His chief concern, however (so he claim’d), was not the inevitable misunderstandings & conflicts of interest betwixt governors & govern’d 3,000 miles apart; it was the invasion of white settlers across the Appalachians into Indian lands, in despite of George III’s proclamation. He could not believe that the confederated state governments being proposed by the Committees of Correspondence & the Continental Congress would be inclined to check that invasion. Exempt from patriotism, he saw the self-interest & bad faith on both sides of the Atlantic, and a dozen routes to peaceful compromise, none of which bade especially well for the Indians. If, on the other hand, war were actually to break out betwixt the British & the colonials, each would scramble to use the Indians against the other — in particular the Six Nations of the Iroquois, whose situation once again would be, for better or worse, strategic.

In April of ’75, when the shooting commenced at Lexington & Concord, Father was in nearby Cambridge, poring thro the library of Harvard’s old Indian College for references to the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy, and deciding that he had had enough of Yale’s Congregationalist orthodoxy, perhaps of the academical life. His friend Arnold rusht up from New Haven to add his company of militia to George Washington’s army, assembling on the Common. His friend Burr hurried over from law school in Litchfield to join that army. Father introduced them. They could not persuade him to enlist, nor he dissuade them.

“We must have Canada!” they declared. Father understood, with a chill, that “we” already meant The United States of America. If Canada were not among those states, they argued, the British could crush the unborn republic betwixt its armies to the north & west and its navies to the east & south. The key to Canada was old New France, never easy under British rule: Arnold’s strategy, in which General Washington & the Massachusetts Committee of Safety concurr’d, was a three-prong’d attack: one force (General Montgomery’s, say) should move down the St. Lawrence from Maine to take Quebec; a 2nd (Arnold’s own, he hoped) up thro Lake Champlain to take Crown Point, Ticonderoga, and Montreal; a 3rd thro the Mohawk Valley to Niagara. “We” would then control the St. Lawrence &: the Lakes; Canada would be “ours.” The French would surely help, in hopes of regaining New France for themselves; the habitants could be relied upon at least not to aid the British. The great uncertainty was the allegiance of the Six Nations: Could my father not be prevail’d upon to accept a commission & persuade the Mohawks to remain neutral, the Senecas to lay siege to Forts Erie & Niagara?

He could not, tho he affirm’d the soundness of the strategy. He urged young Burr to enlist with Arnold instead of Washington if he wanted action, and caution’d Arnold to beware the jealousy betwixt the Massachusetts & Connecticut Committees of Safety, which, together with the rivalry & reciprocal sabotage common to generals, was bound to make joint operations all but impossible. He himself, Father declared, was withdrawing to another Cambridge: not the one on the river Cam in Mother England, where his grandfather had gone to school with Henry More & Isaac Newton, but the one in tidewater Maryland. Not his fatherland (Heaven forfend!), but his grandfatherland, where that same ancestor had made certain decisions respecting his own deepest loyalty.

Burr & Arnold had not heard of this Cambridge, nor were they much inclined to hear. Was it in the neighborhood of Annapolis? One day’s sail, my father replied, but a world away, and the last white outpost before the wild & trackless marshes. Above this Cambridge the river-names were English: Severn, Chester, Wye, Miles — it was a wonder the Chesapeake itself had not been dubb’d the Wash, or the Bristol. But at this Cambridge it was the Great Choptank, larger than Cam & Charles together, with the Thames at Oxford thrown in; and after the Great Choptank the Little Choptank, the Honga, Nanticoke, Wicomico, Manokin, Annemessex, Onancock, Pungoteague, Nandua, Occohannock, Nasswadox, Mattawoman—

Enough, cry Burr & Arnold: ’tis the beat of savage drums! To which my father replies: ’Tis the voice of the one true Continental, his vanisht forebears, in whose ranks he was off come morning to enlist.

All this my mother told me — your grandmother Nancy, who is about to enter the story. Andrew III’s investigation of his latefound father had led him from Annapolis to Castines Hundred; my own father’s re-investigation of that same ancestor reverst that route, as he was determined to reverse his father’s judgement of the 3rd Henry Burlingame. From Castines Hundred, where he paid his respects to the incumbent Baron (sire of the current one), he made his way 1st down to Annapolis, to search the records of the province and dig thro the library at St. John’s College; then over the Bay to Cambridge & Cooke’s Point, once the seat of the family, to consult more local records & the memories of old inhabitants.

From one of these latter — an aged, notorious former whore named Mag Mungummory, he learnt three valuable things. 1st, that Ebenezer & Anna Cooke’s childhood nurse, Roxanne Russecks, née Édouard, had had a romance with their father, Andrew Cooke II, and borne him a daughter named Henrietta Russecks (as shown on the family tree, or thicket, in my last), who herself later bore a daughter named Nancy Russecks McEvoy. 2nd, that Mag Mungummory’s mother, Mary, call’d in her prime “the Traveling Whore o’ Dorset,” had once known Henry Burlingame III himself, in various of his guises, & fear’d him — tho of his disputed role in the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy, Mag knew nothing. 3rd, that about the same time when Ebenezer Cooke regain’d his lost estate by marrying the whore Joan Toast, and Henry Burlingame III left Cooke’s Point for Bloodsworth Island, and Henrietta Russecks married one John McEvoy, this Mary Mungummory had purchased from Roxanne Édouard Russecks a tavern own’d by the miller Harry Russecks, Roxanne’s late husband. She had establisht a brothel in its upper storey and flourisht with the common-law husband of her old age, the miller’s brother, Harvey Russecks. Mag herself, the fruit of this autumnal union, had inherited the business on her parents’ death and, tho nearly 80 at the time of this interview, continued to operate both tavern & brothel with the aid of a young woman she’d taken in as an orphan’d relative four years past.

The establishment was the same in which my father was lodging, and where this conversation was taking place: Russecks Tavern, near Church Creek, below Cambridge. The young woman — herself chaste, tho uncommonly worldly for her age — was the same he had been unable to take his eyes off thro this interview as she bustled about the place. More, she was the Nancy Russecks McEvoy aforemention’d, whose family had been lost at sea in the ship Duldoon out of Piraeus for Cadiz in 1771. Then only fifteen, she had made her way from Paris to Philadelphia & thence to Maryland to seek her one known relative, her great-uncle Harvey Russecks. In his place she found his daughter (still call’d by her old working name, “Mag the Magnificent,” but by Nancy rechristen’d “Magnanimous Maggie”), who had welcomed her as a grandchild, seen as best she could to her education, protected her from the establishment’s rougher patrons — and gratified, insofar as she was able, the girl’s tireless curiosity about her ancestry. Perhaps Mr. Burlingame could be of assistance in this last? Hither a moment, pretty Nancy…

And so my mother & father meet — he nearly 30, she nearly 20—and their matchmaker withdraws for the present, tho she has one crucial thing more to do for us. And they very soon fall in love, Henry & Nancy, whilst the country goes to war. Colonel Arnold’s plan to move against Ticonderoga has been approved by Massachusetts; but to mollify Connecticut, which is jealous of both Massachusetts & New York, Arnold must yield command of the operation to the “Vermonter” Ethan Allen, who himself would separate New Hampshire from New York even if it means “making this state a British province” (so he assures Governor Haldimand of Canada in secret letters!). Even so, jealous officers in Massachusetts mount an inquiry into Arnold’s “conduct,” about the same time that Ethan Allen is superseded by a rival of his own as commander of the “Green Mountain Boys.” Both men angrily resign their commissions & return to Cambridge, where Burr, having ignored his tutor’s advice and stay’d with Washington, is dying of inaction. All three take up the Canadian campaign — but Allen, under General Montgomery, gets the key assignment of moving from Ticonderoga to take Montreal, whilst Arnold & Burr must take the bitter northern route thro the Maine woods from Castine — named for our 1st émigré Baron — to Quebec. (The 3rd crucial thrust, to Niagara thro the Mohawk Valley, is never mounted.)