I remembered the blithe confidence of so many of the Philadelphians I’d met. They’d placed all their faith in Congress and ignored the warnings of military gentleman like Papa, and instead assumed that the British would never choose to recapture their pretty city of red brick and neat houses. I didn’t want to imagine how wrong they could be proven to be.
“Are you certain the British are interested in Charleston?” I asked, preferring to discuss a city I’d never visited. “Even if so, they wouldn’t begin to shift their forces until summer, would they?”
“Oh, my sweet Eliza,” he said with a curious mix of fondness and despair. “In January, General Clinton sent an expeditionary force of both British and Hessian soldiers to the town of Savannah in Georgia, which is already in British hands. Some say it’s eight thousand men, some say twelve. Either way, it’s far more than we have. By all our best intelligence, Clinton has every intention of attempting Charleston by land, where the city is weakly defended. If he does, he’ll likely succeed. He could be there by now.”
Abruptly I sat upright, twisting about to face him.
“Is it so bad as that?” I asked.
“I’ve heard from Laurens as well,” he said grimly. “Those skirmishes he’s led, the attacks that he and others in the local militia have made against the British—it’s all that our forces can do to keep them from Charleston.”
“And how is Colonel Laurens?” I knew how close Alexander was to John Laurens, and though I’d yet to meet him, I prayed for his safety, too, for the sake of their friendship.
“Laurens is as strong as a bull and has more good luck than ten mortal men together,” he said. “He’s nigh invincible because of it. God, I wish I were there with him!”
“I’m glad you’re not,” I said fervently. I’d heard too much of Colonel Laurens’s reckless form of heroism, and I was horrified by the prospect of Alexander lying dead on some distant southern battlefield while his bull-like friend charged onward.
“You needn’t fear,” he said, the familiar bitterness and disappointment welling up in his voice. “The general shares your opinion, and will not let me go with the others.”
“The others?” I repeated. “You just told me that His Excellency had no troops to spare.”
He sighed again; this conversation was too full of sighs, and worse, too full of the reasons for them.
“This is for your ears alone, Eliza,” he said, lowering his voice even further. “At the Council of War this week, His Excellency and the other generals agreed that they would send the Maryland Line to join and support the Southern Army. They shall depart as soon as it can be arranged.”
“How many men is that?” I asked.
“Two thousand,” he said, the number a blunt fact.
I swiftly made the calculations. “If those two thousand soldiers are subtracted along with the twenty-five hundred expected to depart when their terms are done, then there will be scarcely more than five thousand remaining here.”
“Other brigades should be returning soon from outpost duty, but yes, the Northern Army will be sorely depleted.” He raised his hands and spread his fingers in an uncharacteristic gesture of resignation. “I pray we won’t be tested. Those fools in Congress believe that the General exaggerates our needs, and that we can continue indefinitely without more men, guns, and other resources. With their lack of support, all the general can do is pray that Clinton will not decide to launch an attack on us from New York.”
I shook my head in silent empathy. I had heard the same from Papa, who was every bit as frustrated with Congress’s denials as was Alexander.
“The general might as well march us all to Charleston,” he said with increasing bitterness. “At least then we would meet our fate with a semblance of honor instead of wasting away to shabby nothingness here.”
“Is that a possibility?” I asked anxiously. I knew all too well what he meant by the word fate; to him it was a more-noble euphemism for death.
“I don’t know, Betsey,” he said wearily. “I’m only a soldier. I await my orders, and I follow them.”
I curled against his chest, desperate for some sense of security in the face of so many unfortunate tidings, and the way Alexander wrapped his arms around me meant he needed that same comfort, too. It was quiet in the little yard, too quiet, really. So many of the birds and wild creatures had perished during the harsh winter that the absence of their songs and cries was eerie.
I do not know how long we sat there together. The sky was overcast, with clouds that masked the sun and stars and made for a muffling darkness that reflected our somber mood.
Alexander was first to break the silence. “Your mother has great plans for our wedding, doesn’t she?”
I smiled sadly, though I didn’t lift my head from his chest. So that was how it would be tonight: we’d pretend that we were an ordinary betrothed couple, with no concerns beyond our wedding clothes.
“Mamma does,” I said, mustering a semblance of good cheer. “She speaks to me—and you—of little else, as you’ve doubtless observed. She missed the fuss of a proper wedding with Angelica, and now she’s bound to redouble her efforts on our behalf to make up for it.”
He chuckled. “I suspect your father’s not the only general beneath your roof.”
“We’ve often thought that,” I said, only half in jest. “Mamma is the bravest woman you will likely ever meet. She has accompanied my father into the very face of the enemy, and has stood beside him against dangers that would make most men flee in terror. A wedding will be as nothing to her. There are few things in this world more efficient or determined than a Dutch woman. You stand forewarned.”
“I shall have none but the greatest regard for your mother,” he said. “I’m delighted.”
“You say that now,” I warned. “You may feel otherwise once you see the stacks of marked linens and barrels of porcelain and crystal that she vows are absolutely necessary for us to begin to keep respectable housekeeping.”
“Somehow we shall make do,” he said, lightly stroking my hair. “Imagine a battle royal of supreme tidiness between your Dutch grandmother and my Scottish one, aprons flapping and brooms flying.”
I laughed, and he did, too, and the silence that fell afterward was warm and companionable, and reminded me again of all the reasons that I loved him.
“My dearest girl,” he said softly, quietly. “You do know I won’t be granted leave to go to Albany with you in June.”
I took a deep breath. I did know. I’d known for weeks, from everything I’d heard and witnessed in the encampment and from what he’d already told me that the general would not be able to spare him from his duties, but to hear Alexander speak it aloud was the final blow to pretending I didn’t.
“I do,” I said, unable to keep the sorrow from my voice. “I wish it were otherwise, but I—I understand.”
“Late autumn,” he said, “or December at the latest. A wedding in the Christmas season would be a merry thing, wouldn’t it?”
I nodded with my cheek pressed against his chest, not trusting my voice to agree. It wasn’t simply postponing our wedding that upset me. Certainly, my mother could, and would, use the extra months for preparations.
It was how and where he’d spend the summer. He could well be ordered to join the Southern Army with the others. The general could finally relent, and send him to a regiment that would see battle. Even if he weren’t killed or maimed outright, he could equally succumb to the myriad of fevers found in the Carolinas, fevers that could kill a man as surely as British guns.
How could I explain? I could so easily lose him before he’d truly become mine, and I slid my hands inside his coat, striving to burrow beneath the layers of wool and linen to the warmth and the flesh, the bones, the sinews, and the heart of the man.
“We could marry now,” I whispered with feverish urgency. “We needn’t wait.”
He groaned, even as his own caresses across my body grew more fervent.
�
��No, Eliza,” he said. “I’ve given my word to your papa, and I’d not betray him—or you—that way.”
“But he needn’t know,” I pleaded, my words tumbling fast over one another. “No one else would. We could pledge our love to ourselves now, with only God as our witness, and be bound by that until we stand before a minister. Think of it, Alexander. It would be our secret, and only we would know that we were already man and wife.”
“Oh, my love, if only we could.” Despite his words, I heard the rough edge of desire in his voice, and with the increasing freedoms he was taking with my person—freedoms that I made no attempts to stop. He kissed me deeply, and my heart fluttered with longing, believing that love had triumphed.
But I was wrong. With a muttered oath, he forced himself to ease away from me and rose from the bench, going to stand some feet away, his back to me as he struggled for control. I sat forlornly alone on the bench and waited, struggling as well, with my hands twisting in the corners of my shawl.
Finally he turned, and I saw the anguish in his face.
“My mother was not married to my father,” he said. “I’ve never hidden that from you before. My mother loved my father and he loved her, and I’ve no doubt they made the sort of pledges to each other that you describe.”
“Then why won’t you—”
“I won’t,” he said, “because in the end, what mattered most was that they hadn’t made those vows before a priest, or minister, or magistrate, or any other august personage that society demands. Not only did my mother suffer for it, but my brother and I were labeled as bastards, a sin that was no sin, but that shall always be pasted over my name. And I will not do that to you, or to our children.”
I had no answer. He was right, and I knew it, and yet that rightness was not easy to bear. I felt myself wilting beneath its weight, huddling into myself as I sat on the hard plank of a bench.
He understood my misery and returned to me, gathering me into his arms with great tenderness.
I would not cry. I would not cry. “I know you will be brave and honorable wherever your duty may lead you,” I said, my voice husky with emotion. “All I ask, God willing, is that you return to me unharmed, Alexander. Return to me, and be my husband.”
He kissed me, or perhaps I kissed him. It didn’t matter which. Until we could wed, this would have to be enough.
* * *
Good news will come in fits and starts, like the bright bursts of shooting stars in the night sky, but bad news is often relentless in its progress, one unhappy event after another. It seemed that Nature herself had even conspired against our cause. Even the most venerable and aged persons in the region declared this to have been the worst winter in memory, and no one quarreled with them. As grim as Alexander’s fears for our army’s future had been, the truth as it unwound that spring was far worse than even he could have predicted.
As expected at the end of April, those men whose terms had expired left, leaving gaping places in the lines that could not readily be filled. But there was more: the shortages of food had reached a true crisis, with the forage in the area long exhausted and months before the new season’s crops could be expected. Men stole not only from one another, but left camp without permission to steal what they could from the outlying farms. No threats of punishment deterred them; they were that hungry.
When my mother had traveled from Albany, she had brought with her provisions from our farms. These we rationed out for our own use, and never left untended in our kitchen. In fact I suspected that the sentries that His Excellency had posted outside our house, day and night, were as much to guard our provisions as our persons, and from her own generosity of spirit, my mother made sure to give each of these men a share from our own dinner when his station was done.
The word that reached us in May from the Southern Army was nothing short of disastrous. As feared, the British had laid siege to Charleston by land and by sea. The Americans under Major General Lincoln fought bravely and for as long as they could, but they were grossly outnumbered and outfought. When the British cannon began to rain heated shot upon the city, causing fires to homes and public buildings alike, the army and the city had no choice but to surrender.
The British victory was more costly than anyone in the North had expected. Nearly five thousand Continental soldiers surrendered and were made prisoner, and the British also captured more than three hundred cannons, six thousand muskets, and several tons of gunpowder—a grievous loss in every way.
The British now had possession of the largest city in the south with the best harbor, and further, by their decisive actions, they had won back the allegiance of many of the citizens who’d wearied of the long war. As Alexander told me in gloomy confidence, General Washington himself could have gone to Charleston and met only defeat, the odds were so much against the Continental troops.
At the same time, there was misfortune in Morristown, too. In May, a number of the Connecticut troops fomented an out-and-out mutiny against their officers, citing the lack of pay, food, and respect from Congress. The mutiny was quickly put down, but a number of their leaders were sentenced to death. They were not alone in their infamy, either. Several other men were sentenced for crimes including repeated desertion and forgery, bringing the total of eleven criminals. Some were to be hung for their sins, and others shot.
The night after the executions, Alexander described the scene to me, though in such halting terms I was sure he left much out to spare my sensibilities. At the last moment beneath the gallows, General Washington pardoned ten of the men, but the worst of the lot, a man from a Pennsylvania regiment, was not spared, and died his dishonorable death. As Alexander said, it was one thing to watch a man die in battle, and another to see him die as a weeping, guilty miscreant at the forced hands of his military brothers. The execution shadowed the encampment and the whole town with it, as if any of us needed more darkness in an already dark year.
And yet even in the midst of these unhappy troubles there were scattered bright rays of light and hope.
Alexander learned that his friend Colonel Laurens had survived the siege of Charleston unharmed, but was now among the thousands of prisoners of war waiting to be exchanged and released. Unlike most of his fellow prisoners, however, he’d a wealthy and well-respected father laboring to secure his release, and with Charleston fallen, Alexander hoped that he would soon return to rejoin His Excellency’s family.
In May the encampment was honored by several distinguished visitors from abroad, including the Chevalier de la Luzerne, Minister of France. His presence was seen as a sign that France would soon enter the war as our allies, and hopes began to rise at a giddy rate.
Nor were those hopes in vain. Soon after, another Frenchman arrived, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, who also served as a major general in the Continental Army. Lafayette (for so everyone called him, ignoring his noble title) was another old acquaintance and compatriot of Alexander’s, and much esteemed by His Excellency as well. The news Lafayette brought with him from the French king Louis XVI, however, outshone even the bonds of friendship: the French fleet was bringing six thousand much-needed soldiers to join the American cause against the British.
In honor of these visitors, His Excellency announced a military review and a ball in honor of the French ambassador. As can be imagined, we ladies rejoiced at the news of such a diversion, and rallied to create ensembles suitable for a ball there in the fashionable wasteland of Morristown.
I also took pleasure in again meeting Lafayette, who had once been our guest at The Pastures during the early days of the war. I’d no notion then that he was a close friend of Alexander’s, or that the two would fight together with such distinction and bravery, especially at the Battle of Brandywine where the marquis had been wounded. I remained in awe that he could have achieved so much for the cause of a country that was not his own, and yet was still of the same youthful age as Alexander and I. I liked his enthusiasm and his vigor, and how he hoped that one day I mig
ht have the honor of meeting his wife and young son, now left behind in France. He showed me painted miniatures of them, too: the marquise a sweet-faced lady of fashion, and his son a true little cherub of less than a year, named George Washington de Motier in honor of His Excellency.
For me, however, there was one more guest who arrived on a rainy, muddy, April afternoon of more importance, someone who in my eyes eclipsed all the French nobility combined: the much-admired Mrs. John Carter, or as I knew and loved her, my older sister, Angelica.
* * *
“I wish you had brought your children with you,” I said as I followed my sister up the stairs of our house. I could see from how closely her riding habit fit that she’d regained her neat figure after giving birth to her second child the previous November. “I’ve yet to welcome little Catherine.”
“You’d hear little Catherine before you would see her,” Angelica said. “She’s a dear little creature, but colicky as the wind itself, which can make her a trial. I cannot imagine traveling with her at this season, nor taking her from her nurse to come traipsing off to an army encampment. She’s much better off in Boston with her brother and John. I shall bring her home with me this summer, and you shall meet her then.”
This was a pretty story, but I suspected it was more likely that her husband had preferred to remain in Boston and avoid my parents. Although both parties had finally been brought to a reconciliation, it was an uneasy connection at best. I’d hoped that Angelica’s naming the new baby after Mamma would lessen some of the tension, but that rapprochement wouldn’t occur if Angelica didn’t bring the child to Mamma for her blessing.
“How does Mr. Carter?” I asked. “Is he well?”
“John is always well,” she said, “and always prospering. It is his nature to do so.”
That was certainly true. One of the reasons that Papa disliked Mr. Carter was his uncanny ability to increase his fortune from the vagaries of the war, while most men had seen theirs decline. “You’re brave to travel so far without him.”
I, Eliza Hamilton Page 11
