“It is, sir,” I said, a brief wave of longing for the place sweeping over me. “I was born there. It’s an ancient city, sir, full of beauty, that lies on the shore beside the sea.”
“You surprise me, Mary,” he said. “Mrs. Prevost told me you were from Calcutta.”
“Mistress must have forgotten, sir.” In truth, Mistress had never asked where I’d been born, because I doubted she cared. “Calcutta is not the only city in India, though it is the one most commonly known by Englishmen. There are many others besides it.”
“I’m sure there are,” he said, intrigued. “Speak to me in the language of the place, Mary. Say something in Indian.”
I couldn’t keep back a little sigh. “There is no single Indian language, sir. It would be the same as if I asked you to address me in European.”
“Then say something in the common tongue of Pondicherry.”
I wanted to tell him how there was no single language spoken in Pondicherry, either, exactly as there were several—English, Dutch, French—common here in New Jersey. But I’d already corrected him once, and it seemed unwise to do it again.
“Nkal aiy virumpukika,” I said softly, thinking of how long it had been since I’d spoken in Tamil.
“What an extraordinary sound.” He smiled with delight. “Did you cast an exotic spell upon me, Mary?”
“No, sir,” I said. “All I said was ‘as you wish, sir.’”
The corners of his mouth twitched. “For all I know, you could have just placed a curse on my house for all eternity.”
“I didn’t, sir,” I said evenly. “Having been born in Pondicherry does not make me a witch.”
“Not a witch, no,” he said. “Although I doubt you were born a Christian.”
“No, sir,” I said. “But there are many ways to worship, just as there are many languages in which to do so.”
“Ahh,” he said. “Much as there is a difference between worshipers in Boston and Philadelphia and Charleston.”
“Forgive me, sir,” I said, “but there is a much greater difference between Hinduism and Islam.”
I hadn’t expected to have a conversation with him regarding religion. For that matter, I hadn’t expected to have a conversation with him at all. But now I understood why Mistress found discussions with him to be so intriguing.
“The people of Boston and Philadelphia and Charleston are more alike than not, sir,” I continued. “They are all considered Christians.”
“Oh, Mary, Mary,” he said grandly. “Do not dare tell a Boston Puritan that he is the same as a Philadelphia Quaker or a Baltimore Roman, and as for that Charleston planter—he shall always believe, war or no war, that his soul is ruled by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
“It is still not the same, sir,” I insisted. “They all share the common beliefs of Christians.”
“I never would have guessed what a proper theologian you are, Mary Emmons,” he said. I didn’t know whether the lavender water had succeeded in easing his headache or our conversation had simply distracted him from it, but either way he seemed more his usual self. “A veritable marvel of argument! I wish my grandfather were here, so that you might address him.”
“Your grandfather, sir?” I asked uncertainly, for even from him, this made little sense.
“My grandfather, one of the most feared and fearsome of all New England preachers,” he said. “When he thundered from his pulpit, he could describe the burning fires of Hell in such torrid detail that the strongest men in the congregation fell to their knees and wept like babes at the pitiful states of their mortal souls.”
While it was difficult to imagine the Colonel as having a holy man as a grandfather, it was easy enough picturing him with one who liked to preach and declaim. “How terrifying for you as his grandson, sir.”
“Not at all,” he answered, linking his fingers comfortably upon his chest. “I was a mere infant when he died, and whatever sins I’d acquired by that age were of such a humble and insignificant variety that I suspect he’d no interest in them.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said sadly, unable to keep from remembering my own grandmother. “Children should know their ancestors.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I suppose the very fact that the old gentleman died when he did indicates some manner of divine wrath venting upon me even as a child.”
“There is no loneliness like a child forced to suffer the untimely loss of a devoted parent or grandparent, sir,” I began softly. “Those who are blessed with a full and happy family can never understand it.”
“But you do, Mary.” He reached up and lifted the cloth from his eyes to look at me. He blinked, doubtless from the light, but kept his gaze upon me so that I felt my cheeks warm from it. “I should have known that you, of anyone, would.”
I was tempted to tell him more of Pondicherry, about my mother’s tragedy and my unknown father and how their deaths had been the reason that, in time, I’d been brought here to New Jersey as Mistress’s slave.
I wanted to tell him, because I was sure he’d understand, just as I’d understood him.
But instead he continued, not giving me space to interrupt.
“You see everything in this house, Mary, don’t you?” he asked, his mouth curling into a half smile. “I am certain you realized it all before I did, how the death of Mrs. Prevost’s own father—vale, Theodosius Bartow!—in that carriage accident before she was born would bind her even more closely in sympathy to me. It is but one more way that we are alike, she and I, and in as perfect understanding of each other as two souls can be.”
I instinctively fell back into my usual silence, head bowed, eyes downcast, hands clasped over my apron, with no opinions or ideas of my own. Of course he meant Mistress. Why should I have been so foolish as to think he’d mean me?
“I believe your ministrations have helped me, Mary.” He tossed the cloth aside and sat upright against the pillows as he took up a book he’d borrowed from Mistress’s shelves from the table beside the bed. “I feel quite refreshed.”
“I am glad, sir,” I murmured, gathering up the cloth, the bowl, and the water. They’d served their purpose and were no longer needed, nor was I. I began to turn away with them, and as I did he grabbed on my forearm where it was bare below my sleeve, holding me back.
“A moment, Mary, if you please,” he said. As soon as I’d paused, he released my arm, but now he was running his fingers back and forth over my skin, as if he couldn’t bring himself to break away completely. As featherlight as this caress was—and I’d no doubt it was a caress, however unintentional he tried to make it appear—it was enough to make me shiver, from surprise and confusion both.
“You must know how much I appreciate you,” he said. He paused, his gaze gliding from my face to his hand upon my arm and back again. “You are always an isle of calm and peace and grace in this household, and you have my gratitude for it.”
I nodded, mute. His gaze could hold my own by the hour, if he’d wished it. He’d beautiful eyes for a man, large and a rich color that was neither brown nor blue nor green, but a mixture of all three, and framed by thick lashes that any girl would envy. Yet there was nothing soft or feminine about his gaze. It was too sharp, too penetrating, too impossible to evade or ignore.
He was the one who finally broke the spell, and released me. He looked away, pointedly opening the book to read.
“You may go, Mary,” he said absently, his thoughts already elsewhere.
I fled, my thoughts tangled and raw.
But later that night, when I turned to the commonplace book he’d given me, I wrote only a handful of words—the last underlined—as a warning to myself.
Keep guard, and do not let yourself become a fool.
CHAPTER 13
The Hermitage
Hopperstown, State of New Jersey
August 1780
For the months that followed, Colonel Burr devoted himself both to repairing his health and to Mistress, though perhaps one with
more devotion than the other. Although he was occasionally still called upon to perform some small mission or reconnaissance for the army, his military career was effectively done, and he divided his time between Connecticut, where he’d resumed studying law, and New Jersey.
He was so often at the Hermitage that all the Hackensack Valley knew of his interest in Mistress, and gossiped about it, too. On the rare times when Mistress and her mother and sister visited friends elsewhere and took me with them, I was instantly asked by that house’s servants for details of the scandal—details that, of course, I never provided.
Indeed, it was a scandal. There was no other word for it. For an area that was so besieged and weary of war, the rumors of the wellborn wife of a British officer openly conducting an affair of passion with a much younger gentleman who’d fought for the Continental Army was a titillating diversion. It also became a test of political loyalties. For those who wished to make a public outrage of their Whiggishness, Mistress became an easy target to portray as an adulterous Loyalist harlot. In the way of lopsided English morality, no slanders were cast upon Colonel Burr; but then, what gentleman is ever faulted for loving too freely?
But while Mistress did her best to hold her head high and ignore the tattle from others, she could not ignore her own mother. Mrs. DeVisme was so critical of her daughter’s behavior that it became a constant, wearying theme whenever they were together.
The older lady’s tirades had only increased in the summer of 1779 when Mistress received most momentous news from Colonel Prevost. With nothing to show for years of fighting the Continental forces in the north, the British had decided to concentrate their attacks on the less fortified southern states, where there were believed to be more Loyalist sympathizers. From his headquarters in the City of New York, General Sir Henry Clinton had sent over three thousand troops to invade Georgia with the goal of restoring the state to British rule—or, as it was said, to remove one of the stars back from the American flag. Mistress’s husband was among these forces, and he fought so ably and bravely that, when the British reclaimed the lower half of the state, Colonel Prevost was named acting governor.
All this he wrote in a letter to Mistress, who in turn read the letter aloud one evening to her family and a group of her acquaintances, as she would with any accounting from the war. (It was also, not surprisingly, an evening when Colonel Burr was not in attendance, being at his sister’s home in Litchfield.) By attempting to keep her own loyalties in balance as she always did, she tried to direct her pride toward her husband’s individual achievements rather than toward the British victories against the Americans. But Mistress erred when she also read aloud her husband’s pleas for her to join him and their two sons in Georgia.
Mrs. DeVisme could scarce wait until their guests departed before she began her attack. I was clearing away the cups and plates, and thus overheard it all, though I suspect the older woman’s voice could be heard in every corner of the house, she was that distraught.
“You must go to your husband at once, Theo,” she said. “He has as much as ordered you to join him. There is absolutely no acceptable reason for a Christian woman to keep apart from the man she has sworn before God to honor and obey.”
“Consider the danger of such a journey, Mother,” Mistress said, putting her off as she went about the parlor, plumping a cushion here, adjusting the position of a vase there. “The coast bristles with American privateers.”
“And not a single one of those impudent little boats would dare interfere with a British transport convoy,” her mother countered. “Your passage could be arranged in a matter of days. I’m sure that Sir Henry himself would give the order for it, considering who you are.”
“Can Sir Henry order the winter seas to calm, and the storms to abate?” Mistress asked, her back to her mother. “Can a British general control the vagaries of the weather so as to lessen my risk?”
“You are impossible, Daughter,” Mrs. DeVisme said grimly. “It is your duty to be with your husband and your sons, no matter the imagined risks. I do not know how you can remain deaf to the talk that—”
“Do you believe I care for such talk?” Mistress demanded, turning to face her mother. “After all I have done, all I have endured, all I have ignored, in order to keep this property and us safe within it! After all of that, how can you believe that I care a fig for the opinions of others?”
Mrs. DeVisme’s hands were clasped so tightly about the blades of her ivory fan that I thought she might snap it in two.
“Is it politics, then?” she asked. “Is this—this flirtation with Colonel Burr your misguided attempt to broadcast your sympathies for the Whigs?”
Mistress gave a small toss to her head. “My politics have little to do with my affections, Mother.”
“I do not believe that for a moment, Theo,” her mother said. “You were always a headstrong, obstinate child, and now that same stubbornness will be your ruin if you let it.”
“I am not a child, Mother, and it is my decision to make, not yours,” Mistress said, her voice terse and each word clipped. “And though I do not owe you an explanation, I will tell you that I have already replied to Marcus, and I enclosed a lock of my hair so that he would be sure to know it was from me.”
As Mistress made this declaration, her mother watched her so closely that she flushed.
“A raggedy lock of hair is poor consolation for a faithless wife,” Mrs. DeVisme said at last. “You have made a sorry choice, Theo, and I only hope you will come to your senses before it is too late to do so.”
Mistress didn’t reply, at least not that I heard, for soon after I’d no choice but to return to the kitchen with a tray filled with dishes. There, however, Chloe had opinions of her own once I told her what had happened in the parlor.
“It’s pure meanness in that old woman, forcing Mistress t’confess like that,” she said. “She knows what her daughter’s doing, same as the rest of us. Master is ten years older than Mistress, and the Colonel is nine years younger. What woman wouldn’t take the younger man?”
I shook my head as I slipped the dirty cups into the tub of soapy water. My Lucas had been about twenty years older than I, and I hadn’t reason to complain.
“She was discontented before she even met Colonel Burr,” I said. “I remember when Master brought me here, the last time he was on leave, and she kept apart from him.”
“She doesn’t keep apart from Burr, that’s for sure,” Chloe said with a sly laugh. “She’s like a young girl with him.”
“But it’s more than that, Chloe,” I insisted. “They speak about books and poetry and politics, and he listens to her as if she were another man. He says their souls are alike.”
“Souls and books,” scoffed Chloe. “There’s one reason that Mistress keeps that puppy around, and it’s not souls nor books, neither.”
But it was. Chloe might not understand it, but I did. To see Mistress and the Colonel together was to understand how rare their attraction was. There was no arch coquetry, no false gallantry, nothing practiced nor calculated between them as there was with most of the other white gentlemen and ladies who visited the house. Instead, there appeared to be both genuine respect and regard between them, and a willingness to listen and consider what the other said. Their souls truly were alike, as the Colonel had said, and meant to be together.
Which is not to say there was no desire between them. Far from it. Even through the closed door to Mistress’s bedchamber, I heard her with him, the creaking of the bedstead and the animal cries of their passion. If once they’d abstained, that time was surely now passed. It was fortunate that Mrs. DeVisme was never in Mistress’s house to hear how wantonly her daughter abandoned herself to her young lover, and ignored her vows to Colonel Prevost; I’m not sure the older woman would have survived overhearing such undeniable evidence of their pleasure.
It was difficult enough for me. I’d believed that after all the tragedies and misfortunes of my life, I’d learned to look eve
r forward, and not let the past hurt me further. But the sounds at night of their lovemaking in the room below the attic made me unbearably sad and lonely, so much so that I often silently wept myself to sleep with grief. When Lucas had been killed, I’d lost not only our future together, but also the solace of love and the joy of another who’d made me whole.
As if to echo the chill in my solitary heart, the winter months of 1780 were the coldest and most bitter that any in the valley could remember, with too many snowstorms to count. General Washington’s army had once again made their winter encampment in New Jersey, about thirty miles southwest of the Hermitage. There the army suffered not only from the cold and snow, but also from discontent among the ranks. As the war had continued, the heady patriotic enthusiasm of 1775 seemed long ago, and it felt that far more—in lives, property, and spirit—had been lost than gained. Victories had been few, and because Congress lacked the funds to pay the soldiers, many had quit as soon as their enlistments were done, or simply deserted to return home.
I saw my own dreams of liberty fading, too, and began to think they truly were dreams, and no more. I was most likely twenty years of age then, and all I saw stretched before me was a life of drudgery, bereft of the love that I’d scarcely known, yet always desired. Worst of all, my heart grieved to think that my Lucas might have died for nothing.
It wasn’t until spring that we’d learned that His Excellency and his officers had had to put down a mutiny within their own ranks at Morristown that had led to the execution of the instigators. Even after the army broke camp with the warmer weather in the spring, the northern campaign seemed stalled into inactivity.
The only favorable news from this time was that the French King Louis XVI had decided to show more tangible support for the Americans against the British, and was sending ships and troops to join the cause. I thought of the younger son of my first mistress, Madame, who had been an officer in the French army, and wondered if he, too, would be among those sailing to America to fight for freedom of people like me.
The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr Page 24
