A YOUNG MAN’S ADVENTURE IN THE EARLY AMERICAN FRONTIER
“Don’t love anything overmuch in the backcountry, for the land is a jealous mistress, and she be taking it away.”
Jonathan Asher hides in a hollowed log with his sister while his family’s cabin on the River of the Cherokee burns. There is complete darkness. Outside, a boy’s voice promises, “I’ll come back for you.”
This early memory haunts Jonathan Asher as he comes of age in the epic decade leading into the American Revolution.
Raised at the Asher Trading Post, his world changes with a blood payment for his life to the Seneca.
He takes to the road, first as an itinerant preacher, too young to be not led into temptation,
Then as a peddler and vagabond traveling through a country increasingly at war with itself.
His fortune turns. He becomes a merchant, smuggler, and friend of a fellow smuggler, Benedict Arnold,
And the beloved of a girl who wants to hear every story in the world.
Under the cover of a war profiteer, he offers to spy for the Continental Army in New York.
And before Jonathan becomes the avenger that he believes he must be, the boy, now a man, keeps the promise made on the River of the Cherokee.
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Jonathan’s Story Continues
“Bravo! Bravo! I am enjoying this game immensely, and I will be sad when it ends. But ‘twill end, I promise you, Mr. Asher. You need to win with the cards you hold every time; I only need to win once.”
Revolutionary New York City:
Where the British officers dance, gamble, foxhunt, and take over the homes of the residents while in the burnt-out neighborhoods thousands of refugees huddle in canvas shelters, and captured Continental soldiers starve in the churches, warehouses and ships converted into prisons. A dangerous city but the perfect place for a war profiteer, and a spy, and a seeker of justice for the murderers of the woman he loved.
Yet for Jonathan, there is also the New York of Elizabeth, a milliner, whom he is courting, of two orphans. Emma and Daniel, whom he has taken into his care, and friends like his business partner the former slave Gabriel, his brother William, and sister-in-law Nancy.
Jonathan’s enemies—the murderers he stalks, the profiteers who covet his lucrative trade in smuggled French wine, the officers of British intelligence—suspect and close in.
Plots, counterplots, duels, and betrayals ensue.
As the Revolutionary War draws to its climax at Yorktown, Jonathan’s world of subterfuge begins to come apart, and he must find a way to protect those he loves and maybe even survive.
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When Nathan first meets the Suliote maiden, Malina, he isn’t certain she wouldn’t kill him. Neither is she.
His odyssey begins when the British invade the Chesapeake in the War of 1812. Dreaming heroic dreams, thirteen-year-old Nathan runs away to join the American forces. He did not imagine that in the confusion of the shameful American defeat in the Battle of Bladensburg, he would make a mistake he could not live down.
Scorned by his neighbors, Nathan leaves home in the company of a British colonel. His ultimate destination is the Greek-Ottoman city of Salonika.
Nathan earns the friendship of Ahmet, the son of a powerful janissary. Known as the young stallions, they hunt and hawk in the wilds of Greece and feast into the long evenings. It is a life beyond anything Nathan ever imagined. Malina, who knows not the meaning of moderation in love or hate, completes this perfect life.
Yet discord simmers just underneath the surface. Brigands infest the roads. Greeks mill gunpowder for revolution. Muslims and Christians damn each other to their respective hells. All detest the arrogant janissaries. With a Greek mother and a powerful janissary father, Ahmet is torn by these controversies.
As the Greek-Ottoman world splinters into warring factions, Nathan, Malina, and Ahmet must decide whether love, devotion, and friendship are a means to survival or a barrier to survival.
Therein hangs this tale.
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A TIME-SLIP MYSTERY
The townspeople of Solvidado regretted the senseless loss of life when the lovers, Thomas and Penelope, drove their wagon over the cliff to escape pursuers, but not nearly so much as the disappearance of the gold they had stolen.
One hundred and twenty years later, the events of that turbulent night are relived and the search for the treasure takes unexpected turns.
BLOGS, ET CETERA
FEMMES FATALES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
According to David Hackett-Fischer, on Christmas Eve 1776, a beautiful young widow entertained Colonel Carl von Donop for almost a full twenty-four hours, stalling the progress of his battalion. While the proud and arrogant Hessian enjoyed the widow’s favors and his men twiddled their thumbs, Washington defeated the British at Trenton. There is reason to believe that the beautiful young widow was Betsy Ross.
CASANOVA’S ESCAPE FROM THE LEADS
No one had ever escaped from the Leads—so-called because the prison was on top of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, which was roofed in lead tiles. This roofing made the cells into ovens in the summer and freezers in the winter. The only good thing you could say about the Leads was that it wasn’t the Wells: cells beneath the palace that always had two feet of water in them and were infested with giant sea rats.
WOMAN’S WORK
Resistance Fighters in Epirus
“Woman’s work” is a loaded phrase because it has often been used disparagingly. It brings to mind a woman caught in the endless daily grind of cooking and cleaning for her unappreciative family. I want to suggest with a few examples that the reality for many women was somewhat different. Not easier, by any means—in fact, harder, scarier, but also richer, fulfilling, and, above all, essential for our humanity.
THE MOHAWK CAPTIVE
Seated beside her Mohawk husband, Eunice, at first, refuses to talk to the trader. He represents her father, John Williams, a notable New England pastor, who for nine years has tried to redeem his daughter. The situation has become political. There is a tenuous peace between the French and English colonies. Pressured by authorities in Canada, the village priests, and powerful officials in New England, who all want Eunice to return to her influential father, she has to speak her mind, so she finally replies in her husband’s language, “Ya!” or in English, “No!”
THE FIRST SAILOR
Do we recognize us in him?
LOVE OF THE DEVIL
Two hours after the doctor pronounced him dead, Sir Richard Burton’s wife pronounced him alive and insisted the priest give him extreme unction so his soul would go to heaven.
Bukharin’s Last Stand
In 1938 Fitzroy Maclean was one of the foreign diplomats allowed to witness Stalin’s show trials of Nikolai Bukharin, a former Secretary-General of the Communist International, the leading theorist of the Party, Genrihk Yagoda, the feared head of the secret police N.V.K.D and a dozen other comparatively lesser officials. He described what took place in his unforgettable memoir, EASTERN APPROACHES.
EMPRESS THEODORA AND BYZANTINE NASCAR
In the history of sports, the rivalry of Byzantium’s Blue and Green chariot teams stand out in the fanaticism the savagery of their supporters. It was as if the scientist/god of history decided to make an experiment with our species: take away principles, religious and political, take away territory, take away all the reasons cited for conflict and substitute the colors Blue and Green, give them to two different chariot teams, then see what happens.
What in the world did martyrs have in mind when facing their end? Perpetua, a young Roman mother, kept a diary.
A MODEST THEORY OF GHOSTS
The phenomenon of believing in ghosts and haunted places seems to span all cultures since recorded time. Is it just superstition, or is another aspect of our humanness at play?
BASKET MEN
A modern morality tale from the Brazilian rainforest.
THE FIRST KISS (ever)
COWARDS OF US ALL
The Antihero in our genes.
THE MARRIAGE OF INCONVENIENCE
John II of the Paston family wanted a wife. Unfortunately, if you belonged to the propertied class in the fifteenth-century England, getting married wasn’t all that simple. The goal was to obtain an amiable, attractive mate with a dowry befitting the position and dignity of one’s family. The attractive, amiable prospective brides with hefty dowries usually had a say in choosing their husbands within the limits of their class. They, therefore, were fully aware of their consequent power.
NAPOLEON’S GRAND ARMY AT THE BRIDGES OF BEREZINA
I take this incident from Phillippe-Paul de Segur Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow. It occurs near the end of the retreat when the Grand Army has been reduced to few fighting units and a great horde of stragglers. What is left of the ninth corps of General Victor is making its way toward the partially iced-over river of Berezina. Accompanying the soldiers, many of whom have abandoned their arms, is an unorganized mass of thousands—in many cases whole families—who supplied the Grand Army’s needs. Two bridges cross the river, one for artillery.
HENRIETTE
Casanova was a monumental egoist. Few affairs rose above the level of infatuation, yet there was one woman who eclipsed him in his memoirs. It is hard for a reader, even at a distance of two hundred and seventy years, not to fall in love with her as did Casanova.
Rommel told Lucy, his wife of thirty years, that the generals had presented him with evidence of his part in the plot against Hitler’s life, and because of that, he was to die shortly. He had been given a choice: face the people’s court or take poison that would kill him in three seconds.
The Ice Saint
Gontrans de Poncins begins the chapter about his visit to Pelly Bay in the Arctic thus: “I am going to say to you that a human being can live without complaint in an icehouse built for seals at a temperature at 55 degrees below zero, and you are going to doubt my word.”
THE FIRST TEAR
We are the only animal that sheds tears, but we are not the only animal that grieves. When did tears appear? Did the first human cry, or does it go further back? I have a story that isn’t wholly fiction.