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.
The man’s cabin was of a piece with his sailing. Merchant crews were allowed to dabble in private ventures, of course, as long as they did not consume space meant for the owner’s cargo. Normally that meant some small objects of high value, such as might fit in a sea chest. A conscientious captain did not cram his living quarters—which were his work quarters as well—with bolts of cloth and boxes of pepper. James had to resist the urge to sneeze after examining the chests.
If the prize court ruled the Charming Sally a legal capture, he would see a share of the pepper, the cloth, and the French molasses weighing down her hold. And when she was sold, or more likely bought into the service—Admiral Graves was desperate for seaworthy ships—James might see a share of that as well. Some captains had made fortunes patrolling the Massachusetts coast for smugglers.
But the gold was another matter entirely. It smacked of foreign intrigue, the kind the Admiralty wanted to keep quiet. The kind every officer in the ragtag North American squadron feared, because the Rebels had a thousand miles of tricky coastline and enough ships, if they found the money to arm them, to spit in the eye of the British Navy. Something the French, the Dutch and the Spanish—in that order—would enjoy seeing.
James returned to the deck. He counted sixteen American sailors, only two of them boys, formed up in a human chain from the hatch to starboard, heaving sacks of flint over the side under the watchful eye of a five-man marine detail.
“The chest is stowed in your cabin,” Graves reported.
“Very good, Mr. Graves. Take the boys on board the Wasp and return with a prize crew.”
Graves took a step toward the American boys, and every Yankee sailor on the crowded deck paused and tensed, all eyes fixed on those two small forms. The Americans were suddenly ready—as they had not been when boarded—to do violence.
James looked at the boys again. The smaller one was no more than eleven years old, the same age James had been when he’d unwillingly gone to sea. The youth’s fair hair was sun bleached, his skin deeply tanned, and his gray eyes wide with fear.
The older boy was taller, slimmer, perhaps as old as fifteen, but James could see nothing of his face beneath the broad-brimmed hat. The boy pivoted, sensing James’ scrutiny, and in one fluid movement pulled the younger child behind him. It was a protective gesture, and spoke of courage in the face of the enemy, but it had nothing of masculine bravado about it.
Because the older boy was no boy at all.
“Belay that, Mr. Graves.” James crossed the deck to confront the boy who was not a boy. Her face was still obscured beneath the hat. Her form, now that he was aware of her gender, was plainly feminine: wide hips, narrow waist, and fine bones in her slender wrists. Not an ordinary sailor’s trull either, to judge by the pale skin of her hands. And no one would bother with the precaution of disguising a trollop during an enemy boarding. Only a lady merited such treatment.
She looked up.
He was right. Fine skin, wide luminous eyes, and a dusting of freckles to complement hair much like the boy’s. Her disguise had been hasty. Pearl bobs still hung from her ears, and a fine gold chain circled her neck. She took a step back, out of his reach, barring his access to the child with her slim body.
“Your son?” he asked, but he knew as soon as he spoke that this could not be the case. She was too young. Twenty-five or six at the most.
“My brother,” she said. “He is a passenger.”
“The calluses on his hands say otherwise. I am very sorry, but the King’s ships must have men.”
“He is a child,” she said.
“Can you reef and hand?” He addressed the boy, who looked nervously up at his pretty sister.
“Every child on the North Shore can do as much,” she said. “I can reef, hand, and steer the Sally, but you’re not going to press me.”
She did not intend a flirtation. He knew that. She had none of the jaded sophistication of the Boston ladies he entertained himself with, but he could not resist a smile. “The thought is tempting.”
The girl paled, and he regretted the statement immediately. This was not a London drawing room, or even a Boston parlor. She was alone on a smuggler’s ship, with only a small boy to defend her, and his suggestion, in this context, must sound far from playful.
“Your brother,” he assured her, “will do well on the Wasp. It is a good ship, with,” he lied immoderately, “an excellent crew. We hardly ever resort to the cat.” That much was true. “You may come aboard to see for yourself, and we’ll get you safe to Boston, or wherever home might be.”
The girl narrowed her eyes and scrunched her nose. It was wildly unbecoming and charming all at once. So charming, he realized too late, that it was a signal. He heard a scuffle behind him. He did not turn to look, because she raised one slender arm and captured his full attention.
“I have a better idea,” she said, leveling her pistol at his head. “Order your lieutenant and marines off our ship.”
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Author’s Note
About the Author
Recommended Reading
Readers Guide
A Conversation with Donna Thorland
Terms of Engagement Excerpt
Spring 1775
The Turncoat Page 33
