“I am your very own rascal, the littlest John.”
“But I put you aside, hid you for years,” says she.
“As you should a rascal.”
The guards were suddenly adamant. They must have woken from the little spell I had cast around them.
“We’ll kill him, Mum, if you don’t scatter quick.”
Gert could not bribe them with her silver—that’s how frightened they were of the Fiend.
She put on her spinster’s shawl. I did not want these two yobs to catch me crying. I hugged her for the last time, watched her tread across the attic, until the guards shoved me back into my closet with their usual sneers. But dumb looks could not defeat Gert’s own little rascal. I raced to my spy hole, stood on my toes, until I saw Mum, so diminished now, disappear into the December chill.
Thirty-Nine
WAS IT PROVIDENCE OR THE POWER OF MY OWN want that brought Clara to me on the very afternoon of my mother’s visit? The guards let her in, but they would not lock the door. They stood on the sill, their tongues swollen inside their mouths, and observed us. I could not forgive their obscenity, their callousness to Clara. One lad pawed her as she passed through, while the other advanced his bayonet near my sightless eye, like some miserable jokester. I would have rushed him, bayonet and all, had Clara not held me with her own green eyes.
She was as much a thespian as Major André, but I could feel the desolation in her moves. She twirled about like a top, fed the guards some cold meat Gert had brought me from the nuns’ kitchen, tore a bit of meat from one guard’s mouth, and began to gobble.
“I’m ravenous,” she said. “Haven’t eaten all day.”
She fondled my neckcloth in front of the guards. I told her it was André’s.
“Who’s his clothier?” she asked.
“God, I should think. But you may certainly have it.”
“Johnny, you mustn’t give mementos before a trial. ’T will ruin your luck.”
I did not care. I wrapped that silk cloth round her neck. I could feel a pulse beating like some trapped bird under the skin. It alarmed me. I could never comprehend what tugged at Clara’s heart.
We had to employ a private language in front of these two dolts—a palaver that could pass between us like a silver bullet. I spoke in riddles to disarm the dolts. I concocted a fat fairy tale, full of conceits and an impossible heroine—a rich, rich widow who spent her life on a swing. Her admirers hoped to mend their finances by marrying the widow. Yet the good woman would only give herself and her money to the lad who pushed her on her swing. And said swing was fatal for her suitors—all would die of exhaustion attempting to keep the widow’s feet aflight.
The guards yawned. They hadn’t bargained on stories. The least they could expect was a glimpse of Clara without her bodice.
“One-Eye, ain’t you gonna let us borrow Missy?”
They took to pawing her again, and I readied to plunge between their bayonets when my mother’s beer boy arrived with two goblets of champagne. That liquid mollified them. They put down their muskets and began to drink. Mum’s beer boy produced more goblets.
The guards imbibed and concentrated less and less on Clara. We were inches away. Their drunken songs resounded in my ears like grapeshot. They sang of king and country, began to sob about their lost homeland.
“You can’t have a decent kidney pie or pint of bitters in Ameriky.”
I might have pitied them had Clara not been so near. And I took advantage of their slobbering, whispered to Clara under the breath of their songs. They could not see us in our tiny cove beside the door.
“Darling, did André hurt you?” I asked.
My jailers had emboldened me. I’d never have found courage to sing the simplest words of love away from this attic.
“I’ll strangle André with his own neckcloth if he ever goes near you.”
She licked my ear. “Might be more amusing, Johnny, if you strangled me.”
I hear that pirates often half-strangled their sweethearts to bring them a bit closer to ecstasy.
“Clara,” I said, “you must leave Manhattan at once, shutter the Queen’s Yard, and—”
She thrust her fingers into my mouth, and with her other hand she ripped off her bodice, revealed her charms and every goose bump, with the jailers singing and breaking wind in our ears. Had they leaned a bit and peered over the sill, they would have discovered more than mere goose bumps—indeed, the amazing freckled map of her, the narrow waist that needed no whalebone to pinch into one piece, that sudden, startling curve of her hips—a fluting of flesh that you cannot find even in pictures of the most magnificent nymphs.
We couldn’t lie down on my pallet. Drunk as they were, the jailers would have spotted us, would have wandered into the closet and ripped our flesh. Clara stood against the wall, and she bade me to enter.
An eye, a bloody eye, interrupted our paradise. One of the jailers pushed his head through the door and was perusing the landscape. I am not certain what the jailer saw. But Clara commenced to stroke his stinking face, and that very act blinded him to us. He sobbed without control. “Bless you, Missy. No one’s ever been that kind to a yob like me.”
And ’t was curious—Clara stroking him while my own head lay against her bosom. Then her nostrils quivered and she let out a noise that a child might make—a squeal, piercingly soft—delighting me as it filled me with dread. I could not bear the thought that any other man would ever listen to Clara’s music. I’d have to rush into my own fairy tale and slay a mountain of her admirers.
The jailers were coming out of their coma. Clara quickly dressed. I was mortified. I could no longer feast upon her freckles and goose bumps that were like little heavenly bodies. She forbade me to talk about her own future in Manhattan. She put André’s cloth back on my neck.
“Ain’t we a perfect pair.”
That’s all she said. She ran a finger down my face, smiled at the jailers, and left the attic at City Hall.
Forty
THE CROWN HAD LITTLE TO CROW ABOUT THIS year. France had entered the war in May, as we all knew, and General Clinton had to pull thousands of troops from his command in New York to safeguard the sugar islands, keep these islands out of French hands. Clinton had little purchase on the mainland of America, we soon realized. He controlled Manhattan, much of Long Island, and Newport. Washington could peer down at him from the Jersey Palisades, could camp along the Hudson, and grow stronger, while the British lion ate at its own entrails—the Hessians began to desert a hundred at a time, and Clinton’s best officers would rather hunt fox than seek out rebels.
Small wonder that Henry Clinton and the master of his secret service, Major André, settled on me. I was the only circus in town. I met with Clinton’s court as Christmas neared, tho’ I could scarce call such trappings a court. It was some muster room or mess for British officers with a great chair in the middle that had its own canopy and a crown—the king’s chair in America, reserved for princes of state. ’T was, in fact, a symbol of the Crown, with plush velvet curtains that would have befit a royal bedroom. On both sides of the great chair were lesser chairs, made of common wood, without a canopy or a cushion; each lesser chair had its own little table with an inkpot and a quill and writing paper. The table in front of the royal chair had nothing but a bell on it. I couldn’t take my eyes off that bell.
I entered the room wearing irons. It was not to keep me from running away, but to make me feel small in front of the king’s chair—a throne with all the pomp of Windsor, I imagine. The chair was not occupied. It was the lone orphan among the other chairs, occupied by generals and colonels, with their boots sticking out from under their little tables. Standing next to them, in front of the tables, was André in his gold epaulette, his whiter than white neckcloth, and his reddish riding boots. He was the picture of a prosecuting angel, the ultimate king’s man.
Neither Clara nor any other nun was in the audience, which consisted of Manhattan’s upper crust in camp
chairs, nabobs and their perfumed wives—bloody Loyalists, the women in beehive headdresses and the men in braided coats and buckled shoes. They’d come to Clinton’s circus in their Sunday clothes to howl at little John, who was suddenly notorious. I saw an empty row of camp chairs behind them, and could only surmise that André meant to pack the court with other demons. And then there were the witnesses, who sat in their own special dock behind a rope in a corner of the room. I recognized Loring and the Hessian officer from Loring’s estate—the little king of the Cowboys.
Loring was part of the circus. André would never punish him for peculation. Commissary Loring was much too valuable as a friend of the Crown. He could bribe a fistful of bailiffs.
I was in for it, lads. The whole bloody circus was against me. It could play at being kind—André bowed with much civility.
“Stocking, would you care for a cup of water?”
I was parched, but I wanted nothing from the Fiend. He meant to launch me with the hangman’s rope. It was odd, but the hangman was allowed into the room. Perhaps Redmund served as a sheriff or sergeant-at-arms. He was much admired. The nabobs in the audience doffed their hats to him. Their wives blinked at his beauty. He had branded none of these ladies, just the paupers of Manhattan, and he was, I admit, a beautiful lad, with enormous orbs for eyes. But the hangman seemed to suffer over me.
If not for Redmund, I would have had to pull sympathy from the walls.
The bailiff rocked on the heels of his high-buckled shoes. He might have been an army man in civilian clothes. I was not familiar with the customs of their courts, their hanging courts.
And then the bailiff left off his rocking. A door opened in the far wall and General Clinton entered, his wig awry, his hanger belted very low around his waist, his buttons misaligned, so that he looked more like a vagabond than a commander in chief.
“Hark ye,” the bailiff said, “general’s here.”
He announced this as if he were looking at some invisible man. But the court rose in its entirety—generals, colonels, nabobs and their wives, whispering in anticipation of my undoing. I began to shiver at the sight of all these women and men, and realized I would not escape their wrath.
Clinton occupied his throne, sword between his legs. I’ll wager the general had been in his cups and ’t was not yet noon. He had a hard time of it in Manhattan, with a war that had melted away. He would ride his pony in the field behind his mansion and dream of his dead wife—that is what my jailers swore.
“Mr. André,” he asked, “what have we here?”
“The American spy, Acting Lieutenant John Stocking, formerly of General Arnold’s raiders.”
Clinton peered at me through a lorgnette.
“I remember him. He was at certain meetings, the volume and purpose of which shall remain unsaid. But military secrets were revealed.”
“Precisely,” said the major.
He would not mention Sir Harold, I’d gamble on that. Harold might embarrass the court. He was probably on some prison ship bound for England.
“And this boy sneaked into our larder, into our shop,” Clinton said. “For what purpose?”
“To wound us, Excellency.”
André sang up a storm, charging me with treason and insurrection and the rearing of illegal troops, since no such Blue Brigade existed in His Majesty’s books. I let him sing. Clinton was already fast asleep. André had to rouse him from time to time with a word in his ear.
Loring rose in the witness dock and spat out his bile, swearing how I and my gang of colored Cowboys had invaded his farm with the purpose of molesting his milkmaids and his livestock.
“He is a bandit of the worst stripe,” Loring said, addressing the throne.
But André grabbed at him. “Did he ask you suspicious questions?”
“Most suspicious. He demanded to know how many Hessians were currently encamped on my farm. I saw him scribble a note for one of his black couriers. I heard him pronounce Washington’s name.”
“Which Washington?” Clinton asked, rising out of his sleep.
“Excellency, there is only one—George Washington, the rebel commander in chief.”
And now ’t was the Hessian officer’s turn. In the king’s best English he told the court how a band of colored ruffians had dragged him from his horse, stepped on him, asked him to draw a picture of the nearest fort.
“Did you draw such a picture?” André asked.
“I did not, Herr Major. I gave them nothing. And then they violated my uniform, stole my buttons, and laughed at the British.”
He saluted all the chairs and returned to his dock.
André asked me if I hoped to refute the king’s witnesses. I declined—would only have dragged me further into the Fiend’s black hole.
He was an extraordinary actor in his rouge and powdered wig, acting for the Crown. The generals and colonels dipped into their inkpots and scratched a volume of lines. There were not sufficient pages for them, and the hangman had to withdraw into a closet and return with fresh writing paper. These members of the tribunal uttered not a word. But André was prepared to weave for Clinton and the court.
I saw the foul beauty of his plan, might even have marveled at it had I not been filled with such bitter bile. First there was the marching of redcoats outside the room, then the nuns arrived without a single soldier and sat themselves down in the empty row of chairs behind the Loyalists—nuns’ chairs, I soon realized. Gert was not with them. I could not help but rejoice at the sight of Clara, tho’ André meant to pull the nuns into his little circus and did not want my mother to interfere. But she had interfered. She’d dressed them up as dolls and marionettes, with slashes of red paint on their cheeks and in the leather jerkins of river rats and lady pirates. Gert was having the nuns announce their independence of Clinton and his court, that they could wear whatever they wished. Or perhaps it was done out of desperation. I was glad of one thing. As a frequenter of the nuns’ shoe closet, I could recognize all the familiar markings and varieties of their paste-encrusted boots.
Clara looked at me not a once.
André had his bailiff escort her to the dock. She was the most vivacious of marionettes. She wore that leather jerkin like a princess and a lady pirate. I’m not sure what part Clinton played in André’s enterprise, but he was careful about Clara, who had been the chief attraction at his balls.
“Bailiff,” he said, “will you look to her wants?”
“Excellency,” Clara insisted, “I have no wants.”
But Clinton growled at Major André. “Why have you brought this child here? She was not on your lists.”
“She is essential to my arguments. And I needed the element of surprise.”
André pivoted on his heels and approached the dock. “Witness,” he sang, “may I beg you to state your name and your age?”
“I am twenty years and one,” she said. “Clara is my name.”
“But your surname,” André said, “to please the court.”
“I have none.”
“Ah, then you are a mystery.”
“No,” she said, looking at Clinton now. “I am a mystery child. My mother married a man who thought so little of marriage he kept it a secret to himself.”
“Leave this line of questioning,” Clinton said. “She is Mistress Clara. And she ought not be here—she’s a colored girl, for God’s sake, an octoroon.”
“I have the right to call her as a witness should it please the court.”
“It doth not please the court, but get on with it.”
“Mistress Clara,” André said, “what is your relation to the accused?”
Clara pondered inside her dock. “Relation, sir? He did prick me once unless I am mistaken—once, not twice. We were under the roof of a castle called City Hall.”
The nabobs and their wives began to gasp; they were confused by Clara, did not know whether to pity her or cover her with vituperation. They did both, while Clinton clutched his head and growled at
André.
“You have pressed the girl and made her lose her mind.”
“’Tis a ploy,” André said. “I know her well.”
“Excellency,” Clara said to Clinton, “he does not know me at all.”
But André stepped between the witness dock and the throne and cut off Clara’s view of Clinton. He meant to break her no matter the cost. “You live inside a brothel—a notorious nunnery—with the accused. And what is his occupation?”
“He hath none. His education has put him in a parlous state as ’t has done to many a young man.”
“He is a silver bullet,” André said, “a spy who carries messages to General Washington on his person. And you are in his employ.”
I dreaded this moment. He would hit at Clara with his little hammers, knowing I could not bear it. And André was counting on this. That is why he had let her into the attic—to break my heart. Soon he would bring up the Ethiopian Ball, build a case against Clara as the rebel vixen of Little Africa.
“Cease,” I said. “I am a spy. And I did not enlist any of the nuns.”
Only then did Clara look at me, as if to say I was the biggest dunce in America, that she’d have outlasted André’s onslaught. But her eyes could not even hold their gaze on me. They fluttered like that time when Gert had put her in my closet with a bald head. And André wouldn’t allow me to serenade her with lullabies.
“Mistress Clara,” said the Fiend, “you are dismissed.”
The bailiff led every nun out of the room and locked the door. And I stood there, a wounded dog without its master.
Forty-One
HE WAS A BETTER TACTICIAN THAN I. HE’D allowed Gert and Clara to visit me in the attic and then neutered us all. He sent Sir Harold to some other shore, kept Gert out of court, so that she could not comfort Clara, and put Clara into the dock, knowing that however much she might embarrass him, she would wilt under his scrutiny, and her knight with one eye would rescue her and condemn himself in the very same stroke.
Johnny One-Eye Page 20