Gabriel is not like me. When I tell their aunt that my children come from good stock on their mother's side, what is true of Gabriel is not so true of my next two eldest sons – Thomas and Nathan.
From the moment I placed a gun in the hands of my son Nathan, I knew he was too much like me. It fitted him like an extension of his body, and killing has never given him the slightest pause. When he killed his first man, ironically to save his eldest brother's life, he told me later he was glad.
Although Thomas was spared the ordeal of ever taking human life through his own death at the hands of a man again too much like myself at my very worst, I believe he would have felt much the same as Nathan. The times I caught him parading before the mirror in my old uniform, I knew he would glory in war and in killing.
Not Gabriel. Gabriel would tell me later that he wanted revenge as much as I did but not at the expense of the cause. It has always been the cause that Gabriel believes in. Not war for the glamor and romance one so young would normally imagine it to have, but war as a means to an end. It was the end that he dreamed of. A new world, a world where all would be equal. Gabriel is idealistic. He wanted this war because he believes that America should be a great nation in its own right. But he does not glory in war, for the sake of war. Killing sickens him. He will avoid it if he can, though he never hesitates when it is necessary.
I'll never forget the dark fire in his normally soft brown eyes (so unlike the always amused, often mocking black of Thomas's) when we killed a number of redcoats who were trying to surrender. His rage and disbelief that such a line could be crossed by men he valued and trusted. It was in that moment that I truly realised how unlike he is from me, and how much he is the embodiment of everything I loved in his mother.
Even in looks. Sometimes I will glance at him and be struck by my wife's expressions on my son's face, a face already too like hers with its aristocratic bone structure and delicacy of feature. He has her dark eyes, and her fair hair, whereas Nathan will look just like me, dark-haired and blue-eyed.
Even when Gabriel angers me beyond all endurance, I love him all the more, for in everything he does he acts as his mother would have. The only one of my children who has ever truly defied me not based on some childish want, but based on his own principles and sense of what is right.
He is the most precious to me of all of them, and every day I risk losing him to this war he believes is so necessary.
Three days ago in the early hours of the morning, when he was leaving with a third of the militia to harass a supply caravan, I pulled him aside.
"This belonged to your mother," I told him, as I fastened the ribbon around his throat. "It's the North Star. The only star in the sky that never moves. It's constant. A guide."
He looked down at the pendent between his fingers, then back up at me in wonder.
"Father," he said, his voice still softened and roughened by sleep, such was the earliness of the hour, "it's a routine assignment, I'll be gone two days at the most."
He had sensed my anxiety. He smiled at me, and it hurt my heart a little that my son felt he had to reassure me, a man much more accustomed to the hardships and losses of war.
"I know," I said. "You would almost be the only constant in my life now."
He smiled again, with more certainty.
But by nightfall of two days later, my concern was reaching a ridiculous level, a level only a parent with their first-born child in danger can experience.
And when he finally returned well after midnight, missing two of the original number of militia that had gone with him, with a deep ugly bayonet gash in his side, and the men telling how all supply wagons were now given an extensive guard, I wondered how I would ever let him out of my sight again.
He's sleeping now, wrapped in blankets and in my arms, his soft gold hair like the brush of ghostly fingers on my face and neck.
He has her blood running through him. He has her very eyes.
I suffered the loss of her, how can I possible contemplate even risking losing him?
The answer is simple. That choice is out of my hands. It was out of my hands the day my son enlisted against my direct wishes, out of my hands when he left me again after the death of his brother Thomas, when he had been badly wounded and then almost hung as a spy by a despicable excuse for a man. Left, and forced me to chase after him, for my own piece of mind.
Nothing he has suffered has ever deterred him from doing what he believes he must do.
If truth be known, I lost him the day he looked beyond me and all my failings, and saw a future far beyond my imagination.