Letters (97 page)

Twenty-four hours out from Cobh, as he stands on the quarterdeck with other passengers anxiously scanning the Channel for the dreaded
Argus,
he fetches out and winds the old Breguet. A veiled lady beside him catches her breath. Not long after, a sealed, scented envelope is delivered to his bunk in the gentlemen’s cabin…

“Rossini, von Weber, Chateaubriand: your pardon!” Andrew here pleads. “Above all yours, Andrée!” But there
she
is, like the third-act reflex of a tired librettist. A still-striking, if plumpish, thirty-three, she has been the mistress of the Spanish minister to London; but her implacable ex-lover Don Escarpio, now a royalist agent in Rome, continues to harass her for her disobedience in Algiers. It is to flee his operatives and begin a new and different life that she has taken ship for Canada. But what honorable profession, in 1813, is open to a woman of no independent wealth who would be dependent on no man? Only one, that Consuelo knows of: following the examples of Mrs. Burney and Mrs. Edgeworth, above all of her idol Mme de Staël, she is determined to become…
una novelista!
Indeed, she is well into her maiden effort: an epistolary account, in the manner of
Delphine,
of her imbroglios with Serior Barlow and the wicked Escarpio. There is a new spirit abroad in Europe—perhaps Senor Cook has not heard of it—called
romanticismo:
as she has had alas no luck with the booksellers of Madrid and London, who advise her that the novel is a worn-out fad, Consuelo intends to introduce
el romanticismo
to North America and become the first famous Canadian novelist. For old time’s sake, will her
carisimo
Andrew read through the manuscript and help her English it?

Three weeks later they part, affectionately, at Halifax. Andrew says no more of their shipboard intimacy (he is, after all, writing to his wife, and tardily) or of his friend’s novel, except that, searching promptly for the truth about the poisoned snuffbox, he finds it metamorphosed into a poisoned letter-opener
(“¿Mas romántico, no?”)
and suggests she rework that passage, among others. But that their reconnection was not merely editorial we may infer from Andrew’s immediate guilty assumption—when upon reaching Castines Hundred in September he finds Tecumseh there with Andrée—that in his long and newsless absence his wife has returned for consolation to her Indian friend.

He does not “blame her”—or question her, or even make his presence known. For three days he haunts the area (the same three, ye muses of romantical coincidence, of Tecumseh’s single and innocent visit to his Star-of-the-Lake), surreptitiously satisfying himself that the twins are well, his wife and Tecumseh likewise. He hears the news that Perry has met the enemy at Put-In-Bay and that they are his; he understands that this victory spells the end, at least for the present, of British control of the Great Lakes, and that Perry’s fleet will now freely transport General Harrison’s army to meet Proctor and Tecumseh somewhere above Detroit. It wants no strategist to guess that another, two-pronged American invasion of Canada is imminent: one thrust from New England against Montreal, the other up from Detroit. Does Tecumseh understand that the battle to come is the most crucial of his life?

Comes again the baleful plea:
EVEILEBEM!
If he acknowledges now his rueful return to Halifax and “Consuelo the Consoler”
(la Consoladora),
it is because he had rather Andrée tax him with infidelity than with the least complicity in Tecumseh’s death.
To the charge that I might somehow have aided our noble friend, and did not, I plead nolo contendere,
he writes.
To the charge that I idled & self-sorrow’d in Halifax whilst Proctor cowardly fled the field at Thames and left Tecumseh to be shot
&
flay’d
&
unmember’d by the fierce Kentuckians, I plead guilty. But believe me, Andrée: to the charge that I wisht Tecumseh dead; that I pointed him out to Colonels Whitely & Johnson on the field; that I myself gave a strip of his skin to Henry Clay for a razor-strop—innocent, innocent, innocent!

He does not say whose charges those were. “Soul-shockt” by the loss of Tecumseh so hard upon that of Joel Barlow—and with Tecumseh the only real leadership of an Indian confederacy—Cook languishes in Nova Scotia while Andrew Jackson massacres the Creeks in Alabama and Madison’s two strange replacements for General Dearborn launch their Canadian campaign. John Armstrong, the new secretary of war, is the same to whom in 1783 Henry Burlingame IV perhaps dictated the infamous “Newburgh Letters”; General Wilkinson is the same Spanish spy who conspired with “Aaron Burr” and then testified against him to save his own skin! Like its predecessor, this expedition will be a fiasco of mismanagement; by November’s end it too will have failed, and in December, with the British capture of Fort Niagara, the tide of war will begin to turn. But the retreating Americans will have burned Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) in addition to York; they will still control the Lakes; no one will have remarshaled the scattered Indians in Tecumseh’s stead—and Andrew lingers on in Halifax.

But he is not altogether idle, and nowise inattentive. Prevost’s burning of Buffalo on New Year’s Eve in retaliation for Newark, he observes, while thorough and brutal, is scarcely of so demoralizing a character to the U.S.A. generally as to prompt Madison’s peace commissioners to cede the Great Lakes to Canada. Who cares about Buffalo? Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, commander of the British blockading fleet, before leaving Halifax for winter quarters in Bermuda, proposes a letter to Madison threatening further such retaliation: he would begin on the coast of Maine come spring and burn one town after another until the Americans yield, working south if necessary as far as Boston. This too, it seems to Andrew, will be a blow from the wrong quarter: the Federalists will simply be driven into supporting Madison’s war, and the southern states will be privately delighted to see New England get its comeuppance. Admiral Cockburn’s season in Chesapeake Bay, on the other hand, while of limited military effectiveness—a few buildings burned, a few women raped, much tobacco confiscated, and the port of Baltimore closed to normal shipping—strikes Andrew as having been of considerable symbolic import and strategic promise: his fleet has cruised half a year with impunity at the front door of Washington; the city newspaper is even delivered regularly to his flagship, so that he can read the editorial denunciations of himself and keep abreast of the war! Now he is wintering on Cumberland Island, off Georgia, and allegedly arming Negroes for a general rising. The plan is not serious—Andrew has seen copies of the British directive to accept in service any free or escaped Negroes who volunteer, but not to permit a slave insurrection, lest the example spread to British colonies—but it terrifies the southern whites. Andrew admires Sir George Cockburn’s
panache;
Prevost and Cochrane, he believes, are looking at the wrong part of the map…

Making use of his earlier connections with the Canadian secret service, Andrew spends the early months of 1814 establishing himself as a special liaison between the governor-general and the Royal Navy attaché in Halifax, while “assisting Consuelo with her novel-in-letters.” Except for Jackson’s campaign against the Creeks, who are finally destroyed in March at Horseshoe Bend, there is a general pause in the American war: all eyes are on Europe, where Wellington’s Invincibles have crossed the Pyrenees into France and Napoleon’s fall seems imminent. In the wake of the second Canadian fiasco, American Federalists are calling for Madison to resign or be impeached; Armstrong and Wilkinson are too busy now vilifying each other to prosecute the war. Ruthy Barlow, having wintered with the Robert Fultons in New York, returns to Washington and reopens Kalorama. In London, Mme de Staël, unenthusiastic about the prospect of a Bourbon restoration, hopes Napoleon will defeat the Allies but be killed in the process; in any event she and her friends make ready to end their exile. Byron writes his
Corsair,
Walter Scott his
Waverly,
Consuelo her
Cartas argelinas, o, la Delfina nueva.

Her collaborator and translator, as he privately prepares to avenge Tecumseh’s death, amuses himself with certain problems raised by the manuscript. He has persuaded Consuelo that a new
realismo
must inevitably succeed the current rage for the Romantic; to buy into this growth-stock early, so to speak, she has reworked her story to include all manner of ghosts, monsters, witches, curses, and miracles, in whose literal reality she devoutly believes, but which she’d omitted from her first draft as insufficiently
romántico,
there being none in
Delphine, Corinne,
or
The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Andrew is delighted—and gently suggests that she revise her ambition and residence to become the first great Mexican or Venezuelan Post-Romantic novelist. It is too cold in Canada anyway, no? And the Halifax literary community has not exactly laureled her like Corinne. Why do they not sail down to Bermuda together, where he has business, and assess the literary situation from there?

Consuelo agrees, the Allies enter Paris, Napoleon abdicates and is banished to Elba. Admiral Cockburn returns to the Chesapeake and renews his subscription to the
National Intelligencer;
General Ross in Bordeaux receives orders to take Wellington’s brigades to Admiral Cochrane in Bermuda for the purpose of “chastising Brother Jonathan” in some as yet unspecified way; Andrew Cook completes his strategy. As soon as Lake Erie is free of ice, he is certain, the Americans will re-retaliate in some fashion for the burning of Buffalo. Prevost himself waits for that occasion to prod Admiral Cochrane into action (the letter to Madison has not been sent, though Andrew has offered the governor-general numerous drafts). Sure enough, in May a raiding party from Erie, Pa., crosses the lake to Ontario and pillages the Long Point area. Prevost, into whose confidence our ancestor has by now entirely made his way, sends him at once from Halifax to Bermuda with orders for Cochrane both to demand reparation from Madison and, without waiting for reply, to initiate forthwith his proposed schedule of retaliation. Aboard the dispatch boat, as Consuelo prays to Maria Stella Maris to preserve them from sea monsters, cannibals, and other such
realidades,
Andrew adroitly redrafts the orders (and terminates abruptly, in mid-forged sentence, this first and longest of his posthumous letters, whose postscript you remember he added later, and whose interrupted sentence he resumes at the commencement of his second), substituting, in the catalogue of Cochrane’s targets, for
Castine in Maine, Boston in Massachusetts, and Newport in Rhode Island,
the words
Baltimore in Maryland…

(And here I too break off, to resume in his fashion, quoting our forefather quoting himself, when I take up his second letter on the anniversary of its composition one week hence—by when surely
you
will have interrupted

ABC/ss encl
cc: JB

July 16, 1969

H. C. Burlingame VII
(address pending)

Dear Henry,

&*‡;364)5$!

Thus (missing, silent son) our ancestor opens this second of his “posthumous letters” in “Legrand’s cipher,” the first of which closed with his forged—and interrupted—alteration of Governor-General Prevost’s order to Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane to destroy, not “Castine in Maine, Boston in Massachusetts,” etc., but
Baltimore in Maryland…

&NOTGNIHSAW!

(Where are you, Henry? Better your suspicions, your rude interrogations, your peremptorosities, than this silence. Why can I not share with you my amusement at writing this from my new and temporary office—formerly tenanted by that historian I mentioned in my last, now mine as “Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English” at this newly christened university—to be transcribed, as was my last, by my new and formidable secretary? My appeal to you last week, to join me here in Maryland for good and all after so many years, nay generations, of strained and partial connection; to take up with me the formulation and direction of our Second 7-Year Plan—seems to have been as futile as Andrew IV’s postdated postscript to his “widow” [from Fort Bowyer, Mobile Bay, February, 1815] imploring her to join him there at once with the twins, now that the War of 1812—whose most memorable event he will rehearse for us today—is ended. The second letter is dated a year and a week after the first: 154 years ago today. It is headed [without immediate explanation]
Aboard H.M.S.
Bellerophon,
Off Rochefort, France, 16 July 1815.
Napoleon, his 100 Days done, has just surrendered there to Commander Maitland; Apollo-11, after a flawless countdown and a 9:32 A.M. lift-off from Cape Kennedy, has left its earth orbit to land the first men on the moon; my father has been vaporized at dawn in and with a certain tower in Alamogordo, New Mexico;
your
father feels ever more deeply, though he understands no more clearly, the Anniversary View of History.
Et cher fils, où es tu?)

& Washington!

We review the strategy with Andrew. The British government are convinced from the start that Madison is the tool of his mentor Thomas Jefferson, at whose instruction he has coordinated the 1812 War with Napoleon’s activities in Spain and Russia; while Britain is thus stripped of her allies and engaged in the peninsular fighting, the U.S. intends to add Canada and the Floridas to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. From the time of the emperor’s retreat from Moscow, and more particularly in the first quarter of 1814, the British Cabinet’s strategy becomes not only to retain Canada by sending new forces to Prevost’s aid, but to capture New Orleans as well, and, by tightening the Chesapeake and North Atlantic blockades, to force the secession of New York and New England. The Canadian border will then be adjusted to include a buffer state extending 100 miles south of the Lakes
(i.e.,
most of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, as well as western Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and New England); British jurisdiction will extend from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. The United States will thus be contained effectively by the Hudson and Mohawk rivers on the north, the Allegheny, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers on the northwest and west. The Floridas are perhaps negotiable.