“Oh, sir, you must not say so! Our nation needs you. My father says you are the bravest and most cunning of all the army’s officers.”
“So says General Washington as well.” A voice spoke from the door. “Romantics such as you or I may wish for a brilliant exit, a glorious death in battle. And certainly valor such as yours, General Arnold, seems above this terrestrial world. Yet, His Excellency has great need of your talents, sir.”
Arnold straightened. “Colonel Hamilton.”
In walked one of the prettiest men Peggy had ever seen. A dark green sash across his buff-and-blue waistcoat marked him as an aide-de-camp to George Washington. Small and willowy, his complexion milky and his hair red-gold and thick, the man would have commanded admiration anywhere. But what was most striking about him were his enormous violet-blue eyes that scanned everything in the room, including her, quickly and keenly. She’d never seen eyes that color or that hungry before.
“Fair nymph.” He bowed low. “Enchanté.”
Peggy stood and curtsied, a bit surprised by the flirtatious tone and Shakespearean-florid greeting in so stark a setting. “Moi aussi,” she answered to let him know she understood French.
“Oh-ho. Beware this man, Miss Schuyler. He is famous for his love affairs,” warned Arnold. “I hear he is paying serious courtship to Kitty Livingston—a cousin of yours, I believe.”
“Merely letters, sir,” the colonel responded. “It is but a childhood friendship.”
“So you say, sir, so you say.” Arnold chortled—a laugh more appropriate in a tavern than in front of Peggy. “Have you news for me, Alex?”
“Yes, sir. I wish to ask your advice before I negotiate with General Gates again.”
Arnold visibly stiffened and his scowl returned as he muttered a damnation of Gates.
“It is most urgent.”
Arnold nodded. “Thank you for these apples, Miss Schuyler.”
Both men looked at her expectantly.
They would dismiss her that quickly? Peggy frowned. “Perhaps my father could be of assistance as well, sirs?”
“General Schuyler? I am afraid I do not have time to ride all the way to Saratoga to see him,” said Hamilton. “I had to cover sixty miles a day for five consecutive days to reach Albany. I will need to push myself at the same pace to get myself back to General Washington. Plus, my mission concerns troops no longer under your father’s command, miss. But please do give him my highest regards when you see him. His Excellency’s as well.” The aide-de-camp bowed low, elegant even in his mud-splattered uniform, but with a definite air of impatience.
Silence.
This after her father had done so much, lost so much? Peggy’s eyebrow shot sky high. Emboldened by her sparring with Burgoyne, she replied, “Your ‘highest regards,’ sir, would be your taking the time to give them in person to General Schuyler, whose efforts preserved the troops you now need. But I suppose the war makes all of us rude out of necessity.” She nodded rather than curtsied and made her exit, grinding her teeth with anger for her father.
Interlude
WE RETURN TO THE WINTER OF 1780
AND HAMILTON’S FIRST LETTER TO PEGGY:
Alexander Hamilton to Margarita Schuyler (continued):
Morristown, New Jersey, February 1780
There are several of my friends, philosophers who railed at love as a weakness, men of the world who laughed at it . . . whom your sister has presumptuously and daringly compelled to acknowlege its power . . . I am myself of the number. She has . . . overset all the wise resolutions I had been framing . . . and from a rational sort of being and a professed contemner of Cupid has in a trice metamorphosed me into the veriest inamorato you perhaps ever saw.
. . . It is essential to the safety of the state and to the tranquillity of the army that one of two things take place; either that she be immediately removed from our neighbourhood, or that some other nymph qualified to maintain an equal sway come into it.
SOME OTHER NYMPH. PEGGY SAT UP ABRUPTLY. THE shawls she had snuggled into as she sat cross-legged in the armchair fell back. The frigid predawn air of her bedroom cut into her being—even though her hearth had been roaring for the past half hour as she reread the letter from her sister’s new suitor, this aide-de-camp named Alexander Hamilton, this man who hoped to solicit Peggy’s aid in his courtship of Eliza.
“Nymph!” she repeated aloud, her breath fogging, a cloudy echo puff of her voice. The word lit an alarm beacon.
Peggy stood and paced. Hamilton’s letter had prompted her to remember so many things that had happened since the war began and Angelica ran off with John Carter, shattering the world Peggy had known and loved. Now this single word triggered the memory of her visit to the wounded General Arnold in Albany’s hospital, after the Battle of Saratoga, two years prior.
Eliza’s new suitor was the aide-de-camp who had interrupted their conversation!
Peggy had been struck then by the aide’s flirtatious tone, his flowery, Arcadia-poetic language in a hospital, a place of pain and harsh realities. But she’d been so irate at his not taking the time to pay respects to her father in person that she’d buried his identity as not worthy of remembering.
Peggy’s eyebrow rose in appreciation, recalling Hamilton’s enormous violet-blue eyes, their piercing, searching scrutiny. Typically, so handsome a man would be completely monopolized by Angelica. Well, good for Eliza! Maybe now that Angelica was married, Eliza’s more subtle beauty and gentle heart would be the Schuyler nectar drawing suitors. Then perhaps it would be Peggy’s turn.
Because surely it was her turn, wasn’t it? Peggy had survived the terrors of Burgoyne’s invasion. She’d witnessed their father’s humiliation when General Gates replaced him just in time to win a battle that Schuyler had prepared the Northern Army to fight. She’d cared for him as he grieved the attacks on his honor and sank into ill health. She had helped nurse the tiny baby brother who was born and struggled for each breath, his little body shivering and twitching. And she’d comforted her mother when that baby died five months later.
Why did Peggy always have to be the responsible one among the three Schuyler sisters? Pacing once more—feeling smothered, snuffed—Peggy reread Hamilton’s last line about Eliza: By dividing her empire it will be weakened and she will be much less dangerous when she has a rival equal in charms to dispute the prize with her. I solicit your aid.
That was an invitation. Backhanded, to be sure, but an invitation nonetheless. To the winter headquarters of the Continental Army. To the intimate circle surrounding General George Washington, to the subscription balls and banter his officers reveled in as tonic to the deprivations and disasters, the forebodings of the war. To experience those evenings and camaraderie firsthand, not just vicariously through letters.
She had held the fort at home long enough. Peggy was going to join Eliza at the house their aunt and uncle were renting near this year’s winter encampment. They wouldn’t mind another niece. Dr. John Cochran was always up for merriment and family gatherings.
Peggy fairly danced in her moccasins to the window. Its drawn curtains glowed as sunrise seeped in around its edges. She yanked back the damask brocade to gaze out at a horizon of frozen white, glinting in the dawn’s golden rays. Snowbanks started glittering one after another in a wave of jewel-like sparkle as the sun climbed, spreading out light across the Hudson River toward her, until the earth beneath her window was blinding in reflected, mirrored luster. Shading her eyes, Peggy scanned the fairy-tale-beautiful world, awash herself in morning light and a sense of adventure.
But her smile began to fade as she surveyed the unrelenting view of snow, some of the drifts higher than a horse’s head. The Hudson River was solid ice many feet thick. Had been for weeks and weeks since late November. There were reports that all harbors, bays, and rivers, both saltwater and fresh, from North Carolina to Maine, were frozen over. No ships were sailing anywhere. Her father’s spies had told him that Loyalists in New York City were actuall
y skating and driving ox carts across the harbor to and from Staten Island.
The heavy snows had been nonstop, starting in November—four of them—and followed by seven more in December. One blizzard, right after the new year, had lasted days, packing gale-force winds that collapsed houses and dumped four feet of fresh snow on what was already piled knee-deep on the ground.
The trek to Morristown, New Jersey, would take three dangerously long days pushing a pair of horses to draw a sleigh atop the snow at top speed. The temperatures could be killing for them, for her. No raiding parties were out given the below-freezing cold. Even so, she would have to pass close to enemy camps and hunkered-down sentries.
Eliza had made it through safely, Peggy reassured herself. Although her big sister had been incredibly lucky that one of January’s six snowstorms had not hit as she traveled. Peggy glanced to the heavens—gray clouds, thick, muscular, glowering, menacing. Was she so starved for witty conversation, ballroom flirtations, and her sister’s company to risk potentially dying in a snowdrift somewhere?
Peggy drew in a deep breath as she also considered the fact Philip Schuyler had just left for Philadelphia. No longer a battle commander, he had been elected to the Continental Congress by New York—people who knew and trusted him, unlike the New Englanders who had assassinated his character. Catharine could certainly run the house without Peggy, but what if her mother had to join Schuyler? What about the boys and Cornelia? John was almost fifteen, but he was usually at the center of whatever mischief the boys drummed up.
Wavering, Peggy weighed Hamilton’s letter. She pushed her mind back again to her meeting him. How much sisterly protection did Eliza really need from this man? She closed her eyes to repaint the scene. There was poor, broken General Arnold in his bed, clearly in terrible pain. But he had snapped to military alertness as soon as Hamilton mentioned he needed General Washington’s advice. Before that moment . . . hmm . . . before that there had been a bit of good-natured teasing about . . . about . . .
Peggy gasped, remembering Arnold playfully telling her to beware Hamilton! He is famous for his love affairs. Or infamous?
Was this man trifling with Eliza’s trusting heart? Lord knew he had been quick to flirt with Peggy.
In a flash as quick as gunpowder, she was at her bedroom door. Peggy didn’t care whom she woke. She shouted down the stairs for Prince, who basically ran the mansion and negotiated the worries and chores of the ten other enslaved servants when her papa was not there. Given the chaos of the war, the threat of Tory Rangers, food shortages, the constant in and out of soldiers, Prince had become a guardian, really. They all had come to rely on his judgment as much as Schuyler did.
Until a few weeks ago, she could have called on the faithful Richard Varick to help her. He had just returned to Hackensack, his New Jersey hometown—after an embarrassing good-bye. Peggy had hustled the man out the door for fear of his asking a question she didn’t want to answer. He could have arranged Peggy’s passage and a safe military escort to Morristown easily and eagerly. But perhaps it was just as well. He probably would have insisted on coming along to protect her. Blushing and spluttering all the way.
No, with Prince’s advice she would figure out how she could make this journey. She was going to Morristown. Eliza needed her.
Part Two
1780
The winter of 1779 and ’80 was very severe; it has been denominated the “hard winter,” and hard it was to the army in particular, in more respects than one. The period of the Revolution has repeatedly been styled “the times that try men’s souls.” I often found that those times not only tried men’s souls, but their bodies too. . . .
At one time it snowed the greater part of four days successively, and there fell nearly as many feet deep of snow, and here was the keystone of the arch of starvation. We were absolutely, literally starved;—I do solemnly declare that I did not put a single morsel of victuals into my mouth for four days and as many nights, except a little black birch bark which I gnawed off a stick of wood. . . . I saw several men roast their old shoes . . . some of the officers killed and ate a favourite little dog that belonged to one of them.—If this was not “suffering” I request to be informed what can pass under that name.
—Nineteen-year-old private Joseph Plumb Martin
Nine
Winter
Military Journal, Dr. James Thacher,
January 3, 1780, Morristown
We experienced one of the most tremendous snowstorms ever remembered: no man could endure its violence many minutes without danger to his life. . . . Some of the soldiers were actually covered while in their tents and buried like sheep under the snow.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS . . . SLOOOOOSHHHHHHHHH . . . sssssssssssssss . . . slooooooooshhhhhhh.
For hours, the only sound Peggy had heard was the sweep of her sleigh along the ice-crusted snow, the horses’ struggling trot, and the wind. No birds. No squirrels leaping from branch to branch, scattering ahead of her. Nothing. The world was frozen, suspended in cold and silence.
She wrapped the beaver pelts up around her face so that only her eyes peeped out from the fur. The sun was low in the sky now. If they didn’t make Morristown within two hours, she and the two men escorting her—Private Hines of her father’s guard and Lisbon, the enslaved servant her father most trusted with his horses, his sleds, and the safety of his family when traveling—might freeze to death on the road in the killing night cold. What had she been thinking?
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a’ tiptoe when this day is named. Peggy thought of Shakespeare’s Henry V, convincing his troops to stay the course against their enemy, promising them legendary memories. “All right, Lord,” she murmured, “I absolutely promise that if I make it safe to Morristown that every year on this day I will say my hosannas.”
She had felt so jaunty when they left Albany. Peggy had been bundled happily, sucking in the brisk air, the sun bright, the sky a spring-promising blue. The winds had tasted of freedom. But south of Kingston, in deserted countryside, Peggy may have murdered a pair of kindly draft horses. Not directly, of course, not by her own hand, but it was her fault that the sweet old mares might perish.
A tear crept out of Peggy’s eye and stung her wind-chapped face thinking on the catastrophe. On their second day, when they came to the frozen Wallkill River, Lisbon urged the horses onto the ice to cross. They’d just witnessed another sledge do the same safely. But halfway across, one of the mares spooked and reared, its hooves piercing and cracking the ice as it came back down, plunging both horses into the water up to their chests.
Such accidents happened frequently enough in their frontier world that Peggy and Lisbon knew what to do to save the horses, the sleigh, and themselves. But it had to be done quickly, within moments—or the horses would fight to save themselves and break the ice further, sinking the sleigh and all of them. Or the poor animals would simply expire from the shock of the frigid waters.
“Hurry!” Peggy had cried, tumbling herself off the back of the sled-carriage, where the ice was still solid.
She could hear the horses swimming with their front legs to stay afloat. Panic in their eyes, snorting with terror, the mares stretched their necks out, straining, with their heads sliding back and forth on the unbroken ice in front of them. Thank God the ice was so thick—the horses were engulfed in a self-contained hole cut by their hooves. The white ice around them remained unshattered—for the moment.
“The plank!” Peggy cried.
The men yanked out a flat beam that had been put on the back of the sleigh for this very kind of emergency. They rushed to slip the long board against the horses’ chests, bracing it on the solid ice beyond the animals’ circumference. The mares could then scramble up onto the wood and lunge out of the water. But the peril would not be over with that—the horses would need to hasten forward to jump the sled over the hole, so that it did not sink in the water as well.
“Quickly!” Peggy urge
d. The men rushed to the horses’ heads, knelt, grabbed the bridles, and pulled, hard, as they scrambled backward, slipping and sliding themselves.
“Come on, girls! Walk on! Get!!” Peggy shouted and clucked.
With the brute muscle and force of fear, the heavy old mares wiggled their knees onto the wooden flooring and then, pushing up, sprung and popped out of the water, sprays of ice shooting off them.
“Trot on! Trot on!” Peggy shrieked as the men ran, careening along the ice, dragging the horses with them. They didn’t stop sliding and skating until they all—humans and horses—scrambled up onto the bank, heaving.
Swiftly, Lisbon wiped down and rubbed the wet horses to get their circulation going, talking to them gently as he worked. But the frost was settled into their legs and the mares could only stumble into Poughkeepsie, wheezing. There, a tavern owner took them, promising to do his best to warm them up and save them. Had he not been a Patriot, Peggy might have been stranded there. But her father’s good name—or perhaps in truth it was the good repute of his riches—convinced the man to swap out a pair of horses to pull her to Morristown. On Schuyler’s credit and her promise, the new pair of horses would be returned to him, or her father would pay the tavern keeper 200 pounds, or $20,000 in Continental currency.
Private Hines had whistled at the price. It was a fortune. The Continental Army was paying him only six dollars a month—and that only if Congress actually coughed up the wages, preferably in hard coin and not its grossly devalued paper money. But that was how precious horses had become in the war-ravaged land.
What if she maimed this pair of horses, too? Or killed them with the cold. Peggy glanced back to gauge the shadows cast on the Watchung Mountains now behind them and to the east. She knew they were nearing Morristown—finally. Washington had chosen the village specifically because the mountain range shielded it from British scouting parties and attack. But the sun was going down. Soon they’d be engulfed in darkness and plummeting temperatures.
Hamilton and Peggy! Page 11
