gown at the end of the dining-room table, with the smiling faces of friends between them.

  Gradually the memory changed to the other face, his tired country wife at the end of the dining-room table in Great Rock Farm. He loved both faces. Now he understood what Paul meant about living in terror. Now he understood what British gentlemen were prepared to do to win this war. “You limey bastards can go fuck yourselves,” he roared. “Do you hear me? Go fuck yourselves.”

  No one answered. He was buried alive down here. In Morristown, in Philadelphia, they were saying, Good riddance to the whoremaster. Samuel Chase and those other hypocrites were denouncing him as a traitor. Washington was shaking his head in his mournful disappointed way. Hannah, his sons, were hanging their heads, weeping. If there were some way of telling them, he could accept this miserable death. “Oh, God,” Hugh Stapleton whispered, praying for the first time in decades, “tell them somehow. Let them find out how I died, why.”

  Plop, the bread, splash, the water. “Ready to sign, rebel?”

  “No,” the congressman croaked.

  Much, much later, the cell door opened again. Hugh Stapleton raised his head to answer the usual question. He did not want another kick in the stomach. A woman was standing in the doorway, her bonnet and skirt outlined against the dim lantern light. “Oh, my God,” Hannah said.

  He was sure it was one of those hallucinations men have on the edge of death. God was taunting him, sending him a vision of the one person in the world he wanted to see.

  “Oh, Hugh. Husband,” Hannah said, dropping to her knees in the muck. She hugged his slimy, bearded face to her breast.

  It was the touch, the reality, of a genuine woman. “Is it you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get here? Is the war over?”

  “No. But it shall be over for some people if you’re not treated better. I’ll blow out their brains!”

  She began berating Provost Marshal Cunningham, who stood outside the cell. “How can you treat any human being this way, much less a member of the American Congress? I demand that you remove my husband from this . . . this sewer immediately.”

  “He shan’t be moved without an order from my superiors, madam.”

  Cunningham growled. “He’s been treated no worse than other disobedient, stiff-necked rebels.”

  “In that case I weep for all your prisoners, sir,” Hannah said.

  “If . . . if I’m dead when you come back,” Hugh Stapleton whispered, “tell the boys, Washington, I . . . I wouldn’t sign anything. I never signed anything.”

  “You won’t die,” Hannah said, holding him against her again, this time with ferocity. “You won’t die.”

  The door clanged shut; the cold and darkness engulfed the congressman again. He began to doubt the visit. He was still dying. His breath still bubbled in his chest. It had been a wish after all, the realistic details embroidered by his failing brain. Then he believed it again. I won’t die, he told himself. I won’t die. He crawled around in the muck until he found a piece of bread. He was too weak to chew it. The crust stuck in his throat and he almost choked before he spat it out.

  Hours, or days, later, the cell door opened. Hannah knelt beside him again. By this time Hugh Stapleton was too weak to raise his head. He heard Hannah ordering someone to be careful. Hands lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him up the stairs. In a cell on an upper floor of the prison, he was lifted onto a bed, and warm blankets were drawn over him. A half-hour later, Richard Bayley, the Stapletons’ family doctor before the war, arrived to examine him. Bayley had stayed in New York, a loyalist. But he was a humane man. “It’s enough to make me change my allegiance,” he muttered as he peered down Hugh Stapleton’s raw throat, then checked his laboring pulse.

  Two orderlies from the British hospital stripped off the congressman’s filthy clothes, shaved and bathed him, and put him into a flannel nightgown. Hot flannel soaked in oil of wintergreen was wrapped around his swollen joints. Dr. Bayley ordered braziers of charcoal placed at the head and foot of the prisoner’s bed. For the first few days he permitted only hot beef or chicken broth in the congressman’s starved stomach.

  Those first days were disconnected and delirious. Hannah was often there, urging him to take more broth. She told him a story about fighting British partisans in the old farmhouse. Paul was dead, a hero. He had been an American spy. Several times he asked her if it was true, or had he dreamed it? She said it was true. On the fifth night Congressman Stapleton had a dream. He was laboring through deep snow in the north woods beside his father. Some enemy was pursuing them. The old man became exhausted. “This is as far as I can go,” he said. “You go on.” He sank down behind a tree and raised his huge double-barreled gun to his shoulder, waiting for the enemy. Hugh swayed there, tormented. Shouldn’t he stay and fight? he wondered. “Go on,” Malcolm Stapleton roared, glaring over his shoulder at him. Hugh floundered through the trees. When he looked back, he could no longer see the old man.

  In a week, the congressman was sitting up in bed, listening to Hannah tell how she had gone straight from her first visit to the prison to the residence of the royal governor, General James Robertson. He had been stationed in New York for many years before the war and had several times been a guest at their dinner table. “I remembered you considered him an egregious ass in those days,” she said. “Dr. Bayley assured me he’s a bigger fool than ever, still fancying himself the very model of a modern courtier at the age of sixty-nine.”

  The congressman nodded, enjoying every word. He remembered Robertson well - a pompous, elongated, spindle-shanked character, who looked more like a minister or a college professor than a soldier.

  “I stormed into his parlor,” Hannah continued, “where he was tête-à-tête with two girls young enough to be his granddaughters! When he heard my story, he denied everything. He summoned General Pattison, head of the military police, and the two of them denied even knowing you were a prisoner, I told them their performance was worthy of the Drury Lane, and threatened to notify General Washington of your condition. There would soon be several captured British colonels wearing irons and living on bread and water in our prison camps.”

  “Washington promised you that?”

  Hannah nodded. “He never deserted you for a moment once he learned from Mrs. Kuyper that you hadn’t gone willingly with the British.”

  The mention of Mrs. Kuyper made the congressman uneasy. “A remarkable man, Washington,” he said.

  “Yes,” Hannah said. “His mind is seldom clouded by sentiment. He urged me to come here for two reasons. First, a call for peace from a congressman could have disastrous consequences. Second, there
are only a handful of merchants with as much hard money as you can contribute to the bank Robert Morris is forming, to fund the army.”

  Hannah’s voice was as cool and unsentimental as Washington’s mind.

  “Even for those reasons I’m sure it wasn’t easy for you to come,” the congressman said.

  “It wasn’t,” Hannah said. “It became even more difficult when General Robertson said there was a letter he could show me that you had written to Mrs. Kuyper. Major Beckford wanted to publish it, but Robertson has been delaying permission in the hope that you can still be persuaded to call for a reconciliation, or at the very least abandon the rebellion.”

  “Say what you feel about Mrs. Kuyper,” the congressman said, studying his still-swollen fingers. “I deserve every word.”

  “I’ll say nothing now,” Hannah said. “I hope we’ll have years together to understand what happened between us. Let’s concentrate on getting you out of this place.”

  “How?” Hugh Stapleton said. “It’s obviously going to be a long contest of wills.”

  “Dr. Bayley says you won’t survive a long contest. You need exercise, fresh air.”

  “You can put every cent I have in Holland into Morris’s bank now. I’ll give you power of attorney.”

  “Don’t-”

  She placed her hand over his mouth. He saw tears in her eyes. “My feelings are so complicated. I don’t know whether to . . . . to kiss you - or damn you - or cry.”

  “I love you,” he said. “That’s one of the few things I discovered downstairs.”

  Hannah dried her eyes and sat down beside him on the bed so she could speak in a confidential voice. “George Washington told me he was sending one of his most dependable spies into the city with orders to help you escape. He declined to tell me his name. He said the motto for success in espionage was as much secrecy as humanly possible. He said I, or you, would recognize the fellow by a token - a miniature of George the Third - which he’d pretend to give you to encourage you to turn your coat.”