“We’ve improved the discipline in this place,” the saturnine man growled. “Where have you been lately?”
“I got back from New England two nights ago. I carried a letter from Dr. Haliburton in Newport. He tells me that he has made a great catch. Metcalf Bowler, the chief justice of Rhode Island, has agreed to come over to them the moment affairs look promising for reconciliation.”
“Did you copy Haliburton’s letter?’
Grey shook his head. “Too dangerous. Anyway, it was in that same code. The one you couldn’t break.”
“God damn it,” said the saturnine man, crashing his fist on the table. “If we get more than one sample, we improve our chances a hundred percent.”
“It’s too dangerous, Major. They searched me at the ferry. Stripped me to my skin in the damn ferry house without even a fire. Let me stand there in below-zero cold while they went through every stitch. It was Beckford’s orders. He’s got a nose for double agents. I think he’s wise to me.”
“So you don’t want to go back?”
Grey shifted from one foot to another. “I’d like to return to duty with my regiment, sir. My constitution is worn out from the strain.”
The saturnine man pulled at his nose. He made an odd clicking sound with his back teeth. “How many other men do you think we have in your position, Grey? Trusted courier for His Majesty’s secret agents, from here to Canada?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“None.”
“None,” Grey said in a doleful echo.
“We’ll double your money.”
“It’s not the money. It’s - it’s the consequences. I’ve got two boys. I don’t want them to think of me dying at the end of a rope.”
“Some good men have died that way.”
“And who remembers them? Who remembers Captain Hale?”
“I do,” snarled the saturnine man. “He was my best friend.”
In spite of this warning, Grey sullenly persisted. “His own family scarcely mention him. They all feel the disgrace.”
The saturnine man stared at the polished tabletop. He was back four years, in the fields outside the city of New York, watching Nathan Hale play football with the men of his regiment. Hale gave the ball one of his tremendous kicks, which had sent it soaring over the tops of some nearby trees while everyone watched, openmouthed. A trivial memory, the vanishing ball, the athlete’s laughing face. But for a moment the man could think of nothing else.
“Captain Grey,” he said, “when we caught you in treasonous correspondence with the enemy two years ago, we could have hanged you on the spot. We gave you a chance to repent of your crime and expiate the stain from your soul. But those charges could be revived at any time. Would you want your farm confiscated, your wife and boys turned into the road? I can arrange to have it done - you hanged, them dispossessed - in a week’s time.”
“All right,” Grey said with a sigh. “I’ll go back for another run. They want me to meet some escaped officers in Mount Hope and cross New Jersey with them. In case they can’t get through our lines around New York, I’m to take them through Connecticut and across the Sound. They seem uncommonly concerned about these gentlemen. Beckford offered me double the usual pay to meet them on time.”
“Send me a careful list of their names, as well as the names of the houses in which you stay. Pay close attention to their conversations.”
“How shall I get it to you?”
“Use the substitution cipher I gave you. Write it when you’re safely out of New York. Leave it with the proper token at the Sign of the Elk in Stamford.”
“I don’t trust that innkeeper. He’s drunk half the time. What’s this month’s token?”
The saturnine man handed him a six-dollar Continental bill. It was torn almost in half. “It’ll buy you tuppence of brandy,” he said, in bitter reference to the way inflation had made American currency laughable.
“I’ll leave it with him for a tip,” Grey said. “I want to be on the road when he finds the packet. He enjoys the business too much. The last time, he spent half the night winking at me, the rest of the time treating me as if I was a visiting general. Tell him I’m a peddler and should be treated like one.”
“I’ll tell him,” the saturnine man said. “I must get on to Morristown with this pouch.”
Usaph Grey limped from the room. Benjamin Stallworth sighed and rubbed his aching eyes. Had he sent Grey to his death? he wondered. Perhaps. But in a sense, Grey was already dead. Stallworth remembered the man’s terror as he pleaded for his life in the Morristown jail two years ago. Grey had experienced death that night, sweating, trembling, puking. He, Stallworth, had chosen not to execute the sentence. Instead he had permitted him to survive as his creature; he had restored him to the half-life of a double agent.
Officially, Stallworth was a major in the 2nd Continental Dragoons. These horsemen served mostly as messengers, operating from small outposts dotted along the Connecticut shore, and across Westchester County into New Jersey. The major moved from outpost to outpost, ostensibly making sure that his men retained their military discipline on detached duty. Actually, he was like a patient spider, moving around the rim of New York, weaving webs of information and deception. Major Stallworth was the American army’s chief of intelligence.
Another knock on the door. The man who entered the room this time was also an American spy, but that was where his resemblance to Usaph Grey ended. This second visitor was dressed in expensive, brilliantly colored clothes. He wore spots of rouge on his cheeks and Stallworth suspected he also tinted his lips. He walked like a woman; the movements of his hands, the tones of his voice, were effeminate. Paul Stapleton was a Williamite, the common term for men who were attracted to other men. The sin of Sodom had been popularized, almost legitimized, in England because King William the Third, hero of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, had practiced it. When Stallworth was a boy, his minister father had preached a sermon at the hanging of a Williamite, who had been caught corrupting the youth of Greenwich, Connecticut. Now the minister’s son sat stonily at a table, concealing his revulsion, dealing with one of these perverts as a more or less trusted ally. The fact that Paul Stapleton was the younger brother of a Continental Congressman intensified Stallworth’s distaste.
“Who have you seen on this visit?”
“I’m painting a portrait of General von Knyphausen. Beckford talks to him in German, which I don’t know very well. I only got a smattering of it on my European tour. But I gather they’re discussing some sort of coup. I hear variations on the verb schlagen. It must have something to do with politics. At one point, Becky - I mean Beckford - referred to it as a staatsmännischer Zug - a stroke of statecraft.”
Paul Stapleton was an artist by profession. He had been driven out of New York by the war. Late in 1777, he had unexpectedly asked General Washington for permission to return to the British-occupied city to paint portraits. Having spent several years in London, Stapleton had numerous friends among the British garrison. The officers, eager to see themselves on canvas, had already accepted his declaration of neutrality and guaranteed his safety. Only Washington, and now Stallworth, knew that this unlikely man had volunteered to serve as a spy and for two years had been bringing them information that he picked up while painting British and German officers and their mistresses.
“I hope you haven’t finished your portrait of General Knyphausen.”
“Not quite.”
Stallworth rummaged in his saddlebag and came up with a tattered notebook. “Here’s a dictionary of German phrases that I put together for my men, to help them question deserters. Take it with you and study it before your next visit.”
Paul thumbed the pages. “I can’t promise you much. Languages have never been my forte.”
Paul Stapleton departed. Stallworth sat there, trying to measure the probability that he was telling the truth against the possibility that he was lying. Before the war, Paul Stapleton had been Walter Beckford’s lo
ver. Had Beckford planted Stapleton and fed him information that was not significantly harmful to the British, while waiting to use him to mask a major operation? This possibility, coupled with his revulsion for Stapleton, always made Stallworth reluctant to act on anything the painter brought him.
An hour later, Stallworth said good-bye to his host, Colonel Elias Dayton, a large, solemn man noteworthy chiefly for his stupidity. From drops on enemy-held Staten Island, less than a mile away across the narrow Kill van Kull, and from carefully selected innkeepers and postmasters in New Jersey, Dayton collected the coded letters that Stallworth had just spent two hours deciphering. Dayton also had one or two spies with whom he worked personally. He was always convinced that their information was vital and infallibly true. By now Stallworth had learned to doubt every spy’s report, to see behind it the frightened or boastful or greedy or reckless human being who wrote it.
Up the dark frozen road to Springfield Major Stallworth rode on his careful Connecticut horse. The major’s father had been a minister of the sternest of stern old New England school and the gloomy rigor of unrefined Calvinism was deep in Stallworth’s bones. His world was inhabited by men and women with hearts corrupted by Adam’s fall. How many times had he heard his father thunder from the pulpit: We naturally as we come into the world are disaffected to God, are in league with Satan and in love with his cause and interest. Mankind are much worse than they are wont to imagine.
Stallworth still concurred with that last sentiment, although five years of war had destroyed his faith in a supernatural explanation for it. Whatever or whoever presided over this frozen world, there was no question about mankind’s capacity for treachery, seduction, and murder.
Through the neat village of Springfield, at the foot of the Short Hills, Major Stallworth rode, the bitter northeast wind at his back. At Bryant’s Tavern in the hills above Chatham, he paused to pick up another coded message and some hot rum, then cautiously descended the steep slopes to the rolling country between Chatham and Morristown. An hour later he dismounted in front of General George Washington’s headquarters.
The sentry before the guard hut across the road from the mansion challenged him and called out the sign for the night: “Lafayette.”
“I don’t know the countersign,” snapped Stallworth, “but hold your fire. I’m Major Benjamin Stallworth of the Second Dragoons.”
“Why sure, Major;” said the sentry, lowering his gun. “Come right forward.”
Stallworth strode up the path cut through the drifts to the door of the hut. As he reached the sentry he lunged at the soldier, tore the musket from his hand, and smashed the butt into his chest. The man toppled into the snow gasping with anguish.
“If I have anything to say about it, you’ll be dismissed from His Excellency’s Guard tomorrow,” Stallworth snarled. “You have no right to recognize someone who doesn’t know the countersign. He should only be recognized by the officer of the day. Where is he?”
The sentry staggered to his feet and fell through the door of the hut. An officer and the half-dozen other members of the guard sat sleepily around a small footstove.
“Lieutenant,” the sentry gasped.
The lieutenant sprang to his feet, fumbling for his pistol. The other men lunged for their muskets, which were stacked against the opposite wall.
“Never mind,” Stallworth roared. “If I were an assassin or part of an assassination squad, you’d all be dead men now. I’ve just taken the musket away from your sentry by the simple expedient of telling him my name. Where is your commander, Major Gibbs?”
Ten minutes later, while George Washington stood uneasily between them, Stallworth confronted Major Caleb Gibbs, commander of the Life Guard. A rawboned Rhode Islander with a heavy country accent, Gibbs gestured at Stallworth, almost too angry to utter a coherent sentence. “Your Excellency, sir,” he said. “I got to protest the unsoldierly, treacherous way this man tricked and assaulted one of my men a few minutes ago and possibly injured him.”
“He deserved to be shot dead instead of just possibly injured,” Stallworth said. “I recommend his immediate court-martial and dismissal from your Guard, General, as an example to the rest of them. They’ve become dangerously lax.”
“But the fellow did know you, Major Stallworth. He was a member of your troop of dragoons in 1778,” Washington said.
“The boy - he’s only nineteen, General - tries to be polite to a former commander and gets his chest stove in,” Gibbs fumed. “I say if anyone should be court-martialed or dismissed, it’s Major Stallworth.”
“I’d welcome a court-martial,” Stallworth snapped. “It would give us an opportunity to investigate the conduct of Major Gibbs as commander of Your Excellency’s Guard. Survival of your person and the survival of this country are synonymous, Your Excellency. There’s nothing more important to which a court-martial board might give its attention.”
“Gentlemen,” Washington said, “I think you’re both overwrought. Let’s sleep on these charges and countercharges, and consider them in the calm light of morning.”
Gibbs stamped out of the office. Stallworth dropped onto a straight-backed chair beside the General’s desk and sat there drumming his fingers. Washington sighed and sat down behind the desk. He was wearing a dark blue night robe over his shirt, which was open at the neck. Most of the day’s powder was gone from his reddish-brown hair. A half-dozen already written letters lay on one side of the desk. He had been in the middle of another letter when Stallworth and Gibbs stormed into the office.
“Do you really think that was necessary?” Washington said.
“Your Excellency,” Stallworth replied, “you’ll recall when you chose this house for your quarters, I warned you that it was too far from the main army. My opinion was passed over. But you promised that you’d take extra pains to ensure the strictest discipline in your Guard. It hasn’t been done. You’re two miles from your troops, guarded by a pack of sleepwalkers!”
Washington nodded wearily. “A man can only do so much, Stallworth. Between the weather and no money and a hundred desertions a week, we’ve been on the stretch eighteen hours a day here.”
Stallworth stared at Washington for a leaden moment, remembering the day that his taut nerves had snapped and he had marched into headquarters at Valley Forge to lecture the commander in chief on the carelessness with which civilians were allowed to go in and out of British-occupied Philadelphia. Instead of reprimanding him for impertinence, Washington had quietly explained that a fairly high percentage of these civilians were American secret agents.
Then, with an offhand humility that had astonished Stallworth, Washington admitted that security at the outposts was too lax. He was looking for a cavalry officer who might be interested in doing something more subtle than skirmishing with rival British patrols. Someone who could work with his secret agents. Was Stallworth interested? Stallworth’s answer had been another lecture. He had given a great deal of thought to espionage since his friend Nathan Hale had died so needlessly in 1776. He would accept the responsibility only if he were given some authority over the agents with whom he worked. He did not want to be a mere spectator while brave men were given careless instructions, inadequate disguises, and suicidal missions.
Washington had merely nodded and begun telling Stallworth what some of the Philadelphia agents were doing. One apparent loyalist had access to the British commander-in-chief. He regularly carried letters Washington wrote, packed with false information about the growing strength of the American army, to this gentleman, who believed every word of them. Weren’t they in Washington’s own handwriting? Another spy, a sweet-faced Quaker lady, spent a great deal of time lying on the second floor of her house, her ear pressed to a crack in the floor, listening to the deliberations of British staff officers in her dining room.
“We’ve learned a few things about this business since we lost your friend Hale,” Washington said.
That was the moment when Stallworth began changing hi
s mind about George Washington. Over the next months, Stallworth realized that this man was prepared to accept almost any criticism, to tolerate the dislike of subordinates, the ineptitude of Congress, the hostility of New Englanders, in the name of victory. Stallworth had struggled to imitate his example. For the past year it had become more and more difficult as he watched Americans everywhere, even in New England, lose interest in the seemingly endless war. He had seen Connecticut troops working in the snow without shoes and stockings, and heard their officers damning Congress and the United States of America. For a year, rage and disillusion had been building in Stallworth, intensified by the knowledge that the same thing was happening to everyone else in the army. Only this Virginian’s uncanny calm, his refusal to lose his head, had enabled Stallworth to control himself.
“Maybe we’re all half distracted with the way things are going,” he said. “I’ll apologize to Gibbs in the morning.”
“Good. Would you like some port?”
“Grog would do better. I’ve been on the road for the better part of twenty hours.”
Washington walked to the door of the office and called out, “Colonel Hamilton, would you ask Billy to bring some hot grog for Major Stallworth?”
In a few minutes, Billy Lee, the slave that everyone in the army called Washington’s black shadow, appeared with a mug of steaming rum and water. Stallworth drank it greedily, leaned back in his chair for a moment, and closed his eyes. For another half-hour his tired brain could function. “Now let’s get down to business,” he said. “I want to hear exactly what happened.”
Washington took a sheaf of papers from a drawer and studied them for a moment. “Caesar Muzzey was killed about two hundred yards from this front door. He spent the earlier part of the night at Red Peggy’s, on the Vealtown Road, and left a message from Three-fifteen in the usual place there.”
“What was the message?”
“Of little consequence, so far as I can see. A rumor that there’s an expedition planned to the north for which they’ve imported winter clothing from Canada.”
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