My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  Two summers before, our thirteen colonies declared independence from the British crown, but now our celebratory bonfires had given way to the flames of war. I hoped, following this American victory at Saratoga, that we were finally winning it. So I tended to a Continental scout who held a gory wound on his scalp that had reopened since a doctor last saw him.

  “How bad is it, Miss Schuyler?” he asked, grimacing against the pain as I washed the wound and pulled my needle through the gash at his hairline.

  “Fortunately, your brow is cool and it does not look to have festered,” I replied. Fresh red blood oozed warmly over my fingertips. “Try not to pull it open again,” I told the young soldier as I finished my stitches and cut the thread with a hunting knife.

  While my father taught me to ride, fish, and know my way in the wild, my mother had trained me in rudimentary medicine while tending tenants, Indians, and one frontier army or another. And since I couldn’t fight in this war, I contributed the way women could. I sewed. Uniforms, socks, flesh. “If all goes well, you’ll be left with a battle scar to prove your bravery.”

  He grinned. “Thank you.”

  As a general’s daughter, I knew what soldiers liked to hear. But it seemed, these days, I never knew what to say to please my mother.

  “Betsy,” she snapped from where she stood at the back gate removing an apron she’d dirtied helping soldiers in the nearby pastures. “Go in the house with the other children and clean up. Your father is expected shortly from the surrender at Saratoga. We must prepare to receive his guests.”

  I winced, fearful the scout beside me would misconstrue her words. For we were not expecting guests, but British prisoners. Nor was I one of the children. In fact, I’d just turned twenty. But I knew better than to point any of this out to my mother, a stern Dutch plantation mistress who’d been exceedingly vexed with me for months now.

  You’re the sensible one, Elizabeth, she’d said in the heat of our quarrel. I expected better.

  As if I could stop the tides of change any more than she could. I didn’t say that, either. I merely wiped my hands, bobbed my head, picked up my skirts, and went. Broken oyster shells crunched underfoot on the drive as I passed the stables and made my way to my father’s handsome brick mansion, which stood upon a bluff overlooking the majestic Hudson River.

  The house was a flurry of activity as I hurried past kerchiefed Negro slaves moving the heavy mahogany table into the grand entry hall and went up the stairs to the bedroom I shared with my sisters. Well—just one sister, now, since Angelica had run off to marry a mysterious suitor against Papa’s wishes a few months before. Now it was just me and eighteen-year-old Peggy who shared the spacious pale-green room with its wardrobes, armchairs, and canopied bed.

  “Why can’t General Gates take these prisoners?” Peggy cried, yanking on a pair of stockings. “He took Papa’s victory, after all.”

  “That’s true,” I said. It was bad enough that a rival had pushed our father out of command. Worse that we were now saddled with the captives. We’d shown courtesy to imprisoned British officers before, in the early years of the war, most notably to the dashing Lieutenant John André, a clever and genteel officer who’d charmed my sisters and me with his sketches and accomplished flute playing.

  But my father wasn’t under suspicion then, and General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne was no André—he was a monster and no gentleman at all. How was it going to look to the Continental soldiers in our fields, not to mention our tenants and neighbors, if we wined and dined the very same British general who sent Mohawk Indians to terrorize them?

  But as our black lady’s maid, Jenny, swept into the room and unfastened my apron and frock while fretting about the bloodstains, I reminded Peggy, “Even if you’re right about Papa’s victory being stolen out from under him, you cannot say such things lest you rub the salt of injustice into his still-raw wounds. And you especially cannot say it in front of the British, lest they sense disunity amongst our generals.”

  “That’s no secret, is it?” Peggy asked.

  Thankfully not, because Peggy was never very good with secrets. Indeed, Peggy had the habit of speaking aloud what others left unspoken. In fact, she’d quite nearly given away Angelica’s plan to escape the house and run off with her beau, though now I sometimes wished she had. I wished we both had.

  “I just hate that we must go to all this trouble for the same lobsterbacks who burned our Saratoga house,” Peggy grumbled, rummaging in her tall oak wardrobe amidst taffeta, frilly petticoats, gauzy fichus, and embroidered stomachers.

  On a sigh, I stepped into the petticoats Jenny held for me. “I hate it, too.”

  I hated that I couldn’t be as happy about our American victory as I should have been. Hated that our Saratoga house was in ashes. Hated that Papa faced court-martial, his reputation in tatters. Hated that Angelica was gone and our mother blamed me for it. And hated most of all that it might be, at least in some small part, my fault.

  Peggy harrumphed, admiring her dark glossy curls in a looking glass. “Well, we’ll at least remind these king’s men that we’re not paupers. Wear the blue robe à la Française. Oh, and the blue earbobs. I know what you’re going to say, but they’re not too showy.”

  They were, for me. Angelica was the sophisticated one. Peggy the pretty one. And I was Philip Schuyler’s practical daughter. The one who, as the second child in a family as large and prominent as Philip Schuyler’s, was sometimes apt to be overlooked. There was even a story told in my family that when I was a babe, Mama was so distracted by her many responsibilities that she accidentally left me bound up in my cradleboard, hanging from a tree in the way of the natives. So it was that from the smallest age one can conceive of such a thing, I considered it quite natural to be overlooked.

  And I never minded, because it allowed me to slip away to swim in the river, or stay up past bedtime without anyone noticing, and tag along after my father on adventures that were forbidden to other girls. Besides, people said very interesting things in front of girls they didn’t notice . . .

  But the blue paste earbobs drew notice. They sparkled like sapphires—exactly the sort of jewelry that I did not carry off well. Still, I treasured them for their sentimental value.

  “I don’t know,” I said, studying my reflection as Jenny held them to my ear.

  My younger sister met my gaze in the mirror. “Angelica left them for you. She wanted you to wear them.”

  Almost as one, we both sighed for her absence. Angelica. My brilliant sister. My closest friend and confidant. I sank down into the quilted wingback chair by the window where Angelica used to read her books, hoping in vain to catch a lingering scent of my sister’s rosewater perfume. And I reread the little note that had accompanied the gift.

  I love Jack with all my heart, but that will never diminish my first and best attachment to you, Betsy—Angelica

  I hadn’t wanted to help Angelica elope with Jack Carter, a commissary supplier of armaments and other goods, who had courted her in a whirlwind and stolen her away to Boston. I’d begged my sister not to run off with him. But she’d argued. “Love is a thing beyond control. Passion is a thing beyond reason. It can’t be denied.” Her eyes had nearly glowed with fervor. “It’s a thing almost . . . predestined.”

  That still sounded like perfect nonsense to me. I’d thought her scheme foolhardy, dangerous, and disobedient. Not to mention selfish, for all the trouble it would give my parents in the midst of a war. And, if I am honest, there was also a childish part of me that despaired Angelica was to break the vow we once made to be spinsters together like the Douw sisters who lived on Court Street.

  In this world on fire, her marriage was one rebellion too many for me, too. But in the end, I loved Angelica too much to deny her. Even though the elopement had put our mother into a fury and beset Papa with worry and embarrassment at the precise time he could least afford it.

  “I think the earbobs will look quite fine on you, Miss Betsy,” J
enny said with a shy smile upon her dark-skinned face. Jenny always knew the right thing to say. Maybe it was because, as was the custom on plantations in the Hudson Valley, she’d been given to us when we were little children still playing together, and now we couldn’t manage without her. So I let her fasten them and powder me, even though powder always made me sneeze.

  Just then, the sound of horse hooves clattered on the drive. Glancing out the window, Peggy announced, “Papa’s home with the British prisoners.” She all but dragged me down our grand staircase, with its rope-patterned balusters, past the papered walls painted with gray murals of ancient Roman ruins, and into the front hall, where our little brothers and sisters had gathered. Looping her arm in mine, Peggy gave a spiteful grin. “I’ll bet this wasn’t what Gentleman Johnny had in mind when he said he’d be eating Christmas dinner in Albany. Now he hasn’t so much as a twig for a stew pot.”

  “Peggy,” I warned.

  Papa appeared from the back door near to where we all gathered to greet him. I scooped my baby sister Cornelia into my arms, and stood beside our brothers, twelve-year-old John, nine-year-old Jeremiah, and four-year-old Rensselaer, who, like a charming boy soldier, saluted Papa with a chubby hand.

  “I do hope Papa seized Burgoyne’s champagne,” Peggy whispered to me, undeterred. “Spirits may be the only thing to see us through this indignity.”

  Papa’s stern gaze cut to Peggy, silencing her at last.

  Tall and dignified even in his traveling clothes, my father was the portrait of a cultured gentleman. But he was more than a gentleman; he was a general. So it pained me to see him out of his blue-and-buff uniform with its gold braids. Even more so when he frowned and said, “I expect each of you to show the utmost hospitality to our captive British officers.”

  Peggy crossed her arms in protest. “But, Papa, that man doesn’t deserve—”

  “It’s not a matter of deserving,” my father admonished. “The British think we’re uncivilized people living in these wilds. If you’d seen the poor Baroness Riedesel tremble with fear of what we might do to her and her children . . .”

  That image softened me because I knew the sad plight of women caught up in this war. Girls killed and scalped. Old widows robbed by marauding soldiers of every last thing they owned. Young wives abandoned and caught on the wrong side of enemy lines.

  My father’s voice took on the strength of conviction. “The British think we’re children incapable of governing ourselves. It is in service to the cause of our independence to show them otherwise.” Peggy opened her mouth to argue, but Papa stopped her short. “There will be no moment, in word or deed, from any of you that should make the prisoners feel anything but honored guests. I care not what others may say or do; as for me and my house, we will serve my country.”

  In saying this, he spoke as if giving law. But he was also encouraging us to see our own small contributions in this cause. So while others might rebel against him, I would not, even as I feared that the many watchful eyes around our house might see our hospitality as treason. “I’ll help Dinah bring refreshments in from the kitchen,” I said.

  And in the end, everything was almost as my father wished it.

  Redcoat officers filed glumly into the house, and Mama greeted them with her chin held high as befit her lineage, which she traced back to the first Dutch patroon to settle this colony when it was still called New Netherlands. She always said that a general’s wife should show no fear, and neither should his children, so I forced myself to smile sweetly at each and every Redcoat. Not that they looked twice at me. Nor did I wish them to. Especially since I could well imagine them marching into our house under far different circumstances had the battle gone the other way.

  After Burgoyne was settled in the most elegant and comfortable accommodations, I took his men pots of strong tea with Mama’s short-crust biscuits and the preserves we’d been putting up for autumn made from Papa’s prize yellow plums. All the while, I wondered which of our guests might have set fire to our country house or given leave to the Mohawks to scalp our settlers.

  That night, our hostess duties continued in the kitchen. “Some prison this is!” Peggy exclaimed, eyes rolling as she took in a long table laden with silver platters. “They should be lucky to get stale bread but they’re getting a feast.”

  Our cook, Dinah, had spent the day preparing local delicacies under Mama’s supervision. All the servants were so busy catering to the needs of our guests that Mama had enlisted us and Dinah’s daughter, our Jenny, to help. Like her mother, Jenny had a petite stature, but where our lady’s maid had always been shy, Dinah issued orders like a battlefield commander.

  Even to us.

  “Miss Betsy and Miss Peggy, we’ll start with the oysters. Take in the trays. Jenny, go fetch the butter.” Peggy wrinkled her nose even as Dinah gave us a look that brooked no argument.

  We did just what she said.

  Burgoyne and his officers joined Papa at the long banquet table while the womenfolk of the household served them oysters followed by a course of striped bass our servants caught fresh from the river, along with seasoned cabbage and carrots, all to be washed down with Papa’s best claret and Madeira wine and finished with a dessert of spiced bonnyclabber made from soured milk.

  And if I’d not been a Christian, I’d have wished that they choked on it.

  It was no small trouble to keep the British officers and their wives and children fed, especially since some rascal was milking the cows before our servants could get the cream. And though I tried to keep my little brothers from trouble, the next morning Jeremiah flung open the door to the room where Burgoyne and his officers slept. “You’re all my prisoners!” he cried, then slammed the door again, laughing like the arch little fellow he was.

  Prince, our butler, was not amused.

  Carrying himself with a royal demeanor that defied his enslavement and justified his name, Prince was a dark, stately man, who was the most trusted servant in the household and whose disapproving tone was almost more intimidating than Papa’s. “It would reflect best upon you, Miss Betsy, to keep your brothers in better order. And tell Miss Peggy I have my eyes on her.”

  I swallowed. “What’s Peggy done?”

  Prince tilted his head in the direction of the main hall. “She’s flirting with the Redcoats. Flashing those dark eyes of hers. Don’t either of you girls get in your heads that you can play the same trick on me twice.”

  I bit my lip, remembering how we’d lured Prince from his bed near the back door so that Angelica could slip away to meet her beau. He hadn’t forgotten, and might have been angrier about it than either of my parents. Trying to reassure him, I said, “Don’t worry. Neither of us have any use for these lobsterbacks.”

  So imagine my surprise to find my pretty sister sitting next to Burgoyne, the monster himself. The two of them, just sipping coffee there amongst Mama’s silver, glass, and candles!

  Peggy was laughing, having somehow charmed the British general into giving her his silver shoe buckles as a token of esteem. Worse, only a moment later, an unmarried British officer asked if Peggy might take him for a turn in the nursery where we grew Papa’s plums, and she agreed.

  Pulling my sister aside under some pretext, I asked, “What can you be thinking?”

  “Papa said to be kind,” she replied, clasping the general’s sparkling shoe buckles with no intention of giving them up. “Besides, I don’t remember you shunning that handsome Lieutenant André when he was here.”

  “The war was different then.” More civilized, it had seemed. And farther away. Besides, I didn’t have to shun men; they never noticed me with my sisters flitting about. But André was the sort of man who seemed to notice everything, and when he’d commented favorably on my drawings, I’d beat down the stirrings of attraction by reminding myself he was an enemy.

  “The war is no different now,” Peggy argued. “After all, we’ve only won a battle at Saratoga. If we should still lose the war, one of us mig
ht have to marry a king’s man to save the family.”

  I sputtered in exasperation and more than a little astonishment. She should’ve known better than to behave in a way that might confirm suspicions that our family sympathized with the British. And as a general’s daughter, she should’ve known better than to speak openly about defeat. But I was most horrified by her apparent willingness to wed an enemy, no matter her reasons. “I’d sooner marry a Barbary pirate!”

  “Well, I wish you would,” Peggy called over her shoulder as she flounced off. “Because I fear Papa will never consent to let me marry until you do.”

  I would’ve been more cross with her if it weren’t for the fact that the kinder we were to the prisoners, the more it shamed them. A lesson I learned that evening as we gathered in the blue parlor near the fire and the British general offered my father an apology.

  I wanted to think Burgoyne meant to apologize for the poor people who had the misfortune to be caught before his advancing army. Or even that he might apologize for the king, who had forced us all to this war. But instead he said to Papa, “Your hospitality is too much for a man who has ravaged your lands and burned your home. I regret the event and the reasons that occasioned it.”

  All eyes turned to Papa, who regretted the loss of life and his command more than the loss of his house—all three of which were occasioned, in part, by this man. And yet my father forced himself to a nod of acknowledgment. “It is the fate of war. If I had thought it necessary to save the lives of my men, I’d have done the same. Say no more about it.”

  This was, I thought, what it meant to be noble.

  Not a title conveyed by a king. Not by birth or blood. But through a learned and practiced strength of faith and character. And insofar as our revolution was to teach that lesson to the world, I prayed it would succeed.

  I wished to be as noble as my father. And I was shamed anew as I remembered the wounded Redcoat’s face. The one who had asked me for water. The one from whom I had turned away. I’d been wrong—worse, driven by fear, I’d been cowardly.