“Yes,” Caroline said. But there was a mournful echo in her agreement. She inevitably compared herself and Kate and saw how much more formidably she was bound to her husband, not only by conscience but by the force of law and custom.
“I’m not sure how I would feel about Anthony if the war ended tomorrow and he came back here to Kemble Manor. At first I thought I owed him the right to that much consideration. But I’m beginning to wonder how much longer I owe it to him. This war could last ten or twenty years.”
“The other offer - from the British officer - is more attractive?” Caroline asked, plainly dubious that this was possible.
“Don’t worry,” Kate said. “Lieutenant Rawdon is not your ordinary British officer. The trouble is - he is not your ordinary anything. I find him delightful company. He makes me laugh - that is quite a feat in these times. But there is an emptiness in him.”
Time and the Revolution (and Thomas Rawdon) were steadily eroding the bond Kate had forged with Anthony Skinner in that first passionate commitment. Those who admire romance may regret this. I will not judge it. I am trying to stand aside here, telling what happened both within and without our minds and hearts. No doubt some will (as I did) respond to Kate’s first wish that political loyalties could be divorced from the devotions of the heart. But the politics of the Revolution went far beyond those party disputes over the national spoils that divert the readers of newspapers in every country. The Revolution involved a deeper loyalty, the kind that enters the self’s essence - loyalty to a nation, a people. This was the real issue in the Revolution - who would decide the destiny of this new people in this new land - the Americans. The Revolution revealed and then released all the feelings this question evoked and they could not be separated from our personal lives because they went too deep.
For Kate the issue was complicated by her new awareness of herself as an independent woman. She was often angered by the lack of interest her father, her brother, and other males of her acquaintance showed in the future of women in America. At dinner the day after she visited Caroline, the conversation turned to a recent newspaper article in which Dr. Benjamin Rush identified three types of revolutionists. Violent Whigs used the Revolution as an excuse to attack personal enemies and justify their hatreds and greed. Staunch Whigs put their country’s interests first. Timid Whigs were ready to give up every time the Americans lost a battle. Lieutenant Rawdon remarked that the loyalists could probably, be divided the same way. Even the British at home were split along similar lines.
“I find that hard to believe,” Kemble said.
“I assure you it is true,” Rawdon said. “I am seriously thinking of resigning my commission and going home to turn scribbler and tell the country the truth.”
“That would be droll,” Kemble said. “Why don’t you do it?” Kemble had grown rather fond of Rawdon, thanks largely to his iconoclastic attitude toward British society.
“Miss Stapleton here refuses to come with me.”
“I told you I would come as your partner in political crime. But not as your wife,” Kate said. “I am not ready for matrimony just yet. I want to complete my education first.”
“You can read a book with one hand and rock a cradle with the other one,” Kemble said.
“That attitude,” Kate said, “is precisely what is wrong with this revolution. I sometimes think it is not a revolution at all. What have you overthrown? Nothing but a few pathetic royal governors and collectors of customs and some pictures and statues of the King. If we are to have a real revolution, it should start in the home. The word ‘obey’ should be stricken from the marriage ceremony. Women should have the right to go to college and become lawyers and doctors, just like men.”
“You are being utterly ridiculous,” Kemble said.
“Give me one reason why a woman cannot master the subjects taught at Yale or Harvard or the College of New Jersey.”
“She might master them,” Kemble said. “But it would bring her mind into contact with a host of subjects - political, theoretical - unsuitable for feminine natures.”
“Why unsuitable?”
“Your nerves cannot bear the tension, the discord created by the conflicting ideas you would encounter, the loud clash of masculine opinions.”
“I cannot bear tension? Discord?” cried Kate. “I have lived through three years of war. I’ve looked into the faces of the dead and dying and been given thirty lashes and been denounced as a traitor. I seem to be thriving on it. I fear I am growing fat on it.”
“My dear Kate,” said Lieutenant Rawdon. “We depend on you women to brighten, to soften our lives. Not darken them with argument and disagreement.”
“Listen to him sitting there in his red coat,” Kate said. “If that isn’t proof that this whole stupid war is about land, greed, money, I’ve never heard it. The archrebel and the King’s officer are in complete agreement about everything else. No matter who wins, not a single slave or a single woman will be the freer for it. You’re a couple of hypocrites.”
The violence of this assault threw Kemble and Rawdon into some confusion. They turned to Jonathan Gifford for reinforcement. He had been studiously devouring his roast woodcock, trying to pretend he was invisible.
“Let us ask a man of experience,” Kemble said. “You have seen the great world, Father. Do you think these ideas make sense?”
“I would say an education for a woman is like the dressing for this woodcock. Without it, the bird is still a pretty good meal. With it, we have a meal to remember.”
“Solomon could not have done better, Captain Gifford,” murmured Lieutenant Rawdon.
The dressing, made from a secret recipe which contained claret and chestnuts, was superb. Kate looked cross, and said she was not sure she liked being compared to a dead bird. But Jonathan Gifford had escaped the battlefield unscathed. He left the young people to continue their argument over coffee, and rode down to Kemble Manor. There too he heard complaints about women’s lot - but they were softened by an ingredient that made them much less abrasive.
As the new owner, it natural enough for Captain Gifford to spend a good deal of time at the manor. He practically became co-foreman of the laborers whom Caroline hired to plant that year’s wheat and corn and barley. Liberty Tavern saw him only in the evenings. Slocum and his faction spread obscene rumors, about “the Englishman” and the lady of the manor. If he and Caroline heard any echoes of these noxious mutters, they probably consoled themselves with the knowledge that such people would say the same thing even if there was no truth in it. Like lovers in every age, they were too absorbed in each other to care much what the world was saying. To himself and finally to Caroline, Jonathan Gifford confessed he was amazed by the strength of his desire for her.
“I thought I was past all that at forty-seven,” he said.
“It is this dreadful habit of making love in broad daylight that has undone you, Captain Gifford,” Caroline said.
They had begun this delectable practice as a concession to the gossips. It was one thing for Jonathan Gifford to spend several hours a day at Kemble Manor and quite another for him to spend his nights there. At first Caroline had been shocked by the idea. It was the universal practice then and now in England and America to make love in the dark with a bare minimum of kisses and caresses. Only those Englishmen fortunate enough to make the grand tour and daring enough to defy the conventions discovered love in the Italian style. In the winter when they began, it seemed to Caroline harsh and almost demeaning. Her naked body did not seem capable of sustaining or inspiring the enormous emotions his touch awakened in her. The immensity of her love for him seemed better suited to the darkness.
But as spring began to soften and enrich the land and thick white sunshine streamed across the room, she began to like it and then to adore it. She rearranged the furniture so that the sunlight fell across them as they lay together on the bed. Swiftly she came to love with almost frightening intensity the solid curve of his muscular arms, the sw
ell of his thick chest with its growth of fine dark hair, the exquisite sensation this hair aroused when crushed against her breasts. Love, Caroline discovered, was both a large immeasurable idea like the night and a precious congery of specific things, of touches, of shapes that repetition makes more precious rather than mundane.
They loved, in the sunlight of that spring, a special ever-to-be remembered spring to them. But it was not all sunlight. Again and again shadows fell on their happiness, the shadow of the war and those two lesser human shadows cast by Sarah Stapleton Gifford and Charles Skinner.
Sarah was only an occasional intruder since they confronted her on their first night. At times, Caroline found her ghost almost benign. The deeper and more intense her love became, the more she found herself thinking about, almost speaking to Sarah, forgiving her again and again for testifying to life’s central truth, the transcendent importance of love, a truth that her extravagant nature could not contain or tame, yet a truth nonetheless, a truth that deserved to be shouted from house and mountain tops if the respectable world where so many marriages are made for money or social place or a parent’s pleasure would tolerate it.
Gradually, the love Caroline had once felt for her older sister but had long since stifled was reborn. Without realizing it at first, she even began to display some of that native wildness with which Sarah had first charmed Jonathan Gifford. After they made love they often rode out to enjoy the spring countryside. With no warning Caroline would dare him to race her to a distant landmark, an old tree or a meandering creek. Away they would go across pastures and fields, over fences and ditches. The first race ended in a dead heat. Looking at her flushed triumphant face, her glittering eyes, Jonathan Gifford said without thinking, “I haven’t risked my neck that way since - since Sarah - ”
“At heart we Kembles are all alike, wild, wanton vixens,” Caroline said. “But who else can satisfy a satyr like you?”
“Madam,” Jonathan Gifford said, “as a man who prides himself on his philosophic mind, I consider that an insult.”
“Oh, you are a philosopher all right. A hedonist.”
“I begin to think it would be better if women were not taught to read. These American ideas about equality will be the ruination of the race.”
“Not of the race. Simply of the male portion of it.”
They both began laughing. Between lovers, these ideas lost their aura of acrimony and threat.
Toward the end of May, Captain Gifford brought down to Kemble Manor a dozen new roses to plant around the front entrance. They were as exotic as any flowers Caroline had ever seen, a cross between Jersey Blaze roses and the long-stemmed Chinese roses with their four exquisite petals. The dark red of the Blaze roses now filled the white petals, but they retained their delicate, almost transparent texture. The long translucent thorns had also disappeared, but smaller almost invisible thorns had appeared in the ferny foliage.
“They’re beautiful, Jonathan. What do you call them?” “Carolinius passionatus,” he said, with a straight face.
She blushed. “I hope you have not told that to anyone else.”
“I hope to, someday.”
Playfully, he pointed out certain symbolic similarities between the new flowers and their patron. “The thorns are invisible. But they can give you the devil of a scratch if you handle them too roughly. There is practically no aroma. But when you press the petals, they release a delicious ointment. You must press them very hard. Exhausting work.”
“What about their health?” Caroline said. “They look to me as though they will need daily care and attention. If you are not up to it, Captain Gifford, perhaps you could suggest an assistant.”
“I’m afraid three or four visits a week is all I can manage. And if I hear any more talk of assistants, I will start oiling my pistols.”
A few weeks later, as the weather warmed into summer, Caroline asked him to teach her to swim. The brook that ran through the manor park formed a small cove as it entered the bay. It was surrounded by the tall trees of the original forest, creating a private swimming pool. They swam there almost every day for a month. Caroline learned faster than any adult Jonathan Gifford had ever taught to swim. Her slim, small-boned body was almost designed to cut through the water swiftly and gracefully. She also had the temperament of a natural swimmer. Within a week she had lost all fear and was challenging the choppy waters of the bay.
Often, after an hour in the water, they would put on loose robes and have a picnic under the trees. Caroline confessed that she had been wanting to learn to swim for years.
“When I heard about you and Sarah swimming, I wanted you to teach Mr. Skinner and me. But he absolutely refused. He said he had tried it and almost drowned.”
Half playfully, half seriously, Jonathan Gifford outlined his theory that the way people swam revealed much about their characters. Those who could not overcome their instinctive fear of the water were liable to be timid in their central selves, even if they covered these feelings with bravado. The man who slid gracefully through the water was likely to slide gracefully through life. The man who loved lolling on the waves probably enjoyed the good things of this world, fine wine, gourmet food, pretty women.
“That was Dr. Franklin’s style,” Jonathan Gifford said. “I swam with him once in the Schuylkill. We swimmers are a small exclusive club, you know.”
“If I see you lolling, I will sink you,” Caroline said.
“Why?” he said. “I have good wine and good food every day - and a pretty woman to love.”
“You don’t have to flatter me, Jonathan.”
Jonathan Gifford could not convince Caroline that she was pretty. Her parents had inflicted on her a vision of herself as a plain, unattractive girl, in comparison to Sarah. With some exasperation, be finally gave up.
“All right,” he said. “You are not pretty. It is your character I love. I never realized it until I saw you swim. There, I said to myself, goes a woman of good sense, courage, daring.”
“How did Sarah swim?”
“Well. But too hard. She’d tire easily and then she’d panic. She had to have someone near her all the time.”
Caroline groaned. “She would. She would know exactly how to keep a man.”
Jonathan Gifford nodded solemnly. “I am leaving you before you learn to swim faster than I can.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her for a long time. They lay together beneath the ancient trees, listening to the occasional cry of a sea bird, the roll of the water against the shore.
“What will we do - if we must leave each other?” Caroline asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I will not bear it. I will just die.”
“That is not very sensible, or courageous. You are destroying Gifford’s aquatic theory of character.”
“I’m serious, Jonathan.”
“There’s an old Irish saying, there’s no point in breaking your shins against a stool that isn’t there. The time may never come. I hope it never does.”
Up at the manor house, they found Sukey feeding a young half-starved-looking American lieutenant in the kitchen. Until yesterday, when he had been exchanged for a British officer, he had been a prisoner of war in New York. Charles Skinner had given him a letter to deliver to his wife, and assured him he would be rewarded with a good dinner. He took the crumpled envelope from his pocket and handed it to Caroline.
My dear wife:
Almost a year has passed since our angry separation. I find myself miserable and lonely here in New York, although I often go out in company. I have money enough for the time being. I had to sell all our blacks to the West Indies to get it. My heart bled for the poor wretches but what else could I do? At any rate, money or company mean little to me. I have no friends who lift a man’s spirits. How I long to raise a glass with Gifford at his tavern! We wretched refugees from New Jersey do nothing when we meet but denounce the coxcombs and chuckleheads that are running - I should write ruining - the British arm
y. Anthony and his friends are as miserable as we oldsters. He could have recruited men enough for a regiment, but he was told they were not needed. The truth was, and is, that no more colonels are to be made from New Jersey. All the higher commissions go to New Yorkers, thanks to De Lancey’s influence. Anthony was told he was lucky to get a captain’s commission.
There is talk of a French treaty from Paris and a peace commission from London. Which will come first no one can say. A French treaty will mean another three, perhaps four years of war. I speak to you now as a politician, madam, knowing your enthusiasm for that doleful art, which I devoutly wish you had never imbibed. Surely, now that our most ancient enemy, the foe that has drenched our frontiers in blood, has espoused the rebel cause, you can no longer consider the Congressmen defenders of true British liberty and human rights. In their furious and unnatural hatred of our mother country, they have embraced the worst despot in Europe. If all this is true, and I don’t see how you can deny it, would you give some thought, madam, to joining me here in New York as my lawful and loving wife? I have rented a small snug house on Dock Street with an upper room which has been kept vacant for your coming. I am prepared to forgive and if possible forget the severe things we said on parting. I cannot believe the spirit of true religion which I know you possess will permit you to do less. I am told by good report that our old friend Gifford has bought the manor, which means it is safe for the time being from the rebel confiscators. Your presence is no longer needed on the property. I cannot believe you will let false politics any longer divide our marriage - or your conscience permit you to ignore the duties of a wife.
With the greatest respect, madam, I am your affectionate husband,
Charles Skinner
Caroline read this standing in the furniture-less main hall of, the manor house. When she looked up, anguish twisting in her, she discovered she was alone. Jonathan Gifford had walked into the library and was looking somberly out one of the tall eight-glass windows. For a moment, Caroline hesitated in the doorway, wondering if she should lie, simply stuff the letter in the pocket of her apron, and airily dismiss it. He wanted to know if you had bought his land. I will write and tell him.
The Heart of Liberty Page 37