He sat in the tall-backed chair beside the window, a thick book spread open across his lap. He’d finally begun to look well again, his color fresh and his eyes sharp and keen. Mistress fretted that he toiled too hard at his studies, but clearly the scholar’s life agreed with him. Lost in thought, he took no notice of me at first as I slipped into the room and knelt before the fire. It was a necessary skill, to be so quiet at my labors that I became invisible, and caused no interruption or offense.
Yet still I did.
“Mary Emmons, Mary Emmons,” he said softly.
“Forgive me for disturbing you, sir,” I answered without turning. “I shall be done shortly.”
“No, no, you haven’t disturbed me at all,” he said easily. “I’m the one disturbing you.”
I brushed away the last of the stray ashes. Whenever he returned to the Hermitage, I was always startled by how freely he addressed me whenever we were alone together. His familiarity always unsettled me, because it wasn’t right.
He said nothing further, and I imagined he’d returned to his book. I swept the hearth clear and slipped the basket with my brushes and cloths over my arm. Only then did I stand, finally turning toward him to curtsey before I left the room.
He hadn’t been reading. He’d been watching me as I’d been on my hands and knees, and I flushed when I saw the little half smile on his face, the kind of smile men made when imagining wickedness with the woman before them.
“Is there anything else, sir?” I asked, wanting only to flee.
“Tell me what you made of Mrs. Arnold’s revelations,” he said, not what I’d expected. “Mrs. Prevost told me you were in the room with her at the time, and I’m grateful that you were. A conversation like that is best held before at least one witness.”
I hesitated. It was never wise to fault a white lady, even one who’d boasted of treason.
“Tell me, Mary,” he said, his smile now meant to coax away my reluctance. “I’ve heard Mrs. Prevost’s account. I’d like yours as well.”
I sighed, realizing I’d no choice. “When Mrs. Arnold was alone with Mistress, she admitted that she’d only pretended to lose her wits. She said she believed the Americans would lose the war, and that she’d persuaded her husband General Arnold to go over to the British, who were going to make him a general and pay him some sort of reward. She also spoke of a British spy named Major André, who she said had helped her, and was a particular friend of hers.”
“Oh, yes, a particular friend,” he said dryly. “But proceed, please. You haven’t mentioned how she tried to recruit Mrs. Prevost and me as well.”
“She began to do that, sir,” I said. “But Mistress would have none of it, and ordered her not to speak of war and politics, but of her baby instead.”
“Now that was something Mrs. Prevost didn’t tell me.” He chuckled, clearly amused. “It doesn’t surprise me, however. A pretty little fool like Peggy is no match for Mrs. P., and never will be.”
“No, sir.” I knew he was laughing over Mistress silencing Mrs. Arnold, but to me there was nothing entertaining about any of that conversation. My words grew warmer, more forthright. “But—but I was glad that her plot was discovered, sir. If she’d forced her husband to act as she’d wished, then who knows how many Americans would have been killed or captured? The loss of West Point could have meant the defeat of the American cause. To hear Mrs. Arnold, that was exactly what she’d desired, sir, and expected, too.”
“Spoken like a true patriot.” He wasn’t smiling now, or laughing, either. “And yet you understand the other side as well, don’t you? Even a courageous soldier like Arnold can crumble and turn traitor if pressed too hard. Peggy saw his weaknesses, and as an artful coquette, she was able to beguile him into a marriage he didn’t deserve. Fortunately for her, not many will learn her part in her husband’s treason.”
“I wish they would, sir,” I said vehemently. “She deserves to be punished, considering what she has done to both her country and her husband.”
He set aside his book and rose from his chair to look away from me and out the window. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, restlessly clenching and unclenching. His face was all angles in the afternoon light, his jaw set, and he took his time to answer.
“She has destroyed at least two lives by her reckless impulses,” he said finally, his gaze unfocused but his voice as flinty as it had been when he’d worn a uniform. “The British will never grant the reward they promised Arnold. His career and his honor are in ruins, and now little Peggy and their son are shackled to him and his disgrace forever. And as for her dear André: within the week, Washington had him tried, convicted, and hung as a spy. So yes, she has been punished, and if she possesses any conscience at all, she’ll suffer that punishment the rest of her mortal days.”
That was punishment, that was sorrow, and I groaned aloud to think of all the misery the young woman had willfully unleashed.
He swung around to face me, his expression determined.
“You see now why I am urging Mrs. Prevost to take herself from this region,” he continued. “If Peggy and her confederates had heard this—this gossip about us, then others will have as well.”
“They have, sir,” I said. “Servants from other houses often ask me of it.”
“I’m not surprised,” he said, his dark brows drawing together. “Calumny and lies and innuendo of the lowest sort, exactly the ill fame her enemies hunger for. Mrs. Prevost cannot let herself be linked to any of it, not with the cases regarding her property due to come to court soon. The risk is too great. Peggy did her no favors by stopping here and leaving her taint.”
I’d known that Mistress’s property had been eyed for confiscation by the state ever since the war had begun, but I hadn’t realized that the case was so close to a decision. Yet for that very reason, I couldn’t imagine her willingly leaving it, not now.
“Forgive me, sir, but I do not believe she’ll go,” I said. “This place is too dear to her to abandon it now.”
“Oh, I don’t expect her to abandon the Hermitage,” he reasoned, adding an expansive sweep of his hand for emphasis. “Only that she step away for a time to separate herself from the property. It will sit better with the judges if she is not here to remind them with her presence as Colonel Prevost’s wife. Of course, having lived so long apart from him will make it easier for them to explain that she is at heart more a Whig than a Tory. Leaving the state for a short while will only help her cause. Besides, I expect Mrs. DeVisme and her daughter will remain here to oversee the property.”
I nodded, thinking how having her further removed from her husband benefited Colonel Burr as well. But I couldn’t deny that not only the rest made sense, but also that his careful argument proved how he’d already absorbed many of the lessons necessary to being a good lawyer. At first it had seemed odd to me to see him in a plain but well-cut dark suit instead of the familiar blue-and-buff uniform, but now I was aware of a new air and presence to him that came not from a rank, but from his own intelligence and abilities. He’d always been a handsome man; now he’d become one that would be noticed as well.
“Where will you advise her to go, sir?” I said.
“I’ve inquired after rooms for her in the home of a respectable widow near Litchfield,” he said. “It’s not far from the home of my sister and brother-in-law. Removed she may be, but she won’t lack for intelligent company. I mean to speak to her about it tonight.”
He nodded, as if agreeing with himself, then cocked his head to one side to look at me. “But what of you, Mary? What would you say to a sojourn in Connecticut?”
I didn’t say anything, startled that even he would ask my opinion. As a bondwoman, I’d no right to make a decision like that, or any other about my own welfare or agency.
“Well?” he asked when I hadn’t replied. “Would you be willing to accompany your mistress on a journey to the north?”
“If Mistress takes me, sir, then I shall go,” I sai
d carefully. “But I can no more choose to travel or not than if I were her old horsehair trunk. It is for Mistress to decide, not me.”
“You’re more clever than that, Mary,” he said in the low voice he reserved for persuasion. “The condition of slavery is but a temporary state that can be removed at any time in an individual’s life.”
“Only Mistress can give me my freedom, sir,” I said. It was easy for him to say such things, easy and glib, because it wasn’t his life being lived within his “condition of slavery.”
But he was listening, and he didn’t interrupt, and that gave me the courage (or perhaps the anger) to continue.
“My husband wished to buy my freedom, sir,” I said, “but Mistress refused, and said that I was too valuable to her. She won’t free me, either, not so long as either of us still lives, or until the war grants me my liberty.”
“Ahh, Mary, Mary,” he said, taking a step closer to me, then another, before he stopped, and came no farther. “The only thing that is certain in our lives, whoever we may be, is the uncertainty of tomorrow, or even if we live another day. Surely you must know that.”
“More than most, sir,” I said, at once sorrowful and defiant. I shifted the handle of the basket from the crook of my arm to both hands, holding it before me like a shield of woven splints. I told myself that I didn’t want his sympathy, that I didn’t need it, yet I held the basket so tightly that the handle cut into my palms.
“You have learned to read and to write,” he said solemnly, studying my face as if seeing it for the first time. “You speak languages other than your own. You’ve seen more of the world than most sailors. You can cook and sew and spin, and likely a thousand other things besides. Your husband wasn’t stopped by what others had done to him, and neither, I suspect, will you be.”
I swallowed, and looked down and away from the keenness of his gaze, hiding within myself. I couldn’t help it. Whenever he spoke of Lucas, I felt the same, as if to hear my husband’s name on this man’s lips was a kind of betrayal.
“Forgive me, sir,” I said, “but I must see to the other fires before Mistress returns.”
He ignored me. “The commonplace book I gave you,” he said. “Have you filled its pages with your words?”
“Very nearly, sir.” They were my words, too, and neither he nor anyone else would ever see them. I made sure of that.
“Then next time I come here, I shall bring you another,” he said, his voice dropping lower, a rough whisper that seemed to carry his confusion as well as my own. “You are remarkably pretty, Mary Emmons.”
I started when his fingertips touched my temple. No, started is too brave a word: I trembled, I quaked, I quivered, for his touch was so light and grazing upon my skin that I might have dreamed it.
But I didn’t. All he did was brush aside a wisp of hair that had escaped from beneath my cap.
“Go to your fires, Mary Emmons,” he said gruffly, and turned away. “Leave me, and go.”
And I did.
* * *
No matter how Colonel Burr had tried to persuade Mistress to leave New Jersey for Connecticut, she did not go as soon as he wished. Yet not even he could have argued with her reason for remaining at the Hermitage.
In early November, her sons returned. More than two years had passed since they’d gone to join their father and begin their military careers with him. They appeared on the porch without warning, in the care of the elderly merchant who’d accompanied them from Jamaica: Frederick, now nearly sixteen, and Bartow, fourteen.
Both had grown tall and reedy, with hands and feet too large like puppies’ paws, while their too-small clothes gapped at wrists and knees. But while they’d all the awkwardness of youths their age, they’d none of the foolishness. They’d been beside their father throughout the battles in Georgia, and had likely seen things no boys their age should see. Now they’d become serious, solemn young men, their boyish mischief gone, and I thought sadly of how they, too, had been marked forever by the tragedy of war.
Mistress had held them close and sobbed with joy. I wondered if she’d wept as much when she’d read the letter they’d brought from their father. Having completed his posting in Georgia, Colonel Prevost had been stationed again in the West Indies, and he had not wanted his sons subjected to the fevers of the Caribbean. He was not well himself, plagued by old wounds and ailments, and he had, it seemed, finally given up hope that she’d ever again join him.
There was no further mention of the boys following the Prevost tradition of military careers with the British army, and I suspected that this, too, had been at the suggestion of Colonel Burr. The Colonel helped Mistress choose the schools her sons would attend, and oversaw their preparations. To his credit, he treated the boys in a most agreeable fashion, and they soon became great friends; not surprisingly, since the Colonel was, at twenty-four, only about ten years their senior, and must have seemed more like a young and benevolent uncle or older brother.
Frederick and Bartow seemed now destined to study the law, like the Colonel himself. The significance could not have been more obvious. Mistress, however, took great pains that he be described as a dear friend only before the boys, and all romantic gestures between them ceased for the sake of the boys.
Early in the new year, Mistress closed up the Hermitage and went to the lodgings the Colonel had found for her in Connecticut. I was the only servant she took with her, Chloe and the others being left behind with her mother and sister. While she told her family that the purpose of this visit was to improve her cause with the state courts, I soon saw that the real reason was for her to strike a friendship with the Colonel’s older sister, Mrs. Sally Reeve.
As the only other survivor of the Colonel’s family, Mrs. Reeve was extremely close to her brother, and as proof had named her only child Aaron Burr Reeve. I doubt the Colonel would have continued with Mistress if the two women had not pleased each other. Mrs. Reeve was two years older than her brother, with the same pale complexion, dark hair, and large eyes. At seventeen she had wed their childhood tutor, a legal gentleman, teacher, and scholar named Tapping Reeve. Mr. Reeve doted upon his young wife, and it was fortunate that he did, too, for she was weak and so sickly that her bedchamber was on the lower floor of their house, to spare her the exertion of climbing stairs.
But if Mrs. Reeve’s mortal body was feeble, her mind was as nimble and quick as could be, and she and Mistress instantly delighted in each other. Together they could discuss books, ideas, and events by the hour, and Mistress became her near-constant companion. With only Mistress to wait upon, I’d little to do, but Mistress had offered my skill with a needle to Mrs. Reeve. Thus I often sat near to them, close enough to be summoned for fresh tea and to hear their conversations, while I sewed new buttons on Mr. Reeve’s shirts and mended Mrs. Reeve’s household linens.
From the two ladies, I learned that the Colonel had shifted his law studies first to the library of Mr. Thomas Smith in Haverstraw, and then to the capital of Albany, where a wealthy friend in that place, Stephen Van Rensselaer, had fortuitously found him lodgings with a pair of elderly maiden aunts. Yet the Colonel was so determined to be admitted to the bar as soon as was possible that he’d no time to spare from his books to visit Mistress. Instead, he’d send his own newly purchased bondman, Carlos (whom Mistress wryly called her fleet Mercury), with letters. She respected his dedication, and never pined or fussed the way most ladies would. Mrs. Reeve became the Colonel’s surrogate, wooing Mistress in his stead with the family’s wit and intelligence. I have never seen or heard of a similarly curious courtship, but it seemed to suit Mistress, the Colonel, and Mrs. Reeve.
In this small village, the war seemed so distant as to have ceased. By late summer, Mr. Reeve told us of rumors of a battle to come that many in the region believed would involve the armies of General Washington and General Howe, and would settle which country controlled the City of New York. Mistress and Mrs. Reeve (and I as well) pored over fresh newspapers whenever they arrive
d, and listened breathlessly to even the smallest whispers of news that Mr. Reeve relayed.
By the end of October, we learned of a siege and battle far greater than any we’d anticipated, which had taken place at a town on the Virginia coast called Yorktown. Overwhelmed by the Continental forces combining with French ships and soldiers, the British General Cornwallis had surrendered outright to General Washington. It was a momentous victory, and one that was hoped would finally lead to the end of the war.
But for Mistress, even more momentous news arrived in a letter from her sister. Writing on the last day of 1781, Miss DeVisme had enclosed a brief announcement carefully cut from a newspaper, an announcement that Mistress immediately shared with the Reeves.
Far to the south on the island of Jamaica in the Caribbean Sea, Lieutenant-Colonel Jacques-Marc Prevost, Major of the 60th Foot, aged forty-five, had died of yellow fever.
CHAPTER 14
The Hermitage
Hopperstown, State of New Jersey
July 1782
“Are you certain the ladies in New York and Philadelphia are still wearing powder?” Mistress leaned closer to her looking glass in dubious scrutiny, turning her face from side to side as I stood next to her with the pot and duster. “It has been so long since I’ve powdered my hair that I’ve forgotten how it looks.”
“Yes, Mistress, it is still the fashion,” I said. “Miss DeVisme asked me specifically to dress your hair with it today, and sent you her own French-milled powder, too. She said the queen of France powders daily, and is considered a great beauty for it.”
The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr Page 26
