He came in the night.
He always came in the night. That was simply his schedule.
Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride is the fourth book in the Patriotica Romance Series, and it is the one that will make you read sentences twice. Not because anything explicit happens — Buck Freedman keeps things firmly in the realm of historical propriety — but because almost every line in this story is doing two things at once, and the second thing is significantly more interesting than the first.
The setup is this. Eleanor Hartwell is awake at midnight, sitting at her table by the window with a candle and a letter she has been composing and recomposing since Tuesday. Some things are difficult to put into words. She has been trying to find the right ones.
Then the hoofbeats come.
Paul Revere arrives at her door breathing hard, moonlit, hat slightly askew, coat open at the collar from hard riding. He has thirteen miles of warning left to deliver. The revolution will not wait. He looks down at her from his black horse in the full light of the April moon and delivers his message with the low urgent voice of a man who has been riding for an hour and intends to keep riding.
“The British,” he says, “are coming.”
Eleanor considers this information. She considers the man delivering it. She lets him in out of the cold.
What follows is the most tension-filled doorway scene in the history of patriotic fiction, which is a category that Buck Freedman has largely invented and immediately dominated.
He says her name once. Quietly. Like something he has been saving.
Then he rides.
She sits back down at her table, picks up her pen, and finally knows who she has been writing to.
The genius of Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride is that it takes the most famous midnight ride in American history and asks the question nobody thought to ask — what happened at all those doors? Revere knocked on dozens of doors that night. He warned dozens of households. History recorded the route and the message. It did not record the conversations. It did not record what was said on the other side of the threshold when the door opened onto moonlight and a breathing man on a black horse with something urgent to say.
Buck Freedman recorded one of them.
Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride includes the complete short patriotic romance story plus 80 lined journal pages with prompts about urgency, letters you’ve been meaning to write, midnight arrivals, and things you’ve been saving. Prompts like “The letter I’ve been trying to write but can’t find the words for is…” and “The person I would stay awake at midnight waiting for is…” and “When this is all over I intend to…”
This book makes the perfect romantic gag gift, an ideal present for the history lover in your life, a genuinely steamy yet completely workplace-appropriate white elephant gift, and the most dramatically patriotic thing you can give someone for the Fourth of July, Veterans Day, or honestly any Tuesday.
Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride is available now on Amazon. Part of the Patriotica Romance Series by Buck Freedman, available at PatrioticaBooks.com.
He came in the night. She was already awake. The British were coming.
That was not the most urgent thing happening at her door.