Dreams of Glory (10 page)

Read Dreams of Glory Online

Authors: Thomas Fleming

“Anything is possible, from what I hear goes on at Yale these days. There aren't two students in the place who believe in God. When they're not writing plays or acting in them, they're drinking and whoring like Charleston rakes. Do we have men watching this fellow Chandler?”
“Day and night.”
“Good. What about Congressman Stapleton?”
“We detained him in camp for a few days by asking him to help us in the pro forma inquiry we conducted into Muzzey's death. I had someone go through his baggage while the inquiry was in session but we found nothing.”
“Do you know him well?”
“No. I met his father years ago, when I visited New York. A direct, outspoken man, with a very distinguished record in the
French wars. He was no enthusiast for independence. But, then, neither was I.”
“We'll open a dossier on you immediately, General,” Stallworth said with a flicker of a smile. “Stapleton's brother is one of our agents. That's in the congressman's favor.”
“He's the portrait painter, who poses as a neutral?”
“Correct. But one patriot in a family guarantees nothing, these days. I sometimes think half the people in New Jersey have a relative living on the King's shilling in New York.”
Washington nodded glumly. “I had my doubts about letting the congressman visit Mrs. Kuyper. But I wasn't prepared to take him into our confidence.”
“Of course not,” Stallworth said. “Let's see how he conducts himself with that charming lady. It may tell us a good deal about him.”
“Did you pick up anything else in your travels that might shed some light on this mystery?”
“Something big is brewing, that's all we can find out. There's a lot of talk about a ‘capital stroke' that will end the war. Muzzey's murder may have been connected to it. If Beckford found out he was a double agent, looking for information to sell us, he'd kill him without a qualm.”
The General shook his head. “I'm afraid you've let the deaths of those other agents incline you to overestimate Beckford's bloodthirstiness. He's as likely as we are to let a double agent go on living, as long as he's useful. I suspect Muzzey was more useful to them than he was to us. The information he brought us from New York was trifling.”
“I didn't trust him enough to let him anywhere near a major network,” Stallworth said. “All of which leads me to conclude that our resident son of a bitch Twenty-six sniffed out Caesar and killed him without consulting Beckford.”
“Why did he leave the body in the snow two hundred yards from this house? It would have been far more sensible to bury it under a drift in the woods, where no one would find it until
spring, if then. It's as if whoever killed him wanted us—or someone else—to know about it. Even to implicate us in the crime.”
“I can't imagine who your someone else might be.”
“If we knew more—if we knew anything—about Twenty-six, we might have the answer to that question. I can't see what he's gained by arousing us. If anything, it's increased his risks.”
“All that makes admirable sense,” Stallworth said. “There's only one way to find out if it's true. We must replace Muzzey. Find someone who'll become their courier as well as ours. Someone more loyal to us.”
“Not an easy order.”
“I have a candidate. This chaplain, Chandler.”
“Chandler?” Washington looked dubious.
“We've got enough evidence to justify an arrest right now. Give me two or three days with him. I'll find out if he's one of theirs or just a fanatic. Either way, I'll turn him into one of ours.”
“I'm not sure if I like this process you've developed,” Washington said. “Tampering with a man's soul is a dangerous business. Remember what happened with the Reverend Lockwood.”
“Lockwood was a drunkard.”
“Chandler's awfully young.”
“Is it any different, General, from ordering men his age to stand and die on a battlefield?”
“Yes,” Washington said. “It is different. Don't forget that, Major.”
Stallworth swallowed the rebuke. “I'll remember it, General. Do I have your permission to make the arrest?”
“Yes. Even if you don't succeed, it will at least put a stop to his sermons.”
For a moment Benjamin Stallworth remembered the terror on Usaph Grey's face, the anguish in Joel Lockwood's eyes. It was not a pretty process; he was willing to admit that much.
But a battlefield was not a pretty place, either. War, especially a war for national survival, was not a pretty business. “That much you can depend on, General,” he said. “You'll hear no more noise from Caleb Chandler.”
HISSWRACK! HISSWRACK! HISSWRACK!
IN THE below-zero cold, Caleb Chandler watched a private from one of the regiments in his brigade being given thirty-nine lashes for striking an officer. The soldier clung to the whipping post, biting into a lead bullet to keep from screaming. The rest of the brigade stood in ranks, impassively watching his ordeal. In their ripped and patched uniforms, they looked like an assembly of beggars.
“Don't let up, Drum Major. Thirty-nine full strokes,” growled the acting commander of the brigade, lean, imperious Colonel Jedediah Sumner, son of the richest man in Connecticut.
The drummer wielding the lash obeyed Colonel Sumner by redoubling the force of the next seven strokes. Caleb had seen at least a dozen men whipped since he arrived in Morristown in November. Each time the sight and sound had made him numb with revulsion. He had never dreamed that free men, fellow Americans, would have to be disciplined with such brutality.
After witnessing one particularly severe lashing—five hundred strokes for robbing chickens from a local farmer—Caleb Chandler had crossed frozen Primrose Brook to the camp of the 1st Connecticut Brigade and denounced the army's treatment of the enlisted men to his cousin Return Jonathan Meigs, colonel of the 3rd Connecticut Regiment. Meigs, already one of the most distinguished soldiers of the revolution, had regarded his clerical cousin with amazement. “Wait till you're in camp another month before you get so exercised,” he said.
Chandler had now been in camp considerably longer than another month, and seeing soldiers lashed still incensed him. He had been almost as disturbed by the other punishments the
army used to enforce discipline. Picketing dangled a culprit by his wrist from a hook on a tall post. The victim had the choice of enduring the pain in his arm or balancing his feet on a stake just sharp enough to cause agony if he placed his full weight on it. A man sentenced to the horse straddled a wooden plank, his hands tied behind him, a musket lashed to each leg. After a few minutes the pain in his private parts was exquisite.
Caleb could no longer complain to Colonel Meigs about the army's disciplinary methods. Relations between them had ceased to be cordial when Caleb preached to the two Connecticut brigades and the New Jersey brigade early in the New Year. His text had been from Exodus.
Then the Lord said unto Moses: Go in unto Pharaoh and speak to him.
Pharaoh, Caleb told the men, was authority, the officers and especially the generals of the army. Perhaps it was time that the enlisted men learned to speak to them. Perhaps it was time for Pharaoh to heed the complaints of those in bondage before the seven plagues devoured America, as they had devastated Egypt. The sufferings of the enlisted men cried out for justice and no one seemed willing to listen.
Some enlisted men had liked the sermon. But it had enraged the officers. Caleb's cousin Meigs had glared and shaken his head. Colonel Sumner had been more vocal. “These men haven't seen fresh meat for a month,” he had roared. “If they go to Pharaoh, it will be with guns in their hands.”
Caleb was tempted to ask Sumner how much fresh meat he had eaten lately. But that mocking inner voice had whispered
Fool
and he had swallowed the colonel's rebuke in silence.
Hisswrack,
the last stroke fell. The lashed man, whose name was Twist, was untied from the whipping post and dragged into a nearby hut. Caleb followed him. Twist lay face down on the floor before the fire while his friends rubbed cold snow on his bleeding back. “Is there anything I can do?” Caleb asked from the doorway.
“Yeah, Chaplain,” gasped Twist, “go tell Pharaoh to shit in your hat.”
“I thought this might help,” Caleb said, and held out a canteen filled with rum.
Twist took a long swallow. “Chaplain,” he said, “maybe you ain't such a horse's ass as you seem like.”
Outside on the frigid parade ground, the men were being dismissed. Caleb stood there while they streamed past, not one even looking at him. He wanted desperately to let them know he was their friend, that he was still prepared to risk the abuse of the officers by speaking out for them. But it seemed more and more impossible to convince them of his commitment. They had turned bitterly inward, trusting neither officers nor chaplains.
With a sigh, Caleb Chandler set out for the camp of the New Jersey brigade. He was still trying to find out more about Caesar Muzzey. He had visited Muzzey's hutmates twice, and they had refused to talk to him, beyond growling that they did not know who killed Muzzey and cared less. Caleb had tried to assure them that he had no official connection with the court of inquiry General Washington had set up to investigate the murder. They had ignored him.
At headquarters, when Caleb asked about the investigation, aides turned him away with curt, vague assurances. General Washington was still very concerned about the matter. He had assigned an officer, Major Benjamin Stallworth of the 2nd Dragoons, to explore it fully. Exactly what was Major Stallworth doing? That was confidential. Nothing could be discussed until his work was completed.
Like the two Connecticut brigades, the three regiments that composed the New Jersey brigade lived in huts around a small parade ground in the long, shallow ravine called Jockey Hollow. The perpetual northeast wind lashed at Chandler as he trudged to the hut where Caesar Muzzey had been quartered. A half-dozen men were huddled around a small fire in the smoky interior. One man was wearing his blanket for
breeches. Another was using his blanket as a shirt. Their stockings gaped with holes; their feet were wrapped in rags as substitutes for shoes. Their sooty, dirt-smeared faces had had no contact with soap and water for weeks.
“Hey, Chaplain, you back again?” asked Case, the hut's leader, a gaunt man with a face like a skull. He had been a tailor in civilian life and had kept his uniform fairly intact, except for his shoes. No one, not even a shoemaker, could rescue the shoddy shoes that Massachusetts contractors sold the army. Often they fell apart after a day's march.
“I'm back,” Caleb said. “I'm still hoping you'll remember something that might help us find Caesar Muzzey's murderer.”
“Chaplain, didn't I tell you last time we don't give a damn?”
“I brought some food and drink for you—and your brother soldiers,” Caleb said, adopting the phrase that the enlisted men had begun to use when they spoke to each other.
Caleb held out the canteen of rum and drew a small ham from the pocket of his cloak. He had bought it from his landlady. Case swigged from the canteen and passed it to his brother soldiers. While they drank he whipped a knife from a sheath at his belt and sliced the ham into six pieces with almost miraculous speed. Each piece was only a mouthful but the meat and the rum transformed the men's attitude toward Caleb.
“Fire away, Chaplain,” Case said. “We'll talk as long as the rum holds out.”
“Who do you think killed Caesar?”
Case looked around the circle of dirt-smeared faces, each set of jaws working on the ham. “Just remember, you goddamn chompers, none of you ever heard me say this.”
Everyone nodded vigorously and chewed away. Case nibbled on his slice of ham. “One of the officers done it for sure. Maybe our lieutenant. Name's Haldane. He went home on leave the day after they found Caesar's body.”
“It wasn't one of us, Chaplain,” said another soldier, with
the face of a fourteen-year-old boy. “None of us
liked
old Caesar, mind you. But none of us hated him enough to go lookin' for him in the dark.”
“Why did Lieutenant Haldane hate Caesar?”
“At Monmouth, Haldane hid behind a tree,” Case said. “Caesar called him a cowardly bastard. Haldane didn't say a word. After that, Caesar went over the chain pretty much when he pleased.”
“So Haldane and maybe a brother officer waited for Caesar in the dark,” the boy said. “That's what we think.”
“Did Muzzey ever talk about where he went when he left camp?”
Case grabbed the canteen of rum from a gray-haired man who was guzzling too much of it. “He had a wench,” Case said bitterly. “Used to talk about layin' her. Drove the rest of us half crazy, the bastard.”
“Did Caesar ever let on where this woman lived?”
Everyone shook his head. Caleb Chandler was baffled by what he was learning about Caesar Muzzey. It was becoming harder and harder to picture this black man as a martyr to prejudice. His hutmates apparently had good reason to dislike him.
“Caesar had ten guineas in his pocket when he died,” Caleb said. “Where did he get the money?”
“Might have been from his sable lady fair,” Case said. “I suspect she was a free nigger. There's a lot of'm in this state.”
“Used to tell us that he had the money to buy his discharge anytime he wanted it,” the boy said. “Told us we was fools for bein' scared to try it. Said he could get us all discharges, for five guineas each, anytime.”
“Discharges are for sale?”
“More than one way to skin Pharaoh, Chaplain,” Case said, his skull face contorting into a laugh.
“Where? Who—who would do such a thing?” Caleb said.
Case smiled and drained the last of the rum from the canteen. “Don't he sound just like an officer, boys?” He handed
Caleb the empty canteen. “We sort of think we know. But we ain't tellin' you, Chaplain.”
Caleb groped for a response while
Fool
echoed ominously in his head. Case was right. He had sounded like an officer. Did becoming a brother soldier mean you stopped caring about victory? Was the cause poisoned beyond redemption?
The boy's eyes had a liquorish shine. He was enjoying this game of teasing the chaplain. “Might go down to Red Peggy's and ask her a few questions. Caesar spent a lot of time there.”
“Shut your stupid mouth,” Case snarled, and cuffed the boy on the side of his head.
It was not the first time Caleb Chandler had heard Red Peggy's mentioned. The place was a groggery about two miles from Jockey Hollow, on the Vealtown Road. There were several of these establishments on the outskirts of Morristown. Unlike taverns, groggeries neither served food nor rented rooms; they specialized in cheap liquor.
Cowed by a warning glare from Case, Caesar Muzzey's former hutmates refused to say another word about Red Peggy. The goodwill created by the ham and the rum was vanishing into the murky air of the hut's interior. Caleb abandoned his pretensions to being a brother soldier and left the men with an exhortation. “I hope none of you will be craven enough to desert your country now, when your help is so badly needed.”
“Seems more like the country's deserted us, Chaplain,” Case said.
Half frozen, sinking into the snow with every step, Caleb trudged down the Vealtown Road to Red Peggy's groggery. He found himself yearning for his sturdy old farm horse, Horace, who had brought him to Morristown. Like the army's horses, Horace was being boarded at the stable of a nearby farmer. Even General Washington's mounts had been dispersed for the winter.
Only the emergence of a soldier in uniform enabled Caleb
to find Red Peggy's place. It sat back from the road, an ordinary faded red Jersey farmhouse, without even the crude imitation of a tavern sign that most groggeries displayed. Inside, he found the parlor had been converted into a taproom. A welcome blaze crackled in a fieldstone fireplace. Behind a corner bar stood a buxom woman with a strong, not unpleasing face, topped by a mass of curly red hair. She needed no introduction.
Red Peggy looked vaguely disreputable at first glance. She wore too much makeup on her rounded cheeks and full lips. But her dress was as high-necked and modest as anything worn by the respectable ladies of Lebanon, Connecticut. Caleb allowed her the benefit of the doubt for the time being.
Perhaps a dozen drinkers sat at tables scattered about the room. They were being waited on by a squat man, not much taller than a dwarf, in a Continental army uniform. At the bar, Chandler asked for a rum toddy to banish the cold. The hot drink restored a semblance of life to his hands and feet. “Are you familiar with a New Jersey soldier, a Negro named Caesar Muzzey?” he asked.

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