David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

“You know that, do you?”

“I know my wife,” he said. “And I think I begin to know you well enough too. The sting of your disgrace years ago still hangs over you, so you look for new disgraces. But we can put a stop to that. When I prove to the world that your reputation was so unjustly injured, you will have a chance to begin your life anew.”

“I told you I do not want you looking into my past.”

“You did not say not to, only that you prefer the past to be left alone.”

“Then now I shall tell you not to.”

He studied me. Then at last he spoke. “Ah, I see.”

What could he see? What could he know? Perhaps he had heard fragments of the story, or perhaps Hamilton had told him all he knew, though Hamilton ’s version of events would be slanted and ill-informed. The short of it was that, in the weeks before Yorktown, Fleet and I had been stationed with Hamilton’s company and had just returned from making a series of runs between the main army and Philadelphia, visiting our Royalist contacts along the way. We had been sitting outside our tents, playing at cards, when an officer I had never before met, a major from Philadelphia, rode into our camp and demanded from Hamilton permission to search our tents. I had been outraged upon general principle, but Fleet had outright refused.

Fleet was a tall man, slender, more serious in bearing than he was in character, with a full head of cottony white hair. He was a man born to be a spy. One moment he could be either serious, or a doting father to his Cynthia, or as good a drinking companion as any man might wish. He could also be studious and sober and precise.

That afternoon, as we stood outside our tents, the air still and lifeless, I would have expected Fleet to tell me to endure the outrage with good cheer; that there was little that could be done, so it must be suffered without resentment. But not that day. He swore that this man, this Major Brookings, would lose his hand before he would touch any item in Fleet’s tent. At last, Colonel Hamilton was called upon and, in his stiff, magisterial manner, ruled that as Major Brookings acted upon good intelligence, he must be allowed to search, but that he, Hamilton, would oversee the matter to make certain all was done properly. Indeed, he even demanded that we be allowed to remain present, though he asked us not to speak.

Fleet’s tent was searched first, and when suspicious documents were discovered tucked into the lining of his travel pack, I could hardly believe what I saw. It had to be planted falsely, I thought, for, beyond any unthinkable doubts about his loyalty, Fleet would have known far better than to hide something in so obvious a place. Yet the look in his eye, that of distant terror, left me unable to speak.

The knife was to twist once more, however, for, when my own pack was searched, documents of a similar nature were found in a similar position. Appearances may have been sufficiently against Fleet to make me doubt him, my best friend, and yet now they were also against me, and I had no doubt of my own innocence. It was hard to focus my rage on this Major Brookings, for he hardly looked pleased at his discovery. Indeed, his face was cast in an expression of distant sadness. Neither Fleet nor I knew him, and that made it unlikely he came upon some errand of personal vengeance.

Fleet and I were placed under guard while Hamilton reviewed the materials, and in a few hours’ time he came to see us. The documents, he said, letters between an unnamed American and a British agent, suggested we had been selling low-level, inconsequential secrets. To an outsider it would appear that we had been in the business of making money while not precisely compromising the American positions, though certainly coming close to doing so.

Given, he said, that the army was in motion, it could ill afford the distraction of the discovery of treason among two well-placed officers. It was his decision, therefore, that we resign. We both resisted vehemently, but in the end it became clear that we had no better option, and we surrendered to our fate.

Hamilton would not permit me to examine the documents myself, so I could not see the hand in which they were written. It hardly mattered. Fleet and I both knew how to disguise our penmanship. I could not imagine that Fleet would do something so base as to sell the British secrets, even useless ones. He hardly needed the money, and even if he had done such a thing, why would he have hidden some letters among my things? And yet, how else could they have gotten there? Was it possible that the letters were from an earlier time in the war? Perhaps they were from months or even years before. I did not place items in the lining of my travel bag, but neither did I make a habit of checking to see if anyone else had inserted something.

I was troubled because Fleet hardly spoke to me on the subject. I proposed all the most obvious questions. I asked how he thought the letters came into our possession, if we were being made to look like traitors by some other person. He would not answer. He never struck me as guilty, only as too thoughtful to speak. He would fall into such moods at times-as he pieced together a puzzle or connected disparate facts or decoded a message-when he would allow no conversation, sometimes for days at a time. He needed time to think.

Then he left camp without speaking to me. While I awaited his return, Hamilton came to see me and put a hand on my shoulder. “There’s something I think you should know,” he said. “The war has been hard for Fleet, hard on his finances. I believe he is quite ruined.”

I removed his hand from me. “What of it? We’ve all suffered.”

He shook his head. “You and I came into this fight with little of real value, but Fleet was a rich man in Philadelphia. Now he is near penniless.”

“He would not allow his daughter to slip into penury,” I said.

“Before the war he settled separate property on her, in anticipation on this. But his business is gone. I am only saying that he might have thought it not wholly wrong to make some money selling worthless secrets to the British. He might have thought it his due.”

I came close to striking him. Nothing could have convinced me of such a thing, and I turned away without another word. I suspected Fleet had gone to Philadelphia to be with his daughter, and I rode out the next morning intending to follow him. Instead, I decided that it would be best to have some time away from him first, so I went to visit my sister in Connecticut for two weeks.

When at last I arrived in Philadelphia, I received the shocking news that Fleet was dead. Cynthia was in mourning, the house shut against almost all visitors. Her father, she told me, had returned from the war a different, nearly unrecognizable man. He had spoken to her infrequently, and then only a word or two at a time. He had turned aggressively, uncharacteristically, to drink, and had become very belligerent when drunk, only slightly less so when sober. After a week of such behavior, he was killed in a barroom brawl by an assailant never found. And there was more, she said. People whispered. They said he had been cast out of the army in disgrace.

I told her all I knew, disguising as best I could the degree to which appearances implicated her father-implicated both of us, really. I vowed I would find for her the man who had killed her father, but it proved impossible. I could go nowhere without fingers pointed at me in suspicion and hatred. No one would speak to me or answer my questions. Not only was it said that Fleet and I were traitors but that the accusation came from an unimpeachable source, Hamilton himself.

It was for that reason I left Cynthia behind. I could not ask her to be with someone labeled so blackly as I was. Fleet was dead, and people soon forgot that he had ever been involved in the scandal. I could go nowhere, however, without the rumors following me. These accusations had killed Fleet, and they destroyed my life. They were never forgotten, but time, at least, had softened the bitterness felt toward me. And now Lavien wished to unearth it all.