For those who are reading this novel, and decided to brave reading it despite its less than obvious or less than transparent, I salute you for not judging a book by its cover, or at least not by its title. Without spoiling too much information, I can tell the reader that those who are willing to maintain in a state of puzzlement or curiosity about the title and have not already googled it will find the answer to the riddle of the title of the book in the prologue to this book. But as might be expected, knowing what mens rea is happens to only be the first layer of a more difficult problem. And it is framing the problem that this novel presents in a larger context that I will try to do briefly here before I turn you lose onto the text itself.

I conceived of at least the rough bones of this particular novel at the same time that I began Return Of The Native Son, which introduces a middle-aged Viscount Lipton as returning “home” to a country he barely knows after having been away for twenty years in East Florida, a place that for obvious reasons (it being returned to Spanish rule after the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution). We might well imagine that were it not for the authorial providence of inheriting twelve thousand pounds a year as the Viscount Lipton from his grandfather, Robert Woods would be in a much less pleasant position in the aftermath of the American Revolution. He was a colonial, or would likely have been seen as such, despite his English birth, and there was little place for loyalists in the part of the world where he had spent his time. If he had not been able to return home to England and start a new and highly rewarding life, he would have been left considerably worse off. This novel is important with regards to the Lipton family saga in that it shows how it is that Robert Woods (as he is known here, by his given name) avoids a very difficult fate because of his identity.

I have always found identity to be a troublesome matter, and it so happens that among the obsessions of the times in which I write is the question of identity. What is the identity of Robert Woods? Those who take this novel upon reading the previous two volumes that have been written in series will know him well under the guise of Viscount Lipton, a gouty but hearty middle-aged gentleman who manages to marry well and make his mark within British society as being a man of considerable talent but also intense and deep honor. Were he not a wealthy nobleman, he would be a man of integrity that you would be happy to have on your side, but he would be far less easy to get along with because he would come off as being far less justified in being so intensely concerned about his honor and his freedom to behave according to the integrity of his character. During the events of this novel, Robert Woods is treated and viewed as a commoner–to be sure, an able and intelligent commoner, certainly a talented one of considerably loyalty to the British cause–but a person whose prickly sense of dignity rubs others the wrong way. I won’t spoil the trouble that he gets into, but he definitely finds trouble, as one might expect, for being viewed as somewhat defensive for the station of life in which he finds himself as a provincial servant of the crown in a modest pseudogentry status.

It is not spoiling anything to say that Robert Woods does not find a great deal of happiness in his dealings with the people of Charleston, South Carolina, where a maternal uncle of mine was born while my grandfather served in the United States Coast Guard. Charleston, South Carolina is best known among students of history today as being the most rabidly secessionist city in rabidly secessionist South Carolina, a state whose prickly feelings caused crises in 1832 over nullification of a tariff (labeled with typical restraint as the Tariff of Abominations) and then in 1860 at the Democratic Convention that ended up with the division of the Democratic Party into two wings, and then later in 1860 and early in 1861 as the place where both secession and the American Civil War began. While I am a student of that war, this particular book is set in the tail end of the American Revolution, in the period between Yorktown (the supposedly decisive victory in 1781 where Cornwallis’ army was forced to surrender after being trapped by Washington and Rochambeau and their combined Franco-American forces) and the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the war in American independence and made loyalist Americans who supported the crown an awkward reminder of British imperial defeat that was better best swept under the rug and forgotten.

It is worth noting, though, that Robert Woods and the local white population of South Carolina, despite their many causes for mutual antipathy, nonetheless share some important qualities. One of the least important, but personally interesting, is their fondness for sweet iced tea. Some time in the first half of the 1800s, sweet iced tea was first recorded in the area of Charleston, South Carolina, which remains the home of the particular tea culture of Southern American sweet tea. It is no great surprise that this own tradition of tea drinking is one that I share, having inherited it from my maternal grandmother, who regularly made sun tea for my brother and I when we returned to my grandparents’ home after school, along with cinnamon sugar toast made out of homemade bread that came from flour that my grandmother personally grinded herself. For all of their disagreements, Robert Woods was influenced by the behavior of his neighbors in the colonial South, including their love of sugar mixed with tea. His own family history was deeply related with tea, a product of British imperialism, and sugar had long been recognized as a product of the system of slavery that brought such misery to people dragged over from Africa to the Atlantic world that began on offshore islands off the coasts of Europe and Africa and continued to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American South (though admittedly except for Louisiana and Florida, the American South has never been warm enough to be congenial to sugar production). To be fond of sugar in the late 1700s, despite one’s political and moral philosophy, was to be entangled in the process by which slaves were worked to their deaths to create the white powder that sweetened food and drink and made, for a few generations at least, the Caribbean islands to be among the wealthiest places on earth, for those who owned the land and its people.

Besides implication in slavery and a fondness for a drink that was itself a symbol of both slavery and empire, a drink I personally enjoy to this day, having grown up to love it, and being deeply influenced by my own upbringing, there is one other fundamental quality that is shared by the people of South Carolina and our hero, Robert Woods, and that is his prickly sense of honor. There is much in life that cannot be enjoyed and must be endured. Those who tend to lash out in word or deed about the injustices of this world–and surely I am such a person myself–run some risks in so doing. There are only a few times and only a few places where one has been able to speak out against what was wrong in this world without suffering extreme penalties for being the bearer of bad news that no one wanted to hear. Generally speaking, people higher in society were, at least in private, better able to speak about the problems that plagued a society, because they had shown the commitment to serve in social institutions and also a vested interest in preserving a social order. If they thought that social order could be best preserved through gradual and patient reforms, they often had good reason for thinking that way, and a fair amount of freedom to operate in at least some cases. Having a prickly sense of honor without having a protected social position, though, has always been a hazardous task. The writers of our age who are obsessed with insulting people and considering them to be beneath human dignity simply because of a social wrong that was widespread in their time (and even in our own) do not properly understand the danger that they are in, because they think that their privilege will save them. In times of crisis such privileges can always be revoked.

The American Revolution happened to be a time when certain privileges in certain places were revoked. Any efforts on the part of a distant Parliament to claim that it had the right to decide for the colonies in all cases, as it had claimed in the disastrous 1765 Declaratory Act, were dead letter in an America that was just about to find its independence. Whatever the chances had been in 1763 for an imperial federation where America served as a junior partner of the English, such a project was a dead letter in 1782 after years of fighting and the surrender of two British Armies (at Saratoga and Yorktown) and the collapse of the British government that had fought the war led by Lord North. Yet at the same time it was not as if all privilege was revoked simply because distant imperial masters had been replaced with provincial elites who were now the founding fathers of an extended and deeply complicated republic spanning from the fishing country of New England to the swamps of coastal Georgia, and to the Mississippi River that was given to the United States, but hardly settled by Americans yet, in the treaty that ended the Revolution. For some people, at least, the privileges that they had to view people as property and to rebel for universal rights that they themselves pointedly refused to acknowledge within their own households seemed as natural as divine-right seemed to the despots of the ancien regime and that the superiority of Parliament over colonial assemblies elected by provincial colonists appeared to Parliament and its supporters. What is natural to one person is a horrible and unacceptable injustice to someone else, and no one is immune from being blind to the privileges that they hold that others refuse to recognize as just and permanent.

While all of these potent ideas, and a few more of them, were brewing in my head, it was very hard to figure out where exactly this particular novel would go. Unlike the first two novels of the Lipton Family Saga, this novel was not going to be a romantic comedy–although the tone of Clarissa, with its reminders of the trauma of the French Revolution, is not necessarily comic either. We know that Robert Woods begins his saga in England as a single man in search of a bride, and so that means that he must exit this novel as a single man as well, if not yet in entire possession of an independent fortune as he soon would be. I had thought of the title of this book in pondering an argument in law about the importance of the frame of mind of someone committing a crime to the status of a criminal act. In the contemporary period, there are numerous crimes that claim strict liability, so that the violation of the statute is enough to consider someone a criminal, regardless of the state of mind and intentionality of the person involved. Ignorance of laws that are largely unknown and published, if at all, in massive and difficult to find, read, and understand places, is considered as no defense. Innocence of any malicious intent is considered as no defense. Only a lack of prosecutorial resources saves us all from incarceration, for if police departments and district attorneys were given enough resources to prosecute every statutory violation, no one, not even themselves, would be free from punishment, and to prosecute everyone but themselves would be an injustice of the highest order.