Alex and Eliza--A Love Story Page 18

  “I am informed by General Schuyler that, though the house at Saratoga has been rebuilt and the fields and orchards replanted, the harvests have not yet reached fruition, and as a result the farm is consuming far more money than it is bringing in. General Schuyler has considered selling it, but there is no one in these conditions of uncertainty who is willing to pay even a tenth of its worth, and parting with it would only be cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Additionally, General Schuyler has not received his stipend from the Continental Congress for nearly two years, and though there is every reason to believe that he will be rewarded amply with land and other in-kind goods when the war is concluded, it is impossible to say when that day will come, or even if it will be decided in our favor.

  “What I am trying to say, my dearest daughter, is that we are on the verge of ruin.

  “It is therefore imperative that you and your sisters marry immediately, and marry well. In this regard, only Margarita is fulfilling her duty, but Master Van Rensselaer is still some years away from attaining his majority. Though the connections between his family and ours go back several generations, I worry that the Patroon will discover to what circumstances we have been reduced and will call off the engagement. So great is my fear that I urge you not to share this information with Peggy, who has not the discretion the Almighty gave to a screech owl and is likely to unnecessarily share this information with young Stephen, who would then be well within his rights to communicate it to his father.”

  “Mama!” Peggy exclaimed when Eliza reached this point. “You libel me!”

  “Oh, hush,” Eliza said. “You know you’re an unrepentant gossip.”

  Peggy hushed. It was true.

  “As for you, Angelica, I am going to advise you to do something that directly contravenes General Schuyler’s wishes for you and, as such, causes me no amount of consternation. Though Mr. Church’s family connections remain hazy to us, as do his business dealings and debts from his time in England, his successes here in America are plain enough to assess. Even General Schuyler has admitted that, though he dislikes Mr. Church personally, the man is remarkably adept at providing munitions to the Continental army at reasonable prices while simultaneously retaining a handsome profit for himself. I am told by both General Schuyler and other sources that those profits number in the thousands, and as such they outweigh any marks against him. Therefore it is with a heavy heart I am advising you—nay, directing you—to accept his offer of marriage and to finalize the union posthaste. If necessary, you should elope with him, for, though the news will wound your father, the general will take comfort in the fact that you are paired with a man whom you respect, and who can provide for you and ease the lot of his relations.”

  “Angelica!” Eliza called to her sister behind the privacy screen. “Are you really going to do it? Are you going to elope?”

  “Keep reading,” Angelica grunted as she writhed free from her dress. “We will discuss everything when you have finished.”

  “Which brings us to Elizabeth. We sent her to Morristown with the expectation that she would meet some suitable young gentleman among the many officers in General Washington’s entourage. But it has come to my attention via Gertrude that Eliza has allowed her time to be monopolized by that nameless and penniless scoundrel Hamilton, who only last year oversaw the prosecution of dear Papa for crimes against his country, even though he was exonerated on all charges. I do not wish to go into that again.

  “Undoubtedly, it is a testament to your father’s goodness of character and breeding that he speaks in the highest terms of Colonel Hamilton’s intelligence and potential despite that fellow’s transgressions against him. Nevertheless, Colonel Hamilton is an unacceptable candidate.

  “Suffice it to say, as a woman I judge him with my heart and my purse. My heart does not forgive him for what he did to your father, and my purse hangs empty at my side—he will not fill it.

  “In short, he will not do, and since Eliza is making no attempt to find a more suitable beau, I have decided to take matters into my own hands. I have been in correspondence with Susanna Livingston, the wife of Governor William Livingston and mother to your friends Kitty and Sarah. Their brother Henry is the same age as Eliza and has served as aide-de-camp to both General Schuyler and Major General Benedict Arnold, who led our boys to victory at Saratoga and regained for us our once and future beloved estate. Though his efforts on behalf of his country are nothing less than commendable, Mrs. Livingston tells me that she has seen certain signs of restlessness in Colonel Livingston, and indeed indications of incipient waywardness that suggest he is in want of a wife to cut short these libertine tendencies before they can become true vices. To that end, Mrs. Livingston and I mutually agree that is in both families’ best interest if he and Eliza marry immediately—”

  “No—!” Eliza cried out, pressing the letter into Peggy’s hands.

  There were two or three more paragraphs, but Eliza couldn’t bear to read further.

  “Angelica?” she called in a forlorn voice. “Is it . . . oh, can it be . . . true? Am I to marry Henry Livingston?”

  It was Peggy who answered her.

  “Mama’s letter says he arrives on the twenty-fourth. That is tomorrow. He will only be in Morristown for one week. She wants the business concluded before he leaves.”

  The business, Eliza thought grimly, as though I were so many bushels of corn to be sold at market.

  “I have not seen Henry in some years,” Peggy said, squeezing her hands, “but Kitty wrote me last winter to say that he had turned out a fine young man.”

  “He pulled my pigtails,” Eliza said dazedly. “When we visited the Livingstons in Elizabethtown when I was eleven. Henry would sneak up on me and pull my pigtails from beneath my bonnet.” She looked at her sister forlornly. “That is all I know about my future husband.”

  “You know he’s rich,” Angelica said, stepping out from behind the screen. “What more do you need to know?”

  Eliza looked up in surprise to see that her older sister had not changed into her nightgown, but into a simple traveling dress in dark wool, without corset or bustle.

  “Sister? What are you doing?”

  Angelica shrugged. The look on her face was one of defiant resolution. “I am doing what Mama directed me to do: I am eloping.”

  “What—tonight?! That cannot be.”

  “John sends the carriage for me at midnight. We will travel to Elizabethtown, and Governor Livingston himself will perform the ceremony. Not even Papa can object, if his daughter is married by a governor. We travel thence to Philadelphia, where John is establishing a base for his business so that it can better cater to both north and south.”

  “But, Angelica! You cannot marry like . . . like a milkmaid in trouble, in front of a judge in a plain wool dress! You must have a trousseau and a dowry and a wedding at home like Mama and Papa’s, in bright silks, with family gathered around you.”

  Angelica smiled benignly. “That will be your wedding, dear Eliza.”

  “I will not marry Henry Livingston! I do not even know him.”

  “That may be so, but you won’t marry Colonel Hamilton either. Mama and Papa will not allow it. They cannot afford it.”

  Eliza was aghast.

  “And you can’t elope either.” This last from Peggy forlornly.

  “What do you mean?” Eliza said, turning to her younger sister.

  “Mama writes that she worried that you might attempt to run off with Colonel Hamilton, but Papa assures her that Colonel Hamilton’s own sense of decorum will prevent such an outcome. She says he feels too much loyalty to Papa as a fellow soldier in the cause of revolution to betray his trust in such a manner. His guilt at being forced to prosecute Papa last year will only reinforce his desire not to further harm a man whom he esteems so greatly.”

  Even as Eliza turned her back to Peggy’s words, she kn
ew they were true. Alex was too honorable to steal a man’s daughter, especially the daughter of a man he had been forced against his will to do harm. She was trapped. Besides, as Angelica pointed out at the dinner table, Alex had yet to declare his courtship or define his intentions concerning their relationship, whatever they were.

  So now she was going to have to marry Henry Living-ston, a boy she had last seen nearly a decade ago, when he had pulled her pigtails until her head was so wobbly she thought it would fall from her neck.

  “If he so much as touches my hair now,” she said out loud, “I swear I’ll cut his hands off.”

  25

  No Guts, No Glory

  Continental Army Headquarters

  Morristown, New Jersey

  March 1780

  The news of Angelica Schuyler’s elopement with John Barker Church made the rounds of the Morristown encampment with the magical haste of gossip. Upon hearing the news, General Washington remarked to Alex that if he could learn of British troop movements with the same speed as he learned of love affairs, he would have won the war two years ago.

  In the long run, few were surprised that the marriage had finally come to pass after Mr. Church’s extended courtship. To the degree that people were familiar with the character of Miss Schuyler-that-was, she was understood to be a brilliant young woman who would only accept a husband who could gain her access to the very highest levels of society. And John Barker Church, despite the questions that remained about his past, was obviously the kind of man who could provide it.

  If his bearing was not quite as martial or athletic as some other young men’s, he had the wooer’s gift of giving a girl his undivided attention—of flattery, yes, and the sorts of gifts and romance that the modern girl expects from a suitor—but also of genuine interest in the things that held a girl’s fancy. Where another man would be content to charge a lady’s maid with procuring a bolt of cloth from which a dress could be made, Mr. Church would not only pick out the fabric himself, but commission a seamstress to craft the most flattering cut for his belle. If a girl expressed an interest in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, he would gift on her a complete set of the Englishman’s work—including even the scandalous Moll Flanders!

  “They are well met,” Lafayette said to Alex when he heard the news. “He will keep her on her toes, but she will keep him honest as well. It will be a tempestuous marriage, but if they can handle each other’s tempers, I predict a successful union.”

  Alex had found the news out from Eliza herself. She had written him a brief note apologizing for Angelica’s outburst at the dinner table, saying that her elder sister was feeling the pressure of the coming elopement, which had occurred that very evening. The words were obviously meant to mollify him, yet the note’s being addressed to “Colonel Hamilton” rather than to “Alex,” and signed “Yours very sincerely, Miss E. Schuyler” instead of “Yours, Eliza” left him on pins and needles. More devastating, she pointedly did not encourage him to visit her or make any mention of coming to see him. Perhaps Angelica’s words had had their effect on her?

  Regardless of Angelica’s motivations for speaking so bluntly to him, Alex knew that she was right. The Schuylers would expect Eliza to marry someone rich. Indeed she, and they, deserved it. The family had worked hard for three generations to establish and increase their status as one of the first families of the northern states, and they would not grant access to their inner circle to just anyone. To be sure, the New World was a place where a man could come from nothing and become a person of great power and wealth. Look at Benjamin Franklin, who had started out a humble printer’s apprentice yet became one of the wealthiest men in America.

  But Alex had not Mr. Franklin’s scientific mind. He would not invent a kind of spectacles or a type of stove, let alone discover something as momentous as electricity itself! He had only his wits—his ability to see through to the heart of a situation quickly and to render that truth persuasively in words. Such a talent boded well for a career in law or in public service, perhaps even newspapering or literature. But none of those paths was a route to quick wealth, and he could not propose to Eliza—let alone to her parents!—on the basis of some hypothetical future success.

  However, Alex did have a head for numbers as well. After his mother died, he had been apprenticed as a clerk in the mercantile house of Beekman and Cruger. There he discovered a flair for keeping books and anticipating the movements of the market and knowing when to sell and buy to maximize profit. Alex had been all of fourteen at the time. To him, it was a game, but many men made careers of this kind of trading—and fortunes. It was base work, to be sure, devoid of glory, and full of questionable morality as well. What man wants to make his living peddling the vices of tobacco or alcohol to the besotted, or manipulating the price of vital goods such as grain or mutton so that he would profit greatly while his thousands of customers might lose? But if he didn’t do it, someone else would.

  And yet . . . could he give up everything just for Eliza? Could he be miserable in business for the sake of a happy wife? And would she be happy, if he were miserable? It seemed to Alex that Eliza did not care for money the way her parents did, or her sisters. It might be that, as a rich girl, she had never had to worry about it, but that was selling her short. She was simply not a material individual, and if she saw Alex throw away his beliefs for the sake of buying her from her family like a piece of livestock, she would lose all respect for him.

  There was one other way, but it was uncertain and dangerous to boot. In all the world, for all of history, there has always been—for men, at least—one aspect of their character worth more than money, and that was glory. The kind of glory that only valor on the battlefield can gain. Horses churning beneath a soldier’s body as swords flash and rifles sound and bullets cut the air. To risk one’s life for a worthy cause—and what cause was more worthy than democracy?—was the kind of endeavor that made a man beloved of his fellow countrymen, and granted him influence in the highest circles, whether it be government or industry or society. Glory brought fortune more surely than an investment in gold bullion or Barbados rum. And unlike those other endeavors, it brought respect, too. The kind of respect that even the Schuylers must surely acknowledge.

  And though Laurens and Lafayette liked to tease him for clerking away the war while other men his age risked his life, Alex had been on the battlefield. As General Washington’s chief aide-de-camp, he was never more than a few feet away from the center of command. But a modern general did not ride into the fray like a medieval king. He stood apart, usually on a hill or other prominence, observing the action and directing its course, and his secretaries were likewise sidelined. Alex had been present at battles on a half-dozen occasions, but in every instance save one he had never drawn his sword or fired his weapon. He had instead taken notes—of General Washington’s orders, of the enemy’s troop movements and the Americans’ response, of request for aid or supplies. The rules of engagement prohibited firing on commanding officers (although that didn’t prevent the occasional “mis-aimed” cannon from coming dangerously close), but Alex’s only real taste of combat had come at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778. When it seemed like Cornwallis’s forces would overcome the Americans, General Washington had ridden into battle and Alex had thrown aside his pen and paper and ridden after him. Together they had rallied the American troops and saved the day, and if the battle ultimately ended in a draw, the result was far better than the rout it could have been. Indeed, it was the first time that American troops had met the British counterparts on an equal basis and held their own, and reports of their bravery had inspired other battalions up and down the line.

  Alex remembered little about the day save that it had been unbearably hot. Later it was discovered that more than half the men who lay dead on the battlefield were not wounded—they had died not of bullets or bayonets but of the heat itself. General Washington’s own horse, a magnificent white c
harger given to him by the governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, had died of heat stroke, and Alex’s own horse had fallen beneath him, from a bullet that could have just as easily killed Alex. The fall knocked him unconscious. His leg and arm had both been badly sprained, though by some miracle neither was broken. When he awakened, he found he had been dragged from the field. His clothes had been soaked in blood, though whether it came from his horse or the enemy he couldn’t have told you. His sword was also bloodstained, but he had no memory of running anyone through. He had been brave, yes, but no stories would be told about a man whose own horse had been the one to remove him from battle.

  He needed to prove himself once and for all. For himself. For his country.

  But above all, for Eliza.

  It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon when Alex knocked on the door of the first-floor rear parlor that General Washington had taken as his private office, and let himself in.

  “Your Excellency.”

  Even seated, the blue-coated figure at the square, paper-covered desk cut an imposing figure, with his erect posture and broad shoulders and thick hair heavily dusted with powder. He did not look up immediately but continued with his writing for some minutes while Alex waited patiently.

  At last the commander in chief of the Continental army placed his quill back in its holder. He sifted a little ash over the sheet of parchment in front of him to soak up any excess ink, then blew the ash to the floor and folded the parchment into thirds. On the outside of the letter he wrote a simple large M, and then, finally, he looked up at Alex with the letter in his outstretched hand.