Alex and Eliza--A Love Story Read online

  Eliza peered through the second-floor windows of her father’s office, hoping for a glimpse of the famous young colonel, but could discern no figures within the room, only the occasional flickering shadow.

  “Perhaps Church will introduce us; I’m certain they are acquainted,” said Angelica, meaning her rich suitor who was practically tripping over himself to ask for her hand. The oldest Schuyler sister was close to giving it, too, as John Barker Church was in the process of building one of the greatest fortunes in the new country, enough to rival or even eclipse their own father’s (or at least before the British had burned a large part of it up at Saratoga). But Angelica was enjoying being the belle of the ball too much to relinquish it just yet.

  “It will be interesting to finally meet this Hamilton fellow,” said Angelica. “Livens up the party for once.”

  Eliza shrugged, attempting to appear disinterested, but her sisters knew her better than that.

  “Maybe if you wore something a little more fashionable tonight, you’d catch his eye,” said Peggy cheekily.

  “And why would I want to do that?” Eliza retorted.

  “As Mama says, honey catches more flies than vinegar,” said Peggy, echoing their mother’s perennial advice about reeling in the right suitor—and quickly.

  “Honestly, Peg,” Eliza said, rolling her eyes. “I have no interest in Colonel Hamilton other than to satisfy my curiosity.”

  “If you say so,” said Peggy, sounding totally unconvinced. There was no hiding her feelings from her sisters, Eliza realized. They knew her too well.

  “Peg’s right, you could make more of an effort tonight,” Angelica chided. “Most girls would love to have your figure. You could at least show it to its best advantage every once in a while.”

  “I suppose,” said Eliza. “But why should I when no one need look at me when both of you are in the room?” It was an honest question, and said without the remotest hint of jealousy. Eliza was proud of her beautiful sisters, and much preferred the shadows to the spotlight.

  “Oh, Eliza, your lack of vanity is sweet, but one day you must let us help you shine,” said Angelica.

  Unlike the perfectly turned-out duo, Eliza was not one for the latest vogue of cinched waists and pannier skirts and powdered décolletage and pompadour wigs. Just a month past nineteen, she favored simpler dresses in solid rose (which did, in fact, flatter her complexion) or soft blue (which made her dark eyes that much more radiant), with square necklines modestly covered by lace shawls whose translucence didn’t so much conceal her cleavage as compel one to look harder. Her chestnut hair, darker than Angelica’s but lighter than Peggy’s, was never covered with anything other than a bonnet, and usually styled in nothing more elaborate than a pair of braided coils that accentuated the oval of her face, making her look that much sweeter. All of which is to say that, though Eliza may have been as “sensible” as her mother feared, that didn’t mean she wasn’t every bit as aware of the way young men looked at her.

  Eliza huffed: “I want a boy who is attracted to me, not to my wardrobe.”

  “Pretty clothes are like the colors of a flower’s petals. They tell the bee where to land. After that, it’s what’s inside that holds his interest,” said Peggy, still quoting their mother.

  Eliza rolled her eyes. “So I’ve heard. At any rate, you two should head inside to get ready; it grows later by the minute. I’ll go back to the Van Broeks’ for the last of it.”

  “Hurry back,” said Angelica. “You don’t really have much time, and the Albany ladies will arrive before you know it.”

  Already running down the hill, Eliza called over her shoulder, “I promise!”

  2

  Troop Inspection

  Eliza’s bedroom & the hallway, the Schuyler Mansion

  Albany, New York

  November 1777

  It was almost an hour later when Eliza returned home. She stashed the last bundle of fabric behind a wall with the others and slipped into the house without being seen by anyone other than a garden boy raking the gravel paths of the garden and a kitchen maid ferrying foodstuffs from the kitchen in the north wing. Inside, half a dozen servants scurried up and down the stairs, but she came upon no one from the family or worse, any guests.

  As she scampered down the hallway, a towheaded boy peeked out of the nursery. “You’re late.”

  “Does Mama know?” Eliza asked her brother. John Bradstreet Schuyler, twelve, nodded somberly. The heir-apparent was deemed too young for the ball. Annoyed to have been left out of the festivities and stuck in the nursery with the littles, he frowned at Eliza’s carelessness.

  Philip Jeremiah, nine, appeared next to his brother and tugged on Eliza’s skirts to entice her to play. Rensselaer, four, followed with glee and honey-covered hands. Cornelia, the baby, cooed from her nurse’s arms, eager to join in the revelry.

  Eliza laughed, took her little sister, and kissed her on both cheeks. “You’re all getting me sticky!” she told the boys, who were running circles around her. “All right. One quick loop around the room. Catch me if you can!”

  She was a favorite of the nursery, being the only older sister who would play on the floor with them or chase them around. After obliging them for one run around the chimney, she dashed upstairs and ducked into her room, which was the only dark one in the house. Inside, Dot was lighting the lamps on the wall sconces and atop the bureau.

  Eliza collapsed in the middle of her four-poster bed. “I made it!”

  “Miss Eliza! For shame!” said Dot. A stout woman of indeterminate middle age, Dot had once been the sisters’ wet nurse, and long years of intimacy had led to an easy—some would say too easy— familiarity of discourse between the maid and her charges. “Your sisters are ready and you look as if you had just come back from a run in the countryside.” She opened the wardrobe and reached into the thicket of clothing inside. “We don’t have much time!”

  Only then did Eliza notice the gown hanging on a dress form in a corner of the room. She caught her breath. The gown was undeniably gorgeous, with a burgundy overskirt and pale green brocade petticoats. It sagged awkwardly in the middle however, without a pannier to hold up its ample skirts—which is what Dot held in her hands when she turned from the wardrobe.

  Eliza did her best to focus on the tangle of straps and slats of the pannier, which looked as cumbersome as a carriage horse’s harness, rather than the gorgeous gown.

  “But I told Mama I didn’t want a fancy gown,” she wailed. “It’s unseemly for civilians to be dressed in frippery when our soldiers are fighting for our freedom in rags!”

  Dot shrugged. “It’s here now. And you didn’t ask her to have it made.” She stifled a giggle. “And it’s not like our boys can wear it to battle.”

  Eliza frowned, unwilling to give in. “It’s not right. For the past year I have spent all my time canvassing the ladies of Albany to spend less on themselves and more on the war effort. If I appear in a gown as sumptuous as this, they’ll think I’m a hypocrite.”

  “If you don’t appear in it,” Dot said, “your mother will jerk a knot in your neck.” She grabbed the loose end of the bow cinching the bodice of Eliza’s dress and gave it a sharp tug.

  Eliza slid across the bed, out of her maid’s reach.

  “And that hue is much, much too red for my coloring! I’ll look like a bruised peach.”

  “A little powder,” Dot said practically, reaching again for the ribbons on Eliza’s bodice.

  Eliza was shaking with fury. “This is so manipulative of Mama! She must know it contravenes all my principles! And she shouldn’t be wasting so much money on a dress when the family fortunes are so tight!”

  Dot bit back a smile, which Eliza wouldn’t have seen, because her eyes were still glued to the gown. “Don’t put it on for your mother. Put it on for Colonel Hamilton,” she teased. Dot had been spending too mu
ch time talking to Peggy it seemed.

  Eliza almost snarled. She did not care a whit what the celebrated soldier would think nor what any man would think. She dressed for comfort, not for competition.

  “But, Miss Eliza . . .,” pleaded Dot. “Your mother.”

  “Fine! Fine! I’ll wear it!” she said, as if she were agreeing to spend the day with her spinster aunt Rensselaer, who was so pious that all she would allow her nieces to do was to read to her from the Bible for hours on end, and so deaf that they had to shout themselves hoarse to be heard. Besides, she knew full well Mrs. Schuyler’s wrath would fall on Dot if she did not put on the dress. “I suppose we’d better get started. It will take at least an hour to put it on—”

  But she was interrupted by a pair of peremptory claps from outside her door.

  “Girls! Inspection time! The first guests will be arriving any minute!” Mrs. Schuyler may have been the wife of a general, but there were times when Eliza thought her mother sounded more like a Prussian instructor before a drill.

  With glee, Eliza realized there was no time to put on the fancy dress now.

  “Quickly, just help me look presentable,” she told Dot. She smoothed her hair and straightened her dress as Dot brushed a little powder on her face and dabbed a little color on her lips. Her maid looked back longingly at the dazzling new dress.

  Angelica and Peggy were already standing in the hallway when Eliza sidled behind them, hoping to escape notice. Angelica was resplendent in an amber gown, heavily embroidered with trails of green-leaved purple irises. Wide panniers beneath her dress gave her a striking hourglass silhouette, accentuated by a ribbed corset that cinched her already tiny waist even smaller, and pushed her breasts up and out. The expanse of bare skin was heavily powdered, as was her neck, face, and forehead, so that her skin had a moon-white purity, broken only by the pink pout of her mouth and flashing eyes. A powdered pompadour wig added nearly half a foot to her height, densely curled on top of her head and trailing between her bare shoulder blades in a few simple rag curls.

  Mrs. Schuyler, dressed in a heavy gown of purple so dark it was nearly black, looked her eldest daughter up and down, then nodded once. “Impeccable.”

  She motioned Angelica back and Peggy forward. Her gown was sea-foam green, complementing her emerald eyes. It was embroidered with blooming flowers rendered in brilliant amethyst, and connected by a delicate tracery of vines woven from thread of gold. Her panniers were smaller than her oldest sister’s, which only brought out the natural advantages of her lithe figure, as supple as a willow’s branch. Though her skin was more lightly powdered, her cleavage was just as pronounced as Angelica’s. As usual she had elected to wear her own hair. The waist-length tresses had been elaborately piled on top of her head in a pouf nearly as tall as Angelica’s wig. Eliza couldn’t imagine how Peggy and Dot had achieved such a sculptural effect in so short a time, but judging from the whiff of bacon she caught, they must have used enough lard pomade to fry up a full rasher.

  Mrs. Schuyler pursed her lips and pinched the fabric of her youngest daughter’s sleeve between her fingers. “I do not believe I recognize the flower, Margarita.”

  Peggy smiled bashfully. “It is called a lotus, ma’am. Apparently, it grows in the gardens of Cathay.”

  Mrs. Schuyler was silent a moment. Then she nodded her head—the equivalent, for the sober matron, of a bear hug.

  “Flawless,” she said. Then, sighing: “Elizabeth. Step forward, please.”

  Eliza bit back a sigh of her own. She should have known she wouldn’t get away so easily.

  Angelica and Peggy parted like theater curtains, and Eliza took a step forward. She was dressed in what she’d been wearing all day, a simple gown of solid mauve, its skirt pleated but unamplified by hoops or panniers, and delicately draped to reveal a darker purple panel beneath. The purple lacing in the bodice ran up the front rather than back, leaving almost no décolletage in view, though what skin was left uncovered was all but concealed beneath an intricately worked lace shawl, which Eliza had stitched herself.

  Mrs. Schuyler’s expression didn’t change, but when she pinched Eliza’s sleeve as she had Peggy’s, she caught a little skin with her fingers. Eliza did her best not to wince.

  “Is this . . . cotton?” Mrs. Schuyler said in a horrified voice.

  Eliza nodded proudly. “American grown and woven, in the province of Georgia.” She shook her head. “I mean, the state of Georgia.”

  Mrs. Schuyler turned away from her middle daughter even before she finished speaking, her dark eyes finding Dot’s, who stood well back against the wall behind her mistress. “I thought I selected the burgundy gown for Miss Eliza to wear.”

  “It’s not Dot’s fault, Mama,” Eliza interjected. “The burgundy gown is too dark for my skin tone.”

  Mrs. Schuyler didn’t take her eyes from Dot’s. “If she would spend less time in the sun as I ask,” she said, not to her daughter but to her daughter’s maid, “she wouldn’t have this problem. She is as freckled as a farmhand, and what boy wants to see that? A little powder to bring the down the tone and it will look regal.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Dot said.

  “Mama,” Eliza tried again, “I think it incumbent upon patriotic ladies to lead by example. How can we deck ourselves out in exotic frippery and stuff ourselves with sweetmeats and pastries when so many of our soldiers are shivering in threadbare rags and subsiding on bones and beans?”

  Mrs. Schuyler didn’t answer immediately. Then:

  “Any moment now this house will be filled with more than a hundred representatives of the province, including more than a dozen suitable bachelors. Your sisters are suitably prepared to meet them, but, alas, you seem bound and determined to alienate them by downplaying the gifts with which our Creator has blessed you. In a more perfect world, you might be able to attract a husband with your mind, but as women we must play the hand that was dealt us. You will put on the burgundy dress that I procured for you—at no inconsiderable expense—and the wig and powder, and you will appear downstairs with a smile on your face, whether that smile is painted on or genuine. And you will do so within the hour.”

  Eliza felt her cheeks color and wished she had used more powder, so she wouldn’t give away her anger. “New York isn’t a province anymore,” she said. “It has been a state since fourth of July, 1776.”

  Mrs. Schuyler bit her lip. She drew in a calming breath before speaking. “Young men don’t like drab dresses,” she said in a clipped voice, “let alone girls who know more words than they do.” She turned back to Dot. “You will dress Miss Eliza in the gown I selected and not let her out of her room until her skin is powdered as white as the Catskill range.”

  “No,” said Eliza, “she will not.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said no, Mama. I won’t wear that dress. I am perfectly presentable and I have no wish to change, nor is there time. If I’m not mistaken, the first guests have arrived.”

  Mrs. Schuyler looked as if she would boil over like a kettle, but the sound of carriages in the driveway seemed to change her mind. “I suppose there is always one spinster in the family,” she said coldly. “You two,” she continued, addressing Angelica and Peggy. “Downstairs on hostess duty. I want your smiles so bright that no one even notices the wallpaper peeling in the entrance hall. As for you, Elizabeth, try to be as inconspicuous as possible. Perhaps I can convince the gathering I have only two daughters.”

  Angelica and Peggy flashed sympathetic looks at Eliza before following their mother downstairs.

  “I don’t understand you, Miss Eliza,” Dot said, tying the bows in the back of the dress a little tighter to accentuate Eliza’s waist. “You had already decided to wear the dress. Why kick up such a fuss? It just draws Mrs. Schuyler’s wrath down on you.”

  “Oh, if it wasn’t the dress, it would be something else,” Eliza said a
s Dot pushed and tugged at her dress. “Mama needs no excuse to scold me.”

  Dot had to agree with that.

  “I don’t know why she cares so much,” Eliza said now. “This is hardly the most prominent party of the year.”

  “Yes, but the Van Rensselaers are coming and the Livingstons and, of course, that famous young Colonel Hamilton. Husband season is open. The hounds are on the loose.”

  Eliza’s face brightened. “A good thing, then, that I have no intention of being a fox!”

  3

  Messenger Boy

  Outside the Schuyler Mansion

  Albany, New York

  November 1777

  It wasn’t supposed to have been this way.

  It was supposed to have been his triumph. After barely a year as General Washington’s aide-de-camp, he had persuaded his commander to send him to Albany on a matter of vital military importance. He was to confront General Horatio Gates, the man who had replaced General Schuyler as commander of the northern forces, and demand that he surrender three of his battalions to the Continental army under the direct command of General Washington. Following the success of the Québec campaign and the recapture of Saratoga, the war in the north was essentially a holding game, and troops were needed farther south to liberate the British-held New York City and stem the onslaught of British troops besieging the southern states, where they were burning the vast fields of cotton and tobacco.

  Technically, all Alex was doing was delivering an order from the commander in chief of the American military forces. But the United States was an almost two-year-old country, and the toddler nation was reluctant to be bound by rules. General Gates, like General Washington and General Schuyler and indeed every other patrician patriot— Jefferson and Franklin and Adams and Madison—had one eye on the war, but the other was firmly focused on what would come after. The new country would need new leaders, and a heroic general could parlay victory on the battlefield to high political office: president perhaps, if that was the direction the new republic went.