Kemble was barely listening. He had lost interest in the war we were fighting in south Jersey.
“Then I worry about things closer to home. You and that girl, for instance.”
In a rush of stumbling sentences, Kemble told his father what was happening. Jonathan Gifford saw the resemblance between Margaret O’Hara and Sarah Kemble Stapleton. He understood Kemble’s feelings of anger and helplessness all too well.
“You have to let her go, Kemble. There’s nothing else you can do,” he said.
He was back five, no six years now, standing in the bedroom of the residence, reading Sarah’s farewell note. He could have called for his horse, galloped to Amboy, dragged her off the ship like a common criminal. She was his wife. In the eyes of the law that made her his property, as much as one of Charles Skinner’s slaves. But he had not wanted that kind of wife. He had wanted a woman he loved, who loved him. That woman had ceased to exist.
Kemble heard the sad echo in his father’s voice. For a moment he almost understood what it meant. But he was too deep in his own torment to think about the past. He took the literal words as good advice - which they were, up to a point.
The next time Margaret O’Hara came to Kemble’s room, be said nothing about New York or Beckwith. Instead, he told her how pleased he was to find her bringing him such valuable information. It meant she was changing sides, didn’t it? She was becoming an American.
“I must go to New York tomorrow,” she said.
“Why?” Kemble asked. He had seen no sign of the Squinter from Philadelphia.
“There is a soldier in the American camp on British pay. He put these papers in my hand today. I met him a mile from here, on the road.”
She held up three or four sheets of soiled paper.
“Give them to me,” Kemble said. “We must have them copied before you go.”
“You want me to go, do you now?”
“I’ve decided not - not to stop you.”
“You damn liar,” she cried and ran from the room.
Kemble saw she had wanted him to forbid another visit to Major Beckwith. She wanted him to sacrifice his beloved Cause, his fanatic devotion to America, to her. Margaret O’Hara was a forerunner, one of those daring souls like Lord Byron who swore allegiance to nothing, neither to God nor to country, but only to their own shrouded selves and their intricate passions, hates, loves.
A great sadness engulfed Kemble’s spirit. For the first time he recognized how little a man can change a woman in the name of love. He was repeating his father’s experience on an even deeper level of personal anguish. His commitment to the Revolution added a dimension that Jonathan Gifford never had to face. Kemble took the papers with their careful descriptions of brigade camps and regimental strengths, and walked out to the barn. Saddling his horse, he rode to Washington’s headquarters, where the figures were multiplied to awe the British into passivity and the camp descriptions, the locations of fortifications and other useful details were altered to confuse a potential attack. Margaret O’Hara went to New York the next day, and did not return.
Kemble waited two weeks. Then it was time for him to go to New York again as an American spy. He stopped at Horace Monaghan’s shop, collected the latest scraps of information from the nervous little tailor, and was soon knocking on Major Beckwith’s back door.
“Go away,” Margaret O’Hara said when she saw him.
“I will stay here until you talk to me - or they arrest me – .”
“We have nothing to say to each other.”
“I love you,” Kemble said.
The scene could not have been more grotesque. Two lovers whose passion deserved a wild valley, a mountaintop, or some other setting of high romance standing in a New York back yard with chickens hopping about them, goats bleating, cows mooing, pigs grunting nearby, and the hero disfigured by a red wig, red side whiskers, and a drooping mustache.
“You may come here each week,” Margaret told Kemble. “Or whenever you please. I will tell you what I have learned from them. That is all you want from me, is it not?”
“Yon, know that isn’t true. If you come with me now - ”
“There will be great boasts in the taproom, boasts and toasts to young Stapleton who pirated away a British major’s punk.”
“What are you talking about?” Kemble said, staggered by her self-hate.
“The truth. That is the only talk I care about now. We will live on truth. Your use of me and my use of you. That is what it was from the start. I went to your bed because I wanted protection if your side wins this cursed war. You wanted a bit of play with an Irish piece. All the rest was lies.”
“All this is lies - ”
“I still want protection. You must promise me I will have it, and a lump sum of hard money at the going rate for this kind of work. You will get your information. Here is the first of it. There will be raids this winter the like of which you have never seen. They will smash up your outposts in Westchester and New Jersey to prove to the people your soldiers protect nothing. In New Jersey, the Tories will take the lead.”
“I will come here each week,” Kemble said. “But I will come to see you. Not for anything else. If you want to give me information, that is your business. I will come anyway.”
“I didn’t see you stopping your ears just now - You mean I am to get nothing, neither money nor protection for it?”
“You will always have my protection, whether you ever tell me another thing worth carrying to General Washington.”
Each week for the next six months Kemble came to New York. Margaret O’Hara never failed to have information for him. For her it was obviously a point of honor to force Kemble to accept it as the reason for their meeting. Her information was frequently valuable. Twice she saved isolated outposts in northern New Jersey and Westchester from annihilation. Another time she helped frustrate a daring attempt to kidnap General Washington. Perhaps most startling was her discovery that an American major general was in secret correspondence with the British about defecting to their side.
The value of her information made Kemble’s agony exquisite. His conscience would not permit him to stop seeing her as a spy - which was the only way he would ever see her as a lover. With deepening desolation Kemble sacrificed his feelings to the Cause.
The winter of 1780 was one of the worst on record. Howling blizzards piled snowdrifts ten feet deep on our roads. The Hudson, the Raritan, Long Island Sound froze so that men, horses, wagons, even cannon could cross them without risk, except for the danger of frostbite, pleurisy, pneumonia. Kemble risked all these and the worst of all diseases for someone with his weak chest - consumption. Dr. Davie began asking him point-blank if he was coughing blood. He denied it. The doctor did not believe him and asked Molly McGovern to watch for bloodstains on Kemble’s handkerchiefs. But Kemble had long since taken to cutting up ome of his shirts into rags which he burned in the fireplace in his room.
The Great Cold, as we came to call it, was almost unbearable. For over forty days the thermometer remained below zero. From Morristown came word that the army was starving. Farmers were being robbed at bayonet point by hunger-crazed soldiers. Even those paradigms of lethargy, Deputy Commissary Beebe and Deputy Quartermaster Beatty, were stirred to action. On direct orders from Washington, they seized cattle and grain froth farmers in our neighborhood. They paid with promissory notes. By now Continental money had depreciated so laughably it took almost a wagonload of it to buy a wagonload of food. The phrase “not worth a Continental” became ominously current. Men used them to light their pipes. Contemptuous remarks about Washington, Congress, Governor Livingston were common in Liberty Tavern’s taproom.
Never had the Cause seemed so close to final collapse. Kemble’s gaunt, cough-racked body was a symbol of the wasting disease that seemed to be consuming the glorious hopes of 1776.
Thomas Paine said that the last months of 1776 were the times that tried our souls. I trust that great prophet of the rights of men - an
d women - will permit me to make a slight correction in those historic words. In 1776 our nerves were tried; 1780 was the year our souls were tried. Only the truly committed such as Kemble did not waver. The rest of us were preserved in our slough of indifference and passivity by British inertia. So at least it seemed in New Jersey during that awful winter.
Only a few of us knew how sick Kemble was. I was privy to the secret because as the winter waned to a still-freezing spring, he persuaded me to accompany him to New York. He was afraid he would collapse on the road, or worse on a street in New York. One of these trips was all my nerves could stand. Every minute I spent in New York I saw myself swinging from a gallows. Kemble understood my distress and excused me thereafter. But on that one visit I saw him, meet Margaret O’Hara in Sam Francis’s tavern near the Bowling Green. Kemble was disguised as a Queens County Dutchman, complete with accent, heavy black boots, and a wig of flaxen hair. I was wearing a similar costume.
“Are you Van Ness?” Margaret O’Hara asked, tapping him on the shoulder as he stood at the bar.
Whenever he wore a new disguise he gave her the name that went with it. He nodded, and she asked him if he had chickens to sell. I was openmouthed at her beauty. She was wearing a purple cloak over a dark green sacque dress cut low on her bosom.
“Come, Jemmy,” said Kemble, clapping me on the back. “Ve go show dis preddy lady our fat birds.”
Outside Margaret O’Hara turned to me. “Who is this boy?”
“A friend.”
“He’s no friend of mine in that case. I trust neither you nor your friends. You know that.”
We walked toward the Bowling Green. The thin sunshine failed to warm the chilly wind. My attention was devoted to the pedestal where George III had ridden in gilded splendor in the robes of a Roman emperor until he was smashed to the ground and beheaded by the New York mob. I preferred to look at almost anything, except Kemble and Margaret O’Hara.
“How much longer are we going to keep torturing each other?” Kemble asked.
“Do you call this torture? I call it sport. Your trouble is a sentimental mind.”
“And your trouble?”
“I have none. I am as happy as ever I - ”
She could not finish the sentence. “Oh, damn you, goddamn you,” she said, dabbing at the tears on her cheeks. She took a deep breath and regained her self-control. “Do you want your information?”
“Yes. But I want you, too.”
“You cannot have both. You will never have both.”
“Then tell me the information.”
The defecting major general was using the name Anderson in his correspondence. There was talk of an expedition to destroy the headquarters of New Jersey’s privateers, Little Egg Harbor. Loyalists in western Connecticut were ready to rise and seize the highland forts if the British promised them protection.
For ten minutes she continued this mixture of fact and rumor. Kemble wrote nothing down. But he remembered every word of it.
Even with my adolescent eyes I could see the fantastic mixture of love and hate boiling beneath the surface of these mercenary words. They agreed on where and when to meet next and parted.
As they turned their backs on each other and walked away, Kemble began to cough. It was a bad fit. The veins bulged in his thin neck and gaunt forehead. I saw a gout of blood stain his rag handkerchief. His whole body shook with the racking sound.
My eyes were on Margaret O’Hara. She had whirled with the first cough. A slash of pure anguish leaped across her face. Involuntarily her hand reached out toward Kemble. She withdrew it and clasped it to her waist with her other hand as if it were a disobedient child.
Kemble stopped coughing. He straightened his hunched shoulders and gestured to me. Without so much as a glance in her direction he walked away. I looked back as we neared Sam Francis’s tavern. Margaret O’Hara was still standing there looking after him. Behind her was the empty pedestal of George III’s statue.
On our way home, Kemble swore me to secrecy about his sickness. But he was so weak when he returned, he sent me to army headquarters with the information in writing and took to his bed for ten days. While Kemble lay helpless, intimations of disaster swirled through the state from South Carolina. Sir Henry Clinton had trapped a five-thousand-man American army inside Charleston and was methodically reducing it to surrender by siege. The fall of the queen city of the South, the loss of those precious troops, cast a pall over the rest of the country.
The night the news arrived in the taproom, Jonathan Gifford predicted, “Victory in the North will be their next order of business.”
“And you know where they will try for it,” said a voice from the doorway.
It was Kemble, out of his sickbed for the first time.
“I wish I did know. I would tell George Washington,” Jonathan Gifford said with a forced smile.
“You told me yourself a year ago. You said they would come back to New Jersey someday. What better time than now?”
Jonathan Gifford knew what Kemble’s words meant - another trip to New York. He could only nod mournfully.
With literally feverish energy Kemble flung himself on his horse the following clay and rode to army headquarters at Morristown. He was back the next morning, his pale cheeks flushed with excitement. “General Washington is of the same opinion,” he told Jonathan Gifford, “but there is little he can do about it. He only has thirty-five hundred men - and scarcely a horse to pull a wagon or cannon. We must know where they are coming - or they will be through the Watchung passes before he can move.”.
The Watchung Mountains were the ramparts of New Jersey. There were two main passes through them - one behind Elizabethtown, the other behind Amboy.
It was early in the morning. Father and son were alone in the taproom. The portcullis was still lowered over the bar. Kemble gazed through the wooden interstices at his shadowy image in the mirror behind the bar. A ghostly prisoner. Was that his future - or his present state?
“I must go to New York.”
“Let me go with you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. There are a thousand people in that city who would recognize you the first - ”
“Give me a disguise.”
“No.”
Never in his life had Jonathan Gifford felt so helpless, Fatherly words crowded to his lips. You should stay in bed. You need rest, medicine. But he could not say them to this son who was now a man.
“I want you to know - know how proud I am of you.”
Kemble smiled - the same crooked-lipped smile that had illuminated his small face at nine.
“Thanks,” he said.
Instinctively, Jonathan Gifford started to put his arm around Kemble’s shoulder. But Kemble moved-abruptly beyond his reach. They were allies. But they were not yet father and son. Something deeper and more painful than war and politics still separated them. Jonathan Gifford knew what it was. With a sigh he withdrew his arm and murmured, “Good luck.”
BY THE TIME Kemble reached New York he was so weak he did not have the strength to walk uptown from the ferry slip to Major Beckwith’s house. He stumbled into the nearest tavern - a disreputable dive named the Anchor, patronized by sailors and bargemen. He was wearing his Irish tinker’s disguise, which enabled him without too much risk to send a messenger to Horace Monaghan’s shop. The diminutive Irish tailor hurried down to see him in his smelly, vermin-ridden room.
Kemble asked him to carry a message to Miss O’Hara at Major Beckwith’s house. The little Irishman’s thick eyebrows elevated. Like a good secret agent, Kemble had never revealed to Monaghan this other source of intelligence.
Monaghan had news of his own. “There is talk of a mighty effort in New jersey. The whole army to go from here.”
“When?”
“I wish I knew.”
That night, Kemble met Margaret O’Hara in the Anchor taproom. She was furious. “You swore to protect me. Now you have revealed me to that little double-talking Protestant.”
In a dry, factual voice, as if he were discussing a piece of military information, Kemble told her how sick he was. Before she could say a sympathetic word, he was giving her an assignment.
“You must find out the exact day and hour they are going to invade New jersey.”
“I will obey no orders from you. I tell you what I please when please.”
“Find out - or I will write a letter to Major Beckwith.”
“You would do that. We have come that far.”
No, Kemble wanted to cry out, no. But he had become adept - too adept - at masking his emotions.
“We have come that far.”
“Will you stay here?”
“Until I recruit my strength.”
Two days later, Margaret O’Hara returned to the Anchor. The innkeeper told her that Mr. Kelly - Kemble’s assumed name - bad not been out of his room since her previous visit.
“Go away,” Kemble said, in response to her knock.
“It’s Margaret. Open the door.”
The key turned in the lock. The door opened. Margaret cried out in shock. Kemble’s shirt was covered with blood. So was the pillow on the bed. He had had a hemorrhage.
“You’re dying,” she cried. “Oh, my love, you are dying.”
“What - what did you say?”
“My love,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “What else can I call you? I have tried to hate you. But I will lie no longer, to you nor myself.”
“This makes it – ” he gestured to the blood. “ - almost worthwhile.”
He stumbled back to his bed. “I’m not going to die,” he said. “Not yet. But I must find some place where I can get decent food and rest for a few days. This place is vile. The food is poison and at night it is more a brothel than an inn.”
Margaret thought for a moment. “You must pose as my cousin and come to Beckwith’s house. There is ample room. He uses but a third of that big place.”
The Heart of Liberty Page 45