Treason, page 8
He went on to command a regiment through enough combat to last a man a lifetime. He drove it day and night until at last his health collapsed. Lieutenant Colonel Burr; he had earned that rank with honor and honesty, and of all the titles that had come since—officer of the court and senator and vice president and, he was sure when that title came, president—Colonel Burr would be the one he cherished and demanded as by right.
Then the great transition in his life that stilled some of the pain of old. He met Theodosia and everything was different.
Mrs. Theodosia Prevost, American-born wife of a British officer, mother of two sons in their teenage years and two daughters. She was a full ten years older than Burr. Major Prevost was off with the British army; she maintained the family mansion in the New Jersey countryside and made it a watering post for officers of the American Continental Army. That her husband was a Briton and an enemy was just one of those things. There were rules attached to visits to Mrs. Prevost: you must first be brought and introduced by someone she knew and welcomed, and then she must specifically invite you to come again. Absent these tests, your reception would be frosty indeed. But pass them and you were welcome whenever you reined up the long circular drive to her house, and if you bore a shank of beef, a side of bacon, a half dozen bottles of Madeira, that too was welcome but not required. All manner of officers visited; Burr fell in love.
She was smallish, her hair dark, her complexion dusky, her eyes big and liquid and warm, not truly beautiful but possessed of a beauty that everyone recognized. Her warmth, that infinite sense of caring, the unqualified approval in her expression seemed to him a miracle, coupled as it was with intellect and learning of a range to match his own. She was charming beyond any imagining and he needed her in a way that went straight to his heart. No distance was too great, no detour too far to bring him past her house and find him time to stop. He was handsome and dashing, his very appearance seemed to excite women and his conquests were legendary, but this was the woman who mattered. She mothered him, of course, balm to a tortured spirit, and people said that was her attraction, but Burr knew better. When her husband took fever in Jamaica and died she and Burr married and in due time she gave birth to a daughter whom Burr insisted on naming Theodosia. Yes, she mothered him ... she was a mothering woman.
But even then cancer was advancing on her, slowly but with devastating insistence. It became worse and worse. She was more and more often bedridden. Two more babies came; both died. It was tragic, yes, but they were happy. He would always have that. Burr was active in law practice, in the state legislature, in the U.S. Senate, and wherever he went he outlined Theodosia’s problem and begged doctors for a new cure or even new hope. Neither was forthcoming. She was sweet, generous, kind, comforting—she helped him hold his life together—but twelve years after they married she was dead. He was devastated; he and little Theodosia shared their powerful grief and grew closer still; his daughter became the mainstay of his life.
The year he was elected vice president, Theodosia married Mr. Alston, whom Burr expected soon to be governor of South Carolina. His son-in-law welcomed him into their married lives with an open heart which Burr (with much pleasure) suspected Theodosia had made a condition of agreeing to marry. Burr wrote her constantly, sharing his life with her, seeking her advice, bombarding her with instructions for her own improvement and for educating the gorgeous grandson she gave him; without Theodosia life would be empty indeed.
But then, life was a study in loss and irony. Since his youth women had opened to him as flowers and he had plucked them as a man plucks blossoms in a garden, admiring the sheer joy of them even as he knows they won’t last. But the earliest memories of his life were of loss and the crowning blow of his life was the loss of the only person who had ever set that first loss aright.
Aaron Burr was strong, forceful, a man of power who knew how to grasp it and how to use it. He scorned fear, he enjoyed risk, he was physically hard and he was a dangerous man to cross, a man to make great marks on the world. But much had been taken from him and deep-rooted pain also drove him, infusing all that he did— pain and loss that a woman’s caring eyes could lift into the open like a wounded cry.
Well, then, pacing along, had he been so wrong when the great chance struck him with a near blinding vision? The talk with Dolley and the ranging memories it triggered had disturbed him more than he liked. He felt oddly vulnerable, not like himself at all, and he needed to refocus control before seeing Wilkinson. This was a weakness that he was sure old Jim would discern in an instant and by sheer instinct turn against him, like a dog that scents fear.
They had brutalized him, demeaned him, made him a laughingstock among men whose response was like so many sharks sensing blood. What did they hold against him? That he had not stepped back, pulled his forelock, yielded to the Virginian. Well, suppose he had played the good soldier, withdrawn, demanded that the prize be awarded to Jefferson. He would be the much-honored vice president instead of the pariah, an important part of a successful administration—and he would have had a straight path to succeed Jefferson.
Or would he? Would Jefferson ever step down? Who knew? The Constitution put no limits on presidential service. Would he step aside for the New Yorker? Madison, now, there was a man with a lean and hungry look; who was to say he wasn’t the Cassius of this administration, at least as far as his old friend Aaron Burr was concerned? One look told you Madison had been positioning himself all along to be the next president whenever Saint Tom decided to step down. So suppose Burr had pulled his forelock against all his instincts— you still had to wonder if there wouldn’t have been some new circumstance to put him where he was now. Just had to wonder ...
Against all his instincts ... that was the key, wasn’t it? It wasn’t in his nature to step back from opportunity. Drive ahead, seize the grail, make it his own—that was Aaron Burr’s way and it had been from the beginning. He remembered rounding up stragglers during the war, sometimes he’d have to put a pistol barrel under a man’s nose, but he got them, all right, every one of them older than he, and he formed them and threw them against the enemy and by God, they’d done well, too. And they felt better about themselves, you could see it in their faces. When he turned them loose a lot of them didn’t want to go.
That was his way. Maybe wisdom said back off but Burr was a plunger and he liked it that way.
The duck was superb, a handsome big bird done to a turn. His spirits were restored, the boulevardier returned. He could always thrust away the old pain but it was like masking a toothache with laudanum—you knew it was still there, only hidden. Still, a good bird assuages one in other ways. He would have to compliment Mrs. Simpson, perhaps get her a flacon of scent ... which, naturally, he really couldn’t afford. But then he really couldn’t afford a handsome suite when everyone else in House and Senate had a room or shared a room in a boardinghouse. But Aaron Burr was an elegant man, a student of Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son. Now, there was a man, the elegant British nobleman, who knew how to live! And here in the rude United States, far from fashionable London, Aaron Burr held up the flag. A Chesterfieldian gentleman ...
When had he begun slipping into debt? His law practice had been lucrative but then politics took more and more time and with politics came power and with power came men eager to see him over any financial embarrassment with open-ended loans. He made it a point of pride to execute a note for every dollar he borrowed but they never carried a closing date and with a few exceptions he had repaid none of them.
Elegant dress, membership in fine clubs, handsome homes that befitted a man of his stature, lavish gifts for his darling Theodosia—all this took money. He considered himself a patron of the arts and enjoyed underwriting impecunious artists and writers whom he felt had something to offer the world of culture and deserved encouragement. It was surprising how little it took to keep some poor devil alive so he could practice his art in peace. Of course, when you multiplied that by ten or twenty, it did add up. But there always were more men of substance willing to send around a thousand in gold, have your note ready . . . .
He sipped the wine, watching General Wilkinson eat, feeling a sudden hollowness in his own gut. Superb wine, by the way, came fully up to the merchant’s claim—and should be superb, at the price. But that was the thing, he had more or less lost track of his debt, tens of thousands, certainly, though now he couldn’t really say exactly how many tens of thousands. For a man of power there was always more. But now ... the administration emasculating him in public, denying him even the trappings of counting for anything despite his title, which itself had become a mockery. Emasculated ... if the men holding his paper ever felt Samson’s locks were completely shorn and decided to call his notes ... He stopped himself. He refused to think of debtor’s prison. He would die there—it must never, never happen!
“So, Aaron,” Jim Wilkinson said, “how do you see your future unfolding now?” Burr started; had his expression betrayed him? “Excellent duck, by the way,” Wilkinson added. “I’ve always admired your capacity to live well.”
A compliment within a taunt; that was General Wilkinson for you, probably the reason so many people disliked him. Burr enjoyed him despite the occasional barb, perhaps because Wilkinson’s angry, cynical, deeply suspicious nature rather matched his own, though there was a roughness in the man too, nothing like Chesterfieldian elegance. He’d spent most of his life on the frontier and it showed. Been a big mule in the Kentucky Conspiracy at one time, too, days long past now.
His pretensions toward the elegance that came so naturally to Burr did make him faintly ridiculous. They were near the same age—indeed, Burr had known him rather well during the Revolution when they both were on General Washington’s staff. Wilkinson had been pasty-faced even then, running to fat at a time when Burr, lean as a wolf in those days, had sought out combat. Burr had heard the bullets whistle while Wilkinson was moving paper from one office to another. But that was all right; in Burr’s eyes Wilkinson had always been more a political than a military figure.
His career mirrored that. He’d established himself as a trader and a political figure in Kentucky after the war, engaged in the slippery tobacco trade with the Spanish in New Orleans. Eventually he returned to the army with enough political pull to land a berth as second to the chief of staff, Major General Anthony Wayne. It amounted to a bad joke that Burr appreciated immediately. Wayne was a fighting general, beloved of his men, called Mad Anthony for the ferocity with which he had battered the British. He gathered fighters around him and he made his men proud. Wilkinson, on the other hand, personified the political general of which Wayne was the antithesis. At once the natural-born plotter began undermining the fighter and was well on his way to unseating him when the latter took ill and died, leaving the way open for the plotter to slide into his shoes. Underhanded, of course, but Burr considered army command as political as it was military and felt Wayne should have been able to hold his own. It was too bad in a way—Wayne had been a great figure in American military history— but it also meant poor Jim had been living with calumny ever since. And with rage of his own—he’d had the political weight to get the command but not to get the rank that normally went with it. He remained a brigadier, fuming and furious.
Over the years he had let himself go somewhat. He was still a rather handsome man with sandy hair and increasingly round countenance that reflected to those who looked carelessly a kindly and even an innocent impression. He had added much fat and his girth combined unfortunately with his taste for fancy uniforms made to his own design with extravagant epaulets and flashes of color into which he fitted himself like a sausage in its casing. Burr had supposed until now that a uniform was a uniform but it struck him as nicely independent that a general should design his own to set himself apart. Jim’s girth didn’t help, though; when he wore his saber it tended to stick out behind like a rooster tail.
Actually, on strength of appearances alone, he was a little ridiculous but when you looked into his eyes you saw nothing at all ridiculous—nor innocent. Wilkinson was a dangerous man, quick, clever, duplicitous when necessary, skilled at turning the other cheek until he could deliver swift and deadly retaliation. He hadn’t climbed over bodies to the highest command by following a gentleman’s rules. Mad Anthony Wayne had been honest and direct, a fighting man as Wilkinson never would be, but it was probably well that he died before he could fully engage his subordinate. Burr would have put his money on his devious friend.
“What a good fellow you are,” Wilkinson went on, holding his glass toward the light to admire the color. Burr was uncorking the second bottle. “Able, superb political instincts, capacious of mind, grasp of the large view—and how disgracefully they abuse you, my dear friend. As, I might add, they do me too. We are victims together.”
“Oh?” The wine was sweet on Burr’s tongue, its fumes strong in his mind. “I don’t think of you—”
“Held to this miserable rank, sir. Brigadier! When every leader of the army was a major general. Wayne was a major general—am I less? The rank is mine, and they deny me. Just as they deny you—oh, don’t pretend, Aaron, it’s to your honor, as it is to mine, that such men should abuse us.”
He went on in this vein for some time. Denied the rank, denied the honor, and the money—did Burr know that a brigadier’s salary was a pitiful $104 a month? Thank God he still had trade connections on the Mississippi, cargoes running to New Orleans, to supplement this niggardly sum. Burr restrained a smile, remembering now that rumor gave Wilkinson a good deal more connection with the Spanish than mere favorable trade conditions. Spanish gold in his pocket, he sharing American secrets, which technically probably would be treason but in a part of the world that didn’t matter much. And after all, it was only rumor, doubtless kept alive by his manifold enemies whom he liked to say were jealous bastards who held his trade success against him. Still, he always added, he reveled in his enemies for a man can be measured by their ranks. What’s more, the day of their destruction would come, Burr could bet his last dollar on that. For—and here Wilkinson’s voice dropped to a whisper—he had dreams of a scale that soared far beyond their meager grasp.
But then, as if he might have said too much, he waved a hand impatiently, and said, “Well, enough of that. My destiny will unfold as it does.” His eyes brightened. “More importantly, what of you? I sense my old friend is at a crossroads. I know you well, Aaron; you’re not a man to take abuse and soldier on with a smile. I know you have plans to correct inequities that must rankle your soul. Tell me.”
Burr smiled. “I suppose you do know me, Jim. Yes, I do have plans that will, as you put it so nicely, ‘correct inequities.’ You understand that New York controls who will be the next president of the United States?”
Wilkinson’s eyes opened wide. “Jefferson is very popular with this Louisiana business; I’d have thought—”
“Oh, he’ll be reelected next year, no doubt of that; no, I refer to 1808. Everything will be different then.”
He talked on with enthusiasm, the level of the second bottle steadily lowering, the ravaged duck pushed aside.
In essence it was a simple equation but there were subtle complications and ramifications that delighted Burr and were sure to engage so devious a mind as Wilkinson’s. But the overarching fact was that New York was the largest state after Virginia and it was crucial to the new Democratic party. That it had gone Democratic in 1800 had put Jefferson in office; how it went in the future would determine the future. And the rank and file there were furious at the treatment given their native son. Now, it happened that the party machinery had fallen into the hands of that weak old fool, Governor Clinton, who was propped up every morning and made to perform by his ambitious nephew, DeWitt Clinton. Jefferson and his little handmaiden, Mr. Madison, had been courting Clinton, supposing he could deliver New York.
All this calculated, you see, as if Aaron Burr simply would go off and die somewhere to everyone’s convenience. Well, in fact, Colonel Burr intended to return to New York, reestablish himself, reclaim his power, and take over the state. The governor’s chair would be open and Burr’s popularity had never faded, so his operatives there informed him constantly. He was stronger in New York City where the origins of his power lay, but he was strong in Albany too. Party machinery would be in the Clinton faction’s hands, but Burr had cast the party aside in his outrage. He would run and win as an independent.
Then four years to consolidate his power and collect New York Democrats in his hand again. He would control New York while in 1808 New York would control Democratic chances. Ipso facto, Aaron Burr would dictate the next president. He might designate a worthy figure or he might take it himself, but the one sure thing was that the next leader would not be a Virginian.
This prospect was so lovely that he talked on and on as the Madeira level sank. Then he noticed Jim’s eyelids sagging. Enough, enough. He poured the last of the wine, and more to signal that they were done than out of interest, he said, “No more about me, now. Before we finish I must hear about what’s next for you.”
Wilkinson’s eyes popped open and he took up the glass with new relish. “I’m so happy to hear your plans, Aaron. Crush your oppressors, that’s the ticket. I knew you would find the ultimate revenge.”
Burr smiled. “You do have a way of casting things, Jim.”
“I care about such things, sir. Care about justice, about propriety, decency. I resent its denial, to me and to a man of great worth. Is it any wonder that I dream?”
Well, it was Wilkinson’s turn. “Of what do you dream, my dear general?”
“Of the West,” Wilkinson said instantly and Burr saw this had been in his mind all along. “I leave next week for Fort Adams to take immediate charge of the troops with whom we’ll enter New Orleans and take control. Five hundred men.”
