Proud of her relationship to many of her books characters, author Millicent Hughes swears she fell in love with the real-life Lambert Lockwood. A mover and shaker of the retail world in post Revolution CT, Lockwood seems an admirable lover of books, having started a library in his Bridgeport hardware store that blossomed into a bookstore and then a publishing company. Hughes felt deeply for such unknown heroes who were only doing their jobs during the strange days of 1777, when the war had almost slipped into apathy until a fire began in a small CT town.