“Of course,” said Hanging Belt. “But we cannot sit here and wait for them to devour us. We must ambush them before they see our weakness.”
I called Malcolm away from the dying Van Brugge. “Hanging Belt says our only hope is an ambush,” I told him.
“Where?” Malcolm said. “I’m more inclined to retreat upriver to Oswego as fast as possible.”
“It’s too far. They’ll overtake us. And we’ll have to abandon all our goods,” I said. “We’ll be bankrupt.”
“Better bankrupt than dead.”
“Listen to Hanging Belt,” I pleaded. “He’s fought a hundred battles like this.”
“Catalyntie’s right,” Clara said.
Still reluctant to admit an Indian was his military superior, Malcolm listened. “First,” Hanging Belt said. “Let us think no more of sleep tonight. Let’s explore the river and see where these enemies might land. They won’t come ashore here. They know you have cannon in your fort. They will come ashore nearby and approach through the forest and attack without warning. We must be waiting for them as they land and surprise them.”
As I translated this for Malcolm, Hanging Belt ordered the two young Senecas to go downriver in a canoe and try to locate the enemy. Meanwhile, Malcolm and he and I (as a translator) went downriver in another canoe, looking for a likely landing place. The moon was almost full. The river and the shore glistened in its yellow light. We traveled less than a mile when Hanging Belt said: “There is the place.”
A bend in the river had created shallows that were thick with tall fernlike reeds with finely divided fronds. This bracken blended into a grassy bank up which boats could be hauled with little effort. “They will come ashore here,” Hanging Belt said.
“What if they don’t?” Malcolm said to me in English. “We’re nowhere. They can burn our fort and goods at leisure.”
“And us in the bargain if we sit there waiting for them,” I said. “Trust this man.”
“All right,” Malcolm said.
“We will do as you say,” I told Hanging Belt.
Back at our fort, we discovered Guert Cuyler was dealing with a mutiny. At least half our hired soldiers were inclined to take to the woods. They had no stomach for fighting four to one odds. As Malcolm argued with them, the two Senecas returned to report that they had located the enemy. They were about three miles downriver.
That was a moment when Malcolm proved himself a leader of men. “We can beat these bastards if you stand with me,” he shouted. “Do you want Africans to be remembered as soldiers or cowards? We hired you to give you a better life up here on the Mohawk. Are you going to let these murderers steal it from you? Hanging Belt, one of the greatest Seneca chiefs, is going to fight with us—”
He outlined the tactics for the ambush. Hanging Belt had suggested them to him coming back upriver. A dozen men would hide in the shallow water among the bracken. Another dozen would take cover in the woods on one side of the clearing. Hanging Belt and his Senecas would raise a war whoop at the back of the clearing. Then the men in the bracken would fire, followed by the flankers in the woods.
“I want everybody to whoop and yell like a tribe of devils,” Malcolm said. “Make us sound like a hundred and fifty, two hundred men.”
Hanging Belt beamed when I translated this. The white chief was getting in the spirit of the ambush. His confidence may have helped steady the Africans as much as Malcolm’s speech. The rest of the night was consumed by preparations. Each man was issued thirty rounds of ball and powder. At Guert Cuyler’s suggestion, one of the cannon was lugged downriver in a canoe and positioned in the woods where the second detachment would fight. It was loaded with grapeshot—small deadly pellets that turned it into a giant shotgun. Hanging Belt and his warriors carefully applied the violent colors of their war paint—and urged it on Malcolm, Guert, and the Africans as well.
At 4:00 A.M. the ambushers were ready to depart. Malcolm turned to me and Clara, his streaked face weird in the fading firelight. “If we fail, head upriver as fast as you can paddle. Keep going until you reach Oswego.”
“I want to go with you—to fight!” I said.
“Out of the question. Duycinck will bring you the news, one way or another. He’ll be back in the trees with Hanging Belt.”
He kissed me briefly and said: “You’ve been a good wife. Raise our son to be a good man.”
He turned to Clara. “Wherever I go, whatever I become, I’ll remember you.”
“You’ll come back,” she said. “You’ll come back to both of us.”
I was devastated. My expedition to the wilderness to make Malcolm mine forever had produced this testament of undying love to Clara. As we watched the canoes vanish down the darkened river—the moon had long since descended—Clara said: “I didn’t ask for that.”
“I know.”
“You brought me here.”
“I know. I needed you more than I feared you. I still do.”
“How many times do I have to tell you it won’t last? He’s yours in the long run.”
I struggled against my combative, avaricious nature, the soul that fate had bequeathed me. “I’ll try to believe that,” I said.
Clara began loading a canoe with food and muskets and ammunition. “If they lose, you must stay alive for Hugh’s sake,” she said.
“I suppose so,” I said, still disconsolate. Motherhood barely mattered. I only wanted my heart’s desire.
The light along the river began changing from inky black to grey. It was less than an hour to dawn. “I can’t stand waiting here,” I said. “Let’s join Hanging Belt in the woods. We can yell as loud as a warrior.”
“I feel the same way. Shall we put on war paint?” Clara said.
“Why not?”
We found the paints that Hanging Belt and his Senecas had used to streak themselves in red and blue and yellow. Quickly, we coated our faces and arms and pulled on leggings and moccasins I had brought with me to wear in the wilderness. In less than an hour, we crept through the trees to the place where Hanging Belt and his warriors were lying in wait with Adam Duycinck.
“The blood of our fathers brought us here,” Clara said in Seneca. “We want to help you wipe away the stain on your honor.”
“Do you think we shall win?” Hanging Belt said. “We are few and many of the black men are terrified.”
“They’re new to this kind of war,” Clara said. “But they are led by a true warrior.”
“The one you call Mal-colm?” Hanging Belt said. “Yes. He has a warrior’s heart. Let us hope he acquires a war chief’s head.”
The rising sun was beginning to tint the eastern sky. On the river, with its great guardian trees on both banks, the light remained grey. Morning fog added to the dimness.
Panting into our midst came one of Hanging Belt’s Senecas. “They come!” he said. He had been scouting downriver.
Hanging Belt rose to his knees and hooted like an owl three times. From the bracken in the shallows came three answering hoots. Malcolm was ready.
Around the bend in the river came a squadron of canoes. In the lead was de Groot, studying the forest with his murderer’s eyes. Behind him in another canoe was Philip Van Sluyden. In each craft, a half dozen Indians drove them toward the bank with swift strokes of their paddles.
They cut through the bracken on the downriver side of the little bay. Malcolm and his men were crouched less than two dozen feet away. They had cut some of the fronds and planted them in their caps, so they blended perfectly with the swaying greenery.
One after another, the canoes landed and their occupants sprang out and congregated in the meadow. Soon the last canoe was making for the bank. Crowded by the others already ashore, the rear paddler steered for the bracken where Malcolm and his men were hiding. As the prow entered the weeds, Malcolm’s gigantic form rose from the shallows and dragged the lead paddler out of the boat, cutting his throat in the same deadly motion. Behind him his men repeated the murderous performance on th
e others in the boat.
In the same instant, Duycinck, Hanging Belt, and his warriors opened fire from the rear of the clearing and the dozen men in the woods on the left flank poured in another volley. Within sixty seconds, Malcolm and his men had unlimbered their muskets and blasted the stunned foe with a volley from the river. It had not gone exactly according to plan but ambushes seldom do.
Hanging Belt and the Senecas bellowed war cries as they swiftly reloaded their muskets. Clara and I shrilled them as vigorously as the warriors. They were a terrifying combination of the howl of the wolf and scream of the panther. Anyone who had spent some time in the north woods recognized a Seneca war cry. It struck consternation into our frantic opponents.
Similar if less recognizable howls poured from the flankers in the woods, as they too reloaded and blasted another volley into the milling mass in the clearing. “No quarter!” roared Malcolm from the bracken. “No quarter for traitors.” His muskets boomed again and another half dozen Van Sluydenites went down.
Such punishment would have been too much for even professional soldiers to endure. These were not professionals. The traders were mostly bullies who were heroes only when they were dealing with drunken Indians. Their coup de grace was the cannon, which Guert Cuyler had shrewdly kept silent. Just as de Groot managed to form some of his men into a shaky battle line, the gun boomed, flinging hundreds of deadly chunks of metal into their ranks.
Wailing with terror, the survivors took to the woods. Several who could swim leaped into the river, where Malcolm and his men finished them off. The surviving Ottawas also fled. Indians do not believe in fighting to the death. If the enemy has outgeneraled you, far better to run away and fight another day.
In five minutes the battle was over. At least fifty of our would-be attackers lay dead or dying in the meadow. The rest were in frantic flight, a demoralized rabble. I leaped into the clearing, only one idea blazing in my mind: revenge. Among the tangle of bodies, I soon found Philip Van Sluyden. He was barely alive, with two gaping wounds in his chest.
“Hanging Belt!” I cried, as I straddled my quarry. “Give me your scalping knife!”
“Let him die in peace,” Clara said.
“Give me your scalping knife!” I said.
“Don’t give it to her,” Clara said.
Hanging Belt gazed steadily at us. He saw two daughters of the Seneca. He had seen many Seneca women scalp the dead. There was nothing unusual about it. He could not understand why Clara was objecting to it.
Hanging Belt handed me his knife. Grunting, snarling, I hacked off Philip Van Sluyden’s scalp, exactly as I had seen my father’s slashed off twenty years ago. With a final groan Van Sluyden died in the midst of the amputation. I held up the bloody object and realized Malcolm and Guert Cuyler and almost everyone else except the Senecas and Clara were watching me with mute horror. In Clara’s eyes I saw understanding and sympathy—and sorrow. Did she already know what this savage act would cost us?
FIVE
THE DRINKERS AT HUGHSON’S TAVERN GATHERED around Clara in a pastiche of wide-eyed white and black faces as she read the story of the Battle of the Bracken in the New York Gazette. I had commissioned Adam Duycinck to write an account of the clash. Duycinck was honest enough to admit the plan for the battle came from Hanging Belt but his version gave Malcolm most of the credit for leading the fray. He also praised “the brave Africans” who had defeated four times their number in the forest.
“That’s the part I want you to remember,” Caesar said. “What black men can do with guns in their hands.”
Caesar had no interest in the rest of Duycinck’s story, which dealt with political warfare. Because one of the dead was the officer in the French army who had led the band of Ottawas from Fort Niagara, Duycinck argued the affair was proof of French treachery—and the readiness of some New Yorkers, such as the Van Sluydens, to do business with the Catholic enemy. Duycinck worked into the story a graphic description of Malcolm’s rout of the French sloop on Lake Ontario—making him sound like a one-man army on the northern frontier.
Malcolm had come to New York with an advance copy of the story for acting governor George Clarke, urging him to send it to the British secretary of state for America. If that gentleman showed it to Prime Minister Robert Walpole and George II, it might trigger a declaration of war on France. That would clear the muddle of an undeclared war from the atmosphere—and might very well make Malcolm Stapleton the leader of an American army that would invade Canada and settle the question of who would rule North America once and for all.
War was raging all around the perimeter of England’s North American colonies. Only last week, the New York Gazette had reported that on almost the same date as the Battle of the Bracken, a Spanish army numbering over a thousand men had landed on St. Simon’s Island off the coast of Georgia. Timely warning of their arrival had been brought to Savannah by a privateer.37 The royal governor called out the colony’s militia and ambushed the Spanish on the march. The enemy soon fled to their ships, leaving behind more than a hundred dead.
“Read us the other story,” Caesar said. “The Stono River Story.”
Clara drew an older copy of the Gazette from beneath the bar and read the story of a slave uprising in South Carolina. The paper was almost six months old now. Caesar had asked her to read it a dozen times to various Africans he brought to Hughson’s to drink with him.
“A traveler lately arrived from Charleston reports an alarming upheaval on the Stono River, about twenty miles from the capital of that colony. Some twenty slaves from plantations along the river, where rice is grown in great abundance, met secretly at night over several months. Inflamed by reports of Spain’s declaration of war and the hope of freedom, they formed an army, joined by a blood oath, and on an appointed Sunday, while most of the white people were at church, broke into a local store, stole guns and powder and left the heads of the two white owners on the store’s steps to demonstrate their desperate intentions. They marched south for the Spanish colony of Florida, shouting ‘Liberty.’ Along the way they were joined by numerous other Africans. Any whites they encountered on the road were slaughtered without mercy, except for two, whose slaves pleaded for them as kind masters. Fortunately, several whites escaped their vigilance and sounded the alarm. The militia was called out and soon blocked their route. In a pitched battle, the Africans were totally defeated. Most of those who surrendered were executed on the spot, saving a half dozen who pleaded they had been forced to join the revolt at gunpoint. The greatest perturbation now reigns in the whole colony with extra patrols mounted on all roads at night and Africans kept closely confined, even in the city of Charleston.”
“Fools,” Caesar said. “They should have waited for the Spanish to attack, then risen. The whites would have been fighting the Spanish and been caught between two fires.”
Fat moon-faced Cuffee, Caesar’s closest friend, asked Clara to get out her book of maps and show them where it had happened. Clara opened the big atlas of the world she had bought from Harman Bogardus, our old teacher. She showed Cuffee the location of South Carolina on the American coast and ran her finger along the King of Spain’s dominions, which included the entire continent of South America and Mexico and islands in the Caribbean and the long peninsula of Florida.
“How far is it from here to there?” Caesar asked, running his finger from New York to the island of Cuba, which everyone knew was the headquarters of the Spanish fleet. Caesar had been fascinated by the book of maps since the first time he saw it. He had learned the names of the islands and countries from Clara.
“Over a thousand miles,” Clara said.
“How long would it take a ship to sail that far?”
“I don’t know.”
“Three weeks,” said one of the sailors in the crowd.
“That ain’t long,” Caesar said. “We could have a Spanish fleet and army here anytime.”
“Or French, if the Battle of the Bracken gets read in Paris,” Cuf
fee said. “My master claims it’s all stuff. The Stapletons murdered that Van Sluyden fellow and his French Indians on their way to Oswego to talk peace.”
“That’s a lie,” Clara said. “I was there. They came to kill the Stapletons—and they would have killed me too. Van Sluyden got exactly what he deserved. He was a murderer—and a traitor in the bargain.”
The words made little impact on the drinkers. English patriotism was not popular at Hughson’s. Luke Barrington, an elongated hooknosed Irish schoolteacher who frequently drank at the tavern, raised a tankard of rum. “Here’s to King Philip of Spain and King Louis of France. Either one’s my king more than that fat Protestant bastard on his throne in London. If a Catholic king comes here with an army, I’ll carry a musket for him and knock the bloody English on the head.”
“Amen to that!” Caesar said, clinking his glass of ale against Barrington’s tankard. “There’s a thousand black men ready to join you. All we need is some guns.”
“That’s crazy talk. It can get you all hanged!” Clara said.
The war with Spain had turned Caesar’s dream of a slave revolt into an obsession. The Stono River uprising and the Battle of the Bracken had redoubled the intensity of his ambitions. At first Clara had merely scoffed at them. But as more and more Africans began listening seriously to him, the memory of her vision of disaster on her first night with Caesar had returned to haunt her.
“Listen to her,” Caesar said. “Since she peddled her ass to the great Malcolm Stapleton, she’s been hoping it’ll turn white.”
Clara poured a tankard of ale—and flung it in Caesar’s face. “Get out of here,” she said. “And stay out until you learn to hold your tongue.”
Everyone roared with laughter—including Caesar. “Ever seen a bitch like her?” he said.
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