Letters

But no matter. We have the Journall: the “fowle receipt” shall be yours, when & if! Burlingame I made use of it to beget on Pokatawertussan, Queen of the Ahatchwhoops, the Tayac Chicamec (Henry Burlingame II), to whom the Journall (and its author’s justified Anglophobia) pass’d. Ebenezer Cooke discover’d its existence during his own Indian captivity at the hands of Chicamec in 1694; Burlingame III resorted to it to engender Andrew Cooke III on Ebenezer’s sister the following year. And then the Journall—together with Smith’s Secret Historie—disappear’d from sight.

“ ’Twas the dying wish of the whore Joan Toast, Ebenezer Cooke’s wife,” Mag Mungummory explain’d to the lovers, “that the receipt not be made public, lest we poor women be done to death. For what will turn your minnow into a buck-shad, will turn your buck-shad into a shark. Mister Ebenezer was all for destroying it, but his sister takes pity on the Burlingames to come, & on the Anna Cookes that love ’em — which is to say, the likes of Miss Nancy McEvoy! So they give both books to their old friend Mary Mungummory, as the trustiest judge o’ their application; and Mary gives ’em to her Mag; and Mag gives ’em to you.”

She did, and the lovers gratefully retired, with receipt & necessaries, into the gossamer woods. There Jove straightway descended in a shower of golden leaves, and Yours Truly was begot. What’s more, the rest of that same Privie Journall convinced my father, not only that the 1st Henry Burlingame had turn’d his back upon his English heritage & become an Ahatchwhoop Indian, but that Henry Burlingame III, encountering that record of his grandsire’s conversion, must surely have similarly so turn’d, being half Indian to start with! All hesitation then was purged from his own mind, which had anyhow never misdoubted its tendency, only its tactics: if the Appalachians were to dam the white invasion, either the “Continentals” (as the rebels now call’d themselves) must be supprest, or their “republic” kept weak & hemm’d round by territories of the Crown — especially by the Canadas, the key whereto, as always, was Niagara. And the key to Niagara was the allegiance of the Iroquois…

For all this, my mother’s testimony. She & Father wed on New Year’s Eve day in Old Trinity, the church after which Church Creek is named, and in whose yard a pair of nameless millstones mark the grave of Henry Russecks, Nancy’s grandfather. Whilst their vows are exchanging, Arnold, Burr, Montgomery, & Allen make their belated joint attack on Quebec: a debacle in which Montgomery is kill’d & one of Joel Barlow’s brothers so severely wounded that he dies in the retreat.

It had been my father’s plan to go north early in the spring and try to persuade his friends to reconsider their positions, even perhaps to join him in a different kind of thrust along the Mohawk Valley. But by then I had made my existence known, and both Burr & Arnold (in response to discreetly worded postal inquiries from Church Creek) reaffirm’d their patriotism, tho readily acknowledging their disillusionment & the justice of Father’s earlier cautions.

He linger’d on therefore in lower Dorchester, as I linger now at Castines Hundred; and whilst like you I slept towards birth, he associated himself with the Marshyhope Blues, a militia company charged with protecting the rebel citizenry against Lord Dunmore’s flotilla, then in the Chesapeake; also against the Loyalist “Picaroons” assisting that fleet, and in particular against the depredations of one Joseph Whaland, a rogue who piloted British vessels up the estuaries of the County & made foraging raids with his own boats, which then struck their masts & hid in the labyrinth of the marsh. My father’s actual purpose (Mother said) was to keep this Whaland safely inform’d of the militia’s movements & of the several attempts to intercept him at sea. Shortly thereafter, Joseph Whaland and his picaroon schooner were captured in the lower County, where they had thot themselves perfectly secure.

“Your father was barely able to talk him out of prison,” my trusting mother said.

He was not pleased by the coincidence of my birth (a little premature) and the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. I was duly dubb’d Andrew Cooke IV and charged to redeem that name: a great charge, my mother thot, for so delicate a babe.