WHAT HAPPENED AT Liberty Tavern in the next month was a hard lesson in the limits of our human ability to comfort and console each other when pain and loss strike hard. In spite of everything Kemble and the rest of our family tried to do for him, Jonathan Gifford withered before our eyes. His vitality, his commanding presence, vanished. He ignored his roses. He lost all interest in his customers and his friends, the news from home or abroad. Not even the report that the British Prime Minister and the Cabinet who had prosecuted the war against America had been ousted, that Parliament had passed a resolution condemning the excessive influence of George III, stirred him. A visit from Kate produced no more than a wan smile, even when she reported that her old nabob of a father-in-law had replied to Thomas Rawdon’s letter with grudging affection and no warnings about disinheritance.

Worst of all, Captain Gifford made no attempt to respond to a charge of treason which Daniel Slocum lodged against him in the court of common pleas. If he was convicted, the tavern, the manor, everything he owned, would be condemned and confiscated, to be sold by Slocum’s commissioners. With Caroline exiled, he had lost his only favorable witness. With Slocum in control of the judges, it would be a struggle to get an honest jury. Kemble urged his father to hire the best lawyer in the state. Jonathan Gifford wearily agreed, and did nothing.

It was almost unbelievable to see Jonathan Gifford defenseless, unmanned. Kemble’s soul was stirred by an emotion much darker than sympathetic grief. He had been brooding about General Slocum for a long time. The man had poisoned the Revolution in our part of New jersey. I had added to this conviction my own bitter rage for revenge. More than once I told Kemble that Slocum had killed my father as certainly as if he had fired a bullet through his heart. Now he was destroying the man Kemble had come, almost too late, to accept and love as his father.

You will remember back in 1776 Jonathan Gifford had trained me to fire one of the Pennsylvania rifles in Liberty Tavern’s armory. One night, about two weeks after Caroline was exiled, Kemble asked me if I had used a rifle lately. I shook my head. “Stay close to home,” he said. “We will put one to some use tomorrow.”

That night, Kemble took a rifle from the armory and hid it in the barn. The next day we extracted it from the hay and tramped deep into the woods. If ever there was a wicked weapon in its very appearance, it was the rifle of this period. The immense barrel - fifty-two inches long - the gleaming stock with its intricate brass ornamentation gave it a personal, almost living menace. The accuracy with which it could strike a target a quarter of a mile away was awesome. It made the crude muskets with which the average militiamen fought the Revolution seem worse than toys.

Kemble had never fired a rifle. He asked me to teach him everything Jonathan Gifford had taught me. “There is no need for this,” I said. “I am ready to shoot him any time you say the word.”

Kemble slowly shook his head. “This must be on my conscience - and no one else’s.”

The darkness and pain on Kemble’s face silenced my arguments. All day we fired at paper targets across a clearing in those still woods. I told Kemble everything Jonathan Gifford had taught me about breathing, wind speed, the curvature of a bullet in flight. By the end of the day he was putting ball after ball into a target one foot square, at two hundred and fifty yards.

That night, about two a.m., we put on snowshoes and easily covered the thirteen miles from the tavern to Colt’s Neck, keeping off the roads. By dawn we were in position about a quarter of a mile from the front door of General Slocum’s farmhouse. He had largely repaired the damage done by the loyalist torches, although his barns were still burnt-out hulks. The winter sun rose in a clear blue sky. There was almost no wind. It was perfect shooting weather. The General came out on the porch in his expensive green coat and black felt tricorn. Kemble leveled the rifle and shot him through the heart, killing him instantly. As Slocum slumped to the porch, I saw once more how easy it was to kill a man - and how terrible.

No one ever accused me or Kemble of this deed. It was generally attributed to loyalists or some neutralist victim of the Association for Retaliation. Slocum had legions of enemies. Only Barney McGovern suspected the truth. He happened to meet Kemble returning the rifle to the armory an hour or two after the sensational news of Slocum’s death had swept through the tavern.

“Been doing some hunting?” he said.

Kemble nodded.

“Did you hit anything?”

“Only a skunk.”

From the vantage point of fifty years, this savagery saddens me. But it did not trouble me in 1782. When you live for six years with guns in your hands, when you see those you love die and suffer, you lose the humanity that is a normal part of your blood. War replaces it with a cold harsh fluid of its own creation.

Without Slocum’s vicious energy, the Association for Retaliation began to collapse. The state legislature suddenly discovered the moral courage to condemn it. A hint of another investigation of rigged elections and fraudulent land sales produced resignations of several Slocumite judges and assemblymen. The indictment against Jonathan Gifford was dismissed. There was now no reason why Caroline Skinner could not return to Kemble Manor. Mentally, Jonathan Gifford knew this, but morally he was a paralyzed man, What he dreaded most had happened. Charles Skinner had regained his wife. There was no way that Jonathan Gifford would or could attempt to pirate that wife away from him, even though she represented to him more happiness than he ever hoped to achieve in this world. The depth and the intensity of the joy he had known with Caroline had only redoubled the guilt that pulsed beneath it, like an abscess always ready to erupt. Now the poison was spreading throughout his spirit, and he made no attempt to resist it. He was little more than a walking dead man.

You may think I am exaggerating. You may think that a strong character can resist such feelings. It is true that strong characters can overcome the everyday moods that bedevil many weaker men and women. But when melancholy breaks into a strong spirit, it often takes deeper root, especially when there is an underlying guilt. The sadness is almost welcomed, out of a hidden wish to expiate the guilt.

Every day Captain Gifford rode to Perth Amboy to meet boats from New York. He was hoping for a letter. One finally came. But it was not from Caroline. It was from Charles Skinner.

Dear. Sir:

My wife has asked me to write to you and let you know that she is well. She came to me because she had no choice, having neither money nor even a change of clothes, thanks to your good Whig friends and their benign judgment of a mother’s mercy. I wish for the sake of our friendship that I could thank you for your kind treatment of her over the last four years. But she has been utterly frank with me, and I find that you have been no more a friend to me than the rankest rebel in New Jersey. In fact, I can now only think of you as my worst enemy. The rebels have taken my property. I can hope that the value of it will be restored to me by the King’s generosity. But you have stolen my wife’s affections, and she tells me there is no hope of me ever regaining them. This is the worst cruelty I have met in this cruelest of revolutions. How could you do it? Women are children, they are given to us for, our consolation and protection. I trusted you with my wife as a father might a daughter. You have betrayed that trust. I despise you, sir. If I had my health, I would call you, out to answer for it.

Your friend no longer, Charles Skinner

Those words about women being children revealed Charles Skinner’s appalling ignorance of his wife. They eased Jonathan Gifford’s guilt. But the rest of the letter sank him deeper into desolation. There was no hint of forgiveness for Caroline, and the remark about the King’s generosity strongly implied that Skinner would shortly join the hundreds of other loyalists who had retreated to England to recoup their losses by pleading for compensation from the Crown. God knows how many years Caroline would spend as a prisoner of this embittered old man. In desperation, Jonathan Gifford wrote a doomed reply to Charles Skinner’s letter.

My dear old friend,

I knew someday I would have to look you in the face and tell you what had come to pass between your wife and me. It was a deep thing, one of those special friendships that flower into love in spite of everything that both parties do to prevent it. I freely own my responsibility. But this is not the confession of a man who has wantonly seduced a child. It is a responsibility I felt - and still feel - to my love for her, and more particularly to her love for me. You know me. I am not a child. Neither is your wife. I am afraid old soldiers like you and me never knew much about love. Caroline has taught me the difference between old and new ideas, between true feelings and conventional attachments. Let me come see you and tell you this to your face. If I cannot make you understand it, you can blow out my brains.

Your friend, J.G.

There was no answer to this letter. The madness of war and the various madnesses of love and hate had created a kind of arena in which the Skinners, Caroline, Jonathan Gifford, and Kemble were now trapped. The Skinners spent their days and nights brooding on their ruin. The endless war had exhausted Charles Skinner’s funds. He had been forced to sell his fine furniture, his silver, and even most of his splendid clothes. They were living on the loot Anthony brought back from his raids. Soon father and son shared a common delusion. They saw Jonathan Gifford as the worst criminal in New Jersey, the man who had risked nothing, yet had landed on the winning side in possession of their lands. Winning Caroline was the final enormity. Night after night, as Caroline paced like a prisoner in the room above them, father and son got drunk and denounced Jonathan Gifford as Satan incarnate.

Finally Caroline lost all caution and patience. She confronted these two besotted, defeated men, a tiny flaming figure of reproach, and told them what they did not want to hear - it was she who had persuaded Jonathan Gifford to admit his love, she who had offered herself to him from feelings too strong to resist. She told them that Jonathan Gifford would sell Kemble Manor back to the Skinners tomorrow.

“But what good would that do? It would be condemned and confiscated the next day. Admit the truth. You chose the wrong side.”

With a roar, Anthony lunged to his feet, his single fist raised to smash her in the face. For him this truth was unbearable. Charles Skinner lurched from his seat and sent him crashing across the room with a swipe of his huge arm.

“She’s right,” he said. “We chose the wrong side. But Gifford is still a whorernaster. And you - ”

He glared at his wife, wavering between rage and regret. Her confession utterly refuted his primitive belief that women were innocent victims of men like Jonathan Gifford. Too drunk to think, Charles Skinner collapsed into sobbing self-pity.

“You see what you have done to him?” Anthony Skinner shouted. “If there is a God in heaven, you and Gifford will pay for it.”

He staggered into the night. Charles Skinner stood there in the center of his drab parlor, alcoholic tears streaming down his face. Caroline knew there was no truth in the bitter accusation Anthony had just flung at her. It was British defeat that had unmanned Charles Skinner. It was ridiculous to blame it on the loss of her love when there had been no love to lose. But it was impossible not to pity this suffering man. For a moment she almost regretted the Revolution, facing the pain it had caused her husband. In memory of the first days of their marriage, when there had been at least a hope of love, Caroline went to him and threw her arms around him for a sad solemn moment. She put him to bed tenderly, like a daughter nursing an aged parent.

At Liberty Tavern, Captain Gifford remained a melancholy ghost. Kemble took charge of running the tavern and the manor. He hired workmen to plant the spring crops, rode down once or twice a week to check on the gristmill and the outlying farm at Colt’s Neck, replaced the manor house’s shattered windows, and presided each evening in the taproom at the tavern. Simultaneously, he refused to abandon his pursuit of Anthony Skinner. At least once, and often twice a week, he was racing across the district on horseback in pursuit of this public and private enemy. Loot was Skinner’s primary interest, although he added to his greed a personal taste for sadistic destruction. He rarely left his victims without insulting or abusing them in some way, or burning their houses or barns. He was soon the most hated man in south jersey, and no one hated him more than Kemble.

Bearing all these burdens, Kemble carefully concealed from his father and everyone else an alarming decline in his health. He had a number of small hemorrhages in his sleep which left him so weak he could barely mount a horse. He went to Dr. Davie and calmly told him what was happening. He wanted to know if there was any medicine he could take that would slow the disease.

“I don’t want to distress my father when he’s sunk so low. If ever he needed a healthy son, it’s now.”

Dr. Davie urged him to spend the winter in Bermuda or the Bahamas. Kemble shook his head and ended the conversation with a warning that under no circumstances was Dr. Davie to mention it to Jonathan Gifford. The old doctor retreated to one of his magic cures, this one from the manuscripts of Friar Bacon. He wrote that ancient word, Abracadabra, in a pyramidal form on virgin parchment, and each day scraped out one line, saying, “As I destroy the letters of this chain, so by virtue of this sacred name, may all grief and dolor depart from Kemble.”

For a few weeks, Kemble improved. No credit should be given to Abracadabra. Bad weather kept Anthony Skinner away from our coasts and Kemble got some rest. But calm seas eventually permitted Skinner’s return, which meant, after a few sleepless nights, the revival of Kemble’s cough. In desperation, Dr. Davie urged Jonathan Gifford to get a passport from the British army in New York and spend a few months in the West Indies. A sea voyage often cured melancholy. He could take Kemble with him. Jonathan Gifford sighed, nodded, and said he would think about it. It was obvious that he did not believe anything could cure his melancholy.

In despair, Dr. Davie summoned Kate and Thomas Rawdon for a consultation. Rawdon was pessimistic about Kemble. “We don’t understand the disease. How can we cure it?” he asked.

Kate somberly agreed. “All we can do is pray,” she said. “But I am just as worried about my father. It seems to me we can do more for him.”

Rawdon shook his head. “Only time heals the kind of wound your father has received.”

“Time? Time is killing him,” Kate said. “Has anyone told Aunt Caroline that she can now come home safely?”

“The less said about that the better, my dear,” said RawcIon.

“I agree,” said Dr. Davie. “There is already too much talk about it.”

Dr. Davie and Rawdon were only echoing the sentiments of most of Jonathan Gifford’s friends. They were ready to forgive him for his indiscretion (which is what they considered it) with Mrs. Skinner. But they felt that it should be forgotten as quickly as possible. A tavern was subject to strict regulation by the state. Its owner had to be a man of good moral character.

Kate scoffed at this attitude. “You are joining the ranks of the hypocrites,” she told them. “Who cares about talk when a man’s happiness - perhaps his life - is at stake?”

Kate abandoned the doctors and strode to the greenhouse, where Jonathan Gifford sat disconsolately staring at his roses. “Father,” she said, “why haven’t you asked Aunt Caroline to come home?”

“Even if I felt I should, how can I get word to her?” He showed her the letter he had received from Charles Skinner. “I’ve hurt him enough. He was my best friend.”

Kate saw it was futile to argue with him. She mounted her horse and rode to George Washington’s headquarters at Rocky Hill. Introducing herself as Jonathan Gifford’s daughter, she had no difficulty gaining access to the commander in chief. She had heard that General Washington had an intense interest in the affairs of the heart. She told him the whole story of her father and Caroline Skinner. The General listened with fascination and wrote out a pass, permitting her to go to New York, “on a matter of private business.”

Two days later, Kate stood before the Skinner home on Dock Street. She dreaded the thought of seeing Anthony but was ready to risk even that confrontation. She knocked. The door was opened by Jesse, the black butler, wearing a worn, faded relic of his old livery. His lean face brightened at the sight of Kate.

“Why, Miss Stapleton. What a nice surprise.”

“Is Mrs. Skinner at home, Jesse? I would like to see her - alone.”

“She is alone at this moment. Mr. Anthony and the Squire have gone to buy passage on the next packet. We will all be in England before long.”

“Tell Mrs. Skinner I am here.”

Caroline threw her arms around Kate like a mother welcoming a beloved daughter. Kate thought she looked as wan and forlorn as Jonathan Gifford. She did not hesitate to say so.

“It would be ridiculous for me to pretend I am happy,” Caroline said.

“Daniel Slocum is dead, shot by one of his many enemies. There is no reason why you can’t come home.”

“Kate - you know there are reasons. Too many reasons.”

“None that really matter, when there is a man over there in New Jersey dying by degrees for the want of the sight of you.”

For a moment hope created a glow on Caroline’s dark face. Then she shook her head sadly. “I can’t believe that, Kate. No, I can. But I’m sure he feels, as I do, that it would be best if we never saw each other again.”

“Why?”

“You have heard what happened at the manor. We publicly confessed - our attachment. I have embarrassed him enough. He depends on the public for his living.”

“Let us talk as married women. Above all, as women. He is sitting over there in his greenhouse, dying, literally dying, like a prisoner bound and gagged and starving in a dungeon by his own arrangement. I love him as much as you do, but he is a man. His head is crammed with ridiculous rules about honor and friendship - ”

“They are not ridiculous, Kate. They have their place.”

“Not here. Not when they are destroying a love that brought happiness to everyone connected with it - to me, Kemble, above all, to you and him. There has been a Revolution in the name of liberty. Are you going to let it make you a prisoner for the rest of your life? And leave him in the same situation?”

“But how could we ever marry?”

“Your case is surely not unique. I cannot believe an American court would refuse you a divorce if your loyalist husband has gone to London and left you in New Jersey.”

Caroline wrestled with the memory of those tears on Charles Skinner’s ruined face. She had her own guilt, compounded now by pity, to confront. “I don’t know, Kate. I must think about this. You’re sure Jonathan - Captain Gifford - would welcome me?”

“If he doesn’t, I will give up all pretense of being a woman of judgment. I will go back to reading silly novels and consider myself a feminine idiot for the rest of my life. Come with me now. I have money for the stage boat.”

Caroline shook her head. “I must be honest with Mr. Skinner.”

“He will never let you go. That is asking too much of human nature - especially his nature.”

“He has treated me decently, Kate. Coldly but decently.”

She was as unreachable as Jonathan Gifford, as lost in her own guilty melancholy. Kate was discovering that strong feelings cannot be changed by argument. Only the shock of events - usually violent events - can break their grasp on the spirit.

“You had better go,” Caroline said. “They may come home drunk. If Anthony saw you, I’m afraid he would get very ugly.”

Kate retreated to New Jersey so discouraged she did not even bother to send us a message at Liberty Tavern. Within an hour of her departure, Caroline faced the two Skinners like a criminal under investigation. Jesse had told them of Kate’s visit. They demanded to know her purpose.

It is something I wish to discuss with you in private,” Caroline told her husband.

“There is nothing I care to hide from my son,” Charles Skinner said.

“Very well,” Caroline said. “She told me Captain Gifford would welcome me if I chose to go back to him.”

“If you chose to go,” Charles Skinner roared. “By God you shall not go as long as there is a lawyer in England and a King on the throne. You are my wife. You may deny me your bed but you shall not deny me your presence, madam. As long as there is a breath in this body Anthony will see to that, even if illness enfeebles me. You have sinned, madam, and you must pay for it.”

“How many times do I have to tell you, Father. There is only one way to settle this business,” Anthony said.

Charles Skinner looked at his son with gloomy hesitation. Caroline could not tell what was passing through his mind.

“I guarantee it can’t fail. I have the sloop reserved, the men waiting,” Anthony said.

A malevolent violence swept Charles Skinner’s florid face. “All right,” he said. “Do it.”

“As for her,” Anthony said, glaring at Caroline, “I suggest locking her in her room until we are ready to sail.”

“I shall not be treated this way – ” Caroline cried.

“You shall be treated as I wish to treat you, madam,” Charles Skinner said. “You are my wife. The greatest mistake I ever made was letting you assume airs of independence. Now go to your room or I shall drive you there with a whip. Jesse!”

Genuinely frightened, Caroline retreated to her room and let Jesse lock the door after her. An hour later Anthony Skinner sailed for New Jersey aboard the loyalist sloop Revenge. Landing at Woodbridge with three confederates, he rode boldly to Bound Brook on stolen horses, seized a loaded sloop from the wharves there, burned two other ships, and retreated with the tide. Kemble and I and the light horsemen picketed at Liberty Tavern traded bullets with him along the shore. But it was blind shooting and Skinner escaped unscathed as usual.

By the time we returned to Liberty Tavern it was a half-hour after sunrise. Kemble let himself in the side door with his key and checked the downstairs rooms to make sure they were ready for serving breakfast. As he unbolted the big front door, he saw someone had slipped a letter underneath it, addressed to Jonathan Gifford. The handwriting was familiar. He had seen it on many letters to Kate. Why was Anthony Skinner writing to his father? The letter was unsealed. A public insult was scrawled on the envelope: “To Jonathan Gifford, Trimmer, for all to read.” Kemble read it.

Gifford:

My father has decided to retire to England on the next packet. I am going with him. But I cannot leave this country without demanding satisfaction from you for the wound you have inflicted on our family’s honor. You are a thief and a whorernaster of the lowest, most cunning sort. I still have one good hand to hold a pistol. I hereby challenge you to meet me on the beach below Garret Hill tomorrow morning at dawn. If you kill me, you will be the hero of New Jersey. I give you this opportunity, knowing you may betray me to your fellow thieves and usurpers. I will take the risk to give my father a chance to face his friends again.

Kemble looked around, him. The taproom was empty. The first risers were stirring upstairs. He put the letter in his pocket and told no one about it. Except Me.

“You’ be my second, jemmy.”

“But why not tell your father?” I asked, inclined to rely Jonathan Gifford’s prowess as a duelist.

“Because it would be sending him to commit suicide. That letter is written with diabolical skill. It is designed to make him hold his fire.”

This was Kemble at his most admirable. Then darkness consumed his face. “Besides, I want to kill that bastard. For my father it will be just one more torment if he did kill him. For me it will be the greatest satisfaction.”

The war was still in Kemble’s blood. It was in mine, too. We did not sleep much that night. Kemble wanted to talk. At first he poured out to me all the sadness, the regret that burdened his mind and soul. Even though we were on the verge of victory, for Kemble the Revolution was a failure. It had not achieved that purified, virtuous America that he had envisioned in 1776. The paradigm of that failure was his decision to kill Slocum. Its necessity tormented him. He had only one consolation. The act, the crime (let us call it by its right name) was committed more in the name of love than of revolutionary justice. I listened while Kemble struggled with the contradictions between the heart and the mind, between abstract ideals and personal love.

“I always told myself I could never love anything or anyone I did not completely admire. I think that was my original sin - a sin of pride. Now I realize that we can love our country, our friends, our relations with their flaws, their weaknesses, their failures.”

I see him now, pacing the floor of that darkened room, the angular face still young, but also old, creased, worn, stained by six years of war. “Perhaps that is why we learn more from defeat, losses, than from what we win. But I don’t understand exactly how. It is not purely intellectual. I. understand even less how the suffering is passed on to those we love. Perhaps it helps us see them - really see them - for the first time.”

Then he began talking about the future, and I saw that Kemble had only begun to resolve his contradictions. He said that there would always be Slocums for Stapletons and Kembles to fight. The time might come - it might be nearer than we thought when we would have-to use the same solution to eliminate them. I glumly disagreed. “We can’t depend on guns, Kemble. Nothing grows from the point of a gun but death and more death.” .He stopped pacing and stared at me. For a moment I saw the profound weariness, the mortal sadness in his soul. “You may be right, Jemmy. You may be right.”

With a visible effort he hardened himself. “But for the time being, guns are necessary.”

About three a.m. Kemble told me to lie down and get some sleep. He wanted to write a letter to his father. I copy the faded words in Kemble’s small, precise script, from the old yellowed paper before me.

Dearest Sir:

The enclosed letter from Anthony Skinner will explain where I have gone. I know you told me never to indulge in such folly. It seems I am fated to go on disobeying you, ignoring your advice. I suppose sons have done thus to fathers since time began. But let me assure you that I do it here not out of disrespect, but from a loving concern for your state of mind, which renders you incapable of meeting this challenge. Since it is part of a quarrel that I was eager to start, and you reluctant, it seems only fair that I should answer it. If the event proves unfortunate, I would like you to know all this, and one thing more. I have come to love you as few sons love their fathers. (Or perhaps like most do but few can admit.) Please understand that I do not in the least see myself as offering a sacrifice in your place. I am Jonathan Gifford’s son, and I know how to use a gun. I fully expect to put a bullet between, that bastard’s eyes.

Kemble

In New York, six or seven hours before Kemble wrote this letter, Caroline Skinner stood between her husband and son, watching Jesse and two husky sailors hauling the last of their trunks out the door. The royal mail packet H.M.S. Sandwich was sailing with the morning tide. When the wagon lumbered off with their baggage, Anthony Skinner hired a coach and gave the driver directions to a Hudson Rivet wharf. It was not unusual to go aboard a ship the night before she sailed. Captains were not inclined to lose a favorable wind or an early turning tide for a tardy passenger. Caroline was too miserable to pay much attention to what was happening around her, anyway. The rest of her life stretched before her eyes, a gray pilgrimage to oblivion. She tried to imagine what Jonathan Gifford was doing in New Jersey. One moment she felt consoled by the thought that he was also miserable. The next moment this became the most unbearable part of her despair.

In the darkness she barely noticed the ship they were boarding. Not until she was sitting on a hard chair in the corner of a tiny cabin did she begin to wonder about its size. Mail packets were ocean-going vessels. This was no more than a fishing smack. “Is this the packet?” she asked.

No one answered her. On deck she could hear the captain giving orders to cast off the bow and stem lines.

“Mr. Skinner,” she said, “where are we going?”

She walked to the cabin door. Charles Skinner rose from the table in the center of the cabin and blocked her passage. “We are meeting the packet off Sandy Hook tomorrow morning,” he said. “We have a debt we must settle in New Jersey.”

“A debt? Couldn’t you leave the money in New York?”

“This is not a debt that can be settled with money,” Anthony said. “Only with these.”

He took the lamp from its socket on the table and turned to the bulkhead of the cabin. Caroline saw a rack of gleaming muskets.

The cabin door opened and three men joined the Skinners at the small table. Two were young, squat and thick-bodied, with plain hard faces. They wore greasy sailors’ clothing. The third was a big black with a shaved skull and the brand of a runaway slave on his cheek.

“Here is your money, lads,” Anthony Skinner said, and counted fifteen guineas into their grimy, outstretched hands. “There’s five more for each of you if you do the job well.”

“What are you going to do, Anthony?” Caroline asked.

“We are going to settle our debt with your friend, Captain Gifford,” Anthony said.

“Anthony - he saved your life.”

“Which proves he is a fool - as well as a whoremaster.”

“Mr. Skinner. You won’t let him do this.”

For a moment shame flickered in Charles. Skinner’s eyes. Then his face became as cold and empty as the faces of the three men with the guineas in their hands. He took a flask from the inside pocket of his coat and handed it to the big black. “Drink up,” he said. “It will steady your aim.”

The ship pitched and rolled wildly as it raced before a strong northeast wind. Caroline sat there listening to Anthony Skinner describe his plan with the help of a map of the Jersey coast. They did not bother to explain it to her. But it was not difficult to grasp. They had found a way to lure Jonathan Gifford to the shore. They were going to wait for him in the marsh grass below Garret Hill and kill him.

Kemble and I left Liberty Tavern about four a.m. Jonathan Gifford, staring sleeplessly into the darkness, heard our hoofbeats. He thought nothing of it. Travelers often left the tavern before dawn to catch stage boats from Amboy. But the sound of our horses’ hoofs made him decide to do something he had been mulling for two days. He had sent Barney to Amboy to find out when the next packet sailed to England. Today, May 6, was the day. It would be painful to stand on Garret Hill and watch the ship cross the bar at Sandy Hook. But he hoped with the aid of the coast watcher’s telescope that he might catch a last glimpse of Caroline standing on the stem looking at the coast of home.

Kemble and I arrived at Garret Hill in time to see the sun rise from behind a bank of gray northeast storm clouds far out on the Atlantic. The waters of the bay were flecked with whitecaps as far as the eye could see. Atlantic-sized waves were crashing on the beach. As the sun rose higher, we saw a ship riding offshore on a straining anchor cable. The coast watcher on duty came out of his but with his rifle in his hand. He told us the ship was the Tory sloop Revenge. She was flying a flag of truce. “But I loaded up just the same,” he said, hefting his rifle.

At Kemble’s suggestion, each coast-watching station had been equipped with two rifles to give them an advantage over potential attackers.

“Are you here to exchange prisoners?” the coast watcher asked.

Kemble shook his head. “This is a private matter. I give you my word of honor there is nothing illegal about it. You can report the entire thing to General Washington.”

The coast watcher was a member of our light horse troop. He looked baffled by this cryptic guarantee, but he did not argue with us. If it had been anyone but Kemble, he would have demanded to see some authorization to meet loyalists for any reason, public or private.

“There’s no one on the beach,” I said, sweeping the white sand with the coast watcher’s telescope. “I don’t see anyone on deck, either.”

This was not surprising; wind-whipped spray was flying above the sloop’s taffrails.

“They’re probably waiting below to make sure there are only two of us,” Kemble said.

As we descended the winding path to the beach, the sun rose above the cloud banks on the horizon, sending a blaze of red through the scattered clouds above our heads. Soon the whole world seemed drenched in that ambiguous color, symbol of blood, war, victory, national pride. At the bottom of the hill the wind off the marsh had a damp cutting edge. Kemble broke into a fit of coughing. I saw blood stain his handkerchief.

“Don’t worry, Jemmy,” he said. “I don’t expect to die for a good while yet.”

On board the Revenge, Charles Skinner dragged Caroline from the cabin and down the spray-soaked deck to the sloop’s pitching stern. “I want you to see it, madam,” he shouted above the wind. “I want you to see what your faithlessness has done.” He pointed to the two tiny figures descending the footpath down Garret Hill. “Coming down that hill is a man I loved more than anyone I ever met in this world. Now I stand here his murderer, thanks to you.”

From the foot of Garret Hill, without the coast watcher’s telescope, Kemble and I could only make out small formless, faceless figures on the deck of the Revenge. I nervously wondered why they were not lowering a boat.

“They want to make us do the waiting,” Kemble said.

We walked toward the water on a narrow path through the marsh. Sea birds circled above us uttering wild cries. The thick brown salt hay swayed in the wind. Kemble was a few steps ahead of me.

Four men rose out of the hay, like creatures from the ocean depths, two on the left, two on the right. The nearest one on the right was Anthony Skinner. He balanced his musket on the stump of his right arm. Four guns crashed with a simultaneous blast of smoke and flame. Kemble lunged forward as if he were running through the smoke, miraculously escaping the bullets. But it was like the last leap of an exhausted athlete who would never reach his goal.

“Murderers,” I screamed.

They came floundering out of the marsh after me, knives in their hands. I was carrying Jonathan Gifford’s pistols in their ivory case. I leveled them at the two shorter men, who were the first out of the muck, being more lightly built than Skinner and the big black. The guns were empty but the cowardly bastards did not know it. They gave a yell of fright and dove back into the salt hay. I ran for the path up Garret Hill. I made it twenty yards ahead of Anthony Skinner and the black. On the crest of the hill, the coast watcher’s rifle boomed. His aim was poor. The bullet almost took my head off. But the shot discouraged my pursuers. They gave up the chase and returned to the marsh, where the other two killers were going through Kemble’s pockets for money. Anthony Skinner waved them off and the four trotted toward the beach.

“Murderers,” I screamed.

The wind flung the word back in my face, Weeping, I ran the rest of the way up the hill. I reached the summit, half choking with grief and exhaustion, to find Jonathan Gifford dismounting from his horse.

On the stem of the Revenge, a half mile away, Caroline saw the explosion of smoke and flame in the shoulder-high marsh grass, and Anthony’s pursuit of me. “It is done,” Charles Skinner said, in a voice that trembled between exultation and grief. “He is a dead man.”

There was no reason for Caroline to doubt him. She clung to the rail, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Captain,” shouted Charles Skinner. “Lower away. We must get those fellows off without wasting a minute.”

On the summit of Garret Hill, Jonathan Gifford groaned like a man in his death agony as I gasped out what had happened. The red sun glared down like a blind bleeding eye on a toy Kemble. Captain Gifford seized the coast watcher’s telescope and focused it on the beach. A boat had rounded the stern of the Revenge and was pulling hard for shore. Anthony Skinner and his confederates were at the water’s edge, waving exultantly to it.

Jonathan Gifford swung the telescope to the Revenge and trembled with shock and disbelief. There, close enough so it seemed to speak to her, through the magic of the magnifying lenses, was Caroline Skinner on the ship’s stem beside her husband. She was weeping. Her face was contorted with grief.

Captain Gifford sprang into the saddle and spurred his horse down the footpath, which was no more than a yard wide. I grabbed the coast watcher’s rifle, mounted my horse and followed him. I was sure we would both end in a tangle of horseflesh and leather in the swamp below us, but we made it to the bottom without a mishap. I thought Captain Gifford would ride hard for the beach to fight it out with Anthony Skinner before the Revenge’s boat reached shore. The Captain had two pistols in his saddle holsters, I had the rifle and the dueling pistols. But he stopped, dismounted, and knelt beside Kemble. Three bullets bad struck him in the chest. He had died instantly.

With a grief that was terrible to watch, Jonathan Gifford caressed Kemble’s upturned cheek. “Son, son,” he murmured. “Oh, son.”

From my saddle I could see the longboat, about twenty yards from shore. It was having trouble making headway in the surf. Skinner and his cohorts were wading into the water to get to it.

“We can still get a shot at them, Captain,” I said.

Jonathan Gifford shook his head. “Enough blood has been spilled, Jemmy,” he said.

He remounted and rode slowly toward the beach. By the time we reached the sand, Skinner and his three murderous friends were halfway back to the Revenge. Jonathan Gifford paid no attention to them. He rode down the shore until he was directly opposite the sloop. The wind tore at his cloak, lashed his face with blowing spray. He felt nothing, knew nothing but an enormous sadness. The huge sweep of the bay beyond the woman on the stern of that ship was an image of his world, empty of love, and with Kemble’s body back there in the marsh, even of consolation now.

Aboard the Revenge, Caroline had watched with dazed, uncaring eyes the progress of the boat to the beach, the struggle in the surf as Anthony and his confederates clambered into it. It did not matter to her who died or lived, now. Beside her, Charles Skinner gave cries of alarm, shouts of advice.

A horseman emerged from, the swamp. Only one man sat a horse with that instinctive command, only one, man had those solid shoulders and that large noble head. Jonathan Gifford. At first Caroline thought he was a hallucination. Then she saw me behind him. There was no reason why in her torment she should wish Jemmy Kemble into imaginary being. We were real.

She could not see Jonathan Gifford’s face. He was too far away. But there was something in the angle of his head, in the unbroken, unmoving intensity of his stare, that spoke grief, longing, agony.

Beside her, Charles Skinner had decided Anthony was safely on his way back to the ship, and turned his eyes to the beach.

“My God, is that Gifford?” he asked.

He never got an answer to that question. With a cry that was as involuntary as the act itself, Caroline flung aside her cloak and leaped into the wild waters of the bay. At first she sank like a stone beneath the weight of her dress and petticoats. But the hours she had spent swimming with Jonathan Gifford had vanquished all her fear of the water. Beneath the surface, she ripped open her dress, untied her petticoats, and struggled free of them. Wearing only her shift, she emerged among the waves and began swimming for shore. Charles Skinner bellowed to the men in the longboat and pointed toward her. Anthony, crouched soddenly in the stern, took command and ordered the oarsmen to come about and pursue her.

The boat gained on Caroline with every stroke of its six oars. It was exhausting work, swimming in such a surf. She stopped to catch her breath, looked back and saw the boat. She struck out again, swimming with all her strength. But it was no contest.

Jonathan Gifford turned to me. “Is that rifle loaded, Jemmy?”

I nodded.

He pointed to the boat. “Pick off that lead oarsman and I will give you half of Kemble Manor.”

“I will do it free of charge,” I said, springing to the sand.

Caroline was about fifty yards offshore. The boat was about fifty yards behind her now. I knelt on the sand and aimed upwind just enough, I prayed, to hit the man at the bow oar. With modicum care I squeezed the trigger. The rifle bucked against my shoulder. The oarsman pitched forward against the man sitting just ahead of him. They both lost their oars and the boat slewed into the trough of the waves, almost swamping. Jonathan Gifford gave a yell of triumph, kicked off his boots, threw off his cloak and coat, and plunged into the water.

We could hear Anthony Skinner roaring curses at the sailors. They had stopped rowing and were shouting back at him. They had no desire to get any closer to me and the rifle, which I was swiftly reloading.

Captain Gifford reached Caroline with no interference and a minute or two later, was walking back through the shallow water with her in his arms. He wrapped her in his cloak, sat her on my horse, and we turned our backs on the Skinners, leaving them to rendezvous with the packet off Sandy Hook and sail away to their bitter exile in England.

Midway along the path through the marsh to Garret Hill, we found the coast watcher kneeling beside Kemble’s body. Even though Jonathan Gifford had prepared her for it, Caroline wept at the sight of him. He lay on his side, his head oddly cradled on his outflung arm, his sightless eyes staring toward the ocean. I like to believe his last thought was of that wild Irish girl who crooned to him in the face of the darkness they were both entering:

Between us and the hosts of the wind
Between us and the drowning water
Between us and the shame of the world.

We buried Kemble the next day in the manor graveyard, beside his mother. It was a private ceremony. Kate and Thomas Rawdon, Caroline and Jonathan Gifford, I and the rest of the Liberty Tavern family were the only mourners. When we returned to the tavern we were surprised to find one of General Washington’s aides waiting for us. The coast watcher had written a report of the ambush and the events on the beach, and forwarded it to headquarters. The aide handed Jonathan Gifford this letter:

Dear Sir:

I have heard of your loss, which is also our country’s loss. I know how deep such wounds cut, how slowly they heal. I wish to extend my heartfelt sympathy. If your son had a fault, it was an excess of love for his country, and an excess of courage which led at times to recklessness. If these are faults, they are easily forgiven by understanding men. Perhaps they sprang from the want of patriotism and courage in those around him from which alas we have too often suffered in the course of this long war.

You may be consoled to know, sir, that as I sat down to write this letter, word arrived from British headquarters in New York that a new general has taken command there with orders to remain on a strict defensive until peace negotiations are completed in Paris. I think we may fairly rejoice, and I trust you will do so, in spite of your sorrow, that the liberty and safety of our country have been established on a permanent footing.

I also gather from the coast watcher’s report that a lady whose feelings on this score as well as on other matters important to your happiness has been restored to you by the fortunes of war. That your future years together may be as contented as a free and prosperous America can make them is the sincere wish of

Your friend,

George Washington

The news of the cessation of hostilities went swiftly through our neighborhood. That night we gathered at Liberty Tavern for a celebration which none of us living have ever forgotten. We drank and laughed and sang and toasted George Washington, the honorable Congress, the United States of America, and the patriots of New Jersey, into the dawn. It was then, I suppose, that we began the process of selective forgetting that transformed our memory of the Revolution into Fourth of July oratory. We let the needless deaths, the random cruelty and crude greed, the halfhearted and the fainthearted slip into history’s shadows. I think this was a mistake. It would do us no harm - and perhaps a great deal of good - to remember the dark side of our national character. At the very least, it would give us a new appreciation of those who paid a price in anguish, sorrow, and blood to resist this evil undertow.

But that night we drank to our victory, which grew more glorious with every toast. No matter that some who raised their brimming glasses did not deserve it.

The last toast was the best. Jonathan Gifford gave it in the center of the taproom, his arm around Caroline.

“Here’s to all them that we love
Here’s to all them that love us.”

Sorrow and joy mingled in that word love. We echoed his deepened timbre as we sang out the response.

“And here’s to all them that love those that love them Love those that love them that love us.”

The endless war, the hatred, the grief ebbed from our weary hearts. We were at peace at last.