I’d never seen such a Divil as John André, tho’ he often played a cherub with olive skin. He’d crept into Sir William’s graces in Philadelphia, put himself in charge of the Meschianza, a farewell party and costume ball that Sir William’s officers gave in his honor. It was the most extravagant affair Philadelphia had ever seen. Young officers jousted in mock tilts and tournaments, while Philadelphia’s daughters dressed as Turkish maidens. André drew silhouettes of each Tory princess and thrust them under his spell, as he loved to remind us. He meant to convert these princesses into spies, and he would remain their spymaster. I could not imagine using a woman so, Tory princess or not, and I mentioned my chagrin.
“Major André, you were most chivalrous at the Meschianza, lest I am mistaken.”
“It was for Sir William,” André insisted, “all for Sir William. But he spoiled my Meschianza. He arrived with his whore.”
I bowed once, while André sat with his hanger, boots on the table. I did not have even the smallest of swords. “Elizabeth Loring happens to be a friend of mine. And I do not take your insult lightly.”
Harold nudged my knee under the table, but André only laughed. “I dare say, Sir Harold, your lad is trying to entice me into a duel. He is the real knight, defending a lady who has slept with half my dragoons, and I had to joust like a fiend to prevent her from propositioning me.”
I would bide my time, kill him in some dark corner, and not disgrace Harold by parrying with André at headquarters. He drank Madeira, while the general sat and said not a word and was soon fast asleep.
“Yes, I designed hats, and helped the misses with their hair. But it was camouflage. I was recruiting, recruiting all the time. And we may do wonders, gentlemen. I am in correspondence with my two favorite Philadelphia misses. Peggy Shippen and Peggy Chew. Might even give them a lesson in invisible ink,” he said, winking to Harold.
He claimed to have infiltrated the Queen’s Yard, that half the nuns were spies of his. He talked of an American plot to kidnap Clinton from these very headquarters, a house that was guarded all through the night. I was appalled and bewildered by André’s remarks. Had not Clara openly declared herself against the Crown? A nun who rousted the royal chimney sweep couldn’t have been a spy.
But the little shit mocked Harold and me, said we could assist in the capture and arrest of Washington’s agents. André ran the theatre on John Street, Clinton’s Thespians, and this preposterous kidnapping sounded like a theatre piece, a play of his. I expected to meet his own thespians—disguised as American agents—on the lawn at the back of Clinton’s house and headquarters.
I had small delight in such theatrics. But I was Harold’s second-in-command. We shielded Manhattan Negroes, put them in the Black Brigade so they wouldn’t have to work as stevedores or be carted off to the Carolinas. And Harold swore we couldn’t protect these Africans without the help of Sir Henry Clinton. We had to cajole, come to British headquarters on Broadway and listen to their lies. I was loath to do it, lads, but we lived on an island of redcoats, an island of John Andrés.
Thirty-Three
AS I SAT AND WAITED IN THE WAR ROOM WITH Harold, Sir Henry, and the little shit, there was a knock on the door. “Enter,” André rasped, and a short, fat man came into the room wearing Clinton’s uniform. André must have found Clinton’s double at his playhouse. The double was a sergeant with black teeth. He could not have fooled an infant or a doddering old lady in the almshouse, but here he was trying to outsmart Washington’s secret service.
We left the war room while Clinton slept, and we marched downstairs to Clinton’s garden, which looked upon the Hudson and had a royal view of the little houses and woods across the river. And within the garden’s white pavilion was a magnificent chaise longue upholstered in scarlet, with lion heads carved into its wooden borders. Some British brutes must have carried it from the house whenever Clinton decided to take a nap, and now André deposited Clinton’s double in the chair.
We stood behind the pavilion, Harold, André, and I, without another soldier, another guard. André held a pistol to his own head, and I thought he’d gone berserk and meant to blow his brains out. But he was only scratching his ear with the pistol’s silver beak. He looked at his timepiece, yawned, and behold!—a man appeared in the grass, as if he’d come right out of the tide. A thespian, I opined to myself, one of André’s own. The man drew nearer and nearer. He wore leggings and a black handkerchief round his head, like the river rats on our wharves.
Through the lattice rails I could see the whites of his eyes. He had no other weapon than a knife. The scars on his face could not have been manufactured. André had chosen well. As the man approached the chair, André cocked his pistol and ventured out from behind the pavilion. “Stand,” he said. “Stand, or I will give you a ticket to hell.”
The man started to run. André did not seem to aim at all, but when I heard the pistol’s report—a popping sound that failed to echo across the grass—I could scarcely believe what I saw. The man’s brains had begun to fly. Where his scalp had once been, I noticed something raw and red.
RIGHT AFTER THE SHOOTING I raced to Robinson Street. I caught Clara smoking her pipe and reading Jonathan Swift in the parlor. I knocked the book out of her hand. I couldn’t even startle Clara—she smiled at so much activity coming out of little John.
“Johnny One-Eye, what in thunder will you do next? Swallow a page of my book?”
“Only if it will displease you,” I said. “Tell me, dearest, does André pay you in London pounds?”
She pouted with her eyes. “Darling, that nasty little man has never been near my bed.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean the rabbit hutch. There is a kind of rogering that requires not a bed but a silver bullet.”
Silver bullets were notorious material in both the American and British secret service. Spies could carry messages in their hollowed interior, and if about to be captured, could swallow the bullet. But handlers of the opposite service would make them drink castor oil or some other elixir until the bullet was flushed from their bowels.
And it perturbed me because Clara pretended to be ignorant of spies and spying.
“I have no such bullet,” she said.
I slapped her and she must have considered it a caress—she laughed and went with her pipe into a different closet. Perhaps she was not so cavalier as I had imagined, since my mother came flying in a few minutes after Clara was gone.
“Mother, speak plainly to me. Did you inform Major John André that the rebels meant to kidnap General Clinton from his garden?” “Yes.”
“And are you aware that the kidnapper was murdered by André?”
“That was always a risk.”
“I cannot—will not—believe that you are in the paid employ of André’s secret service.”
“I am,” she said, and there was not the least bit of shame in her voice. I was the one who sat down, not Gert. I had to ponder all the ramifications of a silver bullet.
“Ye gods, I am the blindest of boys. The nunnery is Washington’s secret camp. You carry his silver bullets, and if he came here last winter, came here twice, it’s because the bullets didn’t get through. And he had to be his very own bullet. He tricked Billy into believing that he came for love, and to accept his challenge of vingt-et-un…Mother, I am lost. You fed André a piece of cheese when you might have had Clinton as a prisoner in Washington’s camp—why, why?”
“No one wanted the fellow. It would be our misfortune to capture him, since the king would never find a commander as lazy and incompetent as Clinton. That is what Hamilton said.”
Hamilton, always Hamilton. I had to wonder if that little shit was my mother’s spymaster.
“And so ’t was a maneuver—”
“To keep André off the track. He has been suspicious of my nuns. He knows that the Queen’s Yard is the favorite nest of British officers in New York.”
My head was exploding with intrigue, as if I inhabited some mirror land whe
re the world was upside down and nothing could ever remain what it had been before.
Gert took my hand. Was it another of Hamilton’s tricks?
“You must not be so harsh with Clara. She is delicate, and this constant British parade confuses her.”
“Madam, I was soft as a swan. I caressed Clara.”
“You slapped her face,” Gert said. “Go to her. She is in her closet. Sing her to sleep. She has nightmares whenever she shuts her eyes.”
I WENT TO CLARA on tiptoe, quiet as a mouse. She lay about in her nightgown, tho’ it was not yet night.
I sat beside Clara, cradled her head in my arms. She did not resist. And I sang to her the way I would when we were children and she not yet a nun. I sang lullabies that I would invent for Clara, only Clara. I’m not certain that Madame ever listened through the door. Scribbler that I am, I never recorded the lullabies, never wrote them down. They were about forests and all the creatures that inhabited them—slaves who had run from their masters; wolves as black as coal but with pink, slavering tongues; pirates who all had one eye, and therefore composed a vicious, one-eyed panoply; brown bears who lumbered along in all their bulk, with claws as complicated as a fisherman’s knife; and one very tall girl with pyramids of woolly blond hair who fed water to the slaves, took pity on the pirates, went up to the wolves and stroked their wildness away, and danced for the brown bears until they had no more malice, no more desire to eviscerate her with their claws.
And thus I passed the night with Clara, singing to her and wetting her lips with water. I fell asleep, and when I woke, Clara was no longer there; her nightgown sat in one long wrinkle near my legs. And then she burst into the closet wearing lip rouge and a long leather hat that hid her eyes.
“Gracious,” she said, “are you still here? I have a merchant to entertain who’s rich as Croesus. He sells supplies to the rebels and the king’s men.”
“But you do not care for rich merchants,” I said.
“Then I will have to make an exception. Now will you get out, Johnny One-Eye?”
I seized her, trapped her in my arms, because I was still drunk with the power of my own melodies. She did not fight. She trembled under the leather of her hat. “The siren with his songs,” she said, “the siren with his songs…I never lived the whole night with a man. I cannot fall asleep in a man’s arms.”
“But you just slept in my arms.”
“Because of your songs. You are my addiction.”
And she broke from me, the brim of her hat glancing off my forehead like some leather blade.
Thirty-Four
I KNEW NOT WHICH STEPS TO TAKE. I HAD TO BE careful of Clinton, careful of André, and careful not to put the nuns in danger. I could not bear the thought of Clara and Gert being sent to a prison ship in Wallabout Bay, or going to the gallows. But they would not consider leaving Holy Ground. The nunnery was Washington’s outpost in Manhattan, his citadel, Gert said. It mattered naught that Martha Washington often accompanied her general to his winter quarters. Gert had become Washington’s incontestable camp wife. She kept Clinton’s hyena at bay, fed him scraps from Washington’s own table.
But the nuns were no longer under house arrest, as they had been under Billy. Gert and Clara attended Clinton’s parties—parties that were closed to Harold and myself. Gert swore that she and Clara threw up into the same bucket after the soirées. Yet how could Clara not have been the beauty of Clinton’s balls? She with her marvelous freckles and woolly blond hair? I’d watch young captains and lieutenant colonels escort her to the parties in Clinton’s own carriage. Clinton never danced, but his officers kept buying tickets to these charity balls and spent such tickets on capturing Clara. Tory princesses and rich old maids must have watched her dance with malice in their hearts—they couldn’t stone Clara, because it might have angered Clinton. So they rallied against Gert, called her the whore of Babylon, and drove her out of the balls.
’T was Clara who suffered most without my mother. She’d return home with her eyes darting in her head like a dervish. My mother would give her honey and hot milk, and this was the only time—after a ball—that Clara invited me into her closet. She had monstrous corns on her heels and had disabled her best dancing slippers.
“Sing me to sleep, will ye, Johnny One-Eye? Be a good boy. I’ll pay you a London pound.”
A pound for every lullaby, I thought, a pound for every kiss.
I covered her in blankets, cradled her in my arms, sang about that tall girl from lullaby land who calmed animals and men lurking in the forest, but I would not spend the night—I’d only wake to find her mocking me in her full regalia of clothes.
SEPTEMBER HAD COME and gone, and I had to go to headquarters, observe Major André for any sign that he might molest Clara or Gert and close the nunnery. But he couldn’t risk Clinton’s wrath, not while the British commander sent his coach for Clara. Clinton needed her presence as a souvenir to arouse him from his perpetual slumber. Yet I did not like the manner in which that little major looked at me, as if he were manufacturing silver bullets with my name and Gert’s inside the hollow shell.
I walked out of headquarters in a foul mood. There was a cold wind off the Hudson, a wind that could bite like the Divil.
“Milord,” I said to Harold, “teach me to kill.”
“You’re the one who gallivanted with Benedict Arnold. I’ve never been in battle.”
“Battle is easy once you shit your pants,” I said. “You close your eyes and imagine your enemy’s heart. I do not mean that kind of killing.”
“What other kind is there?”
“Your kind. With a hanger. Teach me to kill.”
“And watch you go after André like a pup…have him cut you to ribbons while he is drinking a glass of wine. Don’t forget, Johnny, he went to school in Geneva, where he could buy a dozen fencing masters. Do not let his ability to sew or wear women’s paint at the theatre fool you. He is the champion of his regiment. I dare not vex him. He would unman me in a minute.”
“Then I shall find another way to rid ourselves of the little shit. There must be some blackguard I could hire at the docks. A scalp hunter or pirate in retirement.”
“Then I would be obliged to have Prince Paul arrest you.”
Harold, in his infinite wisdom, had named Prince Paul captain and commander of the Blue Brigade. “If we have to fight,” he’d said, “’tis best the Blues fight under him.” The Blues were never sent out on patrol. They had no ammunition. What they did have was a mandate to lock drunkards up in the attic at City Hall. And they had their own prince.
Paul loved King George but not his man-killers in Manhattan. He could have run over to the American side, but that would have meant abandoning Little Africa, and the Brits would have punished Paul’s people. Yet the Yorkers themselves had burnt his father at the stake, and Paul lived in an uneasy truce with York Island. He had his own holidays inside Little Africa and an Ethiopian Ball, where black women often dressed up in the style of their white masters and mistresses. The Brits envied such balls but were seldom invited to them—besides, they would have had to arrive with a garrison of redcoats, since they feared for their lives in Little Africa.
Paul valued this fear and used it to prevent the Brits from policing Little Africa. He indulged Sir Harold’s Black Brigade, but he was reluctant to arrest paupers, since many of said paupers were black. And so we had to narrow our mandate to wild men who disturbed the peace.
ONE MORNING IN OCTOBER I received a grandiloquent envelope addressed to Squire John Stocking, with an invitation inside to the next Ethiopian Ball. I imagined the prince himself had sent it, inviting a white man to this black soirée.
On the night of the ball a carriage arrived for Squire Stocking, with a black coachman and a bevy of maidens with silver birth-marks painted on their cleavage in the style of Marie Antoinette.
I could not comprehend a word they spoke—it must have been the peculiar mishmash of Little Africa. I listened harder. These
Marie Antoinettes were mocking the conversation of their current or former mistresses, but in their very own music. They gossiped about a Tory princess who when squatting on her pot produced urine that could heal a leper’s wounds.
“’T was prodigious, Mattie Girl,” said the tallest Marie Antoinette. “Magic water that could make flowers bloom in my bum.”
On the way to the Ethiopian Ball, we passed the old Indian wall that was meant to keep hostile savages out of Manhattan and blacks inside Little Africa. We passed the High Road to Boston, the Hebrew burial grounds, passed the gallows, the dueling fields, and Fresh Water Pond, and arrived at the old munitions factory near a vacant parcel of land on Winne Street. The factory had blown up twice, sending plumes of black smoke across the island and covering Robinson Street with a cloud that killed the sun for a day and a half, but ’t was abandoned now.
Yet I saw carriages and horses in front of the factory. I went inside with the Marie Antoinettes, and I could scarce believe my eyes. This cavern was a replica of the ballroom at headquarters, tho’ six or seven times as large. I’d never appreciated the quality of Paul’s boldness. The men at his ball were dressed as British officers—generals, colonels, majors, and captains with their regimental colors. Paul alone did not wear a uniform. Paul alone stood outside this extravagant jest. And the women at the ball resembled a tribe of Tory princesses, merchants’ wives, and the wives of Hessian officers who had headdresses wired up like the tallest of citadels, powdered pink.
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