The volunteers were meant to only be the Dutch together with their native allies, I believe, but then of course when Schuyler asked for men, Wilde stood.

I thought of what he’d said about the measure of a man, and it mattered to me suddenly to try to show this man that I was made of more than what I might appear, so I stood, too.

So the others left and our force carried on in our canoes, sometimes by night, always by stealth, building a new plan from the one that had been broken.

Of the battle that came after, if it can be honorably called that, there are men who’ve written histories of it, and I’ll leave the telling of that part to them. They were not there, of course, which makes it easier to praise or judge, depending on their point of view, but La Prairie was my first battle, and I did emerge from it more hardened in my mind, and with a stab wound in my shoulder from a blade that caught me unawares.

It had seemed clean enough when we had left the field, but on the march back down again it festered. By the time we came to Albany I was too ill to travel any further, and was put into the hospital.

I stayed there through that autumn.

Then one day I woke and Jacob Wilde was sitting in a chair beside my bed.

“I have some news to tell you,” he began. And that was how I heard.

He traveled back with me, and in Cross Harbor I was met with sympathy. A lawyer gave me documents to sign, and Wilde and our militia captain bore their witness to my signature, the captain making some speech about hardships and endurance.

It was Wilde alone who walked out with me to the farm, and stood beside me as I looked at what had been the house, and now was only blackened ruins.

I knew what had happened. He’d told me in Albany.

“The committee of safety, or so they do call it, that serves our new lieutenant governor, came to believe that Long Island was harboring Jacobites, so they did send over soldiers in boats who went round the north coast, into all the bays, searching. They broke open houses. They broke open mine,” he said. “Frightened my wife and the children. I was in the orchard, at work, or I might have done what your father did. When they reached your house, your father came out with his musket, and so did your hired lad behind him. Your mother apparently stepped in between. And that’s all we can tell you, for certain. I’m sorry.”

They’d all died. All shot, for a small piece of ground and the disagreements we’d transplanted from our old land to our new one.

How the fire started was a mystery, but it had done its work. Little remained of the house where I’d lived, that had looked to the water.