Dreams of Glory (32 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Dreams of Glory
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CATO'S BULK FILLED THE DOORWAY of the Kuyper farmhouse. For a moment he seemed to consider blocking Caleb Chandler's entrance. It was easy to imagine this black moralist's disgust with the Reverend Chandler's conduct. Too bad Cato could not imagine the Reverend Chandler's own disgust. Instead they communicated in formal terms.
“Good morning, Cato. I'm here to see your mistress.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you used the Billings songbook I left with you?”
Cato's face brightened slightly. “Yes. It's done wonderful things for the hearts of my people. That man must have written those songs under the inspiration of the Lord.”
“Yes,” Caleb murmured. “May I come in?”
“Of course, sir. Mrs. Kuyper is in the parlor.”
The plangent tones of the harpsichord drifted into the hall, along with Flora's delicate contralto, a sound between a chime and a sigh. She was singing
“Plaire á celui que j'aime.”
Caleb felt a thickness in his throat. He had to struggle for breath. It was almost as if Stallworth were strangling him again. He forced himself to walk briskly into the parlor.
Smiling, Flora turned to greet him. “I was hoping it was you,” she said. She was wearing a simple country dress, a soft red, without lace or pleats. Her hair was tied with a matching red ribbon. It made her look girlish. She acted the same way, throwing herself into Caleb's arms for a long enthusiastic kiss.
“I haven't slept a whole night since you went to New York,” she said. “Nelson told me Major Beckford arrested you and put you on one of the prison ships.”
“A little test of my nerves and loyalty,” Caleb said.
“I almost went to New York—to berate him,” she said. “But I decided it might arouse his suspicion.”
“Possibly. Anyhow, I survived the major's auto-da-fé and his suspicion has turned to trust. He's paying me twenty guineas for a trip to Morristown and back.”
“I feared for you at Morristown, too,” she said. “You're new at this business of deception.”
“I proved myself a talented liar there, too.”
Flora caught the pain in his voice. “It troubles you, doesn't it?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
“That's been my worst fear,” she said, her arms still around him. “I saw your New England conscience getting the better of you, once we parted. I imagined you starting to think: Is she worth the risk of my soul, this Portuguese-Jewish baggage, this amorous quadroon, this mere woman? Has she tricked me into abandoning my country's cause?”
“I begin to think you are my soul,” he said.
Was that true? Caleb wondered. It was what Flora wanted to hear. The extravagant words came so naturally to his lips he found it impossible to qualify them in his mind. This woman was so alive, so vulnerable, she blurred the boundary between truth and deception.
“Let's have a late supper,” she said. “I'll tell Cato to light the fire in my bedroom.”
“I—yes. That sounds lovely.”
He dangled between opposing wishes, between desire and conscience. On the road he had vowed to avoid another visit to her bedroom, where the boundary between truth and deception was certain to vanish. He had hoped for a chance to resume the talk they had been having when Major Beckford's emissaries had interrupted them two weeks ago. Caleb was still convinced that he could use her father's death to change Flora's loyalty.
But Flora only wanted to talk about, think about, love. As they drank mulled Madeira, waiting for the bedroom to warm,
she dismissed Caleb's halfhearted attempts to discuss the war. She wanted to know if he had thought about her as he shivered aboard the
Jersey.
Had he hated her? Did he think she had betrayed him? Even now, did he feel some resentment? She wanted to analyze their love, learn its precise shape and quality. In spite of his conscience, his opposing wish, Caleb began to experience the transported sensation again. Every smile, every change of mood in Flora's green eyes, took him further away from the winter world of Morristown, where he had so recently sat surrounded by corpses and discussed betrayal with Major Benjamin Stallworth.
Up the stairs they went, arms entwined, tongues exploring, his lungs filled with her perfume. They undressed each other before the fire.
Eden,
Caleb thought. She recreates Eden with her freedom from shame, with the pleasure, the joy, she invests in this sacred act. He saw that Flora wanted to consume with her kisses, her breasts, her welcoming thighs, the memory of his ordeal on the
Jersey.
She wanted to restore the purity of the mutual gift, the passionate trust they had exchanged on their first night together.
When it was over, the transported experience was complete. Caleb lay in her arms, trying to think of some way to escape with this woman, to avoid returning to the real world of Stallworth and Beckford, to the guns and bayonets of New York and Morristown.
“We have so little time together,” Flora whispered.
“So little? I'm thinking of the rest of our lives,” Caleb said.
“John Nelson and Wiert Bogert were here today. They told me to leave the usual signal the moment you arrived. Major Beckford is very anxious to see you.”
“What's the usual signal?”
“Two candles in this window.”
“Let's ignore them all and think of some way—”
Stallworth's hands seized Caleb's throat. He heard him roaring,
I love this country. I love the men who died for it.
“There is no way,” Flora said. She got up, lit two candles,
and put them in the window that faced the British fort on Powles Hook. “Let's have supper.”
Downstairs, distanced by the table, Caleb regained control of his emotions. She was right. There was no way—except the one Stallworth had already chosen for him. He had to persuade Flora to return to Morristown and expose Twenty-six. Caleb waited until Cato had finished serving the modest supper—beef and kidney pies—and they were having coffee. He began talking about the situation in Morristown. The army had run out of meat again. Several regiments had refused to obey their officers. The men had stayed in their huts, chanting, “No meat, no meat.” A mutiny seemed more probable every day.
“That's always been part of Walter Beckford's plan,” Flora said.
“Congress is sending a special committee to Morristown to see if they can solve some of the army's problems. Your friend Hugh Stapleton is on it.”
“He's not my friend.”
“I'm being ironic, my darling.”
“Why mention him at all?”
“I'm just wondering what Beckford plans to do with him.”
Flora was looking confused and hurt. “I have no idea. Perhaps all he wanted was the letter Mr. Stapleton wrote to me about going to Amsterdam. Beckford can use it to blackmail him.”
“I hope that's all.”
“If I must meet Congressman Stapleton again, I'll do my best to avoid inviting him upstairs. Even if that's necessary, can you believe he could change my feelings for you?”
Caleb writhed. He could hear Stallworth's rasp:
She's a whore
. He found some small consolation in an answer that was the literal truth. “I can‘t—I won't—tolerate that man—or any other man—in this house, much less in your bed. Sometimes I think you're still under William Coleman's influence.”
“Caleb—what's wrong? After we just—”
“I know what we just did. It makes me all the more determined to speak—out of love for you. I wonder why you go on working for William Coleman, knowing that if he succeeds, he may try to claim you as his wife, knowing—you must know it—that he killed Caesar Muzzey.”
“William didn't kill Caesar. The Americans did. Walter Beckford told me.”
“Beckford wouldn't tell you the truth. Even if he knew it. But I don't think he knows. You must have known, though, or at least suspected in some part of your mind.”
Flora grew agitated. She obviously did not want to think about William Coleman as a murderer. “You'll never convince me—unless you give me some proof.”
“Did Caesar ever talk of buying a discharge from anyone?”
“Yes. From a woman they call Red Peggy. She keeps a grog shop.”
“Do you know what buying a discharge involves?”
Flora shook her head.
“Forgery. The certificates themselves are easy to counterfeit. Any printer can run them off. But there must be two signatures on each one—George Washington's and the colonel of the man's regiment.”
“Forgery,” Flora said.
“William Coleman was convicted of forgery, was he not?”
Flora nodded numbly.
“Caesar knew nothing of your marriage to Coleman.”
She nodded again, passive, almost defenseless now. Caleb struggled to control his guilt, his regret for the pain he was inflicting on her.
“Caesar didn't know what Twenty-six looked like. He talked carelessly to him—or to someone in his network—about you. He was proud of having a woman like you. Even if he didn't mention your name, even if he simply said he needed his discharge to get to New Orleans with his beautiful woman—Twenty-six would have known whom he was talking about.”
Flora's anguish was almost unbearable to watch. But Caleb pressed on to the climax of his prosecution. “When I found Caesar, he whispered two words: ‘Forty—Twenty-six.' The second number was unmistakable. Now that I know what it means, I think the first word wasn't ‘forty'—it was ‘Flora.' Caesar was trying to say, ‘Tell Flora Twenty-six killed me.'”
“Stop—please!”
Flora fled from the dining room into the parlor. Caleb found her on the couch, her arms wrapped around her body, rocking back and forth, weeping. “Caesar, Caesar, I let you go, I let you go to your death,” she sobbed. “Why didn't you stop me? Father, why didn't you warn me?”
Caleb sat down beside her and took her hands. “Flora,” he said, “I think William Coleman deserves to die for what he did to you in London. Now he deserves hanging twice over.”
“Hanging?” Flora said.
Caleb saw the word was a mistake. It revived memories of Newgate. But he could not retreat from it now. “Hanging,” he said. “Come to Morristown with me. We'll find him and expose him to the rebels. They'll hang him for us.”
She shook her head, still half objecting to the word “hang.” “I only know he's in Morristown. I have no idea where. No one knows except Major Beckford.”
“Can you send him a message, asking him to come here?”
“He'd never come. If you're right about Caesar, he already suspects me.”
“Has Coleman given you a way of getting a message to him if you ever need help?”
Flora stopped weeping. She struggled for another moment against some inner resistance. “Yes. He told me to go to Red Peggy's, on the Vealtown Road, with this token.”
She went to a sideboard in the dining room and took out a playing card—the Queen of Hearts. Someone had scribbled a beard on the face. There were similar scribblings on other cards in the deck.
Caleb realized that this was Flora's final secret—the one
she had withheld even from him. He took her hands again. “My dearest love, you must trust me. I'll be with you. This is your chance to free yourself from an incubus, an evil spirit—”
“No!” Flora cried, pulling herself free. She backed away from him, shaking her head. “I can't do it to him. I couldn't bear the thought that I was directly responsible for his death. Especially a spy's death—hanging. I remember how we waited in Newgate. He told me he loved me.”
“What about Caesar's death? Do you think that was pleasant? A bayonet in the chest. Left to die in the snow.”

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