Making use of his earlier connections with the Canadian secret service, Andrew spends the early months of 1814 establishing himself as a special liaison between the governor-general and the Royal Navy attaché in Halifax, while “assisting Consuelo with her novel-in-letters.” Except for Jackson’s campaign against the Creeks, who are finally destroyed in March at Horseshoe Bend, there is a general pause in the American war: all eyes are on Europe, where Wellington’s Invincibles have crossed the Pyrenees into France and Napoleon’s fall seems imminent. In the wake of the second Canadian fiasco, American Federalists are calling for Madison to resign or be impeached; Armstrong and Wilkinson are too busy now vilifying each other to prosecute the war. Ruthy Barlow, having wintered with the Robert Fultons in New York, returns to Washington and reopens Kalorama. In London, Mme de Staël, unenthusiastic about the prospect of a Bourbon restoration, hopes Napoleon will defeat the Allies but be killed in the process; in any event she and her friends make ready to end their exile. Byron writes his Corsair, Walter Scott his Waverly, Consuelo her Cartas argelinas, o, la Delfina nueva.

Her collaborator and translator, as he privately prepares to avenge Tecumseh’s death, amuses himself with certain problems raised by the manuscript. He has persuaded Consuelo that a new realismo must inevitably succeed the current rage for the Romantic; to buy into this growth-stock early, so to speak, she has reworked her story to include all manner of ghosts, monsters, witches, curses, and miracles, in whose literal reality she devoutly believes, but which she’d omitted from her first draft as insufficiently romántico, there being none in Delphine, Corinne, or The Sorrows of Young Werther. Andrew is delighted — and gently suggests that she revise her ambition and residence to become the first great Mexican or Venezuelan Post-Romantic novelist. It is too cold in Canada anyway, no? And the Halifax literary community has not exactly laureled her like Corinne. Why do they not sail down to Bermuda together, where he has business, and assess the literary situation from there?

Consuelo agrees, the Allies enter Paris, Napoleon abdicates and is banished to Elba. Admiral Cockburn returns to the Chesapeake and renews his subscription to the National Intelligencer; General Ross in Bordeaux receives orders to take Wellington’s brigades to Admiral Cochrane in Bermuda for the purpose of “chastising Brother Jonathan” in some as yet unspecified way; Andrew Cook completes his strategy. As soon as Lake Erie is free of ice, he is certain, the Americans will re-retaliate in some fashion for the burning of Buffalo. Prevost himself waits for that occasion to prod Admiral Cochrane into action (the letter to Madison has not been sent, though Andrew has offered the governor-general numerous drafts). Sure enough, in May a raiding party from Erie, Pa., crosses the lake to Ontario and pillages the Long Point area. Prevost, into whose confidence our ancestor has by now entirely made his way, sends him at once from Halifax to Bermuda with orders for Cochrane both to demand reparation from Madison and, without waiting for reply, to initiate forthwith his proposed schedule of retaliation. Aboard the dispatch boat, as Consuelo prays to Maria Stella Maris to preserve them from sea monsters, cannibals, and other such realidades, Andrew adroitly redrafts the orders (and terminates abruptly, in mid-forged sentence, this first and longest of his posthumous letters, whose postscript you remember he added later, and whose interrupted sentence he resumes at the commencement of his second), substituting, in the catalogue of Cochrane’s targets, for Castine in Maine, Boston in Massachusetts, and Newport in Rhode Island, the words Baltimore in Maryland…

(And here I too break off, to resume in his fashion, quoting our forefather quoting himself, when I take up his second letter on the anniversary of its composition one week hence — by when surely you will have interrupted

Your loving father)

ABC/ss encl

cc: JB

&: A. B. Cook VI to his son. A. B. Cook IV’s second posthumous letter: Washington burned, Baltimore threatened.

A. B. Cook VI

Dept. of English

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Md. 21612

July 16, 1969

H. C. Burlingame VII

(address pending)

Dear Henry,

&*‡;364)5$!

Thus (missing, silent son) our ancestor opens this second of his “posthumous letters” in “Legrand’s cipher,” the first of which closed with his forged — and interrupted — alteration of Governor-General Prevost’s order to Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane to destroy, not “Castine in Maine, Boston in Massachusetts,” etc., but Baltimore in Maryland…

&NOTGNIHSAW!

(Where are you, Henry? Better your suspicions, your rude interrogations, your peremptorosities, than this silence. Why can I not share with you my amusement at writing this from my new and temporary office — formerly tenanted by that historian I mentioned in my last, now mine as “Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English” at this newly christened university — to be transcribed, as was my last, by my new and formidable secretary? My appeal to you last week, to join me here in Maryland for good and all after so many years, nay generations, of strained and partial connection; to take up with me the formulation and direction of our Second 7-Year Plan — seems to have been as futile as Andrew IV’s postdated postscript to his “widow” [from Fort Bowyer, Mobile Bay, February, 1815] imploring her to join him there at once with the twins, now that the War of 1812—whose most memorable event he will rehearse for us today — is ended. The second letter is dated a year and a week after the first: 154 years ago today. It is headed [without immediate explanation] Aboard H.M.S. Bellerophon, Off Rochefort, France, 16 July 1815. Napoleon, his 100 Days done, has just surrendered there to Commander Maitland; Apollo-11, after a flawless countdown and a 9:32 A.M. lift-off from Cape Kennedy, has left its earth orbit to land the first men on the moon; my father has been vaporized at dawn in and with a certain tower in Alamogordo, New Mexico; your father feels ever more deeply, though he understands no more clearly, the Anniversary View of History. Et cher fils, où es tu?)

& Washington!

We review the strategy with Andrew. The British government are convinced from the start that Madison is the tool of his mentor Thomas Jefferson, at whose instruction he has coordinated the 1812 War with Napoleon’s activities in Spain and Russia; while Britain is thus stripped of her allies and engaged in the peninsular fighting, the U.S. intends to add Canada and the Floridas to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. From the time of the emperor’s retreat from Moscow, and more particularly in the first quarter of 1814, the British Cabinet’s strategy becomes not only to retain Canada by sending new forces to Prevost’s aid, but to capture New Orleans as well, and, by tightening the Chesapeake and North Atlantic blockades, to force the secession of New York and New England. The Canadian border will then be adjusted to include a buffer state extending 100 miles south of the Lakes (i.e., most of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, as well as western Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and New England); British jurisdiction will extend from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. The United States will thus be contained effectively by the Hudson and Mohawk rivers on the north, the Allegheny, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers on the northwest and west. The Floridas are perhaps negotiable.