The colonel shook his head. “Regrettably, our ruse was discovered. Given the time we had, our only disguise was to turn our uniforms inside out. When one of the militia saw the green linings to our coats and recognized a former neighbour whom he knew to be a Loyalist, he raised the alarm. We lost more than thirty men in the first volley. Those that didn’t perish in the second fusillade were hacked to pieces, mostly by Oneida warriors fighting on the rebel side. Ellis Hooper was one of those slain. We found his body when the Americans withdrew from the field.”

The colonel placed the wig back on his head, straightening it with both hands. His face was set tight. “He was an exceptionally brave man.” Looking past Wyatt’s shoulder towards the tether line, he added softly, “Who never lived to see his son again.”

“The mother?” McDonell asked, though his tone suggested that he already knew the answer.

“Died in childbirth, alas, the year before Ellis Hooper and I made our escape to Canada. The boy would have had a sister, had mother and child lived.”

Wyatt knew it wasn’t his place to broach the subject of why Hooper had not remained in the valley with his son. Some might have accused him of abandonment, but many a good man had found himself facing the same dilemma and made the same choice as Hooper, Sir John Johnson among them.

The colonel’s own wife had been pregnant with their third child when he’d received the warning that troops were on their way to transport him to New York. A pregnant woman would never have made the journey through the mountains, certainly not with two young children in tow, so he’d been forced to leave his family behind.

Ellis Hooper and the rest of Sir John’s men had prices on their heads; if they had stayed, they would have been subject to the same prospective fate as their colonel – and an imprisoned man could no more provide for his family than a dead one. But for a man who was alive and free there was always hope that his family would remain untouched by the authorities, which meant there was every possibility that they’d be able to affect their own escape in due course, as had been the case with Sir John’s wife, whose own subsequent flight to freedom with, by then, three children in hand, had been every bit as dramatic as her husband’s.