Mistress Firebrand (32 page)

Severin looked thin, but he was smiling. And, she realized, being mocked in a language he spoke mostly fluently but with occasional halting pauses while he searched for a word or phrase he no longer remembered.

It seemed the Mohawks did not much like his hair. It made him look like a woman. Other than that Ashur Rice’s son was entirely what everyone expected Ashur Rice’s son to be. There was no time for them to speak privately, but Severin kissed her and assured her that everything was going to be all right—and
this time
she could rely on that.

“Jack Brag cannot afford to alienate his Indian
allies, and my father convinced a fair few warriors to desert his cause if he did not free me. And Gentleman Johnny has other, greater problems now.”

Severin and his father and his father’s friends talked and ate, and Jenny gathered that much of their discussion was about the war and the English. By nightfall most of their guests had left the village. Jenny and Severin retired to Ashur Rice’s house, where there was an unused bedroom, dusty but serviceable, and they washed and tumbled into bed together, free at last.

He told her about Lieutenant Jones and poor, murdered Jane McCrea, and Burgoyne’s splendid table in the wilderness. Vignettes of fairy-tale fancy, and all too real horror.

“What will happen to us?” she asked. “If General Burgoyne takes Albany?”

“Taking Albany is one thing. Holding the wild places, like this, is another. We are safe enough here for now, and I am content to eat and sleep and love you, while Jack Brag tries to hold water in his open hand.”

Jenny was content too. For a week she rested and ate and relished the company of the man she loved, who insisted they be married. “If my parents had married, Thomas Devere would not have been able to twist the law to separate them, to take her away,” he said.

“If we marry, I will never be able to sign a contract without your permission.”

“Then I must always give it,” he said without hesitation.

“And if you don’t like the terms or the theater, or the theater manager?”

“Then we will discuss my objections and try to come to a decision together. As we should do
everything. But in the end, you will choose your course, Jenny.
Always
.”

He would not take no for an answer, and she found she did not want him to. She relented in the first week of September, though it took two more weeks to find a preacher to perform the ceremony. Jenny only wished Aunt Frances could have been there.

By that time news had reached them that General Burgoyne was on the point of surrender at a place called Saratoga. Among other things, lurid accounts of Indian atrocities—the horrible, damning story of Jane McCrea—had robbed Jack Brag of a good deal of his expected Tory support and bolstered Rebel enlistments.

“It means we can go south,” said Severin.

“To where?”

“Boston.”

“There are no playhouses in Boston.”

“No, but there are presses, and you have been scribbling away for months now. Unless you expect me to write out a thousand copies of this masterwork by hand, we should go to Boston.”

They traveled south and spent the winter in Boston, which Jenny did not much like, but where she put her newest work to press. By then General Howe had been driven from Philadelphia, and they continued on to the City of Brotherly Love, where there were not only presses but also a
theater
.

A letter reached her there, addressed to “Miss Leighton” but intended, she quickly realized on breaking the seal, for her aunt.

“It is gibberish,” said Jenny, passing it to her husband, who was by now used to being given vast texts and tracts to read, sometimes in the middle of the night, and
expected to offer considered opinions and constructive comments.

“It is a book cipher,” Severin explained, unable to conceal his interest. “A code keyed to a work both sender and recipient own a copy of, or know by heart. Can you think of any text your aunt always carried with her?”

It took a week to track down a copy of Rowe’s
Fair Penitent
in Philadelphia, and another day for Severin to work the code and decipher the letter.

“Angela Ferrers is dead,” he said.

“How?” asked Jenny, surprised to find herself grieving for her aunt’s remarkable, dangerous friend.

“André,” replied her husband. “At Howe’s bidding.” Severin wished John André joy serving his old masters. The Widow had been an original. They would not see her like again. “He tracked her down in Philadelphia. The writer has taken up her network, but is obviously unaware of your aunt’s fate. From the hand, I judge your correspondent to be a woman. From the questions she asks, I surmise she has assumed the Widow’s mantle. It is up to you whether we reply.”

Jenny considered for a day and then decided to respond. She could not bring Aunt Frances back, but she could honor her memory by taking her place in the Widow’s network. Severin—reasonably or not—felt he owed something to the American cause, to his countrymen, and perhaps this was a way to do his part, without the old “necessities” of skulduggery and violence.

And so she dictated a brief account of her aunt’s death, and Severin added intelligence from their travels and then put the message into cipher. After that, a new letter came every other week, and as Jenny had
resumed her profession, so Severin resumed his, in the service of the country of his birth. With the freedom now to determine his own limits as to the shape that service might take.

They discovered that Courtney Fairchild had been sent home by Howe to prevent his dueling with Captain André. And that Bobby Hallam had fled New York for Jamaica when Fairchild learned of his part in Frances Leighton’s death.

When the Southwark Theater in Philadelphia reopened, Severin expressed no objections to Jenny’s performing. And when New York was liberated at last, and for good and all, they returned there and bought a very fine house near the Battery. For many years a carriage called at that address three nights a week to take the John Street’s leading lady, Mrs. Devere, an actress and playwright who was a great favorite of President Washington, to the theater. She shared the carriage with her husband: a darkly handsome man, even in later life, who—it was subsequently remembered—never missed a single
performance.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Jennifer Leighton is a creature of fiction, but the American writer Mercy Otis Warren did earn herself a place on a British hanging list with her pamphlet plays
The Blockheads
and
The Adulateur
. The obstacles faced by ambitious Georgian actresses and women of letters in the period were formidable, and the theater was a politically charged arena on both sides of the Atlantic. Frances Leighton is modeled on early feminist actress, playwright, novelist, and poet Mary Robinson, a onetime royal mistress who later became Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s paramour when he returned home after the war.

The Georgian theater played a leading role in the American Revolution that today has largely been forgotten. Playhouses thrived before the war in Philadelphia, New York, and Williamsburg, college students staged amateur theatricals in their dormitories, and British and American forces acted plays in their camps throughout the conflict. The rhetoric of patriots like Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale owed much to Addison’s
Cato the Censor
—reportedly one of Washington’s favorite plays, which his officers performed at Valley Forge despite Congress’s ban on the theater.

John Burgoyne is not recorded to have been in New York in 1775–1776, but apart from the fictive diversion of the
Boyne
, the timeline in all other ways follows his path to defeat at Saratoga.

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.

Ballaster, Ros. “Rivals for the Repertory: Theatre and Novel in Georgian London,”
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research
27, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 5–24.

Berkin, Carol.
Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence
. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Brown, Jared.
The Theatre in America During the Revolution
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Byrne, Paula.
Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson
. New York: Random House, 2005.

Countryman, Edward.
A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790
. New York: Norton, 1989.

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: Norton, 2002.

Ireland, Joseph N.
Records of the New York Stage, from 1750 to 1860
. New York: T. H. Morrell, 1866.

Johnson, Odai.
Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre
. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Johnson, Odai.
The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774: A Documentary Calendar
. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.

Ketchum, Richard M.
Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York
. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.

Ketchum, Richard M.
Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War
. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

Nathans, Heather S.
Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

O’Shaughnessy, Andrew.
The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

Russell, Gillian.
Women, Sociability, and Theatre in Georgian London
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Schecter, Barnet.
The Battle for New York
. London: Pimlico, 2002.

Shaffer, Jason.
Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater
. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Stuart, Nancy Rubin.
The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation
. Boston: Beacon Press, 2008.

Swindells, Julia.
The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Taylor, Alan.
The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution
. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Wheelock, Eleazar.
A Plain and Faithful Narrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and Present State of the Indian Charity-School at Lebanon, in Connecticut
.
1763.

A CONVERSATION WITH DONNA THORLAND

Readers who haven’t finished the book might want to avoid the Readers Guide for the time being—spoilers ahead!

Q.
Mistress Firebrand
is the third book in the Renegades of the American Revolution series, yet it opens in December 1775, before the action in the first book,
The Turncoat
, and after the action in the second book,
The Rebel Pirate
. Why did you decide to write the series out of sequence?

A. Each book is meant to stand alone, so readers don’t have to worry about approaching the series in order. I write stories inspired by real women of the period, but because my books are fiction, I have the luxury of placing my heroines at the center of the action during turning points in the conflict. For Quaker spy Kate Gray, inspired by real-life heroine Lydia Barrington Darragh, this meant occupied Philadelphia in 1777. For Sarah Ward, a composite of historical Salem women whose stories I encountered while working at
the Peabody Essex Museum, that meant setting her tale during the struggle for the materiel of war played out in the waters off Cape Ann in 1775. For my latest heroine, Jennifer Leighton, inspired by Rebel playwright Mercy Otis Warren, and Jenny’s aunt, the Divine Fanny, inspired by early feminist and Georgian actress Mary Randall, that meant the New York stage in the mid 1770s.

Q. In your view of the American Revolution, power and loyalties are constantly shifting among your major characters according to their unique situation and self-interest. It’s a very different picture from what most of us were taught in school and makes our country’s origins, and the beliefs for which our forefathers fought, seem more like tarnished realities than shiny ideals. Why is it important to you to present this more realistic picture?

A. My favorite works of historical fiction, like George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books and Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond series, blend action with complex political intrigue. Even walk-on characters have their own goals and agendas, which are never as straightforward or as simple as national allegiances. They’re the kind of books that make you want to look up all the historical characters and events and learn more about them. I really wanted to write something that would make readers feel the same way about the American Revolution.

Q. I had the impression from my vaguely recalled school lessons that New York remained under British control during most of the American Revolution. But in
Mistress Firebrand
control switches back and forth between the British and the Rebels, often with neither side sure of their position. How challenging it must have been to live in the city during this time! What was it like for ordinary citizens?

A. The British occupied New York for most of the war, but in the early days of the conflict, when it seemed possible that the trouble could be confined to Boston, it was difficult to say who really governed Manhattan—the Rebels, who ruled the streets, or the Governor, who had nominal control of the garrison but dared not set foot on the island.

Ordinary New Yorkers had to contend with food shortages and inflation, and depending on who was in charge at the moment, a shifting political landscape that could put them in jail if they were caught selling goods to the enemy—whoever that might be at any particular moment. The rich fled to their estates in the Hudson Highlands. The poor had fewer choices.

Q. I enjoyed your depiction of early American theater through Jenny Leighton and her aunt. What inspired your portrait of them?

A. Mercy Otis Warren was the inspiration for Jenny’s character. Warren corresponded and shared political ideas with Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and John
Adams. Her satirical pamphlet plays, published anonymously, earned her a place on a British hanging list. After the war she wrote one of the earliest histories of the Revolution, but her portrait of prickly John Adams caused a falling-out between them and inspired him to opine that “History is not the province of the ladies.”

Frances Leighton is loosely based on Mary Robinson, also known as Mary Randall, an early feminist, novelist, poet, actress, royal mistress, and longtime paramour of British cavalry officer Banastre Tarleton, who makes a discreet cameo while very young in
Mistress Firebrand
.

The Douglasses and the Hallams, America’s first families of the stage, built the John Street Theater after the violence surrounding the Stamp Act destroyed their playhouse on Chapel Street in 1766. The riot in
Mistress Firebrand
, and the formation of a shadow company in the absence of the regular troupe, was inspired by incidents that took place in the 1760s. The Douglass-Hallam company spent most of the war in the relative safety of the West Indies.

Q. Severin Devere’s background as the son of a Mohawk Indian and the wife of a British earl seems so unique. Is he also based on a historical figure?

A. Devere’s origins were inspired by the life of Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, who was educated at Wheelock’s Indian school, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian affairs. Brant’s sister, Molly, became Johnson’s consort, and had eight children with him. The Brants
were raised in an environment that mixed Mohawk and English culture, and were influential figures in both worlds before and after the war.

Q. I love the way you contrast the two men: General John Burgoyne and General George Washington. You suggest that each epitomized the character of the men produced under the British monarchy versus the Colonial republic, and you make clear that Washington is by far the superior man. Can you elaborate?

A. Both men came from privileged backgrounds and both loved the theater, but Washington was cautious about money and devoted to Martha and her children. Burgoyne, though, tended to live beyond his means, and between campaigns in North America, he was seen in Bath with his future mistress, actress Susan Caulfield—while his wife lay dying at home.

Burgoyne himself died insolvent in 1792, leaving Caulfield and their four illegitimate children penniless, remarking characteristically in his will: “During a life too frequently blemished by the indulgence of one predominant passion, it has been a comfort to me to hope that my sensualities have never injured, nor interrupted the peace of, others.” One doubts Susan Caulfield, whom he never married and who lost custody of her children to Burgoyne’s family, would have agreed.

Q. Aside from George Washington, Angela Ferrers is the only other character who appears in all three books in the series. By now, I’ve come to admire her, fear her, pity her,
and scorn her. Most of all, I find her fascinating. Please say that she’ll appear once again in the next book, and that you’ll begin to reveal the secret of her origins.

A. I promise that Angela Ferrers will be back in the next book, and we’ll learn a little bit more about her in each installment.

Q. Can you tell us more about the Simsbury Copper Mine, where Severin is incarcerated? I grew up in Connecticut but had never heard of it, and was shocked to learn how inhumanely the Rebels treated their prisoners of war.

A. Simsbury was as bad as the infamous British prison hulk anchored in the Hudson, the
Jersey
, and predated it by three years. The first inmate at Simsbury was a burglar sentenced in 1773, but the mine quickly became a convenient place to incarcerate Tories during the war. It resumed being used, as a state prison, after independence and remained in operation until 1827.

Q. Was the murder of Jane McCrea an actual historical event?

A. Yes. It occurred roughly as related in
Mistress Firebrand
. McCrea was engaged to Jones, a loyalist, and was traveling to meet him and be married when she was captured by a party of Burgoyne’s native allies. Exactly how she died—whether she was accidentally shot by her own people while being carried off, or was killed by Panther or another Wyandot in a dispute over who was to collect the
bounty on her—has never been conclusively determined, but her death was a boon for Rebel propagandists, and the story has resounded through American art and literature ever since, most widely known from Fenimore Cooper’s
The Last of the Mohicans
.

I first heard Jane’s story in high school. She was a sidebar in an American history textbook, with John Vanderlyn’s dramatic painting
The Death of Jane McCrea
accompanying the text. It was the only image of a woman from the American Revolution that I can recall encountering before college.

Q. In addition to writing books and for TV shows, you’re also a big reader. Are there historical novels that you’ve especially enjoyed recently? Or books that readers of your series might enjoy?

A. I find that my readers enjoy a lot of the same authors I do, and I only wish I could come up with a term to describe the qualities that they all have in common. I love a book with a strong female protagonist, a hint of romance, and a historic setting with the occasional dash of the gothic or supernatural. My favorite contemporary authors include Susannah Kearsley, Lauren Willig, Simone St. James, and Diana Gabaldon, and one of my favorite authors while growing up was Mary Stewart.

Q. Can you tell us a little about the next book in the Renegades of the American Revolution series?

A. The next book features a schoolteacher heroine and highwayman hero and takes us to the near-feudal manors of the Dutch patroons in the Hudson Highlands, who ruled their domains as effective lords of the manor during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.