The Spy and the Seamstress

"I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." Nathan Hale uttered these immortal words while staring at a hangman's noose in a New York City park in September 1776. What passions prompted Hale, a Yale graduate and popular schoolmaster, to leave his classroom and join the Continental Army, ultimately volunteering for a slapdash espionage mission well below his privileged station? Why did George Washington conceive such an ill-fated escapade? The onset of the Revolutionary War tossed Anne Wheaton's world into a bubbling cauldron of black tar and feathers. Although Tories, staunch supporters of King and Crown, the Wheaton family had run a prosperous fashion emporium in Connecticut for generations. When a patriot mob threatened her father, Anne tossed her needles and threads aside to become a soldier in her own right. The Spy and the Seamstress chronicles America at its infancy, an era bursting with social and sexual awakening. Were all men created equal? What about women? Bitter debates raged over slavery, taxation, privacy, income inequality and police brutality. Smallpox, a pandemic far deadlier than Covid, ravaged the population. Nathan and Anne must navigate duty and sacrifice, freedom and bondage, love and lust. The Spy and the Seamstress relies on historical correspondence, diaries, and maps to portray this tumult in rich detail. It rollicks with action, suspense, romance and the whimsy of daily life, while also probing deeper moral issues that still resonate today.