KEMBLE WAS BACK, well before dawn, the spy’s report copied and doctored for delivery to his British employers. By eight o’clock Margaret O’Hara was telling Molly McGovern and the rest of the kitchen help that she had a message from a militia captain on duty at the Blazing Star ferry landing. Her husband had escaped and was in New York waiting for her. Captain Gifford had been good enough to procure her a pass from General Washington so she could go see for herself if the story was true. By nine o’clock she was on her way.

Kemble stood in the tavern doorway, mind and body drained by his sleepless night, watching her with haunted eyes. A few hours later he went down the same road in his Irish tinker’s disguise. He caught up with her at Perth Amboy, where she waited for the boat that came from New York twice a week with exchanged prisoners and mail. He struck up a conversation with her and for an hour he chatted in his cracked brogue about Ireland’s troubles and his hopes of getting to Long Island or New York, where a man could earn hard money at his trade. She advised him to slip across narrow Arthur Kill at Elizabethtown - which was precisely what he intended to do.

“But I know not a soul in the city,” whined Kemble the tinker, “and I hear the price of food would drive a man mad.”

“Come to me and you shall have your dinner for a night or two, till you get work. There’s no doubting you can find it, and at sky-high wages, too. Ask for Major Beckwith’s house on Bowrie Lane. There’s a fine snug barn in the back for your sleeping.”

“Cod bless you, my girl. You’ve given me new courage. I’ve had enough of these Americans with their damn paper dollars.”

Two days later, Kemble was in New York. He stopped at Horace Monaghan’s place of business and told the excitable little tailor to prepare a report. A few minutes later he was in Bowrie Lane asking strollers which of the fine town houses belonged to Major Beckwith. Every visit to New York depressed Kemble. The Americans had set fire to the city in 1776 when the British drove them out. Few of the six hundred houses - a fourth of the city - destroyed by the flames had been rebuilt. In many cases their crumbled ruins were still visible on their lots. The streets swarmed with off-duty British and German soldiers and loyalist volunteers, in a mad medley of uniforms. Soldiers drove huge wagons through the streets, cursing civilians. Sentries paced before houses where generals shuffled papers. It was no longer the New York that Kemble had known and loved. It was a military depot. His gloom was increased by the splendid brick three-story house that was Major Beckwith’s home away from home. At the back door he persuaded the fat black cook to find Miss O’Hara for him.

The scullery maid’s clothes she had worn on her journey were gone. She wore an elaborate green silk dinner dress trimmed with white lace. Her hair was piled high on her head in a London coiffure. Sausage curls were draped behind her ears and a bright red ribbon held a mixture Of curls and feathers in place at the crown. A glistening string of pearls wound through them.

“Ah, so you made it safe,” she said before Kemble could remind her of who he was. “There’s many a pot in here that could use some work. Nancy will hand them out to you. Happy am I to help a countryman. I’ve learned from sad experience there is no one else to help us if not each other.”

Kemble God-blessed her in his best brogue and praised her expensive new clothes. “I had no idea I was talkin’ to a fine lady there at the ferry slip.”

“You must forget you saw me here or there if you value my friendship.”

“Why, have you no friends on the other side?” asked Kemble. “A young lady as clever as you?” He gave her a sly wink. “We Irish must play both sides, the way I see it. We care not a tinker’s darn which, of them wins, do we now?”

Margaret O’Hara’s face darkened. “We must do - we must do what we must,” she said. “Go along with you now. You can sleep in the barn. I’ll tell the Major.”

A half-hour later, while Kemble was brooding over a half-dozen pots given him by the cook, Margaret came out to the barn. She wore a green pelisse that matched her gown. On her face was a green silk mask. They were commonly worn by city-bred ladies of the era to protect the complexion when they went out.

“Here’s money for a bit of drink and food. The cook will give you nothing and it’s just as well. She ruins everything she puts over a fire. That’s why we are going out to dinner.”

Kemble had to strangle a fierce wish to reveal himself, to accuse, demand, denounce. He hated himself for his deception and her for her betrayal of their love. He had to remind himself that she had promised him nothing but a temporary dream, a night separate from the rest of their lives.

Around ten o’clock he heard the sound of horses’ hoofs and voices. A few moments later, the downstairs windows of the town house came aglow. Staying well beyond the light they cast, Kemble walked softly down the alley to look through the windows. Three British officers were in the parlor with Margaret O’Hara and two other women. They were all a little drunk. The other women wore coiffures as high and elaborate as Margaret’s. Their faces were stained by a moral emptiness. They were not quite women of the street. But they were on their way to that sordid destination.

Margaret O’Hara was pouring port into long-stemmed crystal glasses. She served each guest with a playful curtsy. The last to receive a glass was probably their host, Major Beckwith. He was a husky thick-jawed man of about forty. She handed him his drink with an even more elaborate mock ceremony. He gave her a rather perfunctory smile and raised his glass in a toast. Glasses were raised in response. Margaret proposed a toast and Major Beckwith accepted it with the same cold smile. To Kemble outside in the darkness it was a pantomime that told him everything he had already known but refused to believe.

Back in the barn be glued the guinea she had given him to the bottom of a heavy pot. He was going to pitch it through the window, shout “British whore,” and run. He would teach her shame at the very least. Then he remembered the ragged, hungry girl in the bogside cabin, remembered he had left his bedroom door unlatched, remembered the shadow on her face as she said We must do what we must. Again he told himself that he would somehow save her.

Margaret O’Hara returned to Liberty Tavern a week later with a sad tale about being misled, her husband was still a prisoner, it was another Sergeant O’Hara who had escaped. Kemble waited until he found her alone, washing clothes in the creek.

“How are all your friends in Bowrie Lane?” he asked.

“What?” she asked, amazed.

“Has Nancy’s cooking gotten any better? Does she still burn everything she puts over a fire?”

“Dear God, you’re in league with the devil,” she cried, springing up.

“No, I think his name is Beckwith.”

She backed away, really frightened now. “You could - you could be right. But how do you know?”

“Come to my room tonight.”

“You have only to ask,” she said softly. “There is no need to terrify me this way.”

When she arrived with her midnight tea, Margaret found not Kemble but the tinker with his bushy red hair and side whiskers. She gasped as he greeted her in a perfect brogue. “Good evenin’ to ya. We Irish must stick together now, isn’t it the truth?”

“You are the devil,” she said, putting down the tea on a chest of drawers.

“If I was,” Kemble said, flinging aside the wig and the rest of his disguise, “I would be rejoicing over your lost soul. What I saw the other night - ”

“What were you doing there, damn you?”

“The same thing you are doing here. Learning what I can. But I don’t do it for money. I do it for my country.”

“You have a country.”

“So do you. It’s all around you. Margaret, when I think of that cold-eyed bastard touching you - ”

For a moment her face was wet with tears. But only for a moment. “You can beat me if you like. I have never let a man strike me. But you - ”

She stood there, her dark head bowed.

“I don’t want to beat you,” Kemble said. “I love you.”

“You’re a fool!”

Her head was up, her eyes ablaze with blue fire. All her despair, the terrible cold uncaring that had emptied her heart, was in those words.

“I will - I will go on being a fool,” Kemble said.

He was not mocking her. He was telling her the truth. He picked up the cup of tea and inhaled its rich strange odor. “Little by little you will fall in love with this fool,” he said. “Little by little this fool will teach you that you don’t need this. You don’t need Major Beckwith. All you need to do is trust - your American fool.”

“I wish to God I could, I truly wish I could,” Margaret O’Hara whispered. She kissed him, caressed him with an abandon that he more than matched. They were lost in each other, two dark stars exploring a universe of wonder and delight. In the dawn she chanted poetry to him, an. ancient Gaelic cry written for long-dead lovers.

“Between us and the fairy hosts
Between us and the hosts of the wind
Between us and the drowning water
Between us and the shame of the world
Between us and the death of captivity.”

To Kemble she was as exotic as a creature from the South Sea Islands. It was impossible to believe she was not as innocent. Kemble’s politics were radically modern, but his attitude toward women was medieval. He saw them as will-less, almost mindless creatures, to be protected, rescued, adored. He was sure that he could save Margaret O’Hara not only from the British but from herself.

A week later, the Squinter was back with another packet of news about Philadelphia. Kemble almost went berserk when Margaret O’Hara told him she was leaving for New York early the next day. After a week of love, he had convinced himself she would refuse. In a fury he told her he would follow her again and haunt Beckwith’s house in a new disguise. If she let the Major touch her, he would shoot him. She matched his rage with a tantrum of her own. She swore she would betray him to the provost marshal and have him hanged as a spy if she saw him anywhere near the house.

“I don’t believe you,” Kemble said.

“Try me.”

It was a mad, dangerous game they were playing, each with their empty, reckless hearts. Kemble donned his tinker’s disguise and followed her to New York. The day she arrived he knocked on the back door of the house and asked for her. She slammed the door in his face. But she did not betray him to Beckwith. That night Kemble stood in the darkness beyond the house lights once more and watched her play hostess in a bright red gown trimmed with gold. He did not shoot Major Beckwith.

When Margaret returned to Liberty Tavern, she brought with her an ambiguous peace offering. Major Beckwith had told her he was about to become acting chief of British intelligence. The current chief was sailing south with the British commander, Sir Henry Clinton, to attack Charleston, South Carolina. This was important news. Kemble rushed it to Washington’s headquarters. The General immediately alerted all his spy networks to find out more about the expedition and warned South Carolina to prepare for the assault.

For a while, as Kemble rode back to Liberty Tavern, he was exultant. Then he saw how totally Margaret O’Hara had outmaneuvered him. He would never be able to object to the time she spent with Beckwith now. In the name of the Revolution he was being forced to accept what his soul detested. But what troubled him even more was the knowledge that Margaret O’Hara did not detest it. She clearly considered it a triumph over him.

Kemble was encountering the darkness in the depths of Ireland’s defeated soul. It was redoubled by the darkness which is part of so many women’s souls. Is it because they are also in a way a defeated people?

For a week Margaret O’Hara did not enter Kemble’s room. It was her time of the month. Kemble found sleep impossible. One night, seeing a light in the greenhouse, he went down to find his father working among his roses.

“What’s keeping you awake these days?” he asked.

“Worry.”

“About what?”

“About the war, for one thing. No one seems to care whether we win or lose any more. Money is the only thing they talk about. Slocum’s privateer captured two transports a few weeks ago. They say he made a half million dollars. Most of the day laborers in the district are heading for Little Egg Harbor to ship out. We can’t hire men to work at Kemble Manor for double last year’s wages.”

Kemble was barely listening. He had lost interest in the war we were fighting in south Jersey.

“Then I worry about things closer to home. You and that girl, for instance.”

In a rush of stumbling sentences, Kemble told his father what was happening. Jonathan Gifford saw the resemblance between Margaret O’Hara and Sarah Kemble Stapleton. He understood Kemble’s feelings of anger and helplessness all too well.

“You have to let her go, Kemble. There’s nothing else you can do,” he said.

He was back five, no six years now, standing in the bedroom of the residence, reading Sarah’s farewell note. He could have called for his horse, galloped to Amboy, dragged her off the ship like a common criminal. She was his wife. In the eyes of the law that made her his property, as much as one of Charles Skinner’s slaves. But he had not wanted that kind of wife. He had wanted a woman he loved, who loved him. That woman had ceased to exist.

Kemble heard the sad echo in his father’s voice. For a moment he almost understood what it meant. But he was too deep in his own torment to think about the past. He took the literal words as good advice - which they were, up to a point.

The next time Margaret O’Hara came to Kemble’s room, be said nothing about New York or Beckwith. Instead, he told her how pleased he was to find her bringing him such valuable information. It meant she was changing sides, didn’t it? She was becoming an American.

“I must go to New York tomorrow,” she said.

“Why?” Kemble asked. He had seen no sign of the Squinter from Philadelphia.

“There is a soldier in the American camp on British pay. He put these papers in my hand today. I met him a mile from here, on the road.”

She held up three or four sheets of soiled paper.

“Give them to me,” Kemble said. “We must have them copied before you go.”

“You want me to go, do you now?”

“I’ve decided not - not to stop you.”

“You damn liar,” she cried and ran from the room.

Kemble saw she had wanted him to forbid another visit to Major Beckwith. She wanted him to sacrifice his beloved Cause, his fanatic devotion to America, to her. Margaret O’Hara was a forerunner, one of those daring souls like Lord Byron who swore allegiance to nothing, neither to God nor to country, but only to their own shrouded selves and their intricate passions, hates, loves.

A great sadness engulfed Kemble’s spirit. For the first time he recognized how little a man can change a woman in the name of love. He was repeating his father’s experience on an even deeper level of personal anguish. His commitment to the Revolution added a dimension that Jonathan Gifford never had to face. Kemble took the papers with their careful descriptions of brigade camps and regimental strengths, and walked out to the barn. Saddling his horse, he rode to Washington’s headquarters, where the figures were multiplied to awe the British into passivity and the camp descriptions, the locations of fortifications and other useful details were altered to confuse a potential attack. Margaret O’Hara went to New York the next day, and did not return.

Kemble waited two weeks. Then it was time for him to go to New York again as an American spy. He stopped at Horace Monaghan’s shop, collected the latest scraps of information from the nervous little tailor, and was soon knocking on Major Beckwith’s back door.

“Go away,” Margaret O’Hara said when she saw him.

“I will stay here until you talk to me - or they arrest me – .”

“We have nothing to say to each other.”

“I love you,” Kemble said.

The scene could not have been more grotesque. Two lovers whose passion deserved a wild valley, a mountaintop, or some other setting of high romance standing in a New York back yard with chickens hopping about them, goats bleating, cows mooing, pigs grunting nearby, and the hero disfigured by a red wig, red side whiskers, and a drooping mustache.

“You may come here each week,” Margaret told Kemble. “Or whenever you please. I will tell you what I have learned from them. That is all you want from me, is it not?”

“Yon, know that isn’t true. If you come with me now - ”

“There will be great boasts in the taproom, boasts and toasts to young Stapleton who pirated away a British major’s punk.”

“What are you talking about?” Kemble said, staggered by her self-hate.

“The truth. That is the only talk I care about now. We will live on truth. Your use of me and my use of you. That is what it was from the start. I went to your bed because I wanted protection if your side wins this cursed war. You wanted a bit of play with an Irish piece. All the rest was lies.”

“All this is lies - ”

“I still want protection. You must promise me I will have it, and a lump sum of hard money at the going rate for this kind of work. You will get your information. Here is the first of it. There will be raids this winter the like of which you have never seen. They will smash up your outposts in Westchester and New Jersey to prove to the people your soldiers protect nothing. In New Jersey, the Tories will take the lead.”

“I will come here each week,” Kemble said. “But I will come to see you. Not for anything else. If you want to give me information, that is your business. I will come anyway.”

“I didn’t see you stopping your ears just now - You mean I am to get nothing, neither money nor protection for it?”

“You will always have my protection, whether you ever tell me another thing worth carrying to General Washington.”

Each week for the next six months Kemble came to New York. Margaret O’Hara never failed to have information for him. For her it was obviously a point of honor to force Kemble to accept it as the reason for their meeting. Her information was frequently valuable. Twice she saved isolated outposts in northern New Jersey and Westchester from annihilation. Another time she helped frustrate a daring attempt to kidnap General Washington. Perhaps most startling was her discovery that an American major general was in secret correspondence with the British about defecting to their side.

The value of her information made Kemble’s agony exquisite. His conscience would not permit him to stop seeing her as a spy - which was the only way he would ever see her as a lover. With deepening desolation Kemble sacrificed his feelings to the Cause.

The winter of 1780 was one of the worst on record. Howling blizzards piled snowdrifts ten feet deep on our roads. The Hudson, the Raritan, Long Island Sound froze so that men, horses, wagons, even cannon could cross them without risk, except for the danger of frostbite, pleurisy, pneumonia. Kemble risked all these and the worst of all diseases for someone with his weak chest - consumption. Dr. Davie began asking him point-blank if he was coughing blood. He denied it. The doctor did not believe him and asked Molly McGovern to watch for bloodstains on Kemble’s handkerchiefs. But Kemble had long since taken to cutting up ome of his shirts into rags which he burned in the fireplace in his room.

The Great Cold, as we came to call it, was almost unbearable. For over forty days the thermometer remained below zero. From Morristown came word that the army was starving. Farmers were being robbed at bayonet point by hunger-crazed soldiers. Even those paradigms of lethargy, Deputy Commissary Beebe and Deputy Quartermaster Beatty, were stirred to action. On direct orders from Washington, they seized cattle and grain froth farmers in our neighborhood. They paid with promissory notes. By now Continental money had depreciated so laughably it took almost a wagonload of it to buy a wagonload of food. The phrase “not worth a Continental” became ominously current. Men used them to light their pipes. Contemptuous remarks about Washington, Congress, Governor Livingston were common in Liberty Tavern’s taproom.

Never had the Cause seemed so close to final collapse. Kemble’s gaunt, cough-racked body was a symbol of the wasting disease that seemed to be consuming the glorious hopes of 1776.

Thomas Paine said that the last months of 1776 were the times that tried our souls. I trust that great prophet of the rights of men - and women - will permit me to make a slight correction in those historic words. In 1776 our nerves were tried; 1780 was the year our souls were tried. Only the truly committed such as Kemble did not waver. The rest of us were preserved in our slough of indifference and passivity by British inertia. So at least it seemed in New Jersey during that awful winter.

Only a few of us knew how sick Kemble was. I was privy to the secret because as the winter waned to a still-freezing spring, he persuaded me to accompany him to New York. He was afraid he would collapse on the road, or worse on a street in New York. One of these trips was all my nerves could stand. Every minute I spent in New York I saw myself swinging from a gallows. Kemble understood my distress and excused me thereafter. But on that one visit I saw him, meet Margaret O’Hara in Sam Francis’s tavern near the Bowling Green. Kemble was disguised as a Queens County Dutchman, complete with accent, heavy black boots, and a wig of flaxen hair. I was wearing a similar costume.

“Are you Van Ness?” Margaret O’Hara asked, tapping him on the shoulder as he stood at the bar.

Whenever he wore a new disguise he gave her the name that went with it. He nodded, and she asked him if he had chickens to sell. I was openmouthed at her beauty. She was wearing a purple cloak over a dark green sacque dress cut low on her bosom.

“Come, Jemmy,” said Kemble, clapping me on the back. “Ve go show dis preddy lady our fat birds.”

Outside Margaret O’Hara turned to me. “Who is this boy?”

“A friend.”

“He’s no friend of mine in that case. I trust neither you nor your friends. You know that.”

We walked toward the Bowling Green. The thin sunshine failed to warm the chilly wind. My attention was devoted to the pedestal where George III had ridden in gilded splendor in the robes of a Roman emperor until he was smashed to the ground and beheaded by the New York mob. I preferred to look at almost anything, except Kemble and Margaret O’Hara.

“How much longer are we going to keep torturing each other?” Kemble asked.

“Do you call this torture? I call it sport. Your trouble is a sentimental mind.”

“And your trouble?”

“I have none. I am as happy as ever I - ”

She could not finish the sentence. “Oh, damn you, goddamn you,” she said, dabbing at the tears on her cheeks. She took a deep breath and regained her self-control. “Do you want your information?”

“Yes. But I want you, too.”

“You cannot have both. You will never have both.”

“Then tell me the information.”

The defecting major general was using the name Anderson in his correspondence. There was talk of an expedition to destroy the headquarters of New Jersey’s privateers, Little Egg Harbor. Loyalists in western Connecticut were ready to rise and seize the highland forts if the British promised them protection.

For ten minutes she continued this mixture of fact and rumor. Kemble wrote nothing down. But he remembered every word of it.

Even with my adolescent eyes I could see the fantastic mixture of love and hate boiling beneath the surface of these mercenary words. They agreed on where and when to meet next and parted.

As they turned their backs on each other and walked away, Kemble began to cough. It was a bad fit. The veins bulged in his thin neck and gaunt forehead. I saw a gout of blood stain his rag handkerchief. His whole body shook with the racking sound.

My eyes were on Margaret O’Hara. She had whirled with the first cough. A slash of pure anguish leaped across her face. Involuntarily her hand reached out toward Kemble. She withdrew it and clasped it to her waist with her other hand as if it were a disobedient child.

Kemble stopped coughing. He straightened his hunched shoulders and gestured to me. Without so much as a glance in her direction he walked away. I looked back as we neared Sam Francis’s tavern. Margaret O’Hara was still standing there looking after him. Behind her was the empty pedestal of George III’s statue.

On our way home, Kemble swore me to secrecy about his sickness. But he was so weak when he returned, he sent me to army headquarters with the information in writing and took to his bed for ten days. While Kemble lay helpless, intimations of disaster swirled through the state from South Carolina. Sir Henry Clinton had trapped a five-thousand-man American army inside Charleston and was methodically reducing it to surrender by siege. The fall of the queen city of the South, the loss of those precious troops, cast a pall over the rest of the country.

The night the news arrived in the taproom, Jonathan Gifford predicted, “Victory in the North will be their next order of business.”

“And you know where they will try for it,” said a voice from the doorway.

It was Kemble, out of his sickbed for the first time.

“I wish I did know. I would tell George Washington,” Jonathan Gifford said with a forced smile.

“You told me yourself a year ago. You said they would come back to New Jersey someday. What better time than now?”

Jonathan Gifford knew what Kemble’s words meant - another trip to New York. He could only nod mournfully.

With literally feverish energy Kemble flung himself on his horse the following clay and rode to army headquarters at Morristown. He was back the next morning, his pale cheeks flushed with excitement. “General Washington is of the same opinion,” he told Jonathan Gifford, “but there is little he can do about it. He only has thirty-five hundred men - and scarcely a horse to pull a wagon or cannon. We must know where they are coming - or they will be through the Watchung passes before he can move.”.

The Watchung Mountains were the ramparts of New Jersey. There were two main passes through them - one behind Elizabethtown, the other behind Amboy.

It was early in the morning. Father and son were alone in the taproom. The portcullis was still lowered over the bar. Kemble gazed through the wooden interstices at his shadowy image in the mirror behind the bar. A ghostly prisoner. Was that his future - or his present state?

“I must go to New York.”

“Let me go with you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There are a thousand people in that city who would recognize you the first - ”

“Give me a disguise.”

“No.”

Never in his life had Jonathan Gifford felt so helpless, Fatherly words crowded to his lips. You should stay in bed. You need rest, medicine. But he could not say them to this son who was now a man.

“I want you to know - know how proud I am of you.”

Kemble smiled - the same crooked-lipped smile that had illuminated his small face at nine.

“Thanks,” he said.

Instinctively, Jonathan Gifford started to put his arm around Kemble’s shoulder. But Kemble moved-abruptly beyond his reach. They were allies. But they were not yet father and son. Something deeper and more painful than war and politics still separated them. Jonathan Gifford knew what it was. With a sigh he withdrew his arm and murmured, “Good luck.”