Remember the Morning (36 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning
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“
W
HY AAN'T YOU HOME MINDING YOUR kiddies?” grunted the latest in my dwindling list of London merchants.
“I have my kiddy with me here in London. He's being very well minded, thank you.”
As Malcolm rode north in jouncing stagecoaches to find out if his mother had negotiated a marriage settlement with his father, I had begun calling on London merchants to locate someone who would ship me goods on credit. I had acquired a pretty good list from several sources in New York. So far I had met with nothing but curt refusals and, occasionally, lectures on the incompatibility of females and business, like this one.
Soon I was down to the last name on my list, a cloth merchant named Chesley White. He was a short rotund man with red cheeks and kindly eyes. “I was expecting a creature with horns. At least a Jezebel with the airs of a Covent Garden strumpet,” he said.
“Why?”
“You don't know about the letter that's been circulated about you? I'm a believer in fair play, even though I can't imagine what a woman's doing in business, when she supposedly has a husband to support her.”
He fished around on his desk and produced a letter from Johannes Van Vorst to another London merchant, named Beckley.
I have news that my niece
,
Catalyntie Stapleton, my late brother's child, is about to descend on London in search of credit to rescue her from her debts here
.
She is the most willful creature in the world—and, I regret to say, possibly the most depraved of her sex in this city. Captivated by the Indians in her infancy, she learned nothing but their godless ways until the age of seventeen
.
It has left her without a trace of virtue or trustworthiness
.
She launched her business on Dutch goods, smuggled brazenly into this town under
cover of favoritism purchased, you may imagine how, from the
governor and his friends. Lately, she married a
fellow
named Stapleton
,
a lout with nothing to recommend him but a taste for rum
.
What he doesn't drink away of her profits, he gambles. Since the good name of New York is dear to me
,
I hope you will circulate
this letter among your friends to make sure she receives no credit or consideration from any worthy man of business in London
.
I burst into tears. They were tears of rage but Chesley White thought they were born of regret or remorse or both and pitied me. He took me to a nearby tavern and bought me a plate of oysters, while he partook of one twice the size. “I've found there's nothing like oysters to settle the temperament,” he said. “They soothe the blood marvelously. Is there any truth to that letter?”
“None,” I said.
“I fancy myself a judge of character. You don't look the part of a depraved woman,” he said. “I have a daughter about your age. She's about to marry a fine young fellow named Nicolls, who's spent time in America. Before I ship you any goods, I'm afraid I must meet your husband.”
Bow down, bow down
. I could hear my grandfather advising me. Fate seemed to be requiring ever-lower declensions. Not only was Malcolm to be examined like a potential felon—I had to do business with the man who was about to make Robert Nicolls rich. What next? Would I have to kowtow like the Chinese, knocking my head on the floor? “My husband's in Scotland on business,” I said. “I'll be happy to introduce you when he returns.”
 
The business in which Malcolm Stapleton was involved when I exchanged those polite words with Chesley White was not the sort that would have induced White, a loyal follower of George II and a warm friend of Robert Walpole, to ship me anything but condemnations. Malcolm was in the manor house of the McCulloughs, a few miles from the town of Thornhill. More and more he felt like a man who had somehow wandered off his home planet.
He had ridden north with his friend Hartshorne, who had bought himself the colonelcy of the 20th Regiment, which was stationed in Carlisle.
44
By happy coincidence, Jamey Stapleton was serving as an ensign in another regiment, the 24th, stationed in the same border town. Malcolm had stopped for a few days to see his brother. It was not a reassuring visit. Jamey had not grown into a man of any size. He resembled his father, short, with a snub nose and lank brown hair. He told Malcolm he had chosen the army as better company than his stepmother, whom he called “The Great Whore.”
Jamey's enlisted soldiers were the worst scum Malcolm had ever seen.
Every one of them looked like a broken-down drunkard or fugitive criminal. Hartshorne offhandedly admitted private soldiers were “the sweepings of the streets.” No one else joined the British army but people so desperate they regarded the sixpence a week they received for pay as decent wages. Jamey proudly assured Malcolm that his men had learned to fear him. He called one private, Tracy, and told him to go to his quarters in the rundown inn where they were billeted and bring him a guinea
45
from the cashbox in his desk.
“Yes, Mr. Stapleton,” the man said. He was a hulking brute twice Jamey's size. He returned with the guinea and Jamey told Malcolm if there was any money missing from the box, Tracy would get one hundred lashes in the morning. It was all so different from Malcolm's romantic vision of the British army, staffed by bold yeomen ready to die for their king, he could only shake his head in dismay.
Malcolm rode on to Thornhill through a countryside that seemed barren and almost uninhabited, compared to the teeming towns and villages of the English midlands, surrounded by their lush green fields. The humpish mountains of the borderlands were practically devoid of trees. Everywhere there were signs of war—ruined houses and abandoned farms. But the few people he met on the road were friendly. Their faces lit at the sight of him with a readiness that almost seemed a personal recognition.
Finally, a laborer with a shovel on his shoulder led him to the McCullough manor house, asking offhandedly in a Scottish burr: “Is it from London you're cooming, me laird?”
“Laird?” Malcolm said. “I'm no lord.”
“Excuse me,” the man said and hurried off, after ringing the bell at the gate of the sprawling walled house.
A bent old woman opened the gate. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she cried when she saw Malcolm. She crossed herself several times, trembling as if she were on the verge of a seizure.
Malcolm introduced himself and said he had been told his mother, Mary McCullough, came from these parts. He was searching for someone who knew her. “From these parts! She came from this house!” the hag cried. “I nursed her at my breasts, bare dugs they are now but once full of milk for the most beautiful babe that ever was born in the kingdom of Scotland!”
“I remember her as very beautiful. I was eleven years old when she—”
“Mistress!” screeched the old woman. “Mistress. Come see a ghost in the flesh! Help me God, before I faint away. Come see him one and all.”
People poured out of the house, young, old, and middle-aged, all
women except for one grey-haired man. They clustered at the gate, staring in a strange combination of horror and bewilderment.
“Is one of you the master of this place?” Malcolm asked, with some exasperation. He had begun to wonder if it was a madhouse.
“I'm best qualified to speak for him,” said a tall, grey-haired woman in a flowing blue gown. “My name is Mildred MacDonough. It was once McCullough. I'm your mother's sister.”
“Why is everyone staring at me this way?” Malcolm said, as they led him into the grounds. Several of the servants shrank back as if they feared his touch.
“You remind them of someone long dead,” Mildred MacDonough said. “They believe in ghosts. I was ready to believe in them myself when I saw you.”
In the house, servants set out glasses and jugs full of malt liquor and the women and the servants and the old man gathered at a long table in a big bare room and toasted his arrival. Everyone was still in a state of high excitement.
“It's a sign, I think—I hope—I pray,” Mildred MacDonough said.
“A sign of what?” Malcolm said.
“That history won't repeat itself,” the old man said.
“To the king!” a younger woman said. “May he not be much longer over the water.”
“May he be on Scotland's soil at this very moment,” said the old man, whose name was David MacGregor.
Malcolm thought it best to drink and say nothing. He soon learned the old man was his mother's cousin. The house and lands were owned by Mildred MacDonough's husband. He and his three sons were in France, soldiers in an army James Edward Stuart was creating to invade England with French help. But she still regarded the estate as McCullough property.
“They were conveyed to my husband in my father's—your grandfather's—will to prevent them from being seized by the English after the failure of the rising of 1715,” she said. “They issued bills of attainder on every prominent man who served the true king in that cruel war. My father fled to France with King James Edward and died there.”
These references to King James Edward made Malcolm so nervous he drank even more of the malt liquor than he was inclined to by nature, and everyone happily joined him, until there was a roaring party in full swing. They brought in a fiddler and several of the young women taught Malcolm some Scottish dances, which he performed with agility, being a natural athlete. Not until well after dark did anyone think of food. Someone in the kitchen had kept enough of her wits to slaughter a lamb, and
they ate roasted lamb and haggis and other native dishes with gusto until close to midnight.
Finally Malcolm found a chance to tell Mildred MacDonough of his mother's fate and the disposition of the lands in his father's will. “That bastard George Stapleton, may his miserable thief's soul burn in hell for all eternity!” Mildred said.
Malcolm felt compelled to defend his father. “I'm afraid I gave him great provocation to disinherit me,” he said. “I resisted his wish to make me a lawyer. A soldier is all I've ever wanted to be.”
“And why not?” Mildred said.
She caught herself. All conversation in the room had abruptly ceased. “You and I must talk in private,” she said.
She led him upstairs to an alcove beside her bedroom and sat him down on a footstool. The light from a full moon filled the room with a ghostly glow. “This was once your mother's room,” she said. “It overlooks the garden. In the spring of 1715, all Scotland was in a ferment with the hope of putting our true king on the throne in London. For once, the lowlands and the highlands were both aflame with that single wish. To us here in Dumfries came Duncan MacGregor, younger brother of the greatest of the Scottish chieftains, Robert MacGregor, whom we called Rob Roy. Duncan was your image. As huge and as handsome. Your mother melted at the sight of him and he at her. Through that garden and up a ladder supplied by me he came to see her for a month. In this room you first leaped in her womb.”
No longer drunk, Malcolm gazed into the moonlit garden, trying to assimilate what he was hearing. “Who was George Stapleton—the man I thought was my father?”
“He was the younger son of a barrister from Carlisle who was in charge of confiscating estates in the wake of the defeat of 1715. He kept wretched books and was a thief in the bargain. The authorities soon were on his track. He saw a chance to save his neck, we saw a chance to rescue some of the family's wealth from London's slavering greed. We proposed to hand over to him all our silver plate and almost every shilling of money, our jewels and our best bedclothes and raiment if he would marry your mother and flee with her to America. He agreed and sailed from Perth with a number of other refugees. Your mother was at that time four months pregnant.”
“What happened to my … my father?” Malcolm said. He was almost unable to pronounce the word.
“By that time, Duncan MacGregor was in his grave, slain in the Battle of Preston, fighting single-handedly at the last against a hundred English, according to legend. He refused to surrender like the others and tried to cut his way out.”
The Battle of Preston meant little to Malcolm. He had heard nothing from George Stapleton but denunciations of Jacobites. To think that his mother had sat in silence through these harangues, concealing her ruined hopes and broken heart. He saw why, of course. To tell him the truth would have required a confession too difficult for a boy to understand.
Mildred MacDonough left Malcolm to sit by the window until the moonlight vanished from the garden and the room. He threw himself on the bed but it was impossible to sleep. He was not Malcolm Stapleton, except by an accident of law. He was Malcolm MacGregor. What did that mean? Shaken beyond all measure, he drifted into a shallow sleep—to be awakened by wild shouts in the yard.
“He's landed, he's landed!” cried a man's voice.

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