Chapter 11

One of my hidden obsessions was to finally meet Miss Peggy Shippen, the Tory inclined socialite that shaped poor General Arnold’s fall from grace with General George Washington and the entire Continental Congress.

Of course, the history books had drawings of her and she was described as a great beauty but I wondered where reality took hold and fantasies became the stuff of fairy tales.

The General and Miss Shippen only had a pen-pal relationship at that point in time but I knew that things would develop as time went on the General Arnold would have plenty of time after Ticonderoga and Saratoga to recover from his wounds. From all reports, the General was not a womanizer but was a romantic of sorts that made him vulnerable to a woman with devious designs.

The connections between Miss Shippen and the infamous Major Andre were well documented despite mostly circumstantial evidence and accounts of the time. The eventual “turning” of the most popular and successful General of the American Revolution was a heartbeat away and I wanted to see this female Mata Hari up close and personal to see if the accounts were real or imagined.

I took my troops deeper into Pennsylvania to an area where there was abundant wild game and the populace was so sparse that we could easily think we were in a wilderness and in God’s truth that might be the better case.

The British regular Army under the command of General Howe were wintering in Philadelphia and the Tory social circles were in full bloom with Miss Peggy Shippen a constant companion of the redcoat wearing young lads. There was a small contingent of Hessian mercenaries that were more an elite unit for taking care of distasteful duties in managing the Patriot supporting populace. At that time the sentiments were almost fifty/fifty despite the fact that the British had the upper hand and the Continental Army was huddling in despair in a wasteland of starvation and disease.

We took a wagon that was loaded with fresh game meat and nuts and berries from the forest and headed down to Philadelphia to engage in some commerce with the invaders of the American colonies. It was a sore point with the British that they were considered invaders because they considered every tree, every house and every person to be the property of the King and that they just needed to be re-educated in the cold hard facts of absolute loyalty no matter how far they were living in distance from the center of power.

The Shippen residence was in the stylish part of the city and no expense was spared in appointing the exterior with the regalia of wealth because that was an advertisement of the power and prestige of the owner and gave fair warning to any interlopers to beware of the consequences if they were caught scamming for an illicit gain.

The family was extraordinarily rich and they had businesses around the globe.

The high-ranking British officers considered an invitation to some function under the Shippen banner to be a feather in their cap.

I got out of the wagon in the nicely paved courtyard and was greeted at the side door by a huge black man in the uniform of domestic servant and with a speech pattern that sounded more like a Caribbean background rather than mainland or British in origin. He looked over our produce and invited me inside to the kitchen proper to dicker with the cook about the trade.

The cook was also dark-skinned and I began to wonder if all the Shippen servants were of the black persuasion or did they have a varied mix.

A dreadfully young girl of about eleven or twelve wandered into the kitchen and came right over and perched right on my lap. She was so bright and charming that I was somewhat taken aback. Needless to say, I evolved into a stirring of sorts and I could tell from the young girl’s eyes that she knew exactly which end was up. When she made no move to remove her soft flanks from my groin, I did my best to contain my arousal and pretended it was of no consequence.

Just then Miss Peggy Shippen came into the room and berated the cook about the “beastly” burning of her toast that very morning like it was some sort of crime against humanity or violation of the rules of warfare that were violated every day in every way not too far distant from this very house. She actually struck the young girl on her face and told her,

“Get off the gentleman’s lap, little sister; you know mama will tan your hide.”

The small girl started to cry real tears at the humiliation and I was stuck silent by my guilt in the matter.

“Now tell me, my strange looking man what are you doing in my kitchen and why is your wagon in my courtyard?”

That was my introduction to Miss Peggy Shippen and I must confess I was quite smitten with her facial features from the very first and could easily understand why an intelligent man like General Arnold would be tongue-tied in her presence.

I suspected that she sensed I was not meant to be in her time period because she kept touching my shoulder or my arm to convince her that I was truly flesh and blood and not some apparition called back from the land of the dead. I would be the first to ridicule any belief in the existence of “ghosts” in our midst, but after personally witnessing the impossibility of time travel, I tried to keep an open mind in any discussion of the occult.

It was relatively easy to mollify her suspicions with the actual depositing of the accumulation of tasty wild game and other condiments from the forest because in that time and place the access to fresh produce and meat was difficult at best. Packaging and storage was non-existent and most food had to be consumed immediately or it would spoil and make one sick. There was no refrigerator or pantry that was temperature controlled, so it was only an ice room with blocks from still frozen mountain streams that did the job. To be sure that was devilishly costly for the general populace and only found in the households of the ultra-rich and powerful regardless of sentiments about the conduct of a war of independence. It was a simple fact that overshadowed the fun and joy of “lording” it over the uninformed masses with annoying benevolent disregard.