Victory at Yorktown: A Novel Read Free Page A

to have Tory leanings, had been able to use her friendship with Peggy to smuggle out information regarding British plans. Especially the crucial news that they were preparing to abandon Philadelphia, thus giving him the lead for the long anticipated confrontation that climaxed at Monmouth Court House.
    While the British occupied Philadelphia during the winter of 1777, this “Miss” Shippen, at seventeen, had an affair with a well-placed Major Andre, but after the British abandoned the capital in 1778, her attention, if not her loyalties, suddenly shifted to the new military governor, Benedict Arnold. As a gentleman he never communicated to Arnold his concerns about who he had chosen to fall in love with and had even sent along a silver tea set as a present from Martha and himself when they were wed in 1779. To his growing concern, the spy had passed along warnings that she believed that “Miss Peggy” was still in touch with her alleged lover, Andre.
    Arnold, a brilliant battlefield commander, was no political general. He was besotted with a girl less than half his age, and soon ran afoul of the politics of Congress in the city he was meant to govern in time of war. Repeated charges of financial chicanery were brought against Arnold, but never proven. He languished in frustration, like a fighting bear locked in a gilded cage, openly took to drink, and finally begged for a transfer that Washington had readily granted his old friend as commander of the garrison and fortifications at West Point.
    Then, at last, it unraveled. At some point Arnold, after losing the laurels of his victory at Saratoga, the rumors that the pain in his crippled leg were so severe he had taken to laudanum, his marriage to Peggy, and his growing rage and frustration with Congress, had turned coat.
    Only by the slenderest of margins had the plot been discovered at the very last minute. Arnold had opened communications, via Peggy, with Andre. He had been promised a generalship, the command of his own forces, and after the Revolution was suppressed, title, rank, and high position in the postwar government of the Americas. He had succumbed, offering back secret maps for the approaches to West Point, the stripping out of troops from the position on the day the British would launch the surprise assault, and to Washington’s disbelief at first, Arnold had even offered him as a prize, promising to lure him into the trap just before it was sprung.
    An untrusting sentinel had caught Major Andre, in civilian garb, carrying the final details of this elaborate plot and trying to slip through the lines as a courier from Arnold. It would have been sprung before the end of the month. As for his own fate, Washington cared little. He had assumed more than once that he was fated to die in this war, but if by so doing, he could inspire the cause to continue, he would gladly lay such a sacrifice upon the altar of his country. The fall of West Point, the guardian and barrier of all of upstate New York, while at the same time, the commander in chief was killed resisting capture? The war most likely would have ended here, especially after the unrelenting series of debacles Gates had suffered in the Carolinas.
    Arnold had not only betrayed him, he had betrayed his country, and that action Washington could never forgive.
    Now the orders that he hesitated to sign were lying upon his desk. By all accounts, Major Andre, the contact for Arnold, was a man of honor, though caught out of uniform while behind enemy lines. By two thousand years of military tradition the doomed man could face but only one fate. Yet all of those who sat at his court-martial, even General Greene, had made appeals for some form of clemency rather than death by hanging, so impressed were they by Andre’s soldierly bearing, his personal sense of honor, and display of gentlemanly behavior. They saw him almost as a victim of Arnold as well, caught up in a web not of his own making, and on the night of his