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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning
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“So, miss,” my Aunt Gertrude said to me that night at the supper table.
“I hope you've found the truth of the Bible's warning of the wages of sin.”
I said nothing.
“What is to become of you, I can't imagine. Any hope of finding a respectable husband has gone glimmering.”
The next day I sought out Guert Cuyler in his father's law office. “Do you too believe the worst about me?” I asked.
He hung his head. “Robert Nicolls left little to the imagination.”
“Do you believe in love—its power to invade the heart and annihilate sense?”
Guert nodded dumbly.
“I loved Robert Nicolls that way. I don't anymore. I assure you I'll never make such a fool of myself again. I'm here as a client—nothing less, nothing more.”
He nodded again.
I told him about my uncle's treatment of my estate. Guert sighed. “It would be a very difficult case to prove in court. Especially in this province, as long as Nicolls remains governor. I would say for however long he stays, it's impossible.”
“I don't understand it!” I cried. “As my father's only heir, don't I have a claim to half ownership of the New Netherlands Trading Company?”
He sadly shook his head. “Your grandfather gave the company to your uncle when he retired. His will only left you his immediate estate. He was afraid if he left you a half interest, and you married, the company might fall into division and quarreling. If you'd been a man, he might have acted differently.”
“What a consolation.”
Guert walked me to the street door. “Miss Van Vorst—Catalyntie—” he said. “I know the mere idea of what I'm going to say must provoke you. But at some future date—when your heart is healed of this wound—as I'm sure it will be—I wonder if you would consider the possibility of another suitor.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
“You're much too good—too kind—too honest—for a wretch like me,” I said. “Find a woman with a heart that hasn't been corrupted.”
Turning my back on what was almost certainly my one hope of redemption in New York, I trudged up the Broadway in the spring sunshine. The street reminded me of Robert, of our expedition, mouth to mouth, on the king's birthday. I was about to turn off it into Wall Street when a large man came flying out of a tavern headfirst to sprawl in the muck at my feet. I gazed down at the soiled figure and muddy face of Malcolm Stapleton.
“What brings you from New Jersey?”
He reeled to his feet. I saw he was drunk. “Clara,” he muttered.
“What about Clara? Have you lost interest in her? I've heard you were using her to save money on your whoring.”
He shook his head drunkenly. “Loved … her,” he muttered.
In my malevolent mood, the very word made me laugh. “What would a lout like you know about love? You're like your friend Nicolls. The morals of a whoremaster. Any woman who isn't for sale doesn't interest you.”
Slumped against the tavern wall, the giant began to weep like a five-year-old. “Dying—Clara's dying,” he said. “My fault.”
“Dying?” I could not believe it. “Dying of what?”
He mumbled out the story. All my accumulated rage at Robert Nicolls exploded in his face. He, not Robert, became the paradigm of male cowardice and corruption. “I hope at least you have the decency never to show your face before honest folk again,” I said. “I hope you'll go where some wandering Indian war party in search of amusement captures you and slowly peels the flesh from your bones and cooks it over an open fire. And you can easily imagine what part I hope they choose first!”
I rushed across town to the Van Vorst mansion. For some reason I was imbued with an absolute certainty that I could save Clara, no matter what had happened to her. Perhaps I was driven by the frantic realization that without her I was totally alone in this hostile New York world. I told Aunt Gertrude what I had heard and asked her for money to go to New Jersey. She refused. I damned her for a heartless bitch and rushed upstairs. There on my dresser was Robert Nicolls's gold locket. I seized it and ignoring my aunt's shrieks, raced to the nearest tavern.
I sold the locket for fifteen pounds, probably a tenth of what it was worth, and hurried to the Hudson River docks, where I found a ferryman in a stout rowboat who hauled me to Hoboken. There I hired a wagon and driver, who took the better part of the rest of the day to reach the Stapleton mansion near the falls of the Passaic.
By luck, Adam Duycinck was glancing out the window of Clara's room as I arrived. He greeted me at the door and led me upstairs without bothering about introductions to anyone. By the time I reached Clara's bed he had shamefacedly told me his role in what had happened. I saw at a glance that Clara's spirit was struggling to escape her body. She had given up her desire for existence.
I seized her in my arms. “I saw Malcolm Stapleton in New York,” I said. “He told me you were dying. You can't. You mustn't. You won't. I need you. I need your love.”
I have no idea how long I lay there with my arms around her. Eventually Georgianna Stapleton hovered in the background, shrilly explaining
why the murder of the baby had been necessary. Duycinck and her husband hid behind her.
“Madam, you sicken me,” I said. “Leave this room. No one shall enter this room except me until Clara is well again. If I have to write to His Majesty the King himself, I will have you prosecuted for this crime—if you stay in this room another ten seconds!”
For the next month, I was Clara's nurse. I demanded and obtained special, extremely expensive medicines Duycinck recommended. I raged at George Stapleton as a worse murderer than his wife, utterly intimidating the man. I refused to speak to Georgianna Stapleton. I treated Duycinck like the whining moral vagrant that he was. Alone with Clara, I told her again and again she had a duty to live. She was my only friend in this treacherous world, where the Evil Brother ruled.
Slowly, Clara allowed herself to be dragged back from oblivion's precipice. By the time summer winds sighed through the opened windows of her bedroom, she was able to walk a few tottering steps—and began to think about the future. “Where is Malcolm?” she asked one day.
“Gone where I told him he should go,” I said. “Where the scum of the colony drifts. To the frontier, where every man has something shameful to hide.”
“You should have let me speak to him first!” Clara said.
“Why?”
“I loved him. He loved me.”
“You were living in a dream. In the real world, love doesn't exist,” I said. “People use the word but it's simply a disguise for animal desire—or some less obvious greed, like money or property.”
“What's happened to you in New York?”
I told her, making myself as stupid, Robert Nicolls as venal as I could find words to describe us. “You didn't love him?” she asked.
“I thought I loved him. Until I awoke from my idiotic dream.”
“I wasn't living in a dream,” Clara said. “Love is as real, if not as powerful, in this world as money or desire. Don't we love each other?”
“We're exceptions.”
“Didn't your grandfather love you—and me?”
“He was another exception,” I said.
“Then Malcolm is another exception. He loved me the way a great warrior makes war—with his whole soul.”
“Why didn't he protect you?”
“In his heart he wanted to protect me. But he was defeated by his God.”
“You're talking nonsense! What were you going to say, if you had a chance to speak to him?”
“That I forgive him.”
“No! You must never forgive. That's what makes women weak. They're preached at day and night to forgive their fathers, their husbands, their lovers, everyone who robs them of their happiness. Men don't forgive. Neither should we.”
For another hour, I poured out the details of the year of humiliations and insults I had endured in the Van Vorst household. I told her of my mulcted estate, of my cousins' perpetual envy and obloquy. I retailed my final conversation with Robert Nicolls.
“Revenge, revenge on them all—that's the only thing that keeps me alive,” I said. “They hope my loneliness, my unhappiness, will kill me. But I'm a daughter of the Seneca. I'll never surrender to them. I'll cut out their lying vicious hearts before I die. I swear it.”
With no warning, my rage faltered. I was the Moon Woman again. “But I can't do it without you, Clara. I want you to hate them with me. You must, Clara! You must! You can't forgive this monster Malcolm Stapleton. The next thing you know you'll be forgiving his stepmother and Duycinck.”
“Oh my dearest friend,” Clara said. “If you could see what I see—what evil is speaking in your soul—your heart would be filled with fear and doubt.”
I strode to the round mirror that hung on the wall beside the bed. “I see nothing but a woman who's going to become rich and powerful. A woman who's never going to allow a man's love to confuse her heart again.”
“I don't think we can control our hearts,” Clara said. “What enters them, what changes them, is part of our
ondinnonk,
our fate.”
“No!” I said, furious again. “I've discarded that part of our Seneca inheritance. Indians are children of nature in all its blind stupidity. As Senecas, we starved each spring like animals in the forest. White men defy nature. They never starve. If their crops fail, they bring grain from across the ocean in their ships. Their money enables them to do anything. We're going to get some of that money, Clara. We're going to get a great mountain of it. Then we'll have the power to do whatever pleases our hearts—and what will please mine most will be
revenge.
”
It was wrong, Clara felt in her deepest self. They were blundering down a path that led to another precipice. But she was too weak, too uncertain, too drained by her illness and the sorrow of her failed love and lost child to oppose her willful Seneca sister. All she could do was silently vow that if she ever saw Malcolm Stapleton again, she would tell him she forgave him.
THREE
B
Y THE FLICKERING LIGHT OF A lantern, I descended into the cellar of our house on Maiden Lane to gaze one more time at the trading goods. I fingered the swatches of deep blue and dark red strouds.
28
I locked the sea chests and turned to the barrels of imitation pearl necklaces and earrings and hand rings. The silver and gold gleamed in the lantern's glow, like my hopes. For a moment I could barely breathe. So much depended on these goods. I was looking at three hundred fifty pounds, half of all the money I had in this world.
Footsteps on the stairs. Clara stood a few feet away. The distance was a kind of statement. She declined to hover over these treasures like a mother over a promising child. The refusal implied a certain dislike, even a disapproval, of their meaning and purpose. Not for the first time, I struggled against irritation, even anger. Why didn't she feel the same way about this leap for independence?
“Come to bed. We have to get up before dawn tomorrow,” Clara said.
“I just wanted to make sure everything was in order,” I lied.
Clara laughed mirthlessly. “It's been in order for a week. Come upstairs. I've made some tea. It will help you sleep.”
I sighed. It was pointless for me to lie to Clara. She could read my soul as plainly as if my thoughts, my desires, were printed on my face. That realization made me surly again. “Very well, Miss
Flowers
,” I said.
“I'm sorry if I hurt you this morning,” Clara said.
“You didn't—I understand, perfectly.”
At 10:00 A.M. on this last day in New York, Clara and I had put on our soberest outfits, skirts of grey and bonnets of black, and hurried down to City Hall. We had stood before the same high walnut dais from which Judge Walter Van Staats had hurled imprecations on Clara and all the other members of her race. Old Staats was dead now. In his place sat the Englishman, lean, hawk-nosed Daniel Horsmanden.
I informed Judge Horsmanden that I wished to free Clara from slavery. The judge nodded perfunctorily. Last week, Guert Cuyler had visited him
in his chambers and negotiated the matter in advance. This was a pro forma appearance, for legality's sake.
“Are you prepared to post a bond of five hundred pounds to guarantee that she won't become a charge on the public?” Horsmanden growled.
Guert had warned us that Horsmanden had grave doubts about freeing Africans, no matter what the law said. I knew nothing about his personal animosity toward Clara. I thought the size of the bond was his way of expressing his judicial disapproval. “Yes, Your Honor,” I said.
The words drove pain through the center of my body. Clara frequently told me I loved money too much. Was this proof? If it was, I would prove to myself at least that I loved Clara more. I stoically signed the bond that the clerk of the court handed me. If I ever needed to borrow money, this obligation could be construed as a debt, inclining a lender to refuse me. There were too many merchants in New York who might look for such an excuse.
Judge Horsmanden asked me what last name Clara was going to use. “Van Vorst,” I said. Why not? We were sisters in everything but blood.
“Is that agreeable to you?” Horsmanden asked Clara.
“No,” Clara said. “I would prefer another name.”
I stared in astonishment—and anger. How could Clara refuse Cornelius Van Vorst's name?
“What name would you prefer?” the Judge asked sarcastically.
“I would prefer Flowers. Clara Flowers.”
I struggled to understand. Clara was telling me we were still Seneca sisters. But she wanted to expunge from her soul the name that recalled her slavery.
“So be it,” Judge Horsmanden had growled. “I'd rather see a Clara Flowers soliciting on the streets of New York than an African with a respectable name like Van Vorst.”
Clara had borne the insult in silence. I had been ready to give Horsmanden a ferocious rebuke, which would probably have prompted him to raise the bond to a thousand pounds. Just in time, Clara's hand on my arm reminded me of my grandfather's advice about bowing down. On the way home, she told me about her encounter with the judge in New Jersey.
A year ago, I had brought a still-feeble Clara back to New York and rented a small house on Maiden Lane. Clara's abuse had been the perfect pretext for refusing to spend another day in the household of Johannes and Gertrude Van Vorst. With Guert Cuyler as my attorney, I had petitioned the court to allow me to live independently on the income from my estate, which I would legally inherit when I became twenty-one.
Behind the scenes, I had already done some vigorous politicking to
guarantee a verdict in my favor. I told George Stapleton I wanted his backing as the price of my silence for his wife's treatment of Clara. There were laws against the murder or attempted murder of a stave—and abortion was an equally serious crime. Royal Governor Nicolls was soon persuaded to say a word on my behalf. The court ordered Johannes Van Vorst to pay me five hundred pounds a year. Clara and I had lived so simply, we had been able to save two thirds of this stipend, and I had invested half of it in a ship that carried four tons of winter wheat to England, doubling the money. I had used this profit to finance our trading expedition.
My uncle, who begrudged every farthing he had been forced to surrender, predicted—and hoped—his rebellious niece would fail disastrously. Most of New York concurred with this spiteful prophecy. A woman could not sell goods to Indians. Johannes Van Vorst declared the headstrong creature might as well take the money—which was really his money—and throw it into the Hudson.
I went grimly ahead with my purchases of trading goods. I bought jewelry that everyone said was much too expensive; I chose nothing but the best cloth, which drew more scoffs from supposedly knowing New Yorkers. Indians could not tell the difference between cheap and dear. More to the point, in regard to predictions of my failure, the frontier was in turmoil. At least eight traders had been murdered, their goods stolen by marauding bands of presumably French Indians in the last six months. A woman stood a very good chance of being raped as well as robbed and murdered.
Now, as we went upstairs to our narrow kitchen, I found myself brooding on our courtroom visit. I declined to be cheered by the pot of hot tea under the cosy or the plate of sugar cookies beside it. “I should have asked George Stapleton to intercede with the governor again. I should never have had to post a five-hundred-pound bond,” I said. “Most people only have to post a hundred.”
“Mr. Stapleton looks like a dying man,” Clara said. We had seen Stapleton on the street on our way to court.
“He looks like a drunkard to me,” I said. “Remember Leaping Bear? He turned yellow the same way, from whiskey.”
Leaping Bear had been the great drunkard of our village. He lived to drink. He sold everything, his gun, his hatchet, he even gave his wife to traders for whiskey, until it killed him. George Stapleton's skin was a pale yellow, his hands shook, his shoulders sagged.
“Tell my son if you see him in Albany or the woods that I'll give him six more months to come home,” Stapleton said when we met him. “If he chooses to remain a vagabond, I'll remove him from my will and leave all my property to his brother.”
“Have you had any reports of his whereabouts?” I asked.
“He's been seen at Albany—and at Oswego.” Stapleton said.
I was dismayed to see Clara brighten at this news. Oswego was the British fort on Lake Ontario where we planned to launch ourselves as fur traders. Could she possibly want to see Malcolm Stapleton again?
George Stapleton gazed mournfully at Clara. “As she lay dying, my first wife made me swear before God to be a good father to him. She's appeared to me in dreams every night since he left.”
“We'll tell him he has a father with a troubled heart,” Clara said.
“In exchange for that favor, would you loan us the services of Adam Duycinck?” I said. I was determined to wring every possible advantage from this man. “His ability to repair muskets could be very useful to us. It's a great problem in every Indian village—so many muskets are broken, useless. A trader who brings a gunsmith with her would be instantly popular.”
George Stapleton was not enthusiastic. “My wife depends on him to run Hampden Hall—”
“He has great influence with your son. He might persuade him to return—”
“All right. I'll endure the thousand lashes I'll receive in New Jersey. Adam will be on the dock tomorrow morning when you sail.”
What a strange man, I thought. He seems tormented in some deep way that goes beyond business or marriage. Why was he so afraid of his first wife's spirit? Why was she haunting him? Eventually I would learn that George Stapleton was more than strange.
As soon as we parted, Clara objected to Duycinck as a traveling companion. He summoned too many painful memories she would prefer to forget. She brought him up again as we drank our midnight tea. “You must learn to ignore your feelings—when they interfere with improving some moneys,” I said.
“I don't think I'll ever do that,” Clara said.
You will if you remain my partner or
—I caught myself before I made the threat. Clara still meant too much to me. But the look on her face made it clear that she had sensed my unspoken words. Suddenly I found myself bewildered, almost afraid of my own nature. Could a mountain of money transform love into indifference, even hate? I did not know. But a vibration of future pain, grief, loss shook both our souls.

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