It was Grey Albion. He stared at James, astonished, but he didn’t smile. This was battle after all.

“Well, James,” he said evenly, “if someone’s going to kill me, I’d rather it was you.”

James paused. “If you surrender,” he said coldly, “you’re my prisoner. If not, I shoot. Those are the rules.”

Albion glanced around. The fighting seemed to have moved beyond the tent as the British were falling back. There would be no help from that quarter. His sword was on the ground beside him, but his leg was wounded and James was armed. Unless James’s pistol misfired, he had no options. He sighed.

And then James spoke again. “One other matter. You are to leave my sister alone. You are to cease from all correspondence with her and you are never to see her again. Do you understand?”

“I love her, James.”

“Choose.”

“If I refuse?”

“I shoot. No one will be any the wiser.”

“Hardly the word of a gentleman.”

“No.” James pointed the pistol at his head. “Choose. I require your word.”

Albion hesitated. “As you wish,” he said at last. “You have my word.”

With the redoubts taken, Cornwallis’s camp was open to close bombardment. Two days later, he tried to break out and get troops across the river, but stormy weather prevented him. Three days after that, on October 19, having no other option, he surrendered. As his troops marched out, they played the dance tune “Derry Down.”

On November 19, 1781, a ship came into New York from Virginia. On board was no less a person than Lord Cornwallis himself. While his troops had been held in transports, the general had negotiated a release on parole, so that he could go to London to explain himself.

Awaiting a vessel to England, he retired to a house in the town where he busied himself with correspondence. He certainly hadn’t come to New York to enjoy its society. Relations between himself and General Clinton were said to be strained. If Clinton thought Cornwallis had been rash, Cornwallis could point out that he had obeyed instructions from London, and considered that Clinton had not done enough to support him. In the wake of the disaster, both men were preparing their cases.

The same ship also carried a letter from James. It was affectionate and full of news. It seemed that Washington had considered following the victory of Yorktown with a strike against New York that might have ended the war there and then. But Admiral de Grasse was anxious to go and do more damage to the British in the Caribbean. “So I dare say,” he wrote, “that I shall be spending some more weeks sitting outside the gates of New York, and thinking of my home and my dear family within as I do so.” He seemed to believe, nonetheless, that the end of the war must now be in sight.