The Committee found Billington guilty of “disrespect and disdain for his country’s cause” and fined him seven pounds. He refused to pay. They threatened him with jail. He told them he would blow out the brains of the first man who came on his property to arrest him. He stalked out of the room. The Committee looked dismayed. Lemuel Peters inflated himself in his odd froglike way and issued an order to Colonel Breese to arrest Billington and confine him in the county jail. jasper Clark demurred. It would lead to bloodshed, he declared. Billington had four or five guns in his house and was a dead shot. Peters insisted that Kemble, as secretary of the Committee, write out the order. Kemble told him to write out his own order and declared he would put in the record his disagreement and his belief that Committeeman Cotter should pay his lawful debts.
Jonathan Gifford left them squabbling and retreated to the taproom, which was, he was glad to see, almost deserted. Barney McGovern had cleared the tables and was polishing the walnut bar. “How goes it with the honorable Committee, Captain?”
“As usual.”
“Is it true what I hear from Colonel Breese and his heroes - they’re to arrest Governor Franklin tomorrow?”
“It’s true.”
“Faith, it’s a loose game these Americans are playing,” Barney said. “You don’t dare the English Lion to a fight with clods like Breese to lead you. They’ll turn this country into another Ireland, sure as I’m standing here.”
Barney was only reciting Captain Gifford’s words back to him - a habit that had grown with the years. This was Jonathan Gifford’s primary fear. But only a few - those who had come from Ireland and seen the British system in that country - understood it. Not that Gifford had much sympathy for the Catholic Irish - the real victims of the system. They were too crushed, too leaderless, too bewildered to excite more than pity - an emotion far different from sympathy. He himself was Anglo-Irish, the younger son of a Dublin lawyer who had married the daughter of an impoverished Irish Catholic aristocrat. His mother had died when he was a half-grown boy. (One of the reasons he had been glad to play a stepfather’s role in America. Strange, the way we often spend our lives repairing the losses of childhood.) From his father, Protestant but an Irish patriot after three generations in the country, Captain Gifford had imbibed the details of England’s systematic exploitation of prostrate Ireland.
It was an exploitation based on the most primitive of all laws - the law of conquest. These reckless Americans were giving England a chance to repeat the lucrative performance in America, on a scale that would make Ireland look like a penny-ante game. There were men in England hungry for the chance to do it - powerful men who saw fortunes to be made in confiscated American lands, men whose fathers and grandfathers had made similar fortunes in conquered Scotland and Ireland. Americans were daring them to unleash the British fleet and army, a war machine that had defeated the combined power of France and Spain in the previous decade.
It was madness. Jonathan Gifford poured himself a half tankard of Madeira. Lately it was the only way he got to sleep at night. Barney McGovern poured himself an equal helping of rum.
“Your health, Captain,” he said.
“And yours, Sergeant.”
“What the devil shall we do, if we find the old Fourth Foot, the King’s very own, coming down this bloody road? The way things look, it wouldn’t surprise me.”
“I don’t know,” Jonathan Gifford said.
Barney McGovern looked shocked. For almost two decades, he had been used to Captain Gifford deciding with an absolute minimum of hesitation matters ranging from a frontal assault to resigning from the army to serving another brandy to an argumentative drunk. As they finished their drinks, the committeemen came to the door, calling their goodnights and praising the liquor and dinner. Jonathan Gifford presented Lemuel Peters with the bill - $5.50, a week’s wages for a farm laborer - and Peters signed it with a flourish no doubt acquired at Harvard. The Provincial Congress would pay - eventually.
A half-hour later, Jonathan Gifford pulled off his sweaty clothes and put on a long flannel nightgown and a flannel nightcap, threw open the window of his room, and slipped beneath the sheets of his big canopy bed. As usual, the sheets were deliciously warm in the otherwise freezing room, thanks to Molly McGovern’s hot bricks wrapped in flannel. For a few minutes, Jonathan Gifford lay there, while faces drifted in the darkness - the grim dignity and confident solemnity of William Alexander, Lord Stirling; Ambrose Cotter’s slack, shifty face; Lemuel Peters’ pompous cartoon visage; the stupidity and earnest honesty of old Jasper Clark; Richard Talbot’s rage; Cortland Skinner’s fear, a strange sight on that usually arrogant face. Then Kemble and Kate, with their heartbreaking mixture of innocence and anger and pride. Finally, a woman’s face - he did not recognize it at first - Caroline, his dead wife’s sister, Caroline Skinner looking at him with odd, almost fevered intensity. There was a question in her eyes. What was it, was she asking the same thing everyone else was asking? The Captain seemed to speak only to her: “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “The truth is, I don’t know what to do.”
JONATHAN GIFFORD WAS dreaming. It was a familiar dream, and it filled him with dread. He told himself it was a dream and vowed he would awake. But neither vows nor oaths nor promises could free him. He was hurtled along the familiar country road on the back of his dun stallion, Achilles. Beside him on sturdy little Narragansett mares rode a boyish Kemble and a girlish Kate. They were three, no, four years back in time. Magical, the way children suddenly became men and women. They were riding toward the Shrewsbury River. The dreamer knew it and he knew why. But the man on horseback did not know why.
Normally, when he went out for a day’s ramble with the children, they would ride to Amboy and gaze at Governor Franklin’s handsome house on Amboy Point - perhaps even see the governor and his lady and their guests strolling in the three-acre park around the house, gorgeously dressed in brocaded silk and satin, like figures from a Watteau painting. But today they rode toward Shrewsbury Vale. Was it that romantic poem, recited in the tavern by a young Philadelphian the previous year - did that explain what was about to happen?
Let Poets the beauties of Ida rehearse
Of Pathos, of Tempe, which they never saw, Make Venus, or Juno the subject of Verse, And Pictures of Gods and Goddesses roar:
Tho pompous their Diction
‘Tis all but mere Fiction
The plain Truth at last will most cruelly prevail, And even Apollo
I’m sure to beat hollow
When singing the Beauties of Shrewsbury Vale.
How did the rest of it go? He could only remember the last four lines:
Here Discord and Faction can never prevail For Wealth, Titles, Place,
Foul Hearts with fair Faces
Are not to be met with in Shewsbury Vale.
Ironic, those blithe words, about foul hearts and fair faces. Had he known? Was the truth already lurking somewhere in his blood? Jonathan Gifford twisted and turned in his bed, but there was no escape from the dream. It was hot, June. Perhaps that was the reason Kate or Kemble had suggested a swim. They had stopped at Huddy’s tavern in Colt’s Neck, bought a picnic lunch of cold ham and cider, watered their weary horses, and ridden on to their favorite cove. Already Jonathan Gifford felt the icy water of the river on his sweaty skin. Perhaps it was he who had suggested the swim. Perhaps he already suspected what he would find on the cool green grass of their cove, shaded by that ancient, tremendous oak.
No, it was purely, totally accidental. He was innocent of foreknowledge, innocent. But not guiltless, perhaps. What about her? What about the woman he instantly knew was there, although he glimpsed only a flash of whiteness through the green leaves of the riverbank trees? How could she desecrate this place? Fire roared behind his eyes now, the madness that had previously raged there only in his worst hours as a soldier, when he led his company into the thunder-filled gunsmoke at Ticonderoga, Quebec, or Havana. He had whirled in the saddle and told Kate
and Kemble, in a voice that even now, in the dream, had death in it, to ride home. Home!
It was too late. They were looking past him up the river road. They saw their mother’s horse and beside it the horse of Viscount Richard Needham, captain in the 23rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
By the time Jonathan Gifford reached the point in the road where the path ran down to the cove and its bank of lush grass, Sarah had gotten into her shift and was trying to disentangle her dress from some clinging bushes on which she had spread it. Viscount Needham, his too-handsome face twisted in a grimace of dismay or disdain, was struggling with the last button of his breeches. Jonathan Gifford stood at the head of the path, gazing down at them for a long time. Or was it only a moment? It did not matter. Asleep or awake he still stood there, rage clotting his veins, thundering in his chest, blazing in his brain while the ridiculous question repeated itself: How could she bring him to this place, here of all places?
Sarah’s hair was wet. It fell in a red sheen down her back. They had come here during their first summer together, and discovered the oak, the cove, the grass. He had taught her to swim. Taught her in the European style, inherited from Greece and Rome, naked. Taught her to love the cool water on sinuous flesh and himself to love the satiny sheen the river left on her exquisite skin.
He began walking down the steep path, faster and faster, like a man with a hurricane at his back. Halfway down, Sarah cried out, “No, Mr. Gifford, please.” But he was not even looking at her. She had vanished, perhaps forever. He was plunging toward Needham, who began to back away, crying, “I am prepared to give you satisfaction, Gifford, any time - ”
His fist smashed into that arrogant young face. Needham crashed against the massive trunk of the old oak tree. Bright red blood sprang from his nose. “Gifford,” he cried, “I am prepared to give you a gentleman’s satisfaction. This is low - ”
He grabbed him by the throat and smashed him against the tree, once, twice, lifting him off the ground each time. His strength was superhuman. Needham was a well-built man of medium height, and no coward, but guilt and the ferocity of Jonathan Gifford’s rage reduced him to helpless terror.
Then something happened that made Jonathan Gifford groan aloud in his sleep. Staring into Viscount Needham’s blood-streaked face, into those normally reckless eyes and that mocking sensual mouth, Jonathan Gifford saw himself. For twenty years, he had worn that face, cultivated that same casual sophistication, pursued the same reckless combination of danger and pleasure, wandered the world wearing the King’s uniform, taking these sweet multiples where he found them. How could he kill a man for doing what he himself had done? No more than he could explain why he had found his adventurous years strangely empty. No more than he could deny their right to return now and finally empty the years he had hoped like a wishing fool to fill with genuine love.
“Satisfaction,” gurgled Viscount Needham, through the vise of fingers around his throat. “As - a - gentleman - insist.”
With a snarl of disgust, Jonathan Gifford flung him to the ground.
“You have exactly one hour to get back to Strangers’ Resort, pack your trunk, and get on the road. If you are there when I return, I Will kill you. Not with a pistol, like a gentleman, but like an innkeeper - by drowning you in my horse trough. Now start running.”
Viscount Needham scrambled to his feet, grabbed his shirt and coat off the bushes, seized his shoes and stockings in his other hand, and, floundered to the top of the path. He flung on his clothes and shouted a farewell insult.
“I cannot believe you were ever an officer in the King’s Own Regiment, sir. I cannot believe that such a distinguished regiment would tolerate such a low, skulking boor in its ranks. You are a liar, sir, like most Americans, a contemptible American liar.”
Jonathan Gifford started up the path after him. Needham leaped into his saddle and galloped away. They were alone. He and Sarah were alone. For a moment he almost wished Viscount Needham back.
“Are you going to beat me, too, Mr. Gifford? I am as much at fault as he is.”
He shook his head.
“Women are forgiven, like naughty dogs, wayward horses, is that it?”
He shook his head again, asking her to stop now, afraid of what his rage might do.
“We didn’t plan to come here, if it makes you feel any better. We met on the road.”
With a strangled cry, he seized her by the throat. “What is it - what - is - it you want?”
She stood there utterly passive, willing to let him kill her without a breath of resistance. His hands dropped to his sides. He turned his back and walked away from her, down to the riverbank.
“Put on your clothes,” he said.
“Mr. Gifford, in the name of God, do one thing or the other. Kill me or forgive me.”
He stared out at the broad sun-bright river. “Put on your clothes,” he said.
Then came those fateful words. They struck him between the shoulders as if they were fired from a gun. “I loved you, Mr. Gifford, but not with my whole heart. Just as you loved me.”
In the dream he could see the two of them in the thick sweet summer air of Shrewsbury Vale, sunlight dappling the grass around them, the trees, rustling with a lovers’ breeze. He heard her broken words and saw his stiff unyielding back and was filled with regret and pity for the woman who would not and the man who could not love with a whole heart. Pity because that stiff back, that wayward heart seemed fated, a kind of doom descending on those two forlorn lovers, dying, yes, dying at least as lovers before his eyes.
Jonathan Gifford awoke. Gray dawn was filtering through the window on an icy wind. The sheets beyond the immediate warmth of his body were icy. But his body was bathed in sweat. He stumbled out of bed and lit the kindling in his fireplace. After letting the flames warm his clothes for a few minutes, he pulled them on and lit a pipe of strong Virginia tobacco. Outside there was a sheen of ice on road and trees and barns and outhouses. The snow had turned to sleety rain and a strong freeze had followed it. He felt utterly weary, as if he had not slept an hour.
Deep puffs on his pipe sent warmth and spirit tingling through his body. He went downstairs and moved swiftly, noiselessly through the dark silent rooms to the back door that led to his greenhouse. Closing the door behind him, he drew a deep slow breath of scented air. The first faint traces of sunrise were streaking the eastern sky. He it an oil lamp and walked slowly past the tubs and pots and trays of roses of every shape and size and condition. Some, protected by the roof of glass which multiplied the heat of the winter sun, were blooming. Others were bare twigs, grafts from different types of roses, bound together with cotton cord in carefully tended soil.
He studied with particular care the blooms in his propagation box. Some of the seeds he had planted only two months ago were growing. Others had been in this four-foot-square frame, built of untreated cypress, for two years. Each day the two inches of enriched soil were moistened by rain water. He turned next to study a hybrid he had created from a moss rose which had double yellow blossoms tinged with peach, rather than the usual pale pink. On one mossy-covered stem he had discovered small reddish spots, the beginning of a canker. It had grown overnight. He took a pruning knife, sharpened it on a piece of soapstone, and carefully cut the spots away. Slowly he went from flower to flower looking for other diseases, above all, the dreaded black spot, the unnatural swelling known as crown gall. Growing roses was a perpetual struggle against a host of enemies, from these indigenous diseases to spiders and field mice. It took meticulous care, daily effort, to create these lovely mysterious flowers so rich in historic and symbolic meaning.
At a table in the rear of the greenhouse Jonathan Gifford sat down and clipped with a shears the still-closed bud of an American wild rose. Gently he removed the pale pink petals until he reached the golden center. Now he was at the heart of the flower, the central group of tiny pistils surrounded by rows of stamens. With a tweezers he meticulously removed all the stamens by pulling them off at
their bases. The flower was now emasculated. He covered it with a small cotton bag which he tied at the bottom with a piece of cotton string. In two or three days the pistils inside the bag would mature.
From another pot he cut a dark red Tudor rose. This flower was richer in history. Virgil had praised it in 50 b.c. The Crusaders had carried it back to England, where its descendants had become the white and red roses of York and Lancaster. Tomorrow he would remove the red petals and brush the cluster of stamens back and forth with a cluster of pistils left on the American rose. Sometime in June or early July, if the breeding proved successful, a new rose, part English, part American, would be growing in his garden. It was a chancy business. It was almost impossible to tell whether the new plant would thrive, much less match its predecessors in their individual beauty. If the cross failed, the round base of the flower - the hip - would fail to stay green. Instead it would shrivel, decay, and drop off.
While he worked, Jonathan Gifford tried to think calmly about his private and his public concerns. Perhaps it was time to stop regretting the dead and consider the living. He had never been able to discuss that day in Shrewsbury Vale with Kemble and Kate. Was his silence feeding the bitter accusation that obviously smoldered in Kemble’s mind? Was it also the reason for the wild romantic visions in Kate’s heart? Did that encounter explain in part at least Kemble’s fanatic hatred of things British, his insistence on total animosity between America and England - and Kate’s infatuation with anything and anyone connected with the glamour and glory of London?
But what about himself? Was there also in that dream an explanation for his deep uneasiness about the mounting revolution around him? Tomorrow - no, today - they would arrest the royal governor. Samuel Breese with his flapping farmer’s trousers and drooping homespun coat and squat Daniel Slocum with his brutal mouth and venal eyes were going to inform the elegant William Franklin in his superfine broadcloth coat, silk waistcoat, and satin breeches that he was a traitor. Then Breese was going to surround the governor’s house with armed men and dare him to do something about it. If this was not revolution, it was the nearest thing to it.
The Heart of Liberty Page 6