House of Dox

A Revolutionary War Novel

Book I of The Cornelius-Gilley Saga

In the 1760s, Petrus and Elisabeth Cornelius leave the thin soils of Loenhout, Belgium, and stake everything on a perilous Atlantic crossing to the New World. In Dutch-speaking Albany, their son Peter—nicknamed Dox—grows up under the low beams of John S. Lansing’s inn, where committees whisper of liberty and war.

At thirteen, restless and hungry to prove himself, Dox slips away from home and follows the militia east, reaching Connecticut just as Benedict Arnold’s redcoats descend on Fort Griswold in 1781. In the smoke and chaos of Groton Heights, he learns what war truly costs.

Years later, when British troops march again in 1814, a battle-hardened Dox shoulders his musket one last time to stand in the rainy fields outside Plattsburgh, determined to finish what began in his boyhood.

Based on real people and documented events, House of Dox opens The Cornelius-Gilley Saga, tracing one immigrant family’s fight to claim a place in a turbulent young America.