“I think it’s Patience Wilde.” Setting the record straight. Righting old wrongs. Bringing all of her family together.
The wind gently rattled the window glass next to the Spanish chair, and the old house seemed to settle around us at last with a human-like sigh of contentment.
And all down the path to the cove and the bay, and across the bright waters of Long Island Sound, every whisper fell silent.
The Wildes had come home.
About the Characters
Nearly all my novels have their roots in some small episode of history, but it isn’t often that the history is my own.
Having been born into a family of amateur genealogists, I’ve always known that one branch of my ancestors, the Halletts, had settled on Long Island in the mid-seventeenth century, at Hallett’s Cove, eventually establishing themselves at Hellgate and at Newtown, where during the Seven Years’ War they had taken in French officers on their parole of honour.
But it wasn’t until I read Thomas M. Truxes’s absorbing history book, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), that I gained a full appreciation for the intrigue of the times.
As always with my novels, I’ve mixed characters who really lived with ones that I’ve invented. And when writing real-life characters, I’ve tried wherever possible to use their own words as I found them in my research documents, and use those sources to establish dates and times of things that happened.
George Spencer, for example, and his treatment by the mob in New York City, is recorded down to the route and time of day, and I’ve changed none of it, choosing to weave my fictional characters into the tapestry of what actually happened.
The Wilde family is fictional, a blending of my own ancestors with their Long Island neighbours, the Lawrences, whose real-life privateering schooner, Tartar, in combination with the New York sloop Harlequin, inspired my fictional Bellewether.
Another of the Hallets’ neighbours, an Acadian refugee known as “French John,” has echoes in my character Pierre Boudreau.
Big-Headed Tom—whose last name was Stephenson—was a real-life character I stumbled across by chance while reading old issues of The Caledonian Mercury newspaper, which on January 13, 1762, published a lengthy extract of a letter from an officer on board the Pembroke (a ship captained at the time, coincidentally, by John Wheelock, younger brother of Captain Anthony Wheelock) relating “the character and adventures of a very strange fellow . . . commonly known by the name of Big-headed Tom,” with details of Tom’s piracy and hatred of the Spanish.
Captain del Rio will not be a complete stranger to my readers, as his equally fictional father played a prominent role in my earlier novel, A Desperate Fortune. And his first mate, Juan Ramírez, although fictional as well, is nonetheless inspired by all the Spanish mariners caught up in the disgraceful so-called Slave Conspiracy and trials that took so many lives so needlessly in New York City in 1741.
Every now and then, while reading for research, I come across voices of good people—quiet ones, usually—swept to the corners of history, forgotten and overlooked, when they deserve to be heard and remembered. Before I had finished the first of his letters, I knew Captain Anthony Wheelock had one of those voices.
Born and raised in the parish of Westminster, London, England, he seems to have inherited his “strong passion for doing what seems to me right” from his father, Bryan Wheelock, a Clerk of the Board of Trade in London, who was once briefly dismissed from that position in retaliation for testifying honestly when questioned by the House of Lords about some secret letters he had seen. Bryan Wheelock, thanks to family connections, had also travelled with Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, a highly respected and influential philosopher who believed that all men had an inner moral sense of right and wrong, that “the love of doing good” was “of itself, a good and right inclination,” and that “Prejudice is a mist, which in our journey through the world often dims the brightest and obscures the best of all the good and glorious objects that meet us on our way.”
Bryan spent the last year of the earl’s life with him in Naples, Italy, and was with him when he died there. It’s my belief that Bryan chose to name his firstborn son in memory of the earl, since in my research of the Wheelock family up to then, I’d found no other “Anthony.”
Anthony Wheelock, born on the 31st of December, 1716, followed a different path from his father. In the 1740s the records show him as a Captain of Marines on board various ships, eventually in command of his own Company, but by the summer of 1759 he was in America, a self-described “late Captain of the 27th Inniskilling Regiment of Foot,” being sent by General Amherst to New York to be in charge of the French prisoners.
His letters to Amherst reveal him as a man of great compassion and integrity, speaking up often in defence of others’ rights. When Amherst failed to pay the mandated provision money to the colonists housing and feeding the prisoners, Wheelock objected to the hardships it would cause. Amherst relented, and paid. Wheelock also argued on behalf of the Canadian prisoners who, in his view, should have been allowed to return to their homes and families after the war, instead of being forced to go to France. It clearly bothered him.
In the early 1770s he served as the crown agent for the British colony of East Florida, and eventually returned home to London, where he died in 1781, leaving everything to his son Jeffrey, and his “dear wife Jane”—the former Jane, or Jeanne, de Joncourt, whom he’d met and lost his heart to while he had been working in New York.
They married in 1761, a year after the events of this novel, and finding the entry of that marriage in the registers of the French Church of Saint-Esprit at New York was, for me, a happy discovery.
Jane’s late father, Peter de Joncourt, a merchant and tavern-keeper, had served for years as an “Interpreter of the French language” by commission from the Lieutenant Governor of New York, so I passed this duty on to Jane, particularly since Wheelock in his letters often wrote of needing somebody to help him write in French.
And since the de Joncourts had also taken care of the captured French commander Baron Dieskau a few years earlier, when he’d been brought to New York gravely wounded, I decided they would be good hosts for my own wounded sergeant in this novel.
The sergeant is a composite of two real-life men, one whose name I’ve not yet learned. The unnamed soldier who was robbed and beaten on the road to Hempstead was the subject of a letter Captain Wheelock wrote to General Amherst. Wheelock was dismayed the man had not received the justice he felt such a crime deserved. In spite of my searches, I’ve since found no further references to this man, just as I could find no information on another man I came across—a sergeant of the Troupes de la Marine whose death was noted in the registers of the French Church of Saint-Esprit at New York City as: Jacques le Roy, dit La Réjouie, prisoner of war.
So I decided to combine them.