CONTENTS
1: The Loring house
2: River's Edge
3: Ben's Advice
4: The Journey Begins
5: Battle Brewing
6: 80 Cannon
7: New Haven
8: Hope
9: The Turn North
10: A Gift
11: Leaving
12: The Battle Begins
13: The Note
14: The Telling of the Treasure
15: The Ghost of Thomas Tew
16: The Waterfall
17: The Journey Ends
18: Found
19: Camp at Cambridge
20: The Decision
H 1 H
THE LORING HOUSE
Reverend Loring’s house loomed ahead of Gabriel Cooper as he made his way along the streets of New York. While most people saw the house as large and elegant, with its two white-washed columns framing the front entrance, twelve-year-old Gabriel saw only a confined and dreary space. He could find no joy there. He did not belong.
Gabriel hadn’t really belonged anywhere since his parents, a bookstore owner and his wife, died of the pox the year before. The Lorings had taken him in, but at times he wished he were living by himself on the streets.
With ten children in the Loring family, there was little food to go around, and Gabriel had barely enough food to survive. The Lorings expected him to pay for his keep, so instead of attending school, he got a job setting type at Peter Dalrymple’s print shop — a job given to him because he could read and write. Many nights, he would arrive back at the house after a long day at the shop to find the table cleared, just a scrap of bread left for him. He would eat quietly and then head upstairs to find his blanket on the hard wooden floor in the corner of the Loring boys’ bedroom. As he lay on the floor, he could hear the older boys snickering under their breath about the “orphan boy.” Sometimes he felt like crying, but he always held back his tears, refusing to give the boys the satisfaction.
Despite the dread Gabriel felt as he neared the Loring home, the world seemed a bit brighter on that sunny spring day. He had finished early at the print shop and would make it to the Lorings in time for dinner — and a bit more food than usual. Still he knew he’d have to pay a price for being home early. Mrs. Loring would have a miserable, endless line of work for him as soon as he walked in the door. He was more of an indentured servant than a member of a family.
Gabriel endured more than just endless work and hunger in the Loring home. Reverend Loring was a strong loyalist. Every night at dinner, he condemned colonists for their lack of loyalty to the good King of England, His Majesty, King George III. Everyone around the table listened at attention and nodded in agreement — everyone, that is, except for Gabriel. This did not go unnoticed by Reverend Loring.
Gabriel longed to do more than just refuse to agree. He wished he could stand up at the Loring’s long dinner table and shout at the top of his lungs, “KING GEORGE IS A TYRANT!” But the risk was too great.
Gabriel had his reasons for siding with the patriot cause. When Gabriel’s father was still alive, Gabriel heard him speak of Parliament’s taxes on paper, tea, lead, and glass — and of colonists forced into taxation without representation. In other words, the colonists had to give money to the King without any say in what laws should govern them. But more than having heard his Father speak out against the unfair taxes, Gabriel knew firsthand what the King’s soldiers were like.
Under the Parliament’s Quartering Act, colonists had to house and feed British troops in their public businesses whenever necessary. When Gabriel was ten, two British soldiers found it “necessary” to lodge at the Cooper’s bookstore. They ate the Coopers’ food and drank their wine, all without paying a thing. Gabriel considered this nothing more than stealing. Even more despicable was the way the soldiers would strut around full of arrogant pride. They called the colonists worthless rabble and said they awaited the day when they could return to “glorious England, where true gentlemen lived.” Gabriel’s father had told him not to speak out against to the soldiers, at least not in their presence, and Gabriel never did. He bottled it all in.
It was with this bottled-up resentment that Gabriel stepped back into the Loring home early that evening. He quickly shot through the door and ran upstairs before anyone noticed he was home. Rushing into the room where he slept, he pried up a loose floorboard.
Hidden under the floor were his most precious possessions: a small bit of money he had saved from his printing-press job, an old knife, a flint rock, a flask he had found by the East River, and the two most precious of all: a note that his mother had written to Gabriel not long after she had taken ill and a ring she had left him. He checked these items whenever he could to make sure that the Lorings had not touched them.
He deposited one of the two coppers he’d just earned into this secret hiding place — the other had to be given to Reverend Loring — then he waited upstairs until he heard the servants below call the family to the table.
In the dining room, Gabriel took a seat at the long wooden bench. He found a spot by Herbert, a redheaded boy about his age and the only Loring who was kind to him. There was barely any room for Gabriel at the end of the bench, but he managed to fit.
As Gabriel sat down, he was met with a cold stare from Mrs. Loring. “Gabriel, why did you not come to me directly after returning from Dalrymple’s? You know the washer woman is off for the week, and there is laundry that needs tending to. I should have you leave and tend to the washing immediately, but as the grace of God wills, I
