I
N HUGHSON'S TAPROOM CLARA WAS GLANCING at the latest edition of the
New York Gazette
when a familiar name caught her eye amid the shipping news.
Arrived on the
Mayflower:
Malcolm Stapleton, Esq. his son Hugh and a servant
. She wondered where Catalyntie was. Clara decided there were numerous reasons why her Seneca sister might have decided to stay in London or go to the Netherlands and thought no more about it.
Two nights later, Mary Burton approached the bar with a crafty look on her plump face. Was she about to tell Clara she was going upstairs with another customer? Mary regularly deserted her post to make a little extra cash that way. “Do you have an order?” Clara asked. She repeatedly had to struggle against her dislike of this girl. Along with her other flaws, she was always prying into everyone's business and spreading gossip about them around the town.
“Two flagons of strong beer,” Mary said. “There's a fellow in the corner who says he'd like you to drink with him.”
“I'm not interested.”
“I think you would be, if you took a look at him.”
Clara asked the drinkers at the bar to step aside and saw Malcolm Stapleton sitting in the corner. She instantly knew something serious was wrong. The politician, the victor of the Battle of the Bracken, the man who thrust his way to the bar and talked down everyone in sight, had vanished. He was still as huge as ever, but defeat, loss, were stamped on his face.
Other drinkers followed her gaze and a general hubbub rose. The entire room swarmed around Malcolm to toast the hero of Culloden. The New York newspapers had all reprinted the London stories of his exploits. He acknowledged their cheers with a pale smile. He deprecated his heroism, claiming there were a thousand other soldiers on the field who did as much. This only swelled his popularity with the crowd.
Eventually, the congratulators drifted back to the bar. Clara left John Hughson in charge there and sat down with Malcolm. “There's talk of giving you a dinner. A hero's welcome home,” she said.
“I can't face it. I'm going out to Hampden Hall. I've gotten it back from my stepmother, thanks to Catalyntie. Will you come with me? We can live out there, without reference to marriage vows. Catalyntie can stay here in New York and plow up her profits.”
“I have a business to run here in New York. What's happened between you and Catalyntie?”
“We've finally concluded what we suspected from the start. We despise each other.”
It was all too sudden, too unnerving. “I don't understand. I thought we settled this,” Clara said.
“Everything's been unsettled, Clara. Everything!”
He told her about his trip to Scotland, his discovery of the truth about his parentage, about Hangman Hawley and the real story of Culloden. An enormous sympathy swelled in Clara's soul. She had never seen Malcolm Stapleton as a giant. His physique was huge. Spiritually, he had always been a stunted man. Now she saw he was a crippled one.
Should she let him draw her back into his world? She resisted the idea. She had become part of the New York that swirled through Hughson's Tavern, the New York of the poor, of the forlorn, of the enslaved. No matter how unsettled he was, Malcolm could never become part of this world. He could never understand or experience the sweetness that flowed through her soul when she knelt with her face to the stars. John Ury had converted her in the deepest sense of that word. She had become a different person.
“Oh, Malcolm, I can't do it,” she said. “I wish I could, for your sake. But I've pledged myself to people here, people who need me.”
“Who?” he said. “That son of a bitch Caesar?”
“More than Caesar. To all of them, the slaves, the whores. I try to give them hope. I pray for them. I help them when no one else will.”
He shook his head, totally uncomprehending. “I thought you loved me.”
“I do. I told you I'd always love you. But not you alone, the way we once dreamed.”
He began to weep. “What's to become of me, Clara? I'm not English. I'm not Scottish. I'm no one. A ghost with his head full of patriotic moonshine.”
“Give me time to pray over you,” Clara said.
That night, back on Maiden Lane, she told John Ury about Malcolm and asked for advice. Ury listened with mounting excitement, out of all proportion to this sad story of a man he barely knew. “His mother was a Catholic!” the priest said. “What an opportunity! You must bring him over, Clara. With him on our side, we can take and hold this city!”
“What?” Clara said dazedly.
“Take and hold this city!” Ury said. “Caesar has been organizing the slaves for a year now. It hasn't been easy. Too many fear retaliation. The Spanish Africans have been a godsend. Their anger has ignited resentment in the hearts of the wavering. But we have too few white men. Hughson, the Irish schoolteacher, a handful of others. Stapleton could stir the Jacobite spirit in hundreds.”
48
The shy, quiet tutor, the follower in the footsteps of Jesus, the prince of peace and forgiveness, had vanished. Clara was facing a fiery insurrectionist. “Dear Clara,” he said, seeing the dismay on her face. “Forgive me for shocking you. I wanted to lead you to this discovery gradually. But events seldom wait for the slow pace of the heart. If Prince Charles had won at Culloden, we might have been able to overturn this government peacefully. Now it must be a bloody struggle.”
“To what end?”
“As soon as the city is seized, we plan to send couriers up the lakes to Canada to bring a French army into the game. Meanwhile, a fast sloop will sail for Havana to summon a Spanish fleet and army strong enough to hold the city against all comers.”
“What then?”
“The war is a stalemate in Europe. Peace negotiations will begin soon. The French and Spanish will claim the whole colony of New York by the right of possession. The British will be forced to surrender everything north and west of Albany. We'll take our Africans and Jacobites and settle on lands up there. We'll have an English Catholic colony, where France can protect us.”
Ury spoke with such assurance, Clara felt bewildered and awed. The priest emanated another kind of power now. But it was shot through with darkness. “I ⦠I must pray over this,” she said.
“Wait!” Ury said, seizing her arm. “I must convince you! In my years of persecution in England, hiding in holes like a runaway felon, I received a light which I think is more powerful than anything in the doctrines of the fathers of the church. It is Christ's greatest mistake, which we are destined to correct in our time. You remember, where he told the apostles, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's? We have learned since the rise of the Protestant heretics that without Caesar, the people of God are nothing. If Caesar becomes a Protestant, they're slaughtered like cattle, driven like sheep. Only if we wield Caesar's power can we hope to achieve the kingdom of God.”
From a figure of transcendent purity, John Ury was dwindling in Clara's eyes to a man with a soul as stunted, as haunted, as tormented,
in its own way as Malcolm'sâor Caesar's. “That's a deep thought. Perhaps too deep for me,” she said. “I must pray on all of this.”
Upstairs, she knelt by her open window and lifted her face to the stars once more. In the street she heard a man cajoling a whore. It was Adam Duycinck. Would he have any advice to offer her? No, his soul was as stunted as his body. She would have to seek her wisdom in the voice that descended from the sky.
Clara extended her arms and prayed.
O Virgin Mother, listen to your servant, a fellow woman, torn between old love and new love, between falsehood and truth. Guide me and protect me.
The earth seemed to heave and sigh around her. The voice whispered:
Remain true to your love, my daughter of the morning.
Clara closed her eyes and a new vision coursed through her soul. She saw Malcolm on a cliff, gazing across a vast ocean. On either side of him stood two figures rimmed in fire, their garments glowing like molten gold. One was a woman, the other a man. Clara knew they were his mother and father. Behind them rose a forest of gigantic trees. The golden figures were pointing into the forest but Malcolm did not see them. He was lost in his torment. Both figures turned and the woman wrote on the air in flaming letters:
American.
They gazed across the distance at Clara, as if they knew she was watching them. They pointed to the word ablaze in the air and vanished. Slowly,
American
vanished too, leaving Malcolm alone, forlorn.
Clara lay awake most of the night, trying to understand the meaning of the visionâand what she should say to Malcolm about John Ury's astonishing plan. Gradually she saw that the angelic figures were trying to tell her that Malcolm must stop gazing across the ocean, thinking of himself as an Englishman or a Scotsman. He was an American. She must persuade him to transfer his dream of a nation of patriots to this side of the ocean, to this uncorrupted new world.
Ury joined her at breakfast, eager to find out if she was ready to bring Malcolm into their plot. She shook her head. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It would be against his nature.”
“What do you mean?”
“He can have nothing to do with your dream of an English Catholic colony, Father. It's a European idea. His destiny is American.”
“American?” The word meant little to Ury. He was consumed by his struggle for English Catholicism.
“Someday it will mean more than Catholic or Protestant.”
“Did your voice tell you this?” he asked with dismaying harshness.
“In a way,” Clara said.
“Have you heard of Joan of Arc?”
“A little.”
“She heard voices too. She died at the stake. Voices can come from Satan as well as from God.”
Clara shook her head. “I know this didn't come from the Evil Brother,” she said.
“We'll see,” Ury said. He was deeply disappointed in her. But Clara trusted her
orenda.
She refused to seduce Malcolm. When she visited him later in the day, she realized it would be easy to do. He felt enormously guilty over his conduct in Scotland. He talked obsessively about it, while Clara held young Hugh on her lap. The boy resembled Catalyntie much more than Malcolm. He had the same thin energetic body and piercing blue eyes. He finally squirmed away and ran off, shouting for his nurse.
“Do you want Hugh to be a Scottish patriot?” she asked.
“Of course not,” Malcolm growled. “That's not his fight.”
“Do you want him to be a Jacobite?”
“Good God, no,” Malcolm said. “That's an even more lost cause.”
“Then why are you tormenting yourself about your failure to be either of these things? You're as American as he is. It's not blood that makes a man one thing or another. It's his birthplace, where and how he was raised. I wasn't born a Seneca but I'll always consider myself one because I spent the most important years of my life with them. They raised me, they gave me their gods, they taught me what to think and feel about love and honor and loyaltyâfundamental things.”
“A woman in Scotlandâmy mother's sisterâtold me that. But I wasn't listening,” Malcolm said.
“You have a dream of a country of patriots. What do you care if there's no hope for one in England? Begin creating one here, where everything is new and possible. Give Hugh the dream. Maybe he'll see it come true in his lifetime.”
“How?” Malcolm said. “As long as Walpole and the Pelhams and their fellow thieves rule the empire with their fleet and armyâ”
“I don't know how. I only know what I heard, what I saw, last night in my prayers.”
She almost told him about her vision of his angelic guardians. But she was afraid he would think she was a madwoman. Alongside Malcolm's idealism lurked the harsh realism of the soldier. The two would always be at war in his soul.
“Perhaps the Dutch resentment of the English will spread to other parts of America. Remember our old argument about being American? When I showed you America was a hundred times bigger than England on the map?
“You're talking treason,” Malcolm said, half jokingly.
“It's not treason to be a patriot in your own country.”
She left him with those halfway thoughts and feelings. Malcolm could not move beyond them for the present. She could only plant seeds in his mind and heart and hope they would take root and grow. As they walked to the door, he took her hand and thanked her for good advice. Then he abruptly added: “But you'll never change what I think about Catalyntie. I'm glad you didn't try.”
For a moment Clara wanted to say something on behalf of her Seneca sister. But she found no words in her heart. Essentially, her judgment on Catalyntie Van Vorst was not much different from Malcolm's.