The Reckoning

PREFACE

The author's intention is to treat, in a series of four or five romances, that part of the war for independence which particularly affected the great landed families of northern New York: the Johnsons, represented by Sir William, Sir John, Guy Johnson, and Colonel Claus; the notorious Butlers, father and son; the Schuylers, Van Rensselaers, and others.

The first romance of the series, Cardigan, was followed by the second, The Maid-at-Arms. The third in order is not completed. The fourth is the present volume.

As Cardigan pretended to portray life on the baronial estate of Sir William Johnson, the first uneasiness concerning the coming trouble, the first discordant note struck in the harmonious councils of the Long House, so, in The Maid-at-Arms, which followed in order, the author attempted to paint a patroon family disturbed by the approaching rumble of battle. That romance dealt with the first serious split in the Iroquois Confederacy; it showed the Long House shattered though not fallen; the demoralization and final flight of the great landed families who remained loyal to the British Crown; and it struck the key-note to the future attitude of the Iroquois toward the patriots of the frontier—revenge for their losses at the battle of Oriskany—and ended with the march of the militia and Continental troops on Saratoga.

The third romance, as yet incomplete and unpublished, deals with the war-path and those who followed it, led by the landed gentry of Tryon County, and ends with the first solid blow delivered at the Long House, and the terrible punishment of the Great Confederacy.

The present romance, the fourth in chronological order, picks up the thread at that point.

The author is not conscious of having taken any liberties with history in preparing a framework of facts for a mantle of romance.

New York, May 26, 1904.

PROLOGUE

ECHOES OF YESTERDAY

His Excellency's system of intelligence in the City of New York I never pretended to comprehend. That I was one of many agents I could have no doubt; yet as long as I remained there I never knew but three or four established spies with residence in town. Although I had no illusions concerning Mr. Gaine and his "Gazette," at intervals I violently suspected Mr. Rivington of friendliness to us, and this in spite of his Tory newspaper and the fierce broadsides he fired at rebels and rebellion. But I must confess that in my long and amiable acquaintance with the gentleman he never, by word or hint or inference, so much as by the quiver of an eyelash, corroborated my suspicion, and to this day I do not know whether or not Mr. Rivington furnished secret information to his Excellency while publicly in print he raged and sneered.

Itinerant spies were always in the city in spite of the deadly watch kept up by regular and partizan, and sometimes they bore messages for me, the words "Pro Gloria" establishing their credentials as well as mine. They entered the city in all guises and under all pretexts, some as refugees, some as traitors, some wearing the uniform of Tory partizan corps, others attired as tradesmen, farmers, fishermen, and often bearing passes, too, though where they contrived to find passes I never understood.

It was a time of sullenness and quick suspicion; few were free from doubt, but of those few I made one—until that day when my enemy arrived—but of that in its place, for now I mean to say a word about this city that I love—that we all love, understanding how alone she stood in seven years' chains, yet dauntless, dangerous, and defiant.

For upon New York fell the brunt of British wrath, and the judgment of God fell, too, passing twice in fire that laid one-quarter of the town in cinders. Nor was that enough, for His lightning smote the powder-ship, the Morning Star, where she swung at her moorings off from Burling Slip, and the very sky seemed falling in the thunder that shook the shoreward houses into ruins.

I think that, take it all in all, New York met and withstood every separate horror that war can bring, save actual assault and sack. Greater hardships fell to the lot of no other city in America, for we lost more than a half of our population, more than a fourth of the city by the two great fires. Want, with the rich, meant famine for the poor and sad privation for the well-to-do; smallpox and typhus swept us; commerce by water died, and slowly our loneliness became a maddening isolation, when his Excellency flung out his blue dragoons to the very edges of the river there at Harlem Bridge.

I often think it strange that New York town remained so loyal to the cause, for loyalty to the king was inherent among the better classes. Many had vast estates, farms, acres on acres of game parks, and lived like the landed gentry of old England. Yet, save for the DeLanceys, the Crugers, their kinsmen, the Fannings, kin to the Tryons, Frederick Rhinelander, the Waltons, and others too tedious to mention, the gentlemen who had the most to lose through friendliness to the cause of liberty, chose to espouse that cause.

As for the British residents there, they remained in blameless loyalty to their King, and I, for one, have never said one word to cast a doubt upon the purity of their sentiments.

But with all this, knowing what must come, no other city in America so gaily set forth upon the road to ruin as did patriotic New York. And from that dreadful hour when, through the cannon smoke on Brooklyn Heights, she beheld the ghastly face of ruin leering at her across the foggy water—from that heart-breaking hour when the British drums rolled from the east, and the tall war-ships covered themselves with smoke, and the last flag flying was hacked from the halyards, and the tramp of the grenadiers awoke the silence of Broadway, she never faltered in her allegiance, never doubted, never failed throughout those seven years the while she lay beneath the British heel, a rattlesnake, stunned only, but deadly still while the last spark of life remained.

Were I to tell a tithe of all I know of what took place during the great siege, the incidents might shame the wildest fancies of romance—how intrigue swayed with intrigue there, struggling hilt to hilt; how plot and plot were thwarted by the counterplot; how all trust in man was destroyed in that dark year that Arnold died, and a fiend took his fair shape to scandalize two hemispheres!

Yet I am living witness of those years. I heard and saw much that I shall not now revive, as where the victims of a pest lie buried it is not wise to dig, lest the unseen be loosened once again. Yet something it may be well to record of that time—the curtain lifted for a glimpse, then dropped in silence—to teach our children that the men who stood against their King stood with hope of no reward save liberty, but faced the tempest that they had unchained with souls self-shriven and each heart washed free of selfishness.

So if I speak of prisons where our thousands died—hind and gentleman piled thick as shad in the fly market—sick and well and wounded all together—it shall not be at length, only a scene or two that sticks in memory.

Once, in the suffocating heat of mid-July, I saw a prison where every narrow window was filled with human heads, face above face, seeking a portion of the external air. And from that day, for many, many weeks the dead-carts took the corpses to the outer ditches, passing steadily from dawn to midnight.

All day, all night, they died around us in ship and prison, some from suffocation, some from starvation, others delivered by prison fevers which rotted them so slowly that I think even death shrank back reluctant to touch them with his icy finger.

So piteous their plight, these crowded thousands, crushed in putrid masses, clinging to the filthy prison bars, that they aroused compassion in that strange and ancient guild that once had claimed the Magdalen in its sad sisterhood, and these aided them with food, year after year, until deliverance.

They had no other food, no water except from polluted drains, no fire in winter, no barriers to the blackest cold that ever seared the city from the times that man remembers. I say they had no other food and no fire to cook the offal flung to them. That is not all true, because we did our best, being permitted to furnish what we had—we and the strange sisterhood—yet they were thousands upon thousands, and we were few.

It is best that I say no more, for that proud England's sake from whose loins we sprang—it is best that I speak not of Captain Cunningham the Provost, nor of his deputy, O'Keefe, nor of Sproat and Loring. There was butchers' work in my own North, and I shall not shrink from the telling; there was massacre, and scalps taken from children too small to lisp their prayers for mercy; that was devils' work, and may be told. But Cunningham and those who served him were alone in their awful trade; cruelty unspeakable and frenzied vice are terms which fall impotent to measure the ghastly depths of an infamy in which they crawled and squirmed, battening like maggots on hell's own pollution.

Long since, I think, we have clasped hands with England over Cherry Valley and Wyoming, forgiving her the loosened fury of her red allies and her Butlers and McDonalds. The scar remains, but is remembered only as a glory.

How shall we take old England's wrinkled hand, stretched out above the spots that mark the prisons of New York?—above the twelve thousand unnamed graves of those who died for lack of air and water aboard the Jersey? God knows; and yet all things are possible with Him—even this miracle which I shall never live to see.

Without malice, without prejudice, judging only as one whose judgment errs, I leave this darkened path for a free road in the open, and so shall strive to tell as simply and sincerely as I may what only befell myself and those with whom I had been long associated. And if the pleasures that I now recall seem tinged with bitter, and if the gaiety was but a phase of that greater prison fever that burnt us all in the beleaguered city, still there was much to live for in those times through which I, among many, passed; and by God's mercy, not my own endeavor, passed safely, soul and body.

CHAPTER I

THE SPY

Having finished my duties in connection with Sir Peter's private estate and his voluminous correspondence—and the door of my chamber being doubly locked and bolted—I made free to attend to certain secret correspondence of my own, which for four years now had continued, without discovery, between the Military Intelligence Department of the Continental army and myself through the medium of one John Ennis, the tobacconist at the Sign of the Silver Box in Hanover Square.

Made confident by long immunity from the slightest shadow of suspicion, apprehension of danger seldom troubled my sense of security. It did sometimes, as when the awful treason at West Point became known to me; and for weeks as I lay abed I thought to hear in every footfall on Broadway the measured tread of a patrol come to take me. Yet the traitor continued in New York without sinister consequence to me; and, though my nights were none the pleasanter during that sad week which ended in the execution of the British adjutant-general, no harm came to me. Habit is the great sedative; at times, penning my spy's journal, I smiled to remember how it was with me when first I came to New York in 1777, four years since, a country lad of nineteen, fresh from the frontier, where all my life had been spent among the Oneidas and the few neighbors nearest Broadalbin Bush—a raw youth, frightened but resolved; and how I lived through those first months of mental terror, now appalled by the fate of our Captain Nathan Hale, now burning with a high purpose and buoyed up by pride that his Excellency should have found in me a fit instrument for his designs.

I have never known whether or not I am what men call brave, for I understand fear and I turn cold at thought of death. Often I have sat alone in the house watching the sober folk along Broadway and Wall Street, knowing all the while that these same good people might to-morrow all go flocking to Catiemuts Hill near the Fresh Water, or to that open space in the "Fields" between the jail and the Almshouse, to see me on the gallows. If such thoughts do not assail the brave—if restless nights, wakeful dawns, dull days are not their portion—I must own that all these were mine, not often, perhaps, but too frequent to flatter self-esteem. And, fight them as I might, it was useless; for such moments came without warning—often when I had been merry with friends, at times when, lulled by long-continued security, I had nigh forgotten through eventless months that there was a war and that I had become a New Yorker only because of war.

It was harder now, in one sense; four years as secretary to my kinsman, Sir Peter Coleville, had admitted me to those social intimacies so necessary to my secret office; and, alas! friendships had been made and ties formed not only in the line of duty, but from impulse and out of pure affection.

I had never found it was required of me to pose as a rabid loyalist, and so did not, being known as disinterested and indifferent, and perhaps for that reason not suspected. My friends were from necessity among the best among the loyalists—from choice, too, for I liked them for their own sakes, and it was against their cause I worked, not against them.

It went hard with me to use them as I did—I so loathing perfidy in others; yet if it be perfidy to continue in duty as I understood duty, then I practised it, and at times could scarce tolerate myself, which was a weakness, because in my own heart I knew that his Excellency could set no man a task unworthy of his manhood. Yet it were pleasanter had my duties thrown me with the army, or with Colonel Willett in my native north, whence, at his request, I had come to live a life of physical sloth and mental intrigue under the British cannon of New York—here in the household of Sir Peter Coleville, his secretary, his friend, his welcomed guest, the intimate of his family, his friends!—that was the hardest of all; and though for months at a time I managed to forget it, the recurring thought of what I was, and what they believed me to be, stabbed me at intervals so I could scarce endure it.

Nothing, not even the belief that God was with us, I fear, could have held me there when the stress of such emotion left me staring at the darkness in my restless bed—only blind faith in his Excellency that he would do no man this shame, if shame it was—that he knew as well as I that the land's salvation was not to be secured through the barter of men's honor and the death of souls.

The door being secured, as I say, and the heat of that July day abating nothing, though the sun hung low over Staten Island, I opened my windows, removed coat and waistcoat, and, drawing a table to the window, prepared to write up that portion of my daily journal neglected lately, and which, when convenient opportunity offered, was to find its way into the hands of Colonel Marinus Willett in Albany. Before I wrote I turned back a leaf or two so that I might correct my report in the light of later events; and I read rapidly:

July 12, 1781.—Nothing remarkable. Very warm weather, and a bad odor from the markets. There is some talk in the city of rebuilding the burned district. Two new cannon have been mounted in the southwest bastion of the fort (George). I shall report caliber and particulars later.

July 13th.—This day Sir Peter left to look over the lands in Westchester which he is, I believe, prepared to purchase from Mr. Rutgers. The soldiers are very idle; a dozen of 'em caught drawing a seine in the Collect, and sent to the guard-house—a dirty trick for anybody but Hessians, who are accustomed to fish in that manner. The cannon in the southwest bastion are twelve-pounders and old—trunnions rusted, carriages rotten. It seems they are trophies taken from the Carolina militia.

July 14th.—A ship arrived in the lower bay. Details later. In Nassau Street, about noon, a tall fellow, clothed like a drover, muttered a word or two as I passed, and I had gone on ere it struck me that he had meant his words for my ear. To find him I turned leisurely, retracing my steps as though I had forgotten something, and as I brushed him again, he muttered, "Thendara; tell me where it is."

At that moment Captain Enderley of the Fifty-fourth Foot greeted me, linking his arm in mine, and I had no excuse to avoid him. More of this to-night, when, if the message was truly for me, I shall doubtless be watched and followed when I leave the house for a stroll.

July 15th.—Last night there was no chance, Enderley and Captain O'Neil coming to take me to the theater, where the Thirty-eighth Regiment gave a frolic and a play—the latter most indifferent, save for Mrs. Barry's acting. I saw my drover in John Street, too, but could not speak to him.

This morning, however, I met the drover, and he was drunk, or made most marvelous pretense—a great six-foot, blue-eyed lout in smock and boots, reeking of Bull's Head gin, his drover's whip a-trail in the dust, and he a-swaggering down Nassau Street, gawking at the shop-windows and whistling Roslyn Castle with prodigious gusto.

I made it convenient to pause before Berry and Roger's show of jewels, and he stopped, too, swaying there gravely, balanced now on hobnail heel, now on toe. Presently he ceased his whistling of Roslyn Castle, and in a low but perfectly distinct voice he said, "Where is the town of Thendara, Mr. Renault?" Without looking at him or even turning my head, I answered, "Why do you ask me?"

He stared stupidly at the show-window. "Pro patria et gloria," he replied under his breath; "why do you serve the land?"

"Pro gloria," I muttered. "Give your message; hasten."

He scratched his curly head, staring at the gewgaws. "It is this," he said coolly; "find out if there be a lost town in the north called Thendara, or if the name be used to mask the name of Fort Niagara. When you have learned all that is possible, walk some evening up Broadway and out along Great George Street. We will follow."

"Who else besides yourself?"

"A brother drover—of men," he said slyly; "a little wrinkled fellow, withered to the bone, wide-eared, mild-eyed. He is my running mate, sir, and we run sometimes, now this way, now that, but always at your service, Mr. Renault."

"Are you drunk, or is it a pretense?" I demanded.

"Not too drunk," he replied, with elaborate emphasis. "But once this matter of Thendara is settled I hope to be so drunk that no friend of mine need be ashamed of me. Good day, sir. God save our country!"

"Have a care," I motioned, turning away. And so I left him to enter the shop and purchase a trinket, thinking it prudent in case any passer-by had observed how long I lingered.

July 16th.—Sir Peter not yet returned from Mr. Rutgers. The name "Thendara" ringing in my ears like a dull bell all night, and I awake, lying there a-thinking. Somewhere, in some long-forgotten year, I had heard a whispering echo of that name—or so it seemed to me—and, musing, I thought to savor a breeze from the pines, and hear water flowing, unseen, far in the forest silence.

Thendara! Thendara!

The name is not Iroquois—yet it may be, too—a soft, gracious trisyllable stolen from the Lenape. Lord! how the name intrigues me, sweetly sonorous, throbbing in my ears—Thendara, Thendara—and always I hear the pine breeze high blowing and the flowing undertone of waters.

July 17th.—Nothing extraordinary. The Hon. Elsin Grey arrived from Halifax by the Swan packet to visit Sir Peter's family, she being cousin twice removed to Lady Coleville. I have not seen her; she keeps her chamber with the migraine. As she comes from her kinsman, General Sir Frederick Haldimand, Governor of Canada, she may be useful, being lately untethered from the convent and no more than seventeen or eighteen, and vain, no doubt, of her beauty, and so, I conclude, prone to babble if flattered.

Here my journal ended; I dipped my quill into the inkhorn and wrote slowly:

July 18th.—Nothing remarkable. The Hon. Elsin Grey still keeps her chamber. The heat in New York is very great. I am, without suspicion, sending money through Ennis to our prisoners aboard the ships in the Wallabout, and next week shall have more for the unfortunates in the Provost, the prisons, jails, and the sugar-house—my salary being due on the 20th inst. I have ever in mind a plan for a general jail delivery the instant his Excellency assaults by land and sea, but at present it is utterly hopeless, Mr. Cunningham executing the laws with terrible rigor, and double guards patrolling the common. As for those wretched patriots aboard the "Hell" and on those hulks—the Falconer, Good Hope, and Scorpion—which lie southeast of the Jersey, there can be no delivery save through compassion of that Dark Jailer who one day shall free us all.

I dropped my pen, listening intently. Close to my door the garret stairs creaked, ever so lightly; and I bent forward across the table, gathering my papers, on which the ink lay still wet.

Listening, I heard nothing more. Perhaps the great heat was warping the new stairway, which led past my door, up through the attic, and out to the railed cupola upon the roof.

I glanced at my journal; there was nothing more to add, and so, sanding the sheets, I laid them back behind the swinging panel which I myself had fashioned so cunningly that none might suspect a cupboard in the simple wainscot. Then to wash hands and face in fresh water, and put on my coat without the waistcoat, prepared to take the air on the cupola, where it should soon blow cool from the bay.

Slipping lock and bolt, I paused, hand on the knob, to glance back around the room—a habit formed of caution. Then, satisfied, I opened the door and left it standing wide so that the room might air. As I ascended the attic stairs a little fresh puff of wind cooled me. Doubtless a servant had opened the flaps to the cupola, for they were laid back; and as I mounted, I could see a square of blue sky overhead.

I had taken my pipe, and paused on the stairs to light it; then, pouching flint and tinder-box, I emerged upon the roof, to find myself face to face with a young girl I had never before seen—the Hon. Miss Grey, no doubt—and very dainty in her powder and one coquette patch that emphasized the slow color tinting a skin of snow.

My bow, I think, covered my vexation—I being all unpowdered and wearing no waistcoat over an unfrilled shirt, for I do love fine clothes when circumstances require; but the lady was none the less punctilious, and as I made to toss my pipe into the street below, she forbade me with perfect courtesy and a smile that only accented her youthful self-possession.

"Mr. Renault need neither retire nor sacrifice his pleasure," she said. "I have missed Sir Frederick's pipe-smoke dreadfully—so much, indeed, that I had even thought to try Sir Peter's snuff to soothe me."