The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr

by Susan Holloway Scott

“I’m glad to see that you’re an early riser, Mary,” she said. “A favorable sign of conscience and industry. Do you know how to make me a dish of tea?”

  “Oh, yes, mistress,” I said. “Shall I bring it here?”

  “Yes,” she said, sitting in one of the chairs that I’d just aligned in a neat row on the porch. “I can’t begin my day without my tea.”

  I hurried back to the kitchen, where Chloe was now bustling about the hearth.

  “Did you make up this fire, Mary?” she asked, pausing with a spoon in her hand. “Up and awake before the rest of us?”

  I nodded.

  Chloe smiled with approval, and slowly I smiled in return. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d exchanged smiles with another, and it felt both strange and pleasing.

  “I was glad to find it done, and I thank you for it,” she said. “Mistress likes us to be up with the sun.”

  “I saw her as I swept the front,” I said. “She asked that I bring her tea.”

  “Ahh, ahh, I believed she was still abed with the Major.” In a flurry, she prepared a small handled tea tray with a pot, saucer and cup, sugar bowl, and cream pitcher.

  “I can take that,” I said, but Chloe frowned.

  “Are you sure, Mary?” she asked. “Mistress is most particular about her tea.”

  I nodded confidently. “My last mistress was a French lady who was most particular, too.”

  “A French lady.” Chloe sighed. “Go, then. But take care. Mrs. Prevost won’t be kind if you spill so much as a drop, and I don’t want to think what she’ll do if you chip one of her precious cups.”

  While I doubted Mrs. Prevost could ever be as unkind as Madame had been to me, I carried the tray before me with the greatest care. Mrs. Prevost was reading from a small book (an act that I’d never once seen Madame do), and she tucked a slip of paper between the pages to mark her place as I set the tray on the table beside her.

  “Very good, Mary,” she said, taking up the teapot’s curved handle. “I’ll pour for myself, since you don’t yet know how dreadfully sweet I like my tea. But stay: I’d intended to address you today, and now shall do as well as any other time.”

  I stood before her and waited as she stirred three snowy spoonfuls of sugar into her tea, the silver spoon clinking softly against the side of the porcelain cup. I waited, and wondered if an English lady like her would ever realize (or wish to) all the misery that had gone into producing that sugar.

  “Mon mari dit que tu parles français,” she said, delicately sipping the tea.

  “Oui, madame,” I said, shifting effortlessly into the other language. If Major Prevost had told her that I spoke French, then I’d reply in that language. “Depuis que j’étais un jeune enfant.”

  “Since you were a young child, Mary?” She glanced up at me over the rim of the cup. “You’re scarcely more than a child now. But at least we’ve established that you do indeed speak the French language, a useful skill. I don’t suppose you speak Dutch as well? That would be more convenient than French in this neighborhood.”

  “No, mistress,” I said, more eagerly than I should have been, “but I do speak Tamil and Hindi.”

  “Then you shall likely be the one person in this entire colony who does,” she said wryly. “English will be much more to the purpose here. If you’re half so clever as my husband believes, then you shall soon enough be able to understand all others around you. Can you read?”

  “No, mistress,” I said.

  “Then I surmise you also cannot write, nor do sums.”

  I shook my head, crestfallen, and hating to admit anything that she might use as an excuse to sell me.

  “You’ll learn,” she said, setting her now-empty cup upon the tray. “You should be well seasoned from your time in the Caribbean, and now you must make yourself more valuable to me. You shall be taught to read, so that you may read Scripture. You will attend church, and you will be instructed in the Christian faith, with the hope that one day you will commit your soul to God’s grace and mercy.”

  She smoothed the full sleeves of her dressing gown over her hands. “So long as you live in this house, I will expect you to be obedient and honest,” she said, each word crisp with warning. “Disrespect, thievery, blasphemy, gossip, indolence, and, especially, lewd behavior will not be tolerated.”

  I couldn’t overlook the emphasis she put on lewdness, enough so that I wondered if the Major had in fact told her the circumstances in which he’d found me.

  “I will expect you to watch yourself and keep yourself from harm,” she said. “I know some masters welcome bastard children among their slaves—their future increase—but I won’t. This is a small household, and you will have many responsibilities. I can’t afford to have you take time away from your duties to tend to some unnecessary infant. If through carelessness you should conceive and bear a bastard, it will immediately be taken from you and given away. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, mistress,” I said, trying not to reflect upon the terrible, thoughtless cruelty she was describing.

  “I also expect complete loyalty from my people, Mary,” she continued. “Whatever you may overhear or witness, whether of my family or of our guests, must never be shared or repeated under any circumstances. I consider myself a fair, even generous, mistress, but I am not reluctant to order the strictest of corrections and punishments to those who deserve them. Do you understand, Mary?”

  “Yes, mistress,” I murmured, striving to look as meek and obedient as possible.

  Mrs. Prevost smiled warmly, confident that everything was exactly as it should be between us. She smoothed her palms across her forehead and over her hair; she’d an old scar above one brow, yet she didn’t bother to hide it, the way most women would. Her smile warmed as she listened to the sounds coming from deep within her house. Her family was waking: I heard her husband’s low-pitched voice and the laughter of her sons, and she rose quickly, eager to be done with me and join them.

  “That is all, Mary,” she said, already halfway through the doorway. “Continue as you were.”

  I bowed, and set to sweeping, the bristles of the broom brushing stiffly over the porch’s wide planks. As I were, and as I now was.

  * * *

  In Pondicherry, and in Saint-Domingue, too, the seasons had been divided into wet and dry, marked by either the presence or lack of steamy torrents of rain, floods, and fevers. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the changeable seasons of New Jersey.

  When the leaves on the trees first began to change their colors from green to golden yellow and brilliant crimson, I marveled at their beauty, even as I worried that some dreadful blight had universally caused these trees to sicken. The others in the kitchen laughed, and told me that it was only the natural course in this part of the world.

  Soon these leaves withered and fell to the ground, as the very air grew colder and the sun rose later in the morning and set earlier in the afternoon. Each day seemed to grow colder, too, reminding me of the terrible passage around the Cape of Good Hope. I saw my first snow, an icy wonder, and heard the howling winds of a blizzard rattle the shutters that were latched and barred over the windows. The fireplaces in the house needed constant attention, and at night in the attic Chloe, Hetty, and I huddled together near the brick chimney, finding warmth from one another and from what little heat rose from the kitchen’s hearth.

  During that first change of seasons, I learned much: how butter should be spread on slices of bread for the family’s tea, how to curtsey in the English manner instead of bowing as was done in Pondicherry, how tightly to lace my stays so that they offered me more comfort for tasks like carrying oak buckets of water from the well in the yard.

  Gradually Chloe gave me more to do. Although most of my work remained in the kitchen and about the house—washing dishes and floors, sweeping, and emptying chamberpots—I also began to acquire other skills such as sewing, mending, and laundering. My English improved as well, until my very thoughts found
their first life in that language.

  On Sunday afternoons, an elderly Quaker gentleman in a long gray coat came to our house to teach me to read. He used a babyish primer to teach us letters and words, with rough-drawn pictures of animals. But because I was feverish for learning, I progressed quickly, and soon could proudly read the entire little book of rhymes. To my disappointment, my reward was an equally babyish book of prayers, and the Quaker gentleman ceased to come. I tried to continue on my own, struggling to make sense of the scraps of old newssheets that sometimes appeared in the kitchen, but the leap was too great for a beginner, and my frustration soon exceeded my knowledge.

  Still, I must have pleased Mistress with my industry, for she never spoke again of selling me or otherwise sending me away. Indeed, by the end of the year I’d settled so seamlessly into the household’s patterns that Chloe said that it appeared as if I’d always been one of them.

  In a way, that was exactly what I’d hoped to be. I’d long before learned the value of listening, of remaining quiet while others around me told their secrets. And, oh, the secrets that filled that red stone house, where nothing was as it first appeared.

  To begin with, there was the Prevost family itself. On our voyage together from the Caribbean, I’d observed how much deference was paid to Major Prevost, an officer in the Royal American Regiment devoted to his English king. In reality, he was no more English than I, but a French-speaking, Swiss-born mercenary who, with his two brothers, had joined the British army for opportunity in the British-ruled colonies. He had found it, too, having received a sizable land grant not far from the Hermitage, and thus by all rights had become a gentleman officer of rank, power, and property.

  And yet, here in his own home, it wasn’t so. Mistress’s twice-widowed mother, Mrs. DeVisme, and younger half sister, Miss Catherine DeVisme, also resided on his property in the second, smaller house nearby, forming a triumvirate with power of their own. All three were considered handsome women, intelligent yet beguiling in individual ways, and without so much as a hint of the petty silliness that had so characterized Madame. They’d many friends—and many of them male—and the house was often noisy with company and deep voices.

  Major Prevost didn’t seem to mind, or perhaps his wife gave him no choice. I recalled the first time I’d seen him with her, and how she had waited for him to come to her like a queen with a favored subject. It was always like that between them, and all the more striking considering that he was ten years her senior. They often quarreled when they were alone together at night. The windows were closed now, so the words weren’t clear, but the anger was, coming up from their bedchamber beneath me as I tried not to hear them. Yet they were cordial enough before others, even as he deferred to her in most everything.

  When Master’s leave ended in the autumn and he returned to his regiment in the Caribbean, Mistress had held him close in farewell, and then had stood watching dutifully from the porch until his carriage was gone from sight, their two young sons beside her. But she didn’t shed a tear for her husband’s departure that any of us saw, and the following day the house was again filled with her acquaintances.

  “Mistress married the Major too young,” said Hetty after the last guests had departed and the family had retired to their beds and we were left tidying the kitchen for the night. Hetty had a right to her opinion. She was the oldest among us, with tight whorls of white hair beneath her cap and corded veins from years of work along the backs of her hands, and she had belonged to Mrs. DeVisme most of her life.

  “Too, too young,” she repeated for emphasis. “No girl who’s seventeen knows what she wants in a man.”

  “Young as she was, Mistress knew what she wanted,” Caesar said, stacking the wood for the morning fire, “and she got it, too. Those children are proof.”

  “If that was what she wanted,” Hetty retorted, “then she wouldn’t’ve married a soldier who’s never home to be in her bed. Won’t matter if he’s left her again with another brat in her belly. Master’s wed to old King George, pure and simple. The army’s his true wife, and a henpecking old biddy it is.”

  Uneasily I laughed with the rest of them. This reminded me of the times I’d steal into the kitchen at Pondicherry and listen to Orianne and the others mock Madame’s airs and Monsieur’s wigs. I could have spoken now, and described how a Tamil bride who was seventeen wouldn’t have been considered too young, but instead old and withered. I’m sure I could’ve made Chloe and Caesar laugh, too.

  But talking behind the backs of those who owned us felt dangerous to me. It was a small rebellion, yes, but a shared rebellion nonetheless, and I was not as confident of my place here as the others.

  As the Major had promised, I hadn’t been whipped once since I’d come to the Hermitage, nor had I seen any others punished with the leather, either. The household was small enough that we answered to Mistress directly instead of to an overseer.

  “How long do you think Master’ll be away this time?” Chloe asked as she gave a final wipe to the main table. “Will he return again in the spring, or be gone for another year or more?”

  “Won’t be him doing the deciding,” Caesar said, and at once the mood in the kitchen grew more somber.

  This was the most fearsome secret of the Hermitage, and the most ill kept, too. The calm and peace that surrounded this house and its sweeping lawns were at heart an illusion. Many of the guests who sat in the parlor here were military men in scarlet coats with swords at their sides, swords that they seemed increasingly desirous to use. As Hetty and I waited on them, unnoticed as we’d carried their food and liquor, we overheard their indignation and their outrage, and how they complained bitterly of the very people whom they’d come to the colonies to protect. Because we were as good as invisible to them, they’d no hesitation of speaking before us of the growing disrespect shown toward them, and toward the king they’d sworn to serve.

  “If there’s a war,” Caesar continued, “why, the Major could be away for years and years, depending on his orders.”

  “There won’t be no war,” Chloe said firmly, as if her declaration could make it so. “This country had its fill of heartache and loss in that last war against the French. Not even Englishmen are foolish enough to start another one for the pure sake of being contrary.”

  “Lucas says otherwise,” Caesar said. He made one final straightening to the pile of wood, and then briskly dusted his hands together in a way that wasn’t only to brush the wood-dirt from his palms, but to dust away Chloe’s reasoning, too. “Lucas says last time he was in New York with Captain Vervelde, the talk in all the taverns was how much Governor Tryon was hated, and how his taxes and laws aren’t fair. Lucas says people were planning and plotting to drive him out, no matter what it takes.”

  “Lucas says, Lucas says, Lucas says,” Chloe grumbled, and sniffed. “What makes you believe everything that man tells you?”

  “Because he’s most always right,” Caesar said promptly. “If he says that men in New York are talking about their governor like that, then I believe him. Lucas is as smart as they come, and he tells the truth.”

  Chloe tucked her chin low and glared at him, her eyes round and bright with warning in the firelight.

  “What Lucas is telling is treason,” she declared. “You don’t work in this house without knowing what that means. Kings and governors are our master’s masters, and they don’t like being told they’re wrong, or can’t do something they want to. If Lucas keeps going around repeating nonsense about this and that in New York, he’s going to find himself made to answer for talking like a fool. You, too, Caesar.”

  Caesar shook his head, refusing to give up. “Right and wrong don’t mean treason,” he said doggedly. “What’s right is right. Lucas is a free man, and—”

  “He’s free?” I blurted out with surprise. “He’s not Captain Vervelde’s man?”

  “He was once,” Caesar said. “But because he’s so clever with horses, and mending leatherwork, bridles and harnes
ses and such, he was let out to others until he earned enough to buy his freedom from Captain Vervelde. One hundred eighty pounds!”

  Caesar paused to give that monumental sum the effect it deserved. I’d no real notion yet of the value of English money; I was never taken to a shop or market, nor did I possess any money of my own to make purchases. But that did seem like a great deal of money, and I marveled at how long and hard Lucas must have had to work on his own time—late at night, or on Sundays—to save so much.

  “One hundred eighty pounds,” Caesar repeated, clearly impressed himself. “Now he’s a free man, and the Captain pays him wages for looking after his horses and stable at Mount Joy, same as he would a white man.”

  I nodded in silent wonder. I’d always been told that only a master or mistress could grant freedom, and most were loath to do so. No one had ever explained to me that it was possible to buy one’s own freedom.

  Chloe sniffed, reading my thoughts. “Don’t be getting ideas, Mary,” she warned. “Mistress isn’t about to set any of us free, even if you worked every hour of the day and the night, too. Especially not then, because you’d be even more valuable to her.”

  “Don’t tell the girl things will never change, Chloe,” Caesar insisted. “There’s no telling what can happen in this world. Lucas says in New York there’s men called Sons of Liberty and they’re promising to stand firm and fight back against the governor if he—”

  “That’s white men, Caesar,” Chloe scoffed, her disgust palpable. “That’s not you, nor Lucas, neither. White Englishmen talking about liberty.”

  “But if Lucas—”

  “Hush, Caesar,” Chloe said firmly, lowering her voice. “Just hush. If you keep letting Lucas Emmons fill your head with wrongful notions like that, then you’re twice, and twice again, the fool that he is.”

  I sat to one side in the shadows and listened, fascinated. What Chloe dismissed as dangerous notions of liberty sounded like the sweetest of dreams to me. If the governor was considered a grander form of master, then how bold and daring these Sons of Liberty must be to question his word! I’d never thought that there could be another side to what the British officers said in the Prevosts’ parlor, or that it would offer the prize of liberty and freedom.