Ghost Town (4 page)

It is with the most profound remorse that I remember our last journey together. Lizzie was with us and we set off at dawn one cold clear morning and crossed to the Jersey shore, having passed the sentry at the Hudson pier without difficulty. The day was dry and we
made good time to Newark and then we were on the Morristown road. We were carried for some miles in the back of a farm wagon loaded with sacks of potatoes bound for the American camp. The sky became cloudy late in the morning and soon we felt the first drops of rain. It seemed we were in for a soaking. We passed through a desolate stretch of country with wooded hills to either side of the road and no human habitation to be seen. Lizzie was made uneasy by the emptiness of the landscape and chattered away about nothing but my mama sat quite silent, wrapped in her shawl, her legs drawn up and her arms around her knees with her back against the potato sacks.

Then all at once we heard horses approaching. Leaping up, I saw a group of uniformed men come cantering down the road toward us. My mama did not move. She asked were they American troopers and I said I thought they were. We were each then taken up on a trooper’s horse and set off west toward Morristown, leaving the potato wagon far behind us as the rain began to come down. Never had we had such an escort before. Lizzie’s temper was much improved despite the weather. Thirty minutes later we rode into the American camp, where
my mama was at once taken to the tent of General Washington himself.

When we left the next day once more we rode with the troopers. They brought us down to within a few miles of the ferry landing on the Jersey shore. It was a cold, raw day, I remember, and my mama was silent. It was clear to me that something of far greater import than usual had occurred and that it was to do with her conversation with General Washington. But she did not speak of it. I felt sure that some momentous action was imminent. Perhaps that very night, I thought, I should again see a great conflagration, but this time in the harbor, with shuddering explosions and ships afire with blazing spars and sails of flame and burning British sailors leaping screaming into the water—!

It was afternoon when we climbed on to the pier on the Manhattan shore. There we were met by the army captain who had issued my mama her pass, also three redcoats. My mama produced from within her clothing a crumpled sheet of paper which she then unfolded and pointed to his own scrawled signature. He asked her why we had traveled to Newark and she replied, as she always did, that we
had been to visit her sister’s family, for her mother was in poor health.

The captain stared at the pass once more. We stood at the end of the pier with our basket of vegetables, shivering in the damp wind coming off the harbor. Never before had our pass been scrutinized with such close attention. I tried not to show my anxiety though I know now that by the very effort I revealed much. But I was a child! What did they expect of me? All at once the officer turned to me and spoke in a loud voice.

—Boy, is this true?

I looked at my mama and for a moment I was brave.

—Yes, sir, I said.

He stared hard at me.

—Tell me what is wrong with your grandmother.

I said nothing. The captain sank down so his eyes were on a level with mine.

—What is your name? he said.

—Edmund.

—What is wrong with your grandmother, Edmund? You have just visited her in Newark, have you not?

I was not brave anymore, I was confused and frightened by this loud man with his fierce blue
eyes! All I could think was that if I told him a lie he would lock me up in a dark stinking hole without my mama. I covered my mouth with my hand and as I did so I saw something flare in his eyes. He stood up. My mama stepped between us. She pushed me behind her and drew close to the officer.

—You are frightening the child, she said quietly. He does not trust you. We have had a long journey, sir. We want to go home.

But no, he would not let us go home, and now Lizzie realized the gravity of our situation. We were to go with him; and not an hour has passed from that day to this that I have not been tormented with the thought that it was
all my fault
—that it was my behavior on the dock that day which aroused the officer’s suspicion, and set in motion my mama’s destruction—

And the tapping at my door starts up again as it does whenever this idea begins to circle in my mind, and try as I might I cannot ignore it but must cross the room and find
again
that nobody is there, unless of course it is Death himself who comes knocking, and given that the cholera encroaches even now, his presence would be no surprise. Indeed, it would be welcome.

We sat on a hard bench in the back of a wagon and the captain escorted us on horseback. My poor mama, she showed nothing, but what torment she must have suffered as we were carried toward Lord Hyde’s headquarters. Lizzie too was silent, and threw worried glances at my mama, who reached for her hand and pressed it. Our road passed to the north of Barrack Street, which is now called Chambers, and then across the island to Kips Bay. After what seemed an interminable journey through a landscape of empty fields and leafless trees, and steep hills with fast-running streams between, in the late afternoon we approached a mansion built of red brick that was partly hidden by a high stone wall into which were set a pair of iron gates. Once the property of a wealthy merchant of republican sympathies it was now the headquarters of Lord John Hyde.

The attempt to forget the wrong that man did my mother has kept me in the grog shops of the seaport this past fifty years. When he entered the room to which we had been taken, some sort of pantry, I believe, his manner was more sober than I had thus far seen it in my two passing glimpses of the man. He stood looking my mama up and down and I knew her insult still rankled
in him. He then turned to the captain with a lifted eyebrow. He seated himself at the table in the middle of the room. It was very cold in there. The floor was of stone, the walls of whitewashed plaster, and there was a single window which looked out onto the courtyard at the back of the house. Several panes of glass were missing.

—You have a choice, madam, said Lord Hyde.

He pulled on a close-fitting glove of soft white leather.

—I intend to search you, and you will first undress yourself, or you will be undressed by others.

He was speaking to my
mother
! I turned to Lizzie and saw the color rise in her cheeks.

—You sons-of-bitches, said my mama—or spat, rather.

—Choose.

Lizzie and I had by this time been brought behind Lord Hyde’s chair, so my mama stood alone. She did not hesitate. I watched her drop her shawl to the floor and then begin to remove her outer garments. There were men’s faces pressed to the window and through the broken pane I saw them grinning. She stood against the wall in only her linen. Her undergarments were
not clean, nothing could be kept clean in Canvas Town. For a moment there was silence. Then Lord Hyde spoke again.

—Undress, madam.

A profound shame swept over me. That this should be happening to my
mama
, and in front of all these strangers, these
Englishmen
—! Then with dawning wonder I realized that in her pride my mama
refused
shame! Again I glanced at my sister and she too had seen it. Our mama seemed to say, as she removed her soiled undergarments, that they mattered nothing, these rags, what mattered lay deeper, and of that Lord Hyde could not strip her. I stared at the floor but no sooner had I done so than the portly lord turned in his chair.

—Lift your head, boy, he whispered.

I did nothing.

—Lift your head
.

There was that in his tone which commanded obedience. I had not the strength to defy him. I lifted my head. My mama stood naked against the whitewashed wall. Never had I seen her so, not even in the close confines of our crowded shack. But yet she was a woman, and more handsome than any of the few I have seen in similar circumstance since that day, naked, I
mean. She showed no shame at all. She was what she was, human, a woman, subjected to power but not lessened by it, no weaker than before. In the silence that followed I was aware of Lord Hyde’s breath coming quick and shallow as the sniggering at the window grew louder.

And then my mama lifted her hands to her hair. Slow and deliberate as before, she unfastened the pins that held the thick auburn tresses in their untidy bun and let them fall about her shoulders and her lovely breasts. It was an insult. She let down her hair for Lord Hyde and so made plain the man’s lechery, indeed the lechery of all those who looked at her. The captain had meanwhile dropped to his knees at my mother’s feet and was searching through her discarded clothing. Almost at once he discovered a sealed letter in one of her shoes. He placed it on the table.

Lord Hyde broke the seal and shook the letter loose, holding it from him with his gloved fingertips as though it disgusted him. Then he began to read. When the search was over and nothing further discovered, he slipped the letter into his pocket and went out of the room without a word.

It was left to the captain to tell my mother to dress herself.

When Lord Hyde returned he brought with him a small glass of cut crystal, a decanter of port wine and also his secretary, a pinched, bitter little Englishman carrying pen, ink and some kind of ledger. The two sat down at the table with the captain and his lordship informed my mama that this hearing was now a court martial and that she was accused of treason. I remember that he examined his fingernails as he spoke these words, and gave the impression that he would rather be hunting foxes than rebels. He poured a glass of wine and tossed it down his throat, then at once poured another one. I was very frightened indeed. Much of what went on I do not remember beyond that my mother treated the court martial with contempt throughout and told them at one point that yes, she was guilty, “if guilt it is to fight you butchers on my own soil.”

The secretary scribbled in his ledger. He did not lift his eyes from the table. At another point I remember my mama declaring that she did not recognize the authority of the court for she was a citizen of the United States of America.

—The United States of America do not exist, said the secretary with some distaste. The territories
to which you refer, madam, are colonies in a state of rebellion, and it is his lordship’s duty to put down that rebellion.

—We ceased to be colonies when we declared our independence.

—What you may or may not have declared is of no matter to us, nor indeed to your rightful sovereign, and that is the king.

My mama fixed her eyes on a point somewhere above his lordship’s head. She planted her feet square on the floorboards and presented a figure of defiance. Lord Hyde by now had lost his air of weary lassitude and become visibly irritated by this woman standing before his court martial arguing the legality of the Crown’s claims to its colonies. We were then taken out of the room and through the door came the low murmur of the secretary’s voice, occasionally interrupted by Lord Hyde or the captain. When we were called back in Lord Hyde wasted no time, and it was with a dull sense of disbelief that I heard him telling my mama that because she had been found guilty of treason he intended to hang her.

—No! screamed Lizzie.

—Be silent! cried the secretary.

I looked up at my mama’s face but she
betrayed no sign of emotion whatsoever. She uttered one word only.

—When?

—Tomorrow morning, he said, and then, with a soft laugh—and may God have mercy on your American soul.

I cast my imagination back to that most terrible of days and to the night which followed and I see the last light glimmering red on the hills of Jersey as a figure passes along the ashy road which my mama and Lizzie and I had lately traveled with the soldiers. With the failing light comes the creeping bitter cold of the winter night and in Canvas Town campfires flare and blaze. Dark shapes sit humped close to the flames or move about in shrouded silhouette. There are sudden screams of laughter or pain. To the west the river blinks in the cold light of the rising moon. When he pauses and turns to see what he has left behind him, the lone traveler can make out church spires and the masts of warships moored in the bay and at this hour, with darkness beginning to obscure the devastation done to New York, he can recall the town as it was before the British came.