Bea begins having vivid dreams about a brave and handsome soldier named Alan Warren—a member of an elite group known as Knowlton's Rangers that served during the American Revolutionary War.
Prone to keeping her head in the clouds, Bea welcomes her nightly adventures in 1776; filled with danger and romance they give her much to muse about the next day.
As she tries to figure out what is happening to her, she pushes away her closest friends and family in order to dive deeper into her dreams, exploring the world of 18th century America and the interesting people she meets there.
He decides to ask Liz Winters to the Halloween dance, despite being Bea's best friend, because after spending so many years around his cousin, a girl with a bit more poise and restraint is a breath of fresh air.
Orphaned at the age of ten, Alan Warren's Aunt Mary raised him alongside his cousins on their apple farm in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Alan's oldest cousin, Dr. Joseph Warren, had left home for Boston to start a medical practice; there he discovered liberty, politics and Samuel Adams.
Only fifteen at the time, Alan quickly got caught up in his cousin's political protests and joined Sam Adams’ Sons of Liberty, much to his aunt's dismay.
And when the American troops entered the city, Thomas Whaley, the father of a high society Bostonian girl Alan had fallen in love with, hunted him down.
Alan Warren promised to bring her home, accepted the offer to join Knowlton's Rangers, but declined the commission, wanting as little responsibility as possible so he could leave to rescue Beatrice the first chance he got.
In New London, Connecticut, where he got a job as a school master, he held special early morning summer classes for women, believing they had as much right to an education as men.
After fighting broke out in the neighboring Massachusetts Bay colony on April 19, 1775, Nathan, filled with a sense of patriotic duty, joined in the army as a first lieutenant.
When some of the men in his company embarked on a mission to light fire to an American ship and send it sailing toward two large British warships on the Hudson River, Nathan alerted his new friend Alan Warren to use the spectacle as a diversion to get on board the Eagle–General Howe's personal ship–and rescue Beatrice Whaley.
Thirty six years old, handsomely rugged, and a veteran of the French and Indian war, Thomas Knowlton fit the bill of an ideal officer in the Continental Army.
To prevent this, Knowlton and his men built up defenses along a rail fence, connecting Breed's Hill to the Mystic River, cutting off any potential British flanking maneuvers.
Knowlton's men were so successful at holding off their opponents that after the third attempt to storm the rail fence, General Howe was the only British officer still standing.
His inconsolable wife barely relented, but ultimately the young man set off for New York City with his father to endure a long, hot summer digging trenches with the other privates.
So he spent most of his summer avoiding the older men–whom he both revered and feared—and would often steal away to a quiet spot to write his mother a few lines about his day, but more importantly, to update her on his father.
The Americans kept Howe's army bottled up in Boston for nearly a year, and the city full of refugees came dangerously close to running out of food and supplies.
When the Americans built defenses on Dorchester Heights, an advantageous position within firing range of the city, Howe chose to abandon the Boston to pick up the fight elsewhere.
The British Commander in Chief, General Gage, gave her father-in-law a generous appointment in the army to make up for the financial losses caused by the rebel mob.
After just a few weeks she became his mistress, following him wherever the British forces moved, and, not one to miss a financial opportunity, her husband, Joseph Loring, followed them, too–to receive his hush money which he all too quickly gambled away.