The Turncoat (45 page)

London had Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket. Philadelphia had only the Southwark Theater, built in 1766 and closed repeatedly by the city fathers for immorality. (As a side note, John André did indeed design a backdrop at the Southwark that remained in use well into the nineteenth century.)

The Mischianza, or little bit of everything, was the crowning event of that glittering winter, but it owed more to the baroque extravaganzas of Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones than to the Grand Medley tradition of the English stage. The event, with its river flotilla and grand processional, bore Captain André’s stamp from concept to execution. And Peggy Shippen’s father did, in fact, withdraw his consent for her participation at the last moment.

Q. Before reading
The Turncoat,
I knew nothing about John André, or even that the British had a spymaster. Can you tell us more about him?

A. A talented artist, a charming conversationalist, and very much a self-made man, André died in Tappan, New York, as much mourned by the Americans who hanged him as by the British he spied for.

His relationship with the Cope family was as set forth in the book: they sheltered him during his captivity in Lancaster. He discovered a talent for drawing in their son, Caleb. After André was released to New York, he wrote to the Copes, asking them to send Caleb to him as a drawing pupil and went so far as to offer to pay all of his expenses. The Cope family refused, but young Caleb made at least one attempt to run away to join André. Speculation about André’s sexuality has arisen only in the last forty years.

Q. Your novel made me feel acutely the high stakes and grave consequences for the men and women who fought on the Rebel side, while for the British soldiers it was business as usual. How do you think that uneven commitment affected the war?

A. For officers like Howe and Tremayne, it
was
“business as usual”—and a distasteful one at that. The Rebels were more dedicated, often desperate. Franklin said it best: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Q. You describe Britain’s General Howe as doing very little during the winter of 1777 to defeat Washington, whose army was stationed in various places just a short distance away from Howe’s men in Philadelphia. Howe’s refusal to act astonishes me. Was he really reluctant to incur high casualties, or did he secretly want the Rebels to win?

A. Howe was a Whig. Before the war he stood for Parliament, vowing never to take up arms against the Americans. It was George III—his cousin—who persuaded him to serve in the conflict. The casualties at Bunker (Breed’s) Hill appalled him, and he spent much of the winter of 1777–78 writing to the king, begging to be recalled. He did not want to fight the Americans, and while I don’t believe he wanted the Rebels to win, I do think he earnestly desired peace and tried his best to minimize both bloodshed and abuses—a nearly impossible task given the circumstances of the occupation.

Q. Were there really female agents working for George Washington during the American Revolution? What do we know about them?

A. There were female agents recorded in the pay books of both Howe and Washington, although neither Lydia Darragh nor the Widow of Mount Holly appears in them. There is no evidence to suggest that Elizabeth Loring and her husband were anything but what they seemed—avaricious Loyalists—but the affair was widely believed to contribute to Howe’s failure to prosecute the war more efficiently that winter.

Eighteenth-century spies communicated in writing using ciphers, masks, and invisible inks. They concealed messages inside the heads of buttons, rolled in writing quills, and sewn into the linings of clothing. André was captured with the plans for West Point stuffed in his boot.

Q. Bayard Caide is an intriguing villain in the novel, and in some ways Kate is sincerely attracted to him. Is he based on a historical figure? What was your intention in creating Caide?

A. It’s difficult to craft a dashing cavalryman in the Revolution without shades of Banastre Tarleton, whose flamboyance and cruelty were legendary. Contemporary portraits and descriptions paint him as a handsome, Byronic figure. He squandered a fortune at nineteen, entered the cavalry at twenty-one, and became a lieutenant colonel by the age of twenty-three. Accounts differ, but he was widely believed to have ordered the massacre of surrendering American troops at the Battle of Waxhaws, and to have claimed that he’d bedded more women and killed more men than anyone in North America.

Caide’s character is a dark mirror for Kate. They’re both brilliant and talented and filled with self-loathing. Caide blames himself for his mother’s unhappiness and suicide, and Kate despises herself for the deceptions she practices.

Q. Kate’s father, Arthur Grey, the “Fighting Quaker,” is one of my favorite characters. Is he based on a historical figure?

A. There were several fighting Quakers in the war, though Nathanael Greene was probably the most famous. The Revolution posed a thorny question for the Society of Friends. The principles of Quakerism were closely aligned with those of the Revolution, but the rights the Quakers saw as intrinsic to man couldn’t be secured through pacifism.

Greene—like so many figures on both sides of the Revolution, including Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, Von Steuben, Arnold, and Cornwallis—was also a Mason. Brotherly love aside, their duties and consciences often forced such men into conflict. In the book, Kate’s father and Tremayne are both Masons. André reportedly was as well. In fact British regiments often had their own lodges. On at least two occasions when the Masonic furniture of British lodges was captured by the Americans, Washington ordered the items returned under a guard of honor.

Q. Did you always want to write fiction?

A. Yes. I’ve always loved stories. I can remember reading the entirety of Nancy Drew in a summer when I was in second grade. I love reading and writing about extraordinary women.

Q. You also write for television. How is writing a novel different from writing for TV?

A. I write feature films and television. Theatrical features are very different. Your audience is sitting in a dark room. You have their whole attention. Television is a lot more like a book. Your audience can turn the TV off or put the book down at any point. It’s much harder to create something immersive, to put your viewer or reader into the seamless dream of the story. But the best TV shows, and the best books, make you want to stay up all night to finish them.

Q. And you’ve studied filmmaking. How has that artistic perspective influenced your fiction writing?

A. There is no better way to learn scene writing than through film. On the page, a writer can disguise a poorly structured or paced scene with good prose, but on the screen, the emotion is naked in front of you. If it isn’t working, it isn’t working. I try to write fiction as I would a screenplay, with an awareness of how it will play on the page.

Q. Are there particular writers who have influenced or inspired your work?

A. George MacDonald Fraser and Dorothy Dunnett are my two favorite authors. I re-read Flashman and
Lymond
every couple of years. I love the plots and characters of Sabatini and Dumas. My husband introduced me to Jack Vance and Dunsany. We discovered Terry Pratchett together. And I have a soft spot for Lovecraft and Hawthorne from the years when I worked in Salem, Massachusetts.

Q.
The Turncoat
is the first of a planned trilogy and I, for one, can’t wait for more of your unique perspective on the American Revolution. Can you give us a hint of what we can expect?

A. Pirates! America had virtually no navy, but she had hundreds of miles of coast and some of the hardiest seamen in the world. Eight hundred American privateers took six hundred British prizes during the war, crippling enemy shipping and creating vast private fortunes. But the stakes were even higher on sea than on land. Because Britain refused to recognize American privateers as enemy combatants, privateers unlucky enough to be captured by British crews could be hanged as pirates.

READERS GUIDE

Donna Thorland’s outstanding
Renegades of the Revolution series continues with

Terms of Engagement

Available in March 2014 from New American
Library in paperback and as an e-book.
Read the excerpt that follows for a taste of the
adventure to come….

Spring, 1775

The gold was Spanish, the chest was French, the ship was American, and the captain was dead. James Sparhawk, Master and Commander in the British Navy, on blockade duty patrolling the waters north of Boston, took one look at the glittering fortune in doubloons and swore.

He was supposed to be thwarting smugglers. Petty criminals. Sharp traders who had weighed the risk of prosecution against the reward of profit and decided to defy Parliament with a cargo of outlawed goods bound for Rebel Boston. He was supposed to be confiscating Dutch tea and French molasses, punishing the rebellious colonists by stopping their luxuries and cutting off their trade.

Instead, he was standing on an American schooner, the
Charming Sally
, which he had chased halfway to Marblehead and been obliged, finally, to dismast. And she was carrying flint for ballast and a fortune in foreign gold into a country on a knife’s edge of war.

He closed the chest and turned to his lieutenant, one of Admiral Graves’ innumerable nephews, and said, “Not a word about the gold. To anyone.” Even English sailors might be tempted to mutiny for such a large sum, and half the crew of Sparhawk’s thirty-gun brig were Yankees, pressed off American merchant vessels and the docks of Boston. “Have the chest moved to my quarters. Tell the marine guard on duty that no one is to enter.”

Lieutenant Francis Graves pursed his lips. It had been clear from his first day aboard the
Wasp
that he did not like serving under James, a man only a few years short of thirty who had made captain with little of the navy’s vital currency, influence. Not when Graves’ well-connected cousins had commands of their own. It proclaimed him to be the only scion of that seafaring family whose talents did not make up for his temperament.

“What am I to say is in the chest?”

A better officer would say nothing at all, but discretion did not come naturally to a Graves. “Paper,
Lieutenant
,” James replied. “Rebel documents.”

“It is far too heavy for paper.”

“Make the Rebels carry it,” James said.
They
would already know—or suspect—what was in the chest. He could not press the whole crew, even though his ship was shorthanded and could use the men. The
Wasp
already had too many disgruntled Yankees on board.

“Order the Americans to throw the flint overboard first. Then press their ship’s boys. The youngest and the smallest. They should be able to reef and hand as well as an adult, and they’re much less likely to cause trouble. Or be believed if they talk about the gold. Lock the rest of the Yankee sailors in the
Charming Sally
’s hold.”

Graves departed with ill grace to dispose of the flint. James did not like having to trust him with a prize crew. He was too inclined to flogging. A good officer rarely needed to resort to the cat, but Graves was not a good officer.

Sparhawk remained behind to search the dead skipper’s cabin for real Rebel documents. He quickly grew discouraged. There were papers everywhere: charts and bills of lading and letters. It was a mess, and he had no time to sort it. He would leave it for the prize court in Boston. He took only the
Sally
’s log. Its presence was another sign of the late captain’s incompetence. Her log
should
have gone over the side at the first sign of pursuit.

The real trouble was, James should never have been able to catch her. She was built for speed, sharp-hulled and square-rigged. Properly loaded, with her cargo and ballast stowed correctly, she should have outrun him. She had been handled badly, and the dead captain had only himself to blame for his fate. James had suspected from afar, and discovered for certain up close, that the bungling skipper had set too much sail, driving her weighted hull down into the water instead of skimming along the surface as her maker had intended.