AT LEAST ONCE a week, Major Moncrieff rode down to Liberty Tavern for dinner with his old friend Captain Gifford. When he came alone, he ate with the family in the residence. When he brought two or three junior officers with him, Jonathan Gifford served them at the tavern in a private room. More than once, the junior officers asked urgent questions about his stepdaughter. Was she as pretty as Major Moncrieff claimed? When would he - why didn’t he - introduce them?

From one point of view it was better to have the officers asking questions about Kate than about Kemble. But their interest in Kate put Jonathan Gifford in another quandary. He had no desire to keep Kate in social isolation. She was alone too much as it was. Although she had physically recovered from her lashing, it seemed to have left her with a tendency to melancholy. She spent most of her time reading. The only person she saw, except for her father and brother, was Caroline Skinner, who invariably arrived with an armload of books. Captain Gifford had been a little staggered to discover that Kate, who had never looked at anything weightier than a novel or a magazine, was reading John Locke and the French political philosopher Montesquieu and the English radical James Burgh and the political-sexual exposés of Junius, the still unidentified mystery man whose scathing public letters revealed to a shocked world the depths of English political and moral corruption. He said nothing against this, either to her or Caroline, but he found himself wondering if it would not do her more good to be reassured that she had lost none of her feminine charm.

“Would you like me to invite some of the regiment’s junior officers to dinner? Moncrieff has them almost crazy to meet yen,” he asked one evening.

Kate shook her head. “It would only cause you trouble Colonel Slocum will call you a traitor. Kemble will call me one.”

“Slocum is already calling me a traitor because I serve Tories and British officers. Kemble is only a step behind him. But there is damn little business from Whigs these days. What else can I do?”

“I hope you are not thinking of changing sides, Father.”

“What?” Jonathan Gifford said, not sure he had heard his daughter correctly. The determined look on Kate’s face reminded him of someone. Kemble? No, Caroline Skinner.

“Changing sides, Father. If you are, I would not be able to follow you. The more I study the subject, the more convinced I am that we - the Americans - are in the right.”

Caroline had changed Kate into a revolutionist. Her melancholy was a by-product of this change. It made her regret even more keenly her reckless leap into love with Anthony Skinner.

“I’m not changing sides, Kate. I’m glad to see you have such strong opinions. That means there is even less reason to worry about having dinner with a British officer or two. A girl your age shouldn’t spend all her time reading political philosophy.”

Kate threw her arms around him and kissed him with some of her old enthusiasm. “You are a dear to worry about me.”

A few nights later, Major Moncrieff rode down to dinner with an invitation. “We are going to end the winter of our discontent with a ball,” he told Kate. “And we are desperate for eligible young ladies. Say yes or be reduced to dancing with one of my lieutenants. None of them is pretty. In fact, it’s a pretty choice which is uglier.”

“What do you think, Father?” Kate asked.

“I see no harm in it,” Jonathan Gifford said, wishing Kemble was not glowering at the other end of the table.

Major Moncrieff had won a special place in Kate’s affections. An invitation from him had extra weight. But it was Kemble who made up her mind. He began lecturing Jonathan Gifford about the dangers of letting gullible women associate with sophisticated English officers.

“Did you call me gullible?” Kate asked.

“It is not simply you - I am talking about women in general.”

“You mean’ we are such nincompoops, we cannot be trusted to have opinions of our own?”

“If you want to put it bluntly - yes!”

“Major,” Kate said, “I accept your invitation. But let me warn you that I will defend the rights of my country if the conversation turns to politics.”

“My dear,” said Moncrieff, “if you look at my lieutenants and captains the way you are looking at me now, it wouldn’t surprise me if the chuckleheads deserted to Washington in a body. If I was twenty years younger I’d go myself.”

“I don’t have a decent dress,” Kate said. “I mean one that isn’t two years old. I don’t even know this year’s fashion.”

“I will not tolerate your buying a London dress,” Kemble said. “That is against the law.”

“We will supply you with a half-dozen London babies and all the cloth we can steal from the commissary,” said Moncrieff. “If necessary, we’ll buy a dress from some damn American who just got it off a privateer.”

“A bargain,” Kate said.

“By God, Gifford,” said Moncrieff, “I knew you’d stand up for the old regiment, even if you’ve turned half a rebel. We shall lord it over those macaronis in the guards and those pretentious chuckleheads on the general’s staff now, with the prettiest girl in New Jersey for our dance cards.”

The daughters of a good many independence men were forbidden to attend the British ball, to the acute remorse of some young ladies. The shortage of femininity was well known and widely discussed in Liberty Tavern’s taproom. Samson Tucker, with five daughters, was a divided man.

“God’s bones,” he groused, “I wish we could patch up a peace in a fortnight, and before the redcoats sailed home I might pick out a viscount or a baronet for one of my female tribe.”

“Samson,” said Jonathan Gifford, “I thought you were an all-out independence man.”

“Oh, I am,” said Samson. “You heard me say I want’m sailing home, didn’t you? But why not take a little souvenir of New Jersey with’m? I don’t see nothing wrong with having a viscount in the family. I don’t believe the honorable Congress has resolved a single word on that subject.”

Down at the Gifford residence, the female half of Liberty Tavern’s staff was spending most of their time getting Kate ready for the ball. Major Moncrieff procured the latest London baby from New York, and Kate marshaled Bertha, Molly McGovern, and her old removed-to-Amboy New York dressmaker, Bridget Terhune, to remodel one f her 1774 dresses. This involved a vast amount of sewing and stitching. Hoops were continuing to dwindle. Sleeves were now waist length. The bodice remained low enough to shock any lady of the present generation who has forgotten how much flesh was unblushingly exposed by the leaders of eighteenth-century society. The style suited Kate so perfectly, she saw no need to seek refuge in the lace fichu that was often the resort of those to whom nature had not been generous. But she still refused to pile and powder her hair in the London style. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she inclined toward not dressing her hair at all, but combing it straight down, and tying it with a plain ribbon as a declaration of republican simplicity.

On the night of the dance, I drove my sister Sally over to Liberty Tavern in our chaise. She - or more exactly, my mother - had also accepted an invitation to the dance, and we had spent hard money we could not spare to buy her a dress in New York. We arrived to discover Kate and Kemble arguing furiously in their parlor. Kemble refused to believe that Kate had created her dress out of one of her old ones. He was examining it like a customs inspector, demanding to know where the lace, the ruchings, the rosettes had come from. Kate was telling him to go to hell, it was none of his business.

“Listen to him,” she said to me and Sally. “He doesn’t even notice my hair.”

My sister, with her “head” piled a foot and a half high, and wrapped in gauze spotted with paste jewels, was goggle-eyed. “Oh, I wish I could do the same thing,” she said. “This damn thing itches so. And I think it’s ugly.”

“It is,” I said, not even looking at her. I Was gazing in rapture at Kate. Her dress was a dark green that both matched and modulated the green of her eyes. I saw not only its beauty, but exactly what she was trying to do - show the British that an American girl could both equal and defy London fashion. I tried to explain this to Kemble after the girls left. But he declined to listen to me.

“Going to that dance is an act of treason,” he said. “It will give those damn British officers a chance to spread their charm. You don’t seem to understand the real issue in this Revolution, Jemmy. England was corrupting America, seducing her step by step into their rotten luxury and knee-bending to aristocracy. She’s still trying to play the game. It sickens me to see my sister - and your sister - succumbing to it.”

I was awed into silence by Kemble’s intensity. I even managed to work up some indignation against my sister. But my heart could not muster even a flicker of wrath against Kate. I was still half in love with her in a distant hopeless way. Perhaps it was then that I began to separate myself from Kemble, to begin to see the Revolution with my own eyes.

Major Moncrieff and six dragoons arrived to escort Kate and my sister Sally to the ball. In New Brunswick Kate was relieved to discover a surprising number of American girls in the company. The four Misses Van Horne, whose parents were considered staunch Whigs, were a picturesque enclave all by themselves, wearing dresses that were obviously just off a ship from London. Kate had gone to school with one of them in New York. When the girl caught sight of her she nudged one of her sisters and in a moment they were all staring at her as if she were a traveling curiosity. Kate found herself flushing angrily. Her whipping was obviously still hot gossip for the hypocrites.

Before the ball began, the officers staged a play. It made outrageous fun of all the American generals, from George Washington to William Maxwell. Washington was pictured as a dumb, drawling Virginian with a sword so huge it dragged along the ground. He was unable to make up his mind about anything. In one scene, he deliberated for a good ten minutes about whether to feed his horse first and have dinner afterward or vice versa. The innkeeper became so exasperated, he finally told the General to go eat hay with his horse. General Putnam was portrayed as a roaring madman making incomprehensible speeches about liberty, and writing letters so badly spelled he could not read them himself one minute later. William Maxwell was drunk from the moment he staggered onstage. He produced a bottle at a mock council of war and got all the rest of Washington’s generals drunk, too. The audience roared with laughter over all this wit at American expense and Kate found herself laughing too, but not wholeheartedly.

At the ball after the play, the officers of the King’s Own Regiment swarmed around her. She did not miss a dance. Major Moncrieff, who had been secretly designated by Jonathan Gifford to act as a chaperon, watched on the sidelines, beaming. Everyone was so gallant, so full of attentions, so deft at amusing small talk that an argument about politics became remote, fanciful. Kate had to remind herself that these men were the enemy, that they had given orders to fire the guns that had killed John Fleming and hundreds of other Americans.

For the first time Kate began to understand how her mother had fallen in love with one of these officers. So many of them represented a world of culture and luxury and privileged wealth, a faery world infinitely beyond the humdrum natural beauty of the New Jersey countryside. She also understood for the first time one part of her attraction to Anthony Skinner. With his endless talk of London and living in style, his fascination with rank and titles, he was a colonial imitation of these glittering gentlemen in red coats.

Thinking these thoughts behind her mask of gay chatter, Kate felt a clutch of self-doubt. Was she doomed to imitate her mother down to the final fatality? She was dancing a gavotte with a muscular captain. It was a dance that traditionally permitted another admirer to break in. A familiar face appeared above the Captain’s shoulder. Anthony Skinner touched his arm.

Anthony was wearing his green militia colonel’s coat with its abundance of gold braid. He wasted no time in getting to the point. “Why won’t you see me or answer my letters? Is it your father?”

“My father has delivered all your letters.”

“He’s using you, Kate, using you against me. Don’t you see how valuable, it would be politically if we married now? It would make your brother Kemble look foolish. It would squelch those people who blame me for letting you get whipped.”

Once more Anthony’s overconfidence in his powers of persuasion and his underestimation of her intelligence were appallingly visible.

“I have changed my mind about the Revolution, Anthony. I wish I could change yours.. When the war ends, perhaps we can decide how much our political differences matter. For now - ”

“I was afraid your father or your brother would turn your head around, Kate. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Take my word for it. I need you now, Kate, not after the war. I want you now. How could you forget the happiness of that night in Shrewsbury, Kate? It was our wedding night.”

Kate began to weep. She saw, felt, her old longing for this man still alive within her, beside her new repugnance. She had not abandoned her desire for him; instead, she had only managed to sequester it in an unvisited part of herself while she filled her mind with politics and philosophy and women’s rights. The old Kate was letting her know that she would not be so casually dismissed by new ideas, however interesting.

Major Moncrieff seemed to materialize beside them. “My dear fellow,” he said, “you appear to be making this young lady cry. Please go away, or I will be forced to thrash you.”

Anthony Skinner retreated. The next partner on Kate’s card, a lieutenant of the King’s Own, approached her with a bow as the orchestra began a menuet de la cour. He was a tall, rather ugly young man named Rawdon. He looked solemn to the point of utter dullness.

“It’s hard to believe that these were once lively dances,” Lieutenant Rawdon said. “Minuets, I mean.” He began giving her a history of the four types of minuets which he claimed should now be classified as slow, slower, slowest, and dead. Even gavottes and allemandes had been slowed to a middle-aged pace. He said it was because royalty had taken over these dances and replaced their zest with ponderous formality.

These were rather startling opinions from a British officer. “We only dance these things to prove we can do it,” Kate said. “Would you like to see how Americans really dance?”

A smile leaped across Lieutenant Rawdon’s wide mouth, giving him a rather puckish look. “I. would like to see Americans do something besides shoot -at me,” be said.

“Let us talk to old Jacquelin.”

Jacquelin Dupuy was the best fiddler in the neighborhood. He had been recruited into the orchestra. “Jack;” Kate said to the white-haired Frenchman. “This gentleman does not believe I can dance him down in a country reel.”

Jacquelin looked worried. “The General said ”

“I will tend to the General,” said Lieutenant Rawdon. “Get to work, old man.”

Old Jack stepped `to the front of the podium and struck up one of the fastest reels in his repertoire. Most of the ladies looked dismayed. With their absurdly high heads, their panoplies of hoops and stays, such violent activity was beyond them. Reels were only “danced at private homes, where women were in “undress” - without hoops. Those who tried to match Kate’s pace soon staggered off to the left and right, gasping. Red-faced colonels and puffing majors joined them with relief, aghast at how exhausting an American country dance could be. They were soon joined by spavined captains and lieutenants. In fifteen minutes Kate and Lieutenant Rawdon had the floor to themselves. They might have danced for another hour, if Major General James Grant had not intervened.

Grant was in command at New Brunswick. He was a short squarish man with a pug nose and bulldog mouth encased in rolls of flesh. He stomped to the podium and waved Jacquelin into silence. “I thought I gave an order that we were to have none of these American dances. This stamping and jigging is not appropriate to His. Majesty’s officers.”‘

Old Jacquelin and the rest of the orchestra seemed to think they might be shot at sunrise. They stammered out an explanation, pointing to Lieutenant Rawdon. “He what?” roared General Grant.

He thundered down the ballroom to Rawdon. “I will see you at my headquarters tomorrow, sir. You will, I hope, explain yourself.”

“I can explain it now, General. This American Amazon challenged me to an endurance contest. I felt the honor of the regiment, not to say the army, was at stake.”

“Are you jesting with me, sir?”

“Only halfheartedly, General,” murmured Rawdon.

“Sir?” roared Grant. “I think you had better retire to your quarters.”

“Would you care to join me, Miss Stapleton?” said Rawdon. “We Will take along your fiddler, and continue our dance there.”

“It is the least I can do,” said Kate. She turned to-Grant. “It was entirely my fault, General.”

“I am not interested. Mr. Whatever-his-name - will explain himself to me in the morning.”

Rawdon strode to the podium and invited Jacquelin to join them in his quarters. The old fiddler hesitated and said he would lose his night’s wages. “I will pay you double,” Rawdon said.

As Rawdon walked to the door with Kate, Moncrieff and most of the officers of the King’s Own Regiment blocked his path. “It’s had enough that you talk back to a major general,” Moncrieff growled. “But if you think you can walk out of here with that young lady - ”

“I was about to invite you and the rest of the officers to join us, Major,” said Rawdon. “Why else would I hire the fiddler? In my opinion General Grant has insulted me - which he has a right to do - but he has no right to insult Miss Stapleton. As I see it, we have no alternative but to withdraw from this party in a body.”

“I have no use for Major General Chucklehead,” Moncrieff admitted. “And there’s something in what you say about insulting – ” He looked anxiously at Kate. “Do you feel insulted?”

“Yes!” said Kate good-humoredly. She was ready to say anything to avoid another encounter with Anthony Skinner.

“Then go we shall.”

Rawdon was living with two other lieutenants in a house vacated by a Whig committeeman who had fled New Brunswick ahead of the royal army. Kate retired to a bedroom and dispensed with her hoops. Rawdon stood Jacquelin on a chair and Kate danced her favorite reels with the officers taking turns for another hour or two. Rawdon and everyone else but Kate drank heroic quantities of port between dances. The house was almost as well stocked with liquor as Liberty Tavern.

No one but Rawdon was able to match Kate’s pace, which was odd, because he looked and acted so ungainly. But when he started to dance he was all lightness and grace. “You know,” he said at the end of one reel, “I think I deserve some reward for defending your honor in the teeth of Major General Grant. I would like it now because I may be shot by tomorrow night.”

“You shall have one,” said Kate.

She conferred with Jacquelin and with his help began singing one of the favorite songs of the Revolution, The Banks of the Dee. The song described the plight of a lonely young lady strolling along the river yearning for her lover who had left her to go “o’er the rude roaring billows” to fight the “proud rebels” of America.. Kate sang it to Rawdon with the exaggerated gestures and expressions used by the actors in the play when they parodied the Americans.

Everyone thought it was funny except Rawdon, who somewhat drunkenly said he would give ten years of his life if Kate would make the last stanza come true. In a sweet tenor voice he sang this reprise which told how “time and prayers” would restore the hero to his beloved.

“The Dee then will flow, all its beauty displaying, The lambs on its banks will again be seen playing, Whilst I with my Katie am carelessly straying And tasting again all the sweets of the Dee.”

“Oh no,” said Kate, ignoring his amorous looks, “I will only be content when you sing the American version.”

“What’s that?” someone asked.

“You haven’t heard it?” She signaled old Jacquelin and he took up the melody once more.

“Twas winter and blue Tory noses were freezing

As they marched o’er the land where they ought not to be The valiant complained of the fifers’ cursed wheezing and wished they’d remained on the banks of the Dee.

Lead on, thou paid captain! Tramp on, thou proud minions, Thy ranks, foolish men, shall be strung like ripe onions

For here thou hast found heads with warlike opinions On shoulders of nobles who ne’er saw the Dee.”

The officers roared with laughter. “A hit, a good hit,” they cried. She suspected that they were really laughing at Lieutenant Rawdon. He seemed oblivious. He sat there, gazing up at Kate with a drunken smile. “I agree with every word,” he said. “Every word.”

We must get this young lady home, or her father will challenge me, and if that happens I’m a dead man,” said Major Moncrieff.

The officers commandeered two carriages and drove Kate home singing Yankee Doodle at the top of their voices. When they arrived, Liberty Tavern was long closed. But this did not stop them from banging on the door and roaring for the innkeeper. A bleary-eyed Barney McGovern finally opened the door, and Jonathan Gifford appeared, stuffing his shirt in his breeches, a few moments later. He invited his three a.m. visitors into the taproom and served them some of his best port - which none of them needed. Kate described Rawdon’s clash with Major General Grant, giving an excellent imitation of that pompous martinet.

“You remember the chucklehead, Gifford,” said Moncrieff. “He attacked Fort Pitt with eight hundred men in ‘58, lost four hundred, and got himself captured.”

“I was there, and saw him hiding under a bush,” Jonathan Gifford said. “Then he gets up and tells Parliament he can conquer America with five thousand men.”

“Right. That is our chucklehead,” said Moncrieff. “The man’s an ass. But this fellow – ” He pointed ominously to Rawdon. “He’d better learn the difference between an ass and an ass who’s a major general. Damn me if we aren’t out hunting hay and oats every day next week, on account of you. Getting potshotted by bloody militiamen, some of them living right here in this tavern, I think.”

“Sing us The Banks of the Dee again, Miss Kate,” said Rawdon. “So I can at least die happy.”

Kate obliged him. Rawdon rose, swaying. “Miss Kate, I must tell you, the Dee is my native river. I was born on its banks.”

“Alas the poor Dee,” said one of the other officers and began dragging Rawdon to the door.

“But it’s not the Scottish Dee. It’s the one in Wales. That’s the way my luck runs.”

They dragged Rawdon into the night, telling him he would need all the luck in the regiment to survive his interview with General Grant tomorrow. Kate stood at the door laughing and waving to them until their voices faded into the darkness.

“You look like you had a good time,” Jonathan Gifford said.

“I did. Thank you for making me go, Father.”

“How would you like a rum toddy?” I’m going to fix one for myself to put me back to sleep.”

Kate said she would welcome one. They sat and talked as friends as well as father and daughter. Kate told him her feelings about the British officers as she danced with them, how it had helped her understand some of her feelings for Anthony Skinner.

It had also helped her understand a little more what had happened between him and her mother.

“I think without realizing it you became an American, Father. In ten years you became an American and that made you seem dull and foolish to her. And all the time it was she who was foolish. She must have been hard to love, Father.”

“No, it was easy at first. Later - it wasn’t all her fault, Kate. I fear I’m not - an especially loving man.”

“You will never convince me of that after what I saw at Princeton.”

Jonathan Gifford’s voice grew thick with emotion. “I was trying to save his life.”

“I saw Anthony tonight.”

“Yes?”

“He made me very unhappy. I still felt this terrible longing for him, Father. Not as he is now but as - he - we - might have been. A regret for losing him. I’m glad I saved his life, Father. It would have been terrible if they hanged him.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve learned a lot in the last six months, Father. But I look at Aunt Caroline and I ask myself, where has all her knowledge gotten her? It didn’t help her make a happy marriage.”

“People change, Kate. It’s hard to see into the future, especially when we make decisions that bind us for life.”

Kate started to weep. “That is what I am afraid I have done. I still love him, Father. What am I going to do?”

Jonathan Gifford took both her hands and held them for a long time. “I know how you feel, Kate. It isn’t easy to stop loving someone. Maybe it’s even harder to stop regretting that you gave your love to someone. We don’t have that much control over our feelings. But at your age, there is every reason to hope - to expect - that a new love will replace the old one.”

He meditated somberly on his drink for a moment. “Before this is over, Kate, I think you may find it impossible to love Anthony Skinner.”