Rural New York in 1787. The great war that turned the former colonies into a fledgling nation is over. Or is it?
In a remote cabin in the forest, Ralph Folsom, once a brilliant Shakespearean scholar but now the last remaining Tory in High Tide, ekes out a bitter impoverished existence. Hideously scarred by an act of vigilante justice and mentally scarred by the betrayal of his wife, nothing is left to him but his hatred - and no one gets a bigger dose of it than aristocrat and patriot Capt. Aaron Collins, who was born to everything Ralph wanted.
Aaron's got problems of his own. Stripped of this tenant lands following the war, saddled with a huge debt, and still reeling from the loss of the old flame who chose to marry Ralph Folsom instead, Aaron is too intent on the day-to-day struggles to notice that his enemy is sliding into madness - and threatening to drag him down with him.
It is the summer of 1787, but old sins bite deep, and the event now driving Ralph over the edge goes back ten years, twenty years, and even before he and Aaron were born . . .
