THAT BITTER EXCHANGE with Kate triggered a night of anguished insomnia for Caroline Skinner. It exposed, with the savage economy of a saber stroke, all the dimensions of her unhappy marriage. Dawn was tingeing the windows with gray, the first birds were twittering, and still sleep refused to close her aching eyes. In the next room, she heard her husband’s big feet shuffling across the floor, then the inevitable coughing, spitting, throat clearing, and other physical sounds of the morning. The manor house suddenly became a huge cage in which she was trapped forever. Hastily throwing on a robe, she fled into the park behind the house. Down a curving path she ran, tears streaming down her cheeks, until she reached a bluff overlooking the bay. The sun had not yet started to rise. The great sweep of water was still a murky gulf.

Across the bay came a strange rumble. What was it? A few stars still glittered in the pale cloudless sky. It was not a storm. Then she knew. The British and the Americans were fighting on Long Island. The rumble was cannon fire. She went back to her room, put on her riding habit, and rode over to our house for breakfast. It was an easy way to avoid her husband and his inevitable predictions of a royal victory.

There was another reason - in fact two other reasons for her visit. My father was still immured with his lawbooks, pondering the legality of independence. Most of the lawyers in Monmouth and Middlesex counties refused to recognize it, and had withdrawn from practice in the courts which had begun to function under our new state constitution. Caroline had spent more than a few hours arguing with him about this boycott and his attitude toward the rebellion. Although he was her uncle, only a dozen or so years separated them in age, and they had long been intellectual companions, exchanging books and ideas. They may also have been drawn together by their mutual unhappiness in marriage. Now Caroline pointed toward the distant cannon and told him that the sound made his continued hesitation unthinkable. War had begun.

My father smiled and told her that the war had begun a year ago. Caroline shook her head. “No. That was a war with New England. This, is a war with America. King George and his Parliament are making independence a necessity.”

My mother warned Caroline that she was talking treason. “Not any more,” Caroline replied.

At the end of a very argumentative breakfast, she asked to see my father privately about a “family legal problem.” They adjourned to his study, leaving my mother almost expiring with curiosity. In the study, Caroline told my father about Kate’s rendezvous with Anthony Skinner and her encounter with Slocum. “I fear the worst,” she said. “Has she broken a law?”

“As yet, no law against treason has been passed by the legislature. But she could be punished under several statutes against public lewdness.”

“If she is accused - will you defend her?”

My father hesitated, as usual. To appear before rebel judges would be a tacit acknowledgment of independence. His glance wandered uneasily toward the dining room, where my mother was undoubtedly still sitting over her coffee. “Yes,” he said.

At Liberty Tavern, Caroline’s fears were proving to be prescient. A few hours after she saw my father, Daniel Slocum strode into the taproom with a warrant for Kate’s arrest. It bad been signed by one of his recently elected judges. With it was a deposition from the landlady of the Shrewsbury tavern stating that Kate had spent the night there with Anthony Skinner.

Jonathan Gifford studied the accusing documents and struggled to control a mixture of anger and shame. “This has nothing to do with the war, Slocum.”

“It has everything to do with it,” Slocum said. “You know as well as I do that your bitch of a stepdaughter set Skinner free. Now she’s down there in Shrewsbury flaunting her tail with him, and like as not acting as his courier. She’s turned an enemy loose at our backs at the very time that we need every man to fight the ones that are likely to be at our throats if the news from Long Island is bad. We are going to make an example of her, by God, we are going to show everyone south of the Raritan what it means to truck with traitors.”

Jonathan Gifford looked past Slocum at the men in the taproom. He saw fear and anger on almost every face. Behind their confident talk, the independence men were haunted by a dread suspicion that the British army was unbeatable. It was inevitable. For decades, Americans had toasted and boasted the prowess of the English soldier. He turned to Barney McGovern. “You had better ask Kate to come up here,” he said.

Captain Gifford and Colonel Slocum waited in a silence charged with mutual dislike until Kate appeared. She was wearing an old blue housedress and only one petticoat. I was there and saw the lascivious light in too many eyes at the glimpse of Kate’s supple body beneath the carelessly flowing cloth as she strode into the room. She stood before Slocum, her back straight as an Indian’s, her proud chin high.

“Katherine Stapleton,” Slocum said, “I have been ordered by the magistrates of this county to place you under arrest.”

“What for?”

“Did you or did you not spend the night with Anthony Skinner at the tavern in Shrewsbury?”

“That is none of your goddamn business,” Kate said, color suffusing her cheeks.

“It is my business if anyone in this county, male or female, trafficks with the enemy.”

“If there is an enemy around here, it is you.”

“You are calling an officer in the service of the honorable Provincial Congress of the state of New Jersey an enemy?” Slocum roared. “You are condemning yourself out of your own mouth, miss. Why don’t you make a full confession here and now? We know you helped Skinner escape.”

Kate lost all control of her temper. It was exactly what Slocum was hoping she would do. In sixty seconds, all Jonathan Gifford’s efforts to protect her lay in ruins.

“I helped him escape because I love him. I went to him in Shrewsbury because I love him. You can do what you want to me. I’m not afraid of you or any of your stupid vicious friends.”

“Maybe we shall teach you some fear before long,” Slocum said .

“The Good Book tells us it is the beginning of wisdom. Mr. Gifford, you are hereby ordered to confine this girl in the same room where you previously confined her paramour with so little success. If she escapes, you will be responsible.”

“I won’t have to escape. A man with more courage than you, with more courage than any of you, will rescue me,” Kate said, making enemies of everyone in the taproom with one fiery glance.

“If be does, he will have to be bulletproof,” Slocum said. “There will be a company of militiamen guarding this tavern day and night. I hope he tries it. We will have no more worries about Mr. Skinner.”

By the time Caroline and my father arrived at the tavern, Kate was a prisoner. Jonathan Gifford was grateful for my father’s offer to defend her. He looked into Caroline’s haggard face and thought he saw the same concern there that was tormenting him. He asked her to talk to Kate. But Caroline did not have the strength for another encounter with her niece. For a moment she struggled with a wish to tell him what Kate had said to her at Kemble Manor on the way back from Shrewsbury. But why should she expect sympathy from him? Her unhappiness was none of his business.

“I think it would be better if you tried to draw her out yourself. She sees me as a kind of model - of what she despises.”

Jonathan Gifford was baffled by this statement. He sensed an unhappiness in Caroline Skinner’s voice that went beyond Kate’s dilemma. But there was no time to explore it now. He turned to my father.

“It’s more important for her to talk with you, Mr. Kemble. Take you up to her.”

A half-hour later, my father returned to Captain Gifford’s office, his hands spread wide with hopelessness and helplessness. “She has no interest in defending herself. She will neither let me plead her guilty nor testify in her own defense. She intends to remain silent.”

“Then she must learn the hard way. That seems to be the way women must learn everything,” Caroline said.

“Women and men,” Jonathan Gifford said.

That evening, Jonathan Gifford brought Kate her supper. She sat by the window staring emptily into the darkness. In profile, Kate looked so much like her mother he thought for a moment he could not bear it. Below in the tavern yard militiamen on guard duty guffawed over some joke. Their coarse laughter gnawed at Jonathan Gifford’s. nerves. They were probably talking about her.

“I think you’ll like this, Kate,” be said, removing the covers, “cold lobster salad with your favorite India relish, iced tea.”

“Take it away. I’m not hungry.”

“Do you really think he’ll try to rescue you, Kate?”

“Yes.”

“How many men does he have?”

“I don’t know.” She thought for a moment. “About thirty.”

“He can’t do it. Slocum is using you for bait, hoping he’ll try. Why did you tell them everything, Kate? They never could have convicted you if – ”

Like the messenger who aroused the King’s wrath with bad news, Jonathan Gifford became the focus of Kate’s rage for telling her the truth. She suddenly wanted to hurt him as much as he had inadvertently hurt her.

“I’m not a hypocrite like everyone else around here.”

“Kate - I’m trying to help you.”

“No you’re not. You don’t care about me. You don’t care about anyone or anything but this damned tavern and your reputation as an ex-officer and gentleman. To protect those two things you’ll let me go to the whipping post. Just as you let Mother go to Antigua.”

“For God’s sake, Kate, don’t sit in judgment on me.”

“I will sit in judgment on you. Because I know the truth. You’re like all the rest of them, playing stupid games with guns, worrying day and night about your reputation, your property, while women die all around you. Die from want of love. Because you don’t care about it.”

“That’s not true, Kate. I failed your mother. I don’t know exactly how. But I tried - I tried to make it up with you. I thought between us - there was a love.”

In the small still room, Kate saw an incredible sight. Jonathan Gifford, the man of iron self-control, was weeping. The shock almost freed her from her despair. She leaped up, crying: “There was - there is - I do love you. Or I did.”

“Then how can you say these things?”

She wanted to fling herself into his arms, to beg his forgiveness, to let him hold her as he often did after one of her tantrums when she was a child. But she was a child no longer. Sadly, she touched his wet check.

“I’m sorry. I guess I’m my mother’s daughter. Forget about me, Father. I’m not worth crying over.”

“Kate!” His big hands seized her arms and gave her a shake that almost made her neck snap. “Don’t value yourself so low. Your mother was one person - you’re another person - separate - different from her.”

She shook her head and turned away from him to stare into the darkness again. Another burst of laughter from the militiamen rose out of the night.

Jonathan Gifford spent an hour beside the brook regaining control of himself. Then he went to his office and wrote a letter to Anthony Skinner, telling him what Kate was facing. “She has acted out of a love for you that is more pure and disinterested than a man can conceive. She clings to the hope that you will somehow rescue her. I don’t think you have a chance of doing such a thing. Slocum probably has guards posted on all the roads from Shrewsbury. From what I hear, your numbers are too small to fight him. There is only one way that you can shield Kate - by surrendering yourself a prisoner of war and testifying at her trial. Even her part in your escape could be softened considerably if you told the judges that you played upon her emotions.”

Jonathan Gifford dispatched Barney McGovern to Shrewsbury with orders to deliver this letter to Skinner personally. He gave him enough money to bribe half the town into guiding him to Skinner’s camp. Captain Gifford spent the night pacing his greenhouse, too agitated even to work on his roses. About an hour before dawn, Barney rapped on the door. The sour look on his face announced failure even before he spoke.

“He read your letter and talked it over with his friends. I could hear them clear enough outside the tent, though they didn’t know it. They decided it might be good business for them, if the rebels beat a woman. Then Skinner came back and gave me a lot of malarkey about not trusting Slocum and sent me off. If I had a gun with me, I think I might have shot the bastard and taken a chance on running for the swamp.”

Early the next morning a dispatch rider from Amboy stopped at Liberty Tavern with grim news. The Americans had taken a terrible beating on Long Island. It was the beginning of that series of disasters in Washington’s defense of New York that shook the nerve of almost every independence man in our district. As far as Kate was concerned, it was not a good omen. The possibility of defeat, disgrace, aroused furious rage in many backers of the rebellion, particularly among the Slocums and their followers.

Later that morning, three newly elected judges, Lemuel Peters, Ambrose Cotter, and Samuel Slocum, the Colonel’s brother, arrived with Colonel Slocum and a military escort. They formed a three-judge court in Liberty Tavern’s assembly room.

My father tried to defend. Kate by asking for a specific indictment under the law. Since the state had not yet passed a law against treason, he was hoping to persuade the judges to dismiss the case. But his legal expertise was useless before Slocum’s judges. The Colonel had told them to convict Kate and they were determined to do so, no matter what the law said. Lemuel Peters declared the court was sitting as a kind of interim Committee of Safety. There was no doubt that the legislature was planning to pass a law against treason and trafficking with the enemy. In the meantime, public order must be maintained. Peters rebuked my father for attempting to use “legal tricks” to defend an enemy of the people. My father was left momentarily speechless to hear the bench so flagrantly prejudging the case. He could only shrug his shoulders, sit down, and let the charade begin.

The prosecution had all the witnesses. The landlady from Shrewsbury told in simpering detail what she knew - and imagined - about Kate’s night there. Two of Slocum’s militiamen told the court how Kate had lashed them when they tried to arrest her at the Colonel’s order. Slocum himself testified that he had heard Kate confess in Liberty Tavern’s taproom that she had helped Skinner escape. A coup de grace - if one was needed - was delivered by George Kennedy. His face still swollen from the beating he had received, he testified in a low defeated voice that Kate had voluntarily joined Skinner and his loyalists in the Shrewsbury swamp.

My father tried the only possible defense - a woman’s weak, easily influenced judgment. In effect he said that women had no judgment at all, that they surrendered it to every man who winked at them. I happened to glance at Caroline Skinner, who sat among the spectators, while my father was making this argument. I was startled by the anger visible on her usually composed face. The defense made no impression on the judges or the spectators. The trial ended with Kate’s reputation in shreds and her guilt beyond question. The judges conferred and agreed that they could not afford to ignore such outrageous disloyalty. They sentenced Kate to receive thirty-nine lashes on her bare back at noon on the following day. Kate did not show an iota of emotion. We could only admire the stoicism of a Christian martyr, wasted on a bad cause.

Later that night a note wrapped around a rock was flung through the bay window of Liberty Tavern’s taproom. It was a message from Anthony Skinner. He had heard about Kate’s sentence. Skinner swore before “the most high God” that the man who laid the whip to Kate’s back would forfeit his hand. It was a typical Skinner solution, meeting violence with worse violence. Jonathan Gifford showed the note to the judges when they arrived at the tavern the next morning. Lemuel Peters huffed that the people’s representatives could not allow themselves to be intimidated in the execution of their duty.

“In this case,” said Dr. Davie, who was at the bar pouring himself a morning brandy, “execution should be tempered by mercy. What do you hope to accomplish by inflicting this brutal punishment on an eighteen-year-old girl? You will only make yourself and your cause an object of ridicule and disgust.”

“You would do well to confine yourself to medical opinions, Doctor,” said Peters.

“All right, here’s one,” said Davie. “You may kill her. I have seen a hundred lashes kill a man. Thirty-nine may well kill a woman.”

Peters shook his head. “It is too late to change our minds now. We must show every man and woman in this state the kind of resolution displayed by the ancient Romans.”

“I never heard of a Roman abusing a woman.”

“Bring down the prisoner and let us proceed with the business.”

A company of militia under Colonel Slocum’s command and about a hundred spectators were assembled in the yard. I was among them, I watched, numb with disbelief, while Kate was led from the tavern door. It was a gray cold day. She wore only the old blue housedress in the raw northeast wind. They tied her hands to one of the columns on the tavern porch and cut her dress up the back with a shears. Ten militiamen were ordered to step from the ranks and draw straws to see who would wield the lash. A husky farm boy named Dunlap drew the shortest straw. He said he would not do it; he had never struck a woman in his life. Colonel Slocum lectured him on his duty. The lad still refused. Slocum turned to his youngest son, Peter, who was about Dunlap’s age. He reluctantly picked up the short ugly whip, with its nine ugly tails.

Kate cried out at the first blow. Then she did not make a sound. Many in the crowd watched with sick fascination as the whip fell again and again on that proud quivering back. I saw for the first time the hatred and envy that lurked beneath the surface of ordinary life. They were here to see Kate punished not for what she had done, but for what she was in their narrow eyes, a spoiled rich girl with bad morals.

I could see that Peter Slocum was striking her with less than half his strength. Still the cat was taking a cruel toll of Kate’s flesh. The skin broke and bled. By the twentieth stroke, her hack was a mass of raw oozing welts. Pain engulfed her. She no longer knew where she was, what was happening. On the thirtieth stroke she fainted.

Lemuel Peters, badly shaken - he had obviously never seen anyone whipped before - declared that justice had been done and commuted the rest of the sentence. Jonathan Gifford rushed to Kate, cut loose her hands, and carried her away. She was as pale and cold as a corpse. Upstairs Dr. Davie helped him force brandy down her throat to restore her, then held her arms while she underwent the final agony. Her father swabbed her back with brine - the standard treatment for lashed backs in the British army and navy. It prevented infection, but the salt water in the fresh wounds was hellishly painful.

For the next two or three days, Kate was feverish to the point of delirium, yet it was almost impossible for her to sleep. Every time she moved, pain clawed at her back. Dr. Davie derided to try one of his unorthodox remedies from the medical practice of the previous century. Davie’s mother had been a Highland Scot. Half his head followed the scientific tradition of Edinburgh and the other half inclined toward the potions, charms, blessings, and curses of medieval medicine.. He had saved the dress stained with Kate’s blood. At the foot of her bed, he stirred into a bowl full of water something called the Powder of Sympathy, which turned the water bright green. He added a half-dozen strips of the dress. Within the hour, Kate’s pain eased, and by morning it was gone. It was my first glimpse of the power of suggestion as a medical remedy.

Kate’s fever passed the following day. But she was far from cured. She stayed in bed for another week, face down like a corpse on a battlefield, staring silently into her pillow. Jonathan Gifford tried the obvious - and wrong - tactic of trying to discredit Anthony Skinner. He told her of Anthony’s cynical reaction to the letter Barney had carried to him. This only deepened Kate’s melancholy. She ate practically nothing and became alarmingly thin. Her father looked almost as haggard. In desperation, he begged Caroline to make another attempt to talk with Kate.

At first Caroline was wary. She acted the sympathetic aunt, visiting a sick niece. Kate declined to respond to her small talk. Caroline decided to risk bluntness again.

“What are you trying to do, kill your father?”

“Kill him? What do you mean?” Kate answered in a leaden voice.

“He eats no more than you. I don’t think he has slept an hour since you were whipped.”

“Of course. I’ve disgraced him. I’ve failed him just like Mother failed him.”

“How did she fail him?”

“She didn’t. He failed her. He failed to love her for what she was. ”

“What was she?”

“A woman. A woman with a heart full of love, a woman who never found a man - worthy of her.”

“Kate; I grew up with your mother. I freely admit I was envious of her. That was almost inevitable. She was five years older. I saw early that we were quite different people. Sarah was infinitely more enthusiastic. She won hearts more readily. She was always so ready to give hers. A lovely trait, but only if it is under some control, Kate. There is always the danger that it will become an extravagance, a thing we do for its own sake, for the glory or the pity or the sadness of it.”

Caroline paced up and down the room for several moments trying to conceal her agitation. What she was saying went to the roots of her life. “That was your mother’s real flaw. In part it was our father’s fault. He goaded her to extremes with his awful abuse of our mother for not giving him a son. It was a bad match from the day of their wedding, as far as I can learn. But in the end, Kate, I believe that no one - not even a woman - can blame her fate on anyone but herself. Bound as we are by all the prejudice against us, we still have enough freedom to decide our destiny. But if you lose your faith in that - as your mother did - if you do not develop your mind as well as cultivate your heart, if you see yourself as nothing but a bundle of desirable flesh created to excite a man for fifteen minutes twice a week - if that’s all you are, Kate, then everything depends on blind fatality, on whatever man happens to cross your path, and whether or not he chooses to be attracted to you. That is the way to desperation, Kate. You end up flinging your life away for a man who has no more use for you than – ”

“The Viscount loved her. I’m sure he did. She wouldn’t have gone to Antigua if – ”

“He did not love her. He wrote a letter to your father, after she died, swearing he had done his best to send her back. They say she died of fever. I think she died of embarrassment.”

This was stunning news, exploding one of Kate’s most cherished romantic dreams. But she was not yet ready to surrender to her aunt’s realism.

“She was driven to it. He drove her to it. The way he refused to forgive her. The man has no heart, Aunt Caroline.” She hesitated, remembering Jonathan Gifford’s tears the night before her whipping and plunged willfully to her conclusion. “He searches for one now and then. But he has no heart.”

“You are wrong. I know you are wrong, Kate. When he came to me last month and pleaded with me to speak to you, if I ever heard love in a man’s voice, saw it on his face, I saw it then.”

Stubborn disbelief still confronted Caroline. “Kate,” she burst out, “face the truth, for God’s sake. Your mother was a fool. A wild, wayward fool who never knew what she felt from one day to the next, who was sixteen years old until the day she died. You are going the same way, or worse. Are you proud of the fact that George Kemble asked the judges to forgive you because you were a typical woman, a creature with a weak will and no understanding? If you had any pride, Kate, any real pride in being a woman, you should have died of shame at those words. I almost did.”

Caroline fled from the room, all the deepest, most disturbing emotions of her life thundering in her soul. Her suppressed hatred of her sister, her smoldering resentment against men’s treatment of women, and her forbidden yearning for Jonathan Gifford flashed like a series of tremendous lightning bolts across her moral landscape. Outside, one of our northeast storms shrouded the sky with gray and sent a chill wind moaning through the September trees. The blooming beauty of the rose garden was gone. Like a foretaste of fall, the delicate plants were wrapped in burlap, looking like blind mourning statues. An image of your soul, Mrs. Skinner, Caroline told herself as she walked along the bank of the little stream, struggling for calm.

“How is our patient?”

Jonathan Gifford’s voice made her start violently. He was the last person she wanted to see. He limped toward her, a serious smile on his face, apologizing for his dirty hands. “I was working in the greenhouse. I saw you come out.”

Caroline nodded. She felt frozen by the fear that she might reveal to this man some of the feelings she had just confessed to Kate. “Our patient - our patient is not very well, either physically or spiritually.”

“She still loves him?”

“Who?”

“Anthony.”

“I don’t think - we didn’t even mention him. Kate is troubled by something - more serious.”

“What is it?”

“I - I’m not sure I can tell you. It has to do with - your wife - with Sarah.”

Caroline’s heart was pounding. She felt perspiration sheening her forehead. Was she about to faint?

“Oh,” said Jonathan Gifford, a stricken look on his face. “I know Kate and Kemble blame me for what happened. As I told you, there is some truth in it.”

“Captain Gifford - ”

How could she speak without confessing the wild, absurd, implausible, disgraceful love that was raging inside her? Was she going mad like the rest of the world?

“I was never the husband Sarah wanted. That is the only defense I can make. We both discovered it - too late.”

“Captain Gifford - She was my sister. I knew her well. Perhaps too well. She has paid a terrible price for her . . . That is why we both hesitate to speak ill of her. But it grieves me deeply to see you blame yourself.”

Jonathan Gifford’s voice was husky with emotion. “Mrs. Skinner, your sympathy - means a great deal to me. But I have thought about it through more than one night. There’s some truth to the charge that I was - less than wholehearted. It is part of my nature and I am afraid part of my profession. A soldier learns very early to control his feelings. In the end he almost loses touch with them.”

It was hopeless, Caroline told herself. Even in death Sarah was triumphant. She stared into the dark autumn waters of the brook. “I told Kate she is wrong. Wrong in what she thinks about Sarah. Wrong to imitate her. But of course she wouldn’t listen. Why should she, when it comes from me?”

She wanted him to contradict those last words. She wanted him to ask her, at the very least, why she said them.

But Jonathan Gifford only shook his head. “At least you told her the truth. We can’t do more than that.”

“Yes.”

She watched him limp away, back to his roses.

I told her the truth, but not you. When can I tell you the truth? Never, she told her mournful heart, never.