She checked her pistol for the third time and lay down in the shallow depression dug for her among the six cutthroats and Washington’s most trusted aide-de-camp. The moon was up, the sky was cloudless, and she felt naked and exposed, with only brush for cover and blacking on her face, but Hamilton had assured her they were invisible. She need only be silent.
It was impossible. Because the boat was coming, and there were only four men in it. All Royal Marines. Hulking in their red coats. Moonlight glimmered off their bayonets. Cast their pale faces in a corpselike glow, floating above their black neck stocks like disembodied heads.
More gruesome still they beached the boat and began digging immediately, not thirty feet from where Kate lay.
Only when they were done, and soft earth yawned to accept their planting, did they drag something out of the boat that had once been a man. She started, but Hamilton grasped her wrist and held her fast. She saw all of it, every detail but the man’s face, because they had covered it with a sack. They kicked the body into the grave, replaced the soil, and left.
Not until the boat was out of sight did Hamilton release her, and she scrabbled on her hands and knees over fresh graves to reach the freshest ones, then dug like a dog until her fingers scratched bloody burlap. Hamilton had tried to stop her once, then decided against it. Now he dragged her away by force, and ordered the other men to watch her while he cut open the sack.
“It isn’t him,” she said flatly.
Which meant they must do this again.
“You should not come with us tomorrow.”
But she did, because she could not stay away.
This time the man’s face was uncovered, but the moon balked them. They made the man dig, and taunted him while he did so, but he was silent, and offered no clue as to his identity. Kate tried to scrutinize the man’s silhouette, his height, the length of his arms, but the darkness played tricks on her, and first he was, then he wasn’t her husband.
Then, when they made him stand at the bottom of the pit he had dug, and asked him if he had any last words, he shrieked and tried to scramble away. Kate knew then it was not her husband. Peter would make a better end. She hoped. Reason told her any man’s courage might desert him at such a moment. Faith said Peter’s would not.
Hamilton uncovered the body after the marines had gone. For one suffocating moment she feared she had been wrong, but Hamilton shook his head and she began to breathe again. It was not Tremayne.
And there were still three more nights on this bleak shore.
On the next, a fog rolled in and settled over the beach, so that even though the moon was full, its light was so diffuse and murky that Kate could barely see Hamilton lying a few feet away from her. She heard the boat before she saw it, first as a disturbance in the steady lap of the waves, then as the scrape of oars in their locks, and finally, the slide of the hull onto the rocky shingle.
Five men emerged, crunching over gravel. Two in the lead, wraiths in the mist, surveying the empty strand. Two in the rear, prodding a fifth man who trod cautiously over the rocks, balance impaired, hands bound before him.
The fog muted their voices, blunted the chink of the shovel in the sand, as the condemned man dug. Kate lay tense beside Hamilton, her eyes fixed on the prisoner.
The mist confounded her. At first she was certain she saw Peter’s black hair, lank and loose around his shoulders. Then she thought the man’s hair might be brown. Or gray. Or blond. His shoulders broad and strong like her husband’s, then hunched and narrow and unknown to her.
She vibrated with tension, her trembling pistol trained on the marine sergeant, because it was he who had fired the killing shot the night before. The moon came out of hiding for a second, but the prisoner’s back was turned and she almost sobbed when the clouds raced in to cover it once more. She was struck by a sudden madness as the condemned man dug, to end it now. The waiting and the uncertainty. If she shot the sergeant dead tonight, and the man was not her husband, she would lose all chance of saving Peter, but this ordeal—watching men die in horror, doing nothing—would be over.
Then the pit was deep enough, and the marine sergeant called a halt to the digging. He stood over the helpless man at the bottom and spoke. “Do you have any last words?”
“A message,” said the voice that was unmistakably Tremayne’s, “for my wife.”
Peter.
Kate fired.
The marine jerked, struck. His pistol went off, the flash muted by the fog, the muzzle still pointed at Tremayne, who fell back onto the sand with a dull thud. The marine crumpled into a heap a second later.
Both men lay on the ground, Tremayne and his executioner, and instead of scrambling over dead men to reach them, Kate lay frozen with fear.
Hamilton’s rogues, fortunately, were not. They rushed the remaining three marines with fixed bayonets. Two of them died before they even saw the black-faced men emerge from the darkness. The last ran away down the beach, but didn’t get far. She heard his strangled scream.
Hamilton ran to Tremayne. Kate, still prostrate, watched him. If she stood up, if she crossed the uneven ground to where Peter lay, it would be real. He would be dead. The part of her life that had held him and the promise of happiness would be over.
“He is only grazed,” Hamilton called out to her.
She stood up on shaky legs. One foot in front of the other. To reach him.
“Please tell me you did not bring my wife,” said Peter Tremayne, sounding nothing like a man who had just dug his own grave.
“You should know your wife well enough to realize that she brought me, my lord. Permit me to help you up.”
Then they were both standing above an open grave, and Kate was crossing the distance between them and she was in Peter’s arms and it was all all right. It was finally going to be all right.
“For heaven’s sake, Hamilton,” Tremayne said, his voice breaking. “She shouldn’t have to see me like this.”
His clothes were in tatters. His hair was snarled and matted about his shoulders. She didn’t care. He was here.
“Had I spared your wife’s sensibilities, my lord,” Hamilton said dryly, “you would be dead. It was she who fired the shot that saved you.”
Tremayne gently disentangled her from his arms, leaned back, and looked into her eyes. “Good God, Kate, what have you been doing while I was gone?”
“Repairing deficiencies in my education.”
He raised an unkempt eyebrow. “Embroidery, watercolors, and marksmanship?”
“Lock picking, trick riding, and marksmanship.”
“She also expressed a keen interest in explosives, but we could not find a suitable tutor,” Hamilton interjected. “And, now, really, I’m afraid we cannot stay. If the marines on the hulks heard two shots rather than the expected one, they may well send a boat to investigate. They will do so presently in any case when the execution detail does not return.”
They rode into the valley that lay west of the Palisades, where Kate, Tremayne, and Hamilton parted ways with the hirelings and followed the road to an inn where Hamilton was known. He requisitioned a bath and a meal and clean clothes for Tremayne, and then all three of them spent an hour closeted in a private room speaking of powder and shot, of mills and waterfalls.
Hamilton rode south with them for another two hours, then turned back. They were well into American territory by then, and dawn was only a few hours off. But husband and wife pressed on, talking the whole night through and into the morning. Of Peter’s mother: “She was never happy at Sancreed. Paris suits her.” Of his cousin: “The king refused to give Sancreed to Bay. I expect the title will go into abeyance, and Bay will go to India.” Of France and his embassy to the French court: “America is very much in fashion now, but only so long as it torments the English. It has always been so. The French will meddle in Scotland and Ireland and America to spite the English.” Of the future: “We cannot rely on foreign nations for arms indefinitely. We must build our own munitions a
nd industries. Hamilton already has a site in mind.”
In turn she told him about John André and Peggy and the planned betrayal of West Point. The new day was half gone when they reached Grey Farm. They climbed the porch, their hands entwined, and crossed the threshold they had not entered together since the day they met.
They sought her father in the parlor, but the house was empty, and they could no longer wait. They kissed with an urgency that did not require bolsters or feather beds, and Kate found herself perched on the wobbling harpsichord, her legs wrapped around her husband, her jacket unlaced and her body alive, alive, alive to him, when the door opened and her father stopped abruptly on the threshold at the sight of them.
Then he nodded, a short sharp gesture that brooked no argument, and said, “Damned harpsichord can’t take the strain. Leg’s always been bad. Take yourselves off upstairs where the furniture’s sturdier.”
And they did. They climbed the stairs together, which still creaked as they had on Tremayne’s first visit to the house. And Kate opened the door to her bedroom and stepped inside.
Her husband lingered in the hall. “I should like to hear you consent to my presence in your bedroom.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And in your life.”
“Yes.”
“And in your heart.”
“Always.”
And he came inside.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Kate Grey is a work of fiction, but the woman who inspired her was real.
On December 2, 1777, Quaker Lydia Barrington Darragh overheard Howe’s officers planning a sneak attack on Washington at Whitemarsh. Lydia put her patriotism ahead of her pacifism—and her safety—and set out from Philadelphia to walk twelve miles through freezing snow to warn the Continentals.
Lydia delivered her message at the risk of her life. Later questioned by John André, she claimed to have been asleep during the meeting. If he hadn’t believed her, she would have hanged.
When the British attacked on December 4, the Americans were ready for them. Four days of skirmishing followed, after which Howe retired to winter quarters in the City of Brotherly Love, and Washington moved his men to Valley Forge and built an army.
Count Donop’s dalliance and disgrace at Mount Holly, as well as his death following the attack on Mercer, occurred as described. The identity of the beguiling Widow of Mount Holly has never been established, although some scholars have suggested she may have been former Quaker Betsy Ross. There is no evidence that Donop ever saw her again.
Graduating from Yale with degrees in classics and art history, Donna Thorland managed architecture and interpretation at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem for several years. She then earned an MFA in film production from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. She has been a Disney/ABC Television Writing Fellow and a WGA Writer’s Access Project Honoree, and has written for the TV shows Cupid and Tron: Uprising. The director of several award-winning short films, her most recent project aired on WNET Channel 13. Her fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Donna is married with one cat and splits her time between Los Angeles and Salem.
CONNECT ONLINE
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RECOMMENDED READING
Bailyn, Bernard. Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence. New York: Vintage, 2011.
Bakeless, John. Turncoats, Traitors & Heroes. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.
Bonk, David. Trenton and Princeton, 1776–77: Washington Crosses the Delaware. New York: Osprey Publishing, 2009.
Brown, Jared. The Theatre in America During the Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Clement, Justin. Philadelphia 1777: Taking the Capital. New York: Osprey Publishing, 2007.
Dwyer, William M. The Day Is Ours!: An Inside View of the Battles of Trenton and Princeton, November 1776–January 1777. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Fischer, David Hackett. Washington’s Crossing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Hatch, Robert McConnell. Major John André: A Gallant in Spy’s Clothing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1986.
Hibbert, Christopher. Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution Through British Eyes. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.
Jackson, John W. With the British Army in Philadelphia, 1777–1778. San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1979.
Lancaster, Bruce. The American Revolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Langguth, A. J. Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Lyons, Clare A. Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
May, Robin. The British Army in North America 1775–1783. New York: Osprey Publishing, 1998.
McGuire, Thomas J. The Philadelphia Campaign. Vol. 1, Brandywine and the Fall of Philadelphia. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2006.
———. The Philadelphia Campaign. Vol. 2, Germantown and the Roads to Valley Forge. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2007.
Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Mollo, John. Uniforms of the American Revolution in Color. New York: Sterling Publishing, 1991.
Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Nylander, Jane C. Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760–1860. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.
Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Palmer, Dave R. George Washington and Benedict Arnold: A Tale of Two Patriots. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2006.
Reid, Stuart. Redcoat Officer: 1740–1815. New York: Osprey Publishing, 2002.
Scull, Gideon Delaplaine. The Montresor Journals. New York: New York Historical Society, 1882.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The Rivals. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1893.
Smith, Billy Gordon. Life in Early Philadelphia: Documents from the Revolutionary and Early National Period. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995.
Wister, Sally. Sally Wister’s Journal. Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1995.
Zlatich, Marko. General Washington’s Army (1): 1775–1778. New York: Osprey Publishing, 1994.
READERS GUIDE
the
Turncoat
RENEGADES OF THE REVOLUTION
DONNA THORLAND
READERS GUIDE
READERS GUIDE
A CONVERSATION WITH DONNA THORLAND
Q. So few writers these days set their work during the American Revolution. Why do you think that is?
A. Contemporary scholarship has added a great deal to our understanding of the period, but it has also added a layer of distance. We’ve forgotten that revolutions are led by daring men and women—not demographics or economic trends.
Q. What appeals to you about this period of American history, and why did you choose to focus on the British occupation of Philadelphia?
A. Howe’s officers attempted to re-create decadent Georgian London in conservative Quaker Philadelphia. It was a clash of cultures from the start.
In London, this was the era of the Hellfire Club (which Franklin attended) and public figures such as John Montagu, the First Lord of the Admiralty, who had as many as nine children with his opera-singer mistress. Sex and the Georgian theater went hand in hand. Wealthy men chose their mistresses from its stages, and those with less coin from the streets outside.
London had Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket. Philadelphia had only the Southwark Theater, built in 1766 and closed repeatedly by the city fathers for immorality. (As a side n
ote, John André did indeed design a backdrop at the Southwark that remained in use well into the nineteenth century.)
The Mischianza, or little bit of everything, was the crowning event of that glittering winter, but it owed more to the baroque extravaganzas of Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones than to the Grand Medley tradition of the English stage. The event, with its river flotilla and grand processional, bore Captain André’s stamp from concept to execution. And Peggy Shippen’s father did, in fact, withdraw his consent for her participation at the last moment.
Q. Before reading The Turncoat, I knew nothing about John André, or even that the British had a spymaster. Can you tell us more about him?
A. A talented artist, a charming conversationalist, and very much a self-made man, André died in Tappan, New York, as much mourned by the Americans who hanged him as by the British he spied for.
His relationship with the Cope family was as set forth in the book: they sheltered him during his captivity in Lancaster. He discovered a talent for drawing in their son, Caleb. After André was released to New York, he wrote to the Copes, asking them to send Caleb to him as a drawing pupil and went so far as to offer to pay all of his expenses. The Cope family refused, but young Caleb made at least one attempt to run away to join André. Speculation about André’s sexuality has arisen only in the last forty years.
Q. Your novel made me feel acutely the high stakes and grave consequences for the men and women who fought on the Rebel side, while for the British soldiers it was business as usual. How do you think that uneven commitment affected the war?
A. For officers like Howe and Tremayne, it was “business as usual”—and a distasteful one at that. The Rebels were more dedicated, often desperate. Franklin said it best: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Q. You describe Britain’s General Howe as doing very little during the winter of 1777 to defeat Washington, whose army was stationed in various places just a short distance away from Howe’s men in Philadelphia. Howe’s refusal to act astonishes me. Was he really reluctant to incur high casualties, or did he secretly want the Rebels to win?
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