Ghost Town (5 page)

Some hours later he draws close to the house Lord Hyde has taken for his headquarters. The trees are bare and the land lies hard and fallow, and on a misty morning in January, perhaps, it would make a not unpleasing picture of the earth in repose while it awaits the quickening of life that comes with the spring. But this image of sleep is brutally disturbed by the stark form of a
gibbet
which stands a half-mile beyond the gates of the house. The traveler sees it framed against the sky, alone on its low rise of ground, and the moon shedding a silver light upon that desolate stretch of road. No sight is better calculated to arouse the terror of which he has not yet spoken to a soul, although he has thought of nothing else since being told late that afternoon of what has befallen his mama: that she has been arrested at the Hudson pier then taken to Lord Hyde’s house at Kips Bay.

In the moonlight the gibbet throws a long, skinny shadow over the frosty ground and the youth passes across it with downcast eyes. Then he draws close to the house. In several of the windows candlelight glows and in his simple heart he feels a flicker of hope. For where there are men, he thinks, surely there is mercy—foolish boy! Holding fast to this idea he comes
to the gates. Two shivering figures huddle close together there.

—Dan!

What Lizzie told him was grim indeed and made more grim still by her anger when she described what had passed between myself and the captain on the pier. She said that I had betrayed our mama and it was all my fault. Never will I forget his anger. It stood between us for the rest of his life, his conviction that if I had kept my wits about me and told a simple lie to the captain all would have been well. He said nothing more but his hot eyes and the rebuke they contained burned into my soul. Dan then approached the sentry at the gate and persuaded him to allow us through. We were permitted to spend what remained of the hours of darkness in an outhouse where once animals had been kept. It stank of manure.

At dawn the house began to stir. Soldiers appeared from various buildings with their tunics open. They shivered and yawned as they crossed the yard to the water barrel. The smell of frying bacon drifted in the clear cold air of the day. From the stables came a shuffling and neighing then the doors were thrown open and a string
of horses was led out across the yard, their hooves ringing on the flinty stones and their breath coming like smoke in the chill morning air.

The first of the officers to emerge from the house was the young captain. He approached the outhouse where the three of us were stamping about on the dirt floor trying to get warm. I had slept a little and been awoken by the smell of bacon. It was there in the yard with the soldiers going about their first duties and the horses being led out to the paddock that Dan came face to face with him.

—You have come for your mother, said the captain.

—We have come to beg for her life, said Lizzie.

My sister was a handsome girl and she had our mama’s strong spirit. Now she stood pleading softly with the captain.

—If it was in my power, he said, I should spare her, but it is not.

At this we stared aghast at the man. Here was a British officer ready to spare her but pleading impotence! A haughty disdain would have showed better than this tantalizing admission, this glimpse of mercy offered even as it was withdrawn! Lizzie drew close to him.

—Sir, you must help us. If we lose her—

She did not finish the thought. The captain could all too easily picture the circumstances into which the war had thrust us.

—It was the verdict of Lord Hyde himself.

—Then go to him, tell him we shall be in his debt forever, but spare her life!

With this last plea Lizzie gripped the officer’s greatcoat and pressed her body against his, gazing into his face with such force of feeling that he had to look away. Still with his face averted he slipped the coat off his shoulders and slung it around the shoulders of the shivering girl before him.

—I will try, he said.

—But let us see her! she cried.

He turned abruptly and walked across the yard to an outhouse not unlike the one in which we had spent the last hours. The door was unlocked and there within we saw our mama. We fell upon her with cries of joy and sorrow mixed.

She was quiet, sad, resigned, but above all concerned for us, her children, and spoke to us not of God’s will, nor of the destiny of the republic, nothing of that, but of how we should get by when she was gone. We had less than an
hour with her before Lord Hyde appeared and with a nod to the captain indicated that it was time. It was not yet nine in the morning. The captain came to the outhouse door, which now stood open. When my mama saw him an expression of horror touched her features but brief as a breeze on water. Then she stared at him with stony disdain. Lizzie turned to the door.

—No! she cried.

She flew across the room. Setting her fists against the captain’s chest she begged for her mother’s life.

—I can do nothing more, he said.

—Come, stand by me, said my mama.

With her arms around our shoulders, her throat bare and strands of hair falling loose, my mama stepped into the clear bright morning. Drawn up in the middle of the yard, at attention, with shouldered arms, stood the execution squad, also a boy with a drum. For a moment my mama surveyed the scene as though she was in command of it. Then Lord Hyde stepped forward. He was powdered and painted. We all then followed the execution squad, watched from every window and doorway. Only once did my mama’s composure fail her, when the stillness of the morning was broken by the crack
of a musket over by the shore. She startled as though the ball had entered her own flesh.

The gibbet stood outlined against a chill blue sky. A noosed rope hung from its crossbeam. Beneath it was drawn up a flatbed wagon with a pair of horses harnessed to it. A squad of redcoats stood to attention in the roadway close by and a small crowd of Americans was gathered a little distance away. The drummer began a slow, muffled roll. A chaplain fell in step beside us and murmured a few words but my mama shook her head and kept her eyes on the road ahead. Lord Hyde moved at a slow, dignified step at the head of the procession and the captain brought up the rear.

When we reached the gibbet the soldiers fell in with the squad already in place there and the rolling drumbeat ceased. The watching Americans were silent. Standing close to the gibbet Lord Hyde slipped off his coat and handed it to the chaplain. In the cold of the morning he stood there, a stout Englishman in a white shirt with lace at the cuffs, an embroidered waistcoat of gold silk and a gleaming white stock with a diamond pin. His wig was powdered as white as his skin, in sharp contrast to his rouged cheeks and scarlet lips.

The captain stepped forward and touched Lizzie on the arm. All at once we realized that we must come away and our mama go forward alone. We embraced her, and the silence was at last broken as from within the crowd of Americans there came a cry of grief which seemed all at once to animate what had become a frozen tableau: the ranked soldiers, Lord Hyde beneath the gibbet, the condemned woman and the watching crowd, and Lizzie now weeping into the chest of the captain while Dan stood by with clenched fists pressed to his bowed head.

Lord Hyde stepped swiftly up on to the wagon and barked at my mama to follow. Only then did it become apparent to all those present that his lordship intended to hang her himself. A murmur of anger was heard and the soldiers stiffened. My mama quickly mounted the wagon, holding her skirts up as she did so. She stood beneath the noose with her head erect and her chin thrust out, her eyes dry and her mouth turned down in an expression of fierce disgust. Her hands were tied behind her back. She refused the blindfold.

She did however wish to speak. The crowd pressed forward. For several minutes all stood in rapt silence. She spoke in a clear voice, her breath turning smoky in the cold of the winter
morning, and it was remarkable to me that with Death so close she was unafraid, indeed she seemed at peace, and not because she craved release from a life grown wretched, for she did not. She stood quite still as she spoke and there was no sweeping of the arms, no raising of the clenched fist, for her wrists were tied behind her back. Simply the lifted chin and the shining eyes and the words being
flung out
, so it felt, for nourishment to the Americans present and as poison dashed in the face of the enemy.

—I am not sorry for what I have done! she shouted.

The silence briefly broken by a few ragged cries of assent.

—I am not sorry that I have tried to help my country drive these monsters from our shores!

She gazed out across the wintry scene. We did not move, we made no sound. Her eyes closed for a second. All at once I remembered our house by Trinity Church, and what had become of that place. I believe she was thinking of it too.

—Once, she cried, we lived here in peace, until England became greedy for what was ours! Now I have no wish for peace, I wish for
war!
There must be war if my children are to have peace! My children—

A pause here. With her hands tied behind her back and her head thrust forward she seemed to be pleading with us to acknowledge her sincerity in these the last moments of her life. At last the tears came spilling down her cheeks, and she could not wipe them away. I flung a quick fearful glance at Lizzie, who held her head high, eyes wide and unblinking, her lips parted. I was suddenly afraid the soldiers would seize us, and carry us up onto that wagon, and hang us with our mama. Perhaps she thought the same, for she spoke no more of her children.

—I hate all kings! she shouted. And if by my death—

Now came cries of “Shame!”. A rock was hurled from the back of the crowd and struck a redcoat on the shoulder. With a hissed command Lord Hyde held the soldiers in their ranks. It seemed he wanted my mama to empty her heart before he stopped it forever.

—If by my death I help my country then it is not in vain that I am hanged here today!

Then all at once her head sank down and her hair drifted about her face. Hushed silence. No one spoke, no one moved. She seemed to have gone someplace else, somewhere inside herself, perhaps to touch some lodestone of her faith.
Then up came her head again, a fierce light now burning in her damp eyes. Once more she refused contrition, she refused to accept any guilt, refused to admit her wrong. In ringing tones she repeated her former declaration.

—I am not sorry for what I have done!

I later heard it said that her words that day gave inspiration to many in the cause, not least Washington’s ragged army. When she was finished there was more cheering and then Lord Hyde placed the noose about her neck. He tightened the knot. He lingered over the task. Still she stood bravely, and still I could not believe that this was the end. Lord Hyde stepped smartly down off the wagon, which shuddered a little. He went forward to take the horses’ reins. He nodded at the captain, who drew his sword and lifted it high.

There was nothing in the universe then but a woman standing on a wagon beneath a gibbet, a rope around her neck, her head uplifted in the wind, a faint smile upon her lips—she was looking at
us
, at
me
!—until
down
came the captain’s sword—Lord Hyde put the whip to the horses—the wagon lurched forward—

The black vomit will soon begin its awful depredations and when it does my life is measured
in hours. The clock ticks on my mantel and the tapping has resumed, but nobody is at the door and I do not trouble to cross the room. I must finish. I have told how I was with her when my mama went to the gibbet and how Lord Hyde conducted the hanging himself—it seems a particular predilection of that noble gentleman to play the hangman. A coffin lay in the back of a wagon and it was in an atmosphere of the bleakest desolation when the crowd had dispersed and the soldiers, all but two, had marched back to the house, that the body of my mama was lifted into it and the lid nailed down. Even now, I can hear their hammers in the stillness of that day! Tap-tap-TAP, tap-tap-TAP!

I stared at the coffin for many minutes. The rough pine box lay so heavy, so
unmoving
beneath the clear sky that it made no sense to think of her there. I had not seen her die. I could not watch when the wagon rolled forward; I had turned my back and closed my eyes and put my fingers in my ears and so I had remained until Lizzie touched my shoulder and said it was over. I stared at the coffin and the sight of it was like an acid in my brain, and it burned so deep that though I forget it in the day, by night I see it
again, and again I hear her tapping inside it and know it is beyond me to save her.

I have had a lifetime in which to weigh in the scales of my own conscience the extent of my guilt. It is true that I was only a young boy when I aroused suspicion at the Hudson pier, and my youth goes some way to excusing me. Such is the case for the defense as it might be put before a court of law or a moral tribunal, although the only such body which I recognize, being a godless man, is that which convenes in the dark constricted place to which I have referred before, I mean my soul. And in my own soul’s tribunal I am guilty as charged, and deserving of the capital punishment which will soon surely be carried out. And that, you might think, is all there is to it.

It is not. The events of that day and of the day that preceded it left me a haunted man. I suppose it is possible to regard such disorder of the mind as evidence of madness but that would be a mistake. I do not believe I was mad, though I was forced into the kind of existence which the mad know; I mean that my guilt set me apart from others. And it was in that state of wretched solitude that I encountered my mama’s ghost, and not once, no,
repeatedly
.

I felt no fear, no horror. Her absence was far more terrible to me than her ghost. It was her absence that did for me! I do not know now how I survived without her and Lizzie was no kind of help or support, being herself broken in spirit after seeing her mama hanged. It was dusk the first time. She stood gazing at the Brooklyn shore where the prison hulk
Jersey
rocked and stank in Wallabout Bay. Somewhere a distant dog was barking. I had seen something from the dock, a human form, a woman standing at the end of the pier, and with a sudden surge of joy I recognized her. Cautiously I advanced along the pier and stood at a little distance from her, careful not to disturb the silence or the twilight or the damp splintered planks beneath my feet. Her hair was lank and her eyes were dead. Her skin had the consistency of lard. She smelled bad. She paid no attention to me but it was enough to be near her. I looked out at the British warships anchored in the bay, their masts thin lines of graphite in the smudged sketch of the evening. They had not burned as Washington had hoped and plotted that they would, I believe because Miles Walsh and my mama and the rest were betrayed. Certainly I never saw Miles Walsh again and can only surmise, from the
shrouded fragments which have come down to me in the form of his legend, that he too went to the gibbet, late one night on Barrack Street, or that he died in the Provost or aboard the
Jersey
or any one of the fatal prisons of New York at that time.