THE SPARKLING SNOW RENDERED BURR’S FACE ALABASTER WHITE.
‘What? How do you mean my designs are known? How widely?’
Bruin reached inside his cloak and extracted a folded newspaper. Burr took it and gazed on it, his head jerking about as if he did not know where on the page to look. Peering over his shoulder, I could not make out the full story, but the bold headline told the tale well enough: VILE CONSPIRACY TO DISAGGREGATE THE UNION. MILITIA MUSTERED. LEGISLATURE PROROGUED. GOVERNOR ORDERS ARREST OF BURR CONSPIRATORS.
‘They have even printed my correspondence,’ Burr murmured. ‘How …?’
‘Read on,’ said Bruin.
‘“… all of which information the patriot General Wilkinson has supplied to the President of the United States, and to the governors of the various States and Territories threatened by the Arch Conspirator”.’ Burr looked up. ‘Wilkinson? But he is our ally, second only to me in this scheme. I had expected to meet him within days to plan the course of our war. Why should he have done this?’
‘He has betrayed you,’ said Bruin. ‘A Brutus to your Caesar.’
I was still staring at the paper. VILE CONSPIRACY TO DISAGGREGATE THE UNION. What could that mean? Burr had intended to wrest Mexico from the Spanish, not conquer territory already held by America. Yet he had not denied the headline, nor even remarked upon it.
I suppose I ought to have felt elation. This must surely be the end of Burr’s conspiracy: the primary object of my unlikely mission had been achieved. Yet my orders had been to see that it died silently, unnoticed. I doubted Nevell would welcome it being emblazoned on the front pages of the newspapers. Who could tell what other aspects of the conspiracy might yet become public?
‘Anyway, there is no gain in freezing to death for it,’ said Bruin, commendably practical. ‘Your thoughts will come clearer indoors, with a good fire and a warm glass.’
Burr seemed not to have heard him. ‘That duplicitous, perfidious traitor. Wilkinson could have been Generalissimo of half a continent. Now he will be nothing – I will break him as surely as he has ruined me, until his name echoes in history with Benedict Arnold, Cataline and Judas.’ He seemed to have forgotten, temporarily, that it was in fact he who had conspired to provoke a war. ‘I have friends, powerful friends, who will aid me. Go back to the boat’ – this to the slave boy – ‘and order them to attend me in the house. We may be reversed, but Aaron Burr is not finished yet.’
Leaning on Bruin’s arm for balance, I struggled up to the house at the top of the ridge. Despite its size it was a sober, lean building, square-cut and simple; within, dark floorboards and heavy wainscoting lent it a mournful countenance. Even with all the curtains pulled open and the dazzling snow outside, little light seemed to disturb the gloom. With the smell of liquor thick in the air, it was not unlike being on the inside of a rum barrel.
In all the shock of Burr’s betrayal, my own predicament had gone unnoticed. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said to Bruin as we stood in his hall, ‘but I have need of a doctor. I was shot in the arm yesterday.’
Bruin’s face creased with concern. ‘You did not encounter the militia, I hope?’
‘A Spanish spy.’
‘That is a great relief. I shall send for Doctor Cummins immediately.’
Why the provenance of my injury should matter so much I did not know, but I was satisfied enough when Bruin despatched a slave to fetch the doctor. With a mumbled excuse, he and Burr disappeared into an anteroom for a private consultation, leaving me in a sparsely furnished drawing room. I seated myself in a comfortable chair, glad of the rest, for the pain in my arm still throbbed fiercely.
A copy of the newspaper lay on the occasional table beside me. I picked it up one-handed and dangled it before my face, trying to catch as much wan light as strained through the windows. There were three pieces on the subject: a proclamation from the governor of the Mississippi Territory ordering Burr’s arrest; an article describing in breathless detail the extent of Burr’s supposed transgressions, including his intention to disunite the American states; and, most curiously, a copy of a letter purporting to be from Burr to General Wilkinson in New Orleans, which (the accompanying text revealed) ‘the patriotic General, famous to all America for his recent negotiations on the Sabine frontier, rendering that happy state of peace and amity between the American and Spanish nations, felt obliged to forthwith supply to the President of the United States’. Why the patriotic general should have been party to such correspondence, why Burr should have written to him on terms of such confidence and intimacy, the paper did not question.
I skimmed the letter. Much of it was unremarkable, though typical of Burr: pompous invocations of honour, requests for men and supplies, details of expenses. The disunion of the United States was mentioned not at all, and the invasion of Spain only in the briefest, most oblique terms which would have been wholly incomprehensible without the newspaper’s assurance that it referred to damnable schemes of treason and conquest. But among all the rhetorical vagaries, one brief sentence leaped out with unmistakable clarity, transfixing me utterly: ‘Naval protection of England is secured.’ In the smudged, thick-set type of a provincial American newspaper, all the world could see that England had conspired with Burr. And here was I sitting in a magistrate’s drawing room, the human proof of that same connection.
A harsh squeak like the call of a crow sounded from the door, and I dropped the paper. To my relief it was only Burr, his eyes as bright and vigorous as ever.
‘So you have read it.’ He pointed to the paper on the floor. ‘It is all nonsense, of course. They have not a shred of evidence.’
‘But the letter …’
‘It says nothing. Show me where I declare my intention to divide the states, or to wage an illegal war with Spain. I tell you truthfully, Jerrold, that I did not even write half those words. Much of this supposed letter of mine is an invention – Wilkinson’s, I presume.’
‘Why should he have done that?’
‘Because evidently, despite his reputation, he is a knave and a coward.’ Or possibly, I thought, a realist. ‘He has worried at our delay, or suffered some unlikely moral fit, and panicked. He will pay for it eventually, even if I must suffer a charge of murder in a second state.’
This much I will say for Burr: for all his delusions, there was never any doubting his sincerity. Whether that spoke better or worse of him, I cannot say, though at that moment I did not incline to indulgence. All along, my position had been perilous; now that Burr’s English co-conspirators were a matter of public knowledge, there would be a great many men all too eager for a frank interview with the naval officer who accompanied him.
‘I know what you must think,’ said Burr, though I doubted it very much. ‘You and your confederates were persuaded to my cause by promises of the riches of Mexico and the wealth of the Mississippi, and now I cannot even guarantee my own liberty. Our predicament seems bleak. But I have been in worse scrapes. If they take me to court, then I am as confident as a man can be that I will walk out of it vindicated and free. Why, this is barely the beginning …’
He continued with his bluster, but I did not hear it. I was too much preoccupied by what he had said, words which had slipped out almost unthought. The wealth of the Mississippi. So it was true, what the Mississippi Messenger had reported: Burr had planned to combine his Mexican empire with the western states. To have invaded neutral Mexico and claimed it for his own would have been provocative, illegal even. But to then annex half the existing United States to his empire would have been plain, outright treason. No wonder Jefferson and his government were in such uproar now that they knew the full audacity of Burr’s scheme. Doubtless they would visit a terrible vengeance on him – and even more on the Englishmen who had conspired to steal back half their former colony. I squeezed myself deeper into the chair, feeling my hopes diminish with every turn.
‘At any rate,’ concluded Burr, ‘the Mississippi Territory never played large in my plans. Tyler and the rest of the men should be here tomorrow, and once they are assembled we can chart our course. It may be we can escape and carry out our plans before the governor is any the wiser that I have passed through his territory.’
‘Carry out our plans?’ I echoed. ‘But General Wilkinson has betrayed you. Without his men you will not stand a chance against the Spanish.’
Burr waved away the objection. ‘Cortés managed without Wilkinson. And we have what he did not – your frigates, poised to strike in our cause. While they sit in the Gulf of Mexico our wagers are still on the table. We need not throw in our hand just yet.’
He had restored his spirits, if not my own, and he bounded out of the room like a dog in search of a bone. I was left to wonder how, with my promise of those damnable frigates, I had become the guarantor of my own destruction.
My solitary piece of cheer that day came from the doctor, who called in the afternoon and spent half an hour unpicking the bandage from my wound, swabbing it out and applying a fresh dressing. ‘If it stays clean, there’s no lasting harm,’ he assured me. ‘The bullet took a bite out of your flesh, but the bone and muscle are untouched. Rest easy, and you’ll be set fair in a couple of weeks. Though you’ll maybe not see so much rest while Colonel Burr’s about. I guess he’s got the whole territory jumping like catfish.’
We spent a dark and draughty night in Bruin’s house, and midway through the following morning the rest of the flotilla pushed up into the creek, or bayou as the Americans called it. Burr summoned the men to parade on the field at the bottom of the hill, and soon the virgin snow was churned grey and brown under their boots. Burr sat on a horse he had borrowed from Bruin, stern as the Duke of York, while his meagre army marched back and forth in ragged lines. After a few minutes he called them to a halt and surveyed them from his saddle. There cannot have been more than sixty of them, but Burr had divided them into six companies, each with a lieutenant, a sergeant and two corporals he had appointed. The ranks owed little to ability or experience. ‘These officers will form the backbone of our army,’ he had once confided to me. It had always seemed an unlikely hope; now, as they stood in single files with their officers at their heads, it seemed the most outlandish notion. Behind them, a crowd of women and children – perhaps half as many as the men –watched like spectators at a hanging.
Burr looked down on them from his horse. ‘Well, gentlemen, I guess you know how it stands.’
It was remarkable, I thought, how Burr’s manner and even his voice could adjust themselves to circumstance. In polite company he could be genteel as a squire, with conversation that would have passed in any drawing room in England. In speaking with the men, his vowels grew harsher and his consonants dropped away, so that he adopted the rougher manner of an unschooled frontiersman.
‘You’ve followed me more than a thousand miles down the river, and I’m grateful for it. But now we’ve hit a snag, so to speak. The governor’s put out a proclamation that I’m to be arrested, on grounds of conspiracy against the United States.’ He raised a hand to quell the muttering. ‘It’s nonsense, of course – cheap slanders that ain’t worth a continental. We’re all patriots here. Lord knows I’ve told you plain enough and often enough: if there’s a war, we’ll fight it; if there’s not, we’ll settle my lands in Louisiana and turn our hands to farming. But this governor, he’s got it in his head that we mean mischief, and if the militia find us here they’ll oppose us. Now none of us wants to turn his guns on the state militia …’
Three-score cold faces nodded earnestly, while my spirits strained with the hope that this would prove the end of the matter.
‘… but I’m not for surrendering myself to their hospitality just because the governor’s taken a dislike to me. Seems to me that’s behaviour that belongs more in King George’s England than in our proud republic.’
That did not draw nearly so much agreement. He hurried on.
‘I guess all I can do is put it to you clean. Will you stand together with me, or does it end here?’
Sixty shivering, wretched faces, and their women and children behind, spoke plainly that they would far rather be at home in New York or Pennsylvania or Ohio than waiting to be drummed into a Mississippi gaol as traitors. But Burr was a hard man to resist outright, and it was hard to forget that for all his improbabilities he had once held the penultimate power in the land. One by one, their features strained with cold and misgivings, the men mumbled that they would stand by Burr until the governor had seen sense.
Burr beamed, visibly swelled to have kept their confidence. Like so many politicians his own spirits were an empty balance, rising and falling with the weight of popular approval.
Hardly had the decision been taken than a grey mare came cantering around the side of the hill. With the snow still thick on the ground, neither horse nor rider could have seen their footing, and I feared lest they both find their limbs snapped apart by some buried rabbit hole or hidden rock. Happily, no disaster befell them. The rider – one of Burr’s men, whom he had posted as a picket at the judge’s gate – reined in his horse and looked across at Burr.
‘The militia’s here.’ There was an awestruck terror in his voice. ‘A company at least, coming up the road. I seen their bayonets.’
A collective groan shuddered through Burr’s army, who doubtless now regretted their haste in committing to his cause. For a moment I feared we all might die in it, that Burr would insist on making a stand on this meadow until the snow froze red with our blood. But however often he let his optimism seduce him, his instinct for his own preservation remained master.
‘Back to the boats,’ he called, waving his sword like a charging dragoon. ‘We’ll cross the river to the Louisiana shore. We’ll be safe from the governor there, for the time being.’
My hopes had been in vain. Burr would not relinquish his conspiracy quietly – not in the face of public exposure, not even in the teeth of an oncoming army. What chance did I have, had I ever had, of dissuading him? As we tramped back to the boats, my feet numb in the snow, I wondered how many other disasters he would inflict on us before the inevitable defeat.