This possible American future that Clara described swiftly receded from view as history began dragging us all down a path that was crowded with the hopes and ambitions, the fears and angers, of other men. At the tavern, Clara found John Ury talking to Sarah and John Hughson in a state of wild excitement. “Word arrived from Albany on a sloop at dawn,” Ury told her. “A French and Indian army burned Saratoga. Wiped the village off the map!”
“What does it meanâbeyond four or five hundred people left homeless?” Clara asked.
“It's a testing of this province's defenses. Which are nonexistent. Can't you predict what will happen? The governor will call out the militia. No one will respond. The Dutch won't fight for the English and the English won't fight for themselves.”
“I think you're wrong. The Americans will fight,” Clara said.
“No one recognizes that name in New York. You're English or Dutch or Jewish or French or Irish. American is the name of a continent, not of a race,” Ury said.
Caesar arrived, accompanied by Antonio, the leader of the Spanish Africans. Ury told him the news of Saratoga. Caesar did a war dance around the taproom. “We need more guns!” he said. “Where can we get them?”
“I'll make another trip to Yonkers tomorrow,” John Hughson said. “How much money do we have?”
“I'll get more money,” Caesar said. “In the meantime take it from the cash drawer.”
“We can't afford a big outlay,” Sarah Hughson said. “We owe Fowler a hundred pounds for last month's rum.”
“We've only got fifty guns for a thousand men,” Caesar said. “We need at least a hundred to take care of the independent company at the fort. The rest can use axes and knives to kill their masters and arm themselves with guns from their houses.”
“Old Fowler's got two guns in his library,” Antonio said.
Clara was appalled by what she was hearing. Caesar's dream of becoming
king of New York had coalesced with John Ury's dream of a colony for English Catholics. They were about to breathe violent bloody life into both of them.
“Clara,” Sarah Hughson said. “Can you lend us some of your money?”
Each month, the Hughsons had paid her half of their profits. Some months that amounted to nothing. But over the years, she had taken away at least two hundred pounds. She had given some of it to the poor but she had saved most of it to pay her rent and food bills when the tavern's profits shrank.
“I don't have that much,” she said. “But I won't lend it to you. I think your scheme is evil! How can anything good come of murdering innocent people in their beds?”
“History is full of bloody deeds for good causes,” John Ury said.
“Innocent?” Caesar said. “I don't think anybody white in this city is innocent. They're all part of the enslavement machine. They're all living off our sweat. Even if they don't own a slave, they pay money to Fowler and my master, old Vraack, for their rum and bread, sold cheap because we get no wages. They're all going to dieâor become Caesar's slaves.”
Clara looked into Caesar's eyes and saw nothing but hatred burning there. The breath of the Evil Brother had consumed his soul. He was a walking talking furnace of hatred. Why couldn't John Ury see it too? In the dim taproom the priest's eyes were opaque, his usually humble expression twisted into a grimace of triumph. How could her voice in the night tell her there was any hope for an America cursed by such darkness?
“Are you with us or against us, Clara?” Caesar asked.
“Neither,” Clara said.
“That's impossible. If I thought you were going to betray us, I'd cut your throat, here and now.”
From his hip pocket Caesar drew a razor. He pressed a button on it and the silvery blade leaped from the case.
“I'll pray for all of you,” Clara said and walked out of the tavern, passing within inches of the murderous blade. On John Ury's face she saw a tremor of regret. Did he realize he was as possessed as Caesar?
Out on Pearl Street Malcolm Stapleton strode toward her, gloomy determination suffusing his big face. “You've heard about the attack on Saratoga?” he said. “The governor's asked me to raise a thousand men to defend the border. I couldn't say no.”
Should she tell him the governor might soon need a thousand men here in New York? No. She could not join Caesar and John Ury. But she
would not betray them. She tried to tell herself she was not part of this devouring beast called history.
In her bedroom, Clara knelt before the Virgin and pleaded for guidance.
Help me heal my divided heart
. There was a long silence. Then the voice whispered:
Prepare to weep, O daughter of the morning. Prepare to weep.
I
N AMSTERDAM, I WAS SURPRISED TO discover British soldiers in their bright red coats swarming in the streets. War continued to rage between Britain and France. The Dutch newspapers reported violent battles in Flanders. I took rooms at the Ster Van Oosten and sent a note to Tesselschade Hooft, hoping we could meet. There was no reply. The next day, I walked over to the great house on the Heerengracht and found it shuttered and empty.
“The Hoofts are not at home,” said a familiar voice. It was the newspaperman, Vondel. He was looking seedy. His chin was in need of a razor. His breeches were stained, his coat sleeves ragged.
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“Their son Willem died of smallpox last year. Tesselschade has gone to France. Some people say she's become a Catholic and joined a convent, others that she's taken a lover. Either may be true. She no longer cares what life does to her.”
“Why didn't you go with her?” I said. “She told me you were the first and only man she loved.”
Vondel laughed. It was closer to a coughâeven a death rattle. “She blames me for every evil thing that's happened to her.”
“Where's Philip?”
“He lives at the Ster Van Oosten. A beaten man.”
A man with a hundred million guilders, beaten? I could not believe it. But I soon saw it was true. I left a note for Philip Hooft with the Ster Van Oosten's room clerk. That evening before dinner, a bedraggled ghost of the stylish banker who had pursued me around Amsterdam appeared at my door.
“I saw Vondel. He told me the terrible news about your son.”
“Willem was never my son,” Philip said, his thick-lipped mouth a knot
of anguish. “Tesselschade taught him to despise me. She reaped the bitter fruits of her scorn. Without a father, the boy was all brain and no body, no flesh, no vital connection to the world. She created an unreal monster and he atrophied. Smallpox was merely the physical agent of a spiritual death that had already occurred.”
The Frog's pendulous lower lip trembled. He wept helplessly. “I'm raving. Forgive me. You saw how promising he was. I was going to take him away from her, make him my son, heart and soul, in a year or two.”
Never had I been so moved. I had come to Amsterdam in a fury, prepared, even eager, to play the slut with this man in return for a loan of ten thousand pounds to pay off Malcolm's gambling debts. Dimly, even as I paced the deck of the packet boat, I had realized I wanted to use the money as a scourge, a cleanser, to wash Malcolm Stapleton out of my heart. I had even been ready to accept Vondel as a third in an orgy if Philip Hooft insisted. That would have added disgust to the scarifying solvent I sought.
Instead, I confronted this broken man asking for my sympathy. It threw me into a near panic. I did not know how to respond. I realized Malcolm Stapleton had also been groping for sympathy, but he did not believe I was capable of it.
“Oh, Philip,” I cried. “What can I say? What can I do?”
Philip Hooft wiped his eyes. “I'm making a fool of myself. I should be inviting you to my rooms for dinner. Will you come, now? You're as beautiful as ever. Don't you grow old in America?”
“I'd like to dress in something better than these rags.” I was wearing the same mundane traveling dress I had worn on the ship to Amsterdam.
“No. I like you as you are. You must take me the same way. I've lost my taste for ostentation, my appetite for glory.”
“No wonder Vondel looks so poor.”
“I've abandoned him, the bank, everything but my grief. I've made a kind of child out of it. I go to Willem's grave every day with fresh flowers.”
We went to his rooms and he ordered dinner sent up, along with a bottle of champagne. I told him about my visit to England. I described Malcolm's exploits at Culloden and our dinner at the Old Lodgeâomitting my husband's near assault on Walpole and Pelham.
Philip Hooft was enthralled. “What have they done for you?” he said. “If even half the story's true, they should have bought him a regiment. Or made him governor of one of the West Indies sugar islands, where a clever fellow can steal fifty thousand pounds a year.”
The question struck me like a blow in the face. I was suddenly forced to confront my own griefâmy abandonment by Malcolm, his hateful attempt to destroy me in the name of his lost patriotism.
“Nothing,” I said. “They gave us nothing.”
Suddenly I was weeping almost as bitterly as Philip had wept for his lost son. Was I mourning the death of my heart's desire?
“Catalyntieâwhat's wrong? What did I say?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. You only forced me to face certain things,” I said. “But I came here to borrow money, not to plead for sympathy. I deserve none from you. I know exactly how much I tormented you on my first visit.”
“Now you must tell me everything,” Philip said, moving his chair close enough to take my hand.
Somehow it seemed easier to tell the truth in my mother tongue. Perhaps speaking Dutch stirred the limitless love I felt for my grandfather and my lost father. I poured out the story of Malcolm's insult to Walpole and Pelham and my husband's repudiation of me, his drunken lunge to destruction at the London gaming tables.
“What a miserable job I'm doingâof cheering you,” I said, wiping my eyes.
“I'm not sure I can help you,” Philip said. “No one's ever asked me for anything but money. And now I have none.”
I barely managed to conceal my amazement. Had he truly abandoned the Hooft bank, his hundred million guilders? To my further amazement, I told myself it did not matter. I would offer this man the affection he cravedâand ask him for the sympathy I needed almost as badly. I would prove to myself, if no one else, that money was not my god.
The dinner arrived: roast duck, codfish, a galaxy of side dishes and wines. We only sampled the feast. Our hearts were already crowded with intimations of love. The whole thing seemed miraculous, incomprehensible. The Frog was just as ugly. But he was no longer a figure to be mocked in my cold heart and colder mind.
“Do you know what I love about you most?” Philip said.
I shook my head. It had been a long time since I had heard a man say he loved me. Malcolm had never used the word. In Robert Nicolls's mouth the words had turned out to be meaningless. It seemed to come naturally to this man's tongue and it stirred a response in my soul.
“You don't seem to know how beautiful you are.”
“Am I? No one's told me that in years.”
“Not even your husband?”
“He hinted at it onceâbut he's not a loving manâ”
Not loving?
Clara hissed in my mind.
Maybe not for you. But I forbid you to slander him. Haven't you wounded him enough?
“Perhaps that's my fault. I'm notâI must warn youâa loving woman.”
“I don't believe there is such a creature,” Philip said. “Every woman is born with love in her heartâbut so many fail to meet a man who
knows how to find it. I used to think a woman's heart was a small narrow place. Now I think of it as a vast mansion, in which love lurks in a single secret room.”
“What are in the other rooms?”
“On the lower floor, politeness, kindness, perhaps compassion. On the upper floors, far more unexpected things: contempt, scorn, hatred, rage. The man who wanders into any of these rooms may be scarred for lifeâlike the victim of a fire. The man who tries to live in one of them may soon welcome the flames of hell as a pleasant surcease to his sorrows.”
“You make us sound like terrible creatures.”
“You are. Most men don't think about women very much. But Tesselschade has made me think about you a great deal.”
“Where is this secret room where love resides?”
“Some say it's on the top floor, in a room full of sunlight and visions. Others say it's hidden in the cellar, amid earth and odors and desire.”
“Perhaps love resides in both places, if a man is nimble enough to enter both in the same visit.”
“I've tried. But I've never managed it.”
He took my hand and led me into the bedroom. It was a summer night in Amsterdam. A soft wind off the sea stirred the curtains. “How do Indian princesses make love?” he said. “Without their clothes, like the Italians? Or bundled in sheets and nightgowns, like the English and the Dutch?”
“Like the Italians,” I said.
He brought more than desire to our bed, he brought his imagination, his humanity, his humorâall the gifts of the spirit that had been concealed, congealed, by Tesselschade's scorn. He told me he wanted to lead my love out of that mythical mansion, where it would always be surrounded by the tenants of the other rooms, into the forest, where it would live in a simple cottage beneath the branches of a great flowering tree.
“There are dangers in the forest too,” I said. “Blizzards, fires. Warriors with hatchets who can inflict mortal wounds.”
“We'll defend our cottage against all comers,” Philip said. “We'll use magic and prayers and dreams. We'll outwit fate and laugh at destiny.”
What I remembered afterward was his tenderness, his joy. My own joy came later. That first night it refused to leave the secret room of love; it stayed crouched in a dark corner, a prisoner of the Evil Brother, refusing to believe there was any hope for it, even when love began to call for it to join Philip in the forest.
As we drifted down into sleep, I asked Philip a question that had long puzzled me. “Did you know Vondel had been Tesselschade's lover?”
“Of course. Everyone knew it.”
“Why did you befriend him?”
“To show her I forgave herâand I suppose to demonstrate my superiority to envy or revenge. There was also the satisfaction of making him my employee.”
“Still she scorned you?”
“She was very beautiful. I was ugly. Scorning me was her way of saying her love was not for sale.”
“I wonder if almost the same thing has happened to me.”
I told him how I had acquired Malcolm as a husband. I even confessed my pact with the Evil Brother. “He'll be another enemy to keep at bay,” Philip said.
For a moment, my throat was clotted with dread. No one could keep the Evil Brother at bay. He was offended by those who mocked him. The thought only made me cling with new fierceness to this unlikely lover, this frog whom sorrow and loss had changed into a prince in my heart.
The next day, Philip explained what he meant by abandoning the Hooft bank. He had sold it to a competitor and turned most of the money over to Tesselschade. He kept only enough to support himself in very modest style. But he still had enough influence on the Dam to borrow fifty thousand guilders to pay off Malcolm's gambling debt. I refused to accept it. “It must be a loan in my name at the regular rate of interest,” I said. “What I gave you last night must not be tainted by money.”
“You're right,” he said. We went to the Bank of Amsterdam on the Dam and ordered the papers drawn for a loan. My heart swelled with gratitude. This would protect my credit in London and New York. I could forget I was a married woman for a while. I would make myself forget it. I would live with Philip in that imaginary cottage in the forest and see what happened to my heart. Perhaps I would become a different womanâa creature full of tenderness and compassionâa woman the Evil Brother would not recognize.
The next day, we traveled on a comfortable
schuit
down a series of canals to a country house in the village of Brock, where Philip had a cottage surrounded by pebbled walks and a flowering garden. There I discovered he was an ardent amateur painter. Tesselschade had dismissed his efforts and refused to let them into the mansion on the Heerengracht. With numerous apologies in advance, he led me into his studio to examine his work.
He made no attempt to match the brooding depth of Rembrandt, the greatest Dutch painter of the preceding century. Philip preferred the simpler Flemish painters of the previous century, above all, Gerard David, the first Dutchman (he was from Utrecht) to make landscapes come alive. He also loved David's realism. He had copied his painting of the Virgin stirring a pot of milk soup, while the infant Jesus sat on her lap. It was a remarkable combination of holiness and everyday life. The Virgin's eyes
were lowered, suggesting sanctityâor a concern for the quality of the soup. The little boy, about three, had a spoon in his hand and a tiny smile on his face, as if he could not wait to get into the soup and make a mess.
“Isn't that life?” Philip said. “A muddle of the miraculous and the mundane. These old masters knew what they were doing. I want to paint you the same way, mixing the simplicity of American love with my humdrum European worldliness.”