Alex and Eliza--A Love Story Page 25

  “Are you awake?” a voice asked then.

  Alex turned. Though he had never seen the boy before, who looked to be about eleven or twelve, he would know him anywhere. He had a Schuyler face: blue-gray eyes and high forehead and small, almost delicate mouth. This must be Philip Junior.

  Alex nodded weakly.

  “How—” His voice broke, and it was a moment before he could speak. “How came I to be here?”

  Philip stared at him blank-faced for a long moment, then opened his mouth to call:

  “Papa! The deserter is awake!”

  34

  Can’t-Runaway Bride

  Outside the Governor’s Mansion

  Morristown, New Jersey

  April 1780

  Tap-tap-tap.

  The knock at the door was as soft as the scratch of a mouse behind plaster, but to Eliza it sounded like the blows of an axe against the trunk of a two-hundred-year-old oak. As long as the door to her bedroom remained closed, she was safe. She was Eliza Schuyler, with her whole life still in front of her. But once it opened she would be Eliza Living-ston, counting down the days until it was over.

  “Eliza . . . dear.” Aunt Gertrude’s voice was soft, but it rang in Eliza’s ears. “It’s time.”

  She looked at herself in the three standing mirrors Kitty had had Loewes drag into her room. Kitty had brought the dress, too, a crème moiré number with a double bustle saved from being too wan by an elaborate green motif on the overskirt, and an emerald underskirt in watered silk. It looked like the desert blooms she had read about, when a once-a-year rain falls and the sands erupt in shoots that will live and flower and die in a single day. The corset—her first in who knew how long—months, maybe even a year—gave her a waist almost as thin as Peggy’s, and the décolletage was more than she had ever dared. She reached reflexively for a shawl, but Kitty slapped her hand away lightly. Lightly, but definitively.

  “Not today,” she said, dusting a little powder over Eliza’s bosom. “Today you become a woman, and you display yourself with pride.”

  The wig was one of Kitty’s, scaled down slightly, because Eliza could not hold still when it was piled too high, yet taller than any she had ever worn. The feathered hat perched atop it looked comically small to Eliza’s eyes, but Kitty said it reminded her of the crest of some exotic jungle bird.

  “A parrot?” Eliza whispered, thinking of Peggy’s wig from the party last week.

  “You’re a cuckoo!” Kitty laughed, slapping Eliza lightly with the flat of the comb she was using to tease up the wig. Lightly, but not so lightly. “Now look!”

  She turned Eliza to the mirrors, arranged so that she could see herself from three sides. Eliza looked like a painting of herself, a painting that the artist had done from memory. Instead of capturing her likeness, he had simply created an idea of womanhood—widened hips, tiny waist, full breasts, rouged lips—and animated it with traces of the girl who used to be Eliza Schuyler.

  “I-I do not look like myself.”

  “Exactly!” Kitty gushed. “Isn’t it grand?!”

  Eliza found her childhood friend’s eyes in the mirror.

  “Tell me. Does it hurt?”

  Kitty’s brow furrowed, but then smiled it away. “You mean, the secrets of the marriage chamber? A thousand generations of women have survived it. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  “No,” Eliza said. She reached for her old friend’s hand. “I meant does it hurt when you hide every last shred of your individuality and self-worth behind acres of silk and cups of powder and smiles that never, no matter how hard you try, reach your eyes?”

  Kitty’s smile grew rigid on her face, and did not, as Eliza had said, reach her eyes, which were cold and condemning.

  “You are nervous,” she said, pulling her hand away from Eliza’s. “I will give you some time to yourself.”

  ELIZA SAT IN her bedroom listening to the rush of footsteps in the hall outside, the hushed voices of women getting themselves dressed for the wedding and maids making the house ready for the reception afterward. Three times she had heard a hand on the door, three times someone—Peggy first, then Stephen, then Aunt Gertrude—had told whoever was at the door to leave Eliza alone.

  “She will come out when it’s time,” Aunt Gertrude had said.

  And now it was time.

  THE DOORKNOB TURNED; the door eased open.

  “Eliza, darling? The carriage is waiting downstairs.”

  Gone was the woman who had waved a vial of smelling salts in Governor Livingston’s face and called it the great pox. Part of the skill of being a good soldier, she had told Eliza last night, is knowing when a battle is lost. This was not a battle, Eliza had protested. It was the whole war. “Perhaps,” Aunt Gertrude had admitted. “But there would still be other battles, other wars, and you must save your strength for them.”

  Aunt Gertrude held out a gloved hand to Eliza. She stood and let herself be led like a little girl into the hall, where the servants stood on either side, smiling at her as best they could. She nodded at them as Aunt Gertrude led her between their ranks and down the stairs, where Peggy and Stephen waited, their smiles even more forced. The door was open, sunlight streamed in like a shower of gold. At the end of the walk a red-trimmed four-wheeled carriage waited just the other side of the gate. Its top was thrown open so that everyone in town could see her as she was carried to her groom.

  She let herself be led outside and helped into the carriage by a liveried footman she didn’t recognize. One of the Livingstons’, no doubt. Aunt Gertrude was installed beside her on the leather seat and the driver snapped his whip and the carriage sprang forward with a little skip. The Livingstons’ house, where the ceremony would take place, was behind them, but the carriage set off gaily up Pine Street and then turned onto Dumon, heading toward the Green, where Eliza would be displayed for all the town to see.

  “It’s just like a wedding is about to happen,” Eliza said, “when it’s really an incarceration.”

  Aunt Gertrude put her hand on Eliza’s knee.

  IT SEEMED THAT spring, too, was in on the joke, for the day had dawned as glorious as any in the new season. The air was brisk, to be sure, but the breeze carried a hint of warmth rather than chill, and though the sunlight illuminated more than it heated, it still shone down through a sky dotted with birds: hawks, ducks, pigeons, jays, and finches, all circling or diving or darting through the buoyant air and singing their varied songs. The trees in the town green hung heavy with buds that seemed only seconds away from bursting into full leaf, while the pond at the park’s center was ringed with golden daffodils, whose blossoms shone in the dark water like the reflection of a hundred little suns.

  Sheep grazed on the verdant grass and chickens pecked at grain while sows rooted at the boggy end of the pond, their bellies full with litters about to be born. A half-dozen townsfolk were about, maids and grooms on their errands, and as many soldiers, who all stopped what they were doing to smile or wave or salute at the lucky girl who was about to marry into the most powerful family in the state.

  “That elm tree there,” Eliza said, pointing over the well-wishers, and past them. “The one with the strong horizontal limb, like a soldier’s rifle held at his shoulder. That is the tree where convicts are hanged, is it not?”

  “Eliza, please,” Aunt Gertrude pleaded. “You are only making it worse.”

  THE TURN AROUND the green was completed, and the carriage headed back along South Street. The view was of white houses now, dainty and neat, with shutters thrown wide to let in the late-morning sunshine. A great furred calico cat, as big as a raccoon, with an orange patch over one green eye and a black one over the other, sat atop a fencepost and cleaned its paws lazily as she watched Eliza’s carriage float by.

  “Oh, I do so love a long-haired cat,” Aunt Gertrude said, staring at the placid beast. “They are as twic
e as warm as a muff on a winter day. They can be a bit ratty, though, but that fine puss is as well groomed as a princess. Someone loves her!”

  “Mama tried for years to keep cats at the Pastures,” Eliza answered. “But the foxes killed them all. I don’t think they were even eating them. I think they just killed them to spite Mama.”

  “You cannot blame Mrs. Schuyler for this, Eliza. You know she wants what’s best for you.”

  “Does she? She offers me for sale to the highest bidder and then has not even the courtesy of showing up to see the final results of the auction.”

  “It is a three-day journey from Albany, under the best of circumstances and, with the wetness this spring, no doubt the route is even slower than ever. And I have heard reports of British raiders, too, making so bold as to attack even guarded mail coaches. Would you really want your mother to risk her life just to see you exchange a few words before a minister?”

  “I think she ought to be here to see what she has wrought. Papa, too. It is the least they could do.”

  “Hush, now. We’re here.”

  The carriage had pulled up before a large white house, which, if truth be told, looked like every other house in Morristown, and every other house in New Jersey, save that it was a little larger than most, with broader windows and a more ornate pediment over the door. Where once Eliza had delighted in the little touches that made each five-bay house a unique expression of its owner’s taste, now she saw them as minute variations on a single repetitive theme, and that theme was, conform or be cast out.

  And look at her! After all her talk of being her own woman, forging her own path, she was letting herself be led along like a sheep to be sheared and sheared again and again until, at last, it gives no wool and instead of having its hair cut, its throat is cut instead, and it winds up in a stewpot.

  Aunt Gertrude alighted from the carriage with the footman’s aid, and now held her hand up to Eliza.

  “Come, dear.”

  “No.”

  “Eliza, please. It is the way things must be.”

  “No,” Eliza repeated. “I will not hand myself over to my own doom.”

  “Then you hand your family over to their doom,” Aunt Gertrude said. “Are you so selfish that you would sacrifice your papa and mama and brothers and sisters so that you don’t have to marry a man you don’t love? Do you think a better man will take you, after word of the scandal gets out?”

  “Are they so craven that they would sell their daughter? I tell you, I will not do it.”

  “Eliza!” another voice called then. “Eliza, wait!”

  Eliza turned. She saw another carriage farther up the lane, wooden-sided and covered with mud, as if it had traveled some great distance. Its door opened, and a blue-jacketed figure was tumbling out of it so clumsily that the carriage rocked like a dinghy in the wake of a whaleship. The fellow stumbled to the ground and nearly fell, his three-cornered hat tumbling off his head and exposing a shock of russet-colored hair.

  “It—it cannot be,” Eliza breathed.

  The ginger-haired figure looked up at her, and there were the blue eyes that melted her heart.

  “Eliza, wait! I’m here!”

  “Alex?” Eliza said, afraid to believe it. Still, she was standing up—no, scrambling up—and pushing aside her aunt’s hand and the footman’s and forcing her bustled hips through the narrow door of the carriage so quickly that she heard fabric tear. She pushed herself all the way through and hopped down onto the flagstone bricks of the Livingstons’ front walk.

  “Alex?” she said. “Is it really you?”

  His face was flushed and he seemed somewhat thinner; he handled his right arm gingerly, as though it pained him. His hands in hers were so hot that she could feel them through his gloves, and hers.

  “It’s me,” he said. “I’m here. You don’t have to marry him. You have to—that is—” He sank somewhat gingerly to one knee. “Elizabeth Schuyler, my darling Eliza, my one and only Betsey, will you marry me?”

  When Alex knelt, a second pair of figures came into her view, emerging from the carriage that had carried him. Her parents. General and Mrs. Schuyler, looking on with grim but determined smiles on their faces.

  Eliza found her mother’s eyes. Her mother looked back steadily, then nodded.

  Eliza looked down at Alex, who stared back at her adoringly, nervously, triumphantly. She opened her mouth to answer him, but no words came out.

  35

  Here Comes the Groom

  The Cochran Residence

  Morristown, New Jersey

  April 1780

  “But how did you . . . I mean, you just disappeared . . . and then your horse was found with blood . . . and I wrote and no one answered . . . and Governor Livingston was just so, so—”

  “It’s fine, Eliza, it’s fine.” Alex knelt on the carpet and stroked Eliza’s hand where she lay on the sofa in Aunt Gertrude’s parlor. “I’m here now. I’ll explain everything. Or, well, your mother will, because I’m afraid I don’t remember much.”

  “You don’t remember?” Eliza asked, frowning. “I don’t understand.”

  Catherine Schuyler’s round face slipped into her daughter’s viewpoint.

  “Oh, Eliza, this poor boy was so delirious when he arrived at the Pastures that he had no idea where he was. In truth, I have no idea how he found us. It must have been God’s will that he arrive.”

  “You rode all the way to Albany and back? In seven days?”

  “Four days, really,” Mrs. Schuyler answered. “Three of those days were spent abed—where he should still be, if you ask me.”

  “I am quite recovered, Mrs. Schuyler, all due to your good care.”

  “You do look rather peaked,” Eliza said. “But please, tell me, what happened? Why did you run off? And how came you to be so ill that you were three days bedridden at my parents’ house?”

  Alex shrugged and moved from the carpet to a nearby chair, though never letting go of Eliza’s hand.

  “I knew that the only way you would break off the engagement to Colonel Livingston was with your parents’ permission. And I knew that the only way they would grant that permission was if they were told, clearly, and without the tact that a feminine correspondent would undoubtedly put into a letter, exactly what kind of scoundrel he was. And so I requisitioned a horse from the mail coach and made my way there. It was a rainy day, as you recall, and I had already been some six hours on horseback during the journey from Amboy, and awake for some eighteen hours, so I was rather susceptible to the effects of damp and fatigue.”

  “And then you were ambushed by those British dragoons. As I said, it is a wonder you made it to us at all,” interjected Mrs. Schuyler once more.

  “Ambushed!” cried Eliza.

  Even if Alex were at liberty to divulge the evidence of treason he had uncovered regarding General Arnold and Major André, he couldn’t think of the words to describe it. He wasn’t entirely convinced that he hadn’t dreamed up the whole thing.

  “Your father has handled it,” he said gently. “Suffice to say that the culprits will be brought to justice, and history will remember them in infamy.”

  “Are you hurt?” Eliza said. “It seemed to me that you were favoring your arm earlier.”

  “Just a scratch,” Alex said, releasing Eliza’s hand just long enough to rub his wound gingerly, then taking it up again. The scab pulled when he lifted it, but the muscle beneath was uninjured. In a week or two, he would likely not even remember the cut. The attack itself was a blur, too, lost behind a wall of fatigue and fever.

  “So that was your blood on your horse’s saddle? But how came it to arrive at the coach station without you?”

  “It was spooked by the gunshots and made its way home to the station on its own. I was able to catch one of my assailant’s horses. I rode as far as the Sloat House c
oach station in Pothat and on up to Albany.”

  “And you slept not a wink during the entire journey!” Eliza asked incredulously.

  “Not in a bed,” Alex said. “Though there were times I’m sure I dozed on horseback.”

  “By the time he got to us,” Mrs. Schuyler said here, “he barely knew his own name, or why he had come. I tell you he was raving so badly that I thought the fever had gone to his brain and we would not have him back, but it seems to have been mostly the effects of three days without sleep and little food, a nagging wound, and a terrible chill.”

  “They tell me I slept for two days,” Alex confessed sheepishly. “I must apologize for that, my dear Eliza.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” Eliza said, stroking his hand. “I can’t believe you risked your life for me!”

  “I would risk it a thousand times more, to win your heart.”

  Mrs. Schuyler cleared her throat self-consciously. “While he slept, your aunt Cochran’s note came, but I confess that your father and I could not distinguish between the jitters of a reluctant bride and the malfeasance of roué. Certainly we had heard nothing suggesting that Colonel Livingston’s character was anything less than that of a gentleman, or we would have never consented to the marriage.” Alex watched as Mrs. Schuyler fixed her daughter in the eye with almost desperate earnestness. “I do hope you believe that, Daughter.”

  “Henry was always a weak boy,” Eliza said in a measured voice, not forgiving, but not condemning either, “but never a roué, as you say. I gather that his time in the army has not had the character-strengthening effect it has on so many of our soldiers. But you could not have known that. He has been stationed in Connecticut and coastal Massachusetts, far from Albany, let alone New Jersey or Philadelphia.”

  It was not exoneration, but Mrs. Schuyler seemed content with that.

  “We thought to write you, but then Colonel Hamilton awakened and was able to give us a fuller accounting, and we were convinced that it was necessary that we travel here in person to stop the marriage. Colonel Hamilton insisted on accompanying us, but the doctor said he wasn’t well enough. We managed to keep him in bed one more day, but then he said he would return without us, so your father commissioned a carriage and we came together. We had to hope that your aunt Cochran was able to delay the marriage until word came from us, or we arrived ourselves.”