“Don’t play innocent with me, wife. I am not the only person who likes to save people. Only in this case, I’m not sure it’s saving you’re doing, or sabotaging.”
“What on earth are you two talking about?” Betty said, interrupting their banter. “And will someone please refill my glass?”
“I would be happy to, Birdy,” a male voice said from the doorway. Alex looked over to see John entering the room, carrying his own empty glass. “I thought I smelled whiskey.”
“Little Johnny Schuyler!” Betty exclaimed. “I had forgotten you were here.”
“Am I so forgettable then?” John said, pouring a little whiskey in her glass and being rather more generous with his own. Alex noted sadly that the bottle was nearly half empty already. “You cut me to the quick, Birdy.”
“What?” Betty said, pretending to look around for the source of the voice. “Oh! John! I had forgotten you were here!”
“Touché,” John said, touching his glass to Betty’s, then swilling half of his back in a gulp. “I tell you what. I won’t call you Birdy if you won’t call me Johnny.”
“Well, what am I supposed to call you then? John is your name, after all.”
“That’s right, John is my name, not Johnny.”
“Eggplant, aubergine,” Betty said. “It’s all the same to me. But whatever you want, John,” she finished in a heavy, teasing voice.
“What’s wrong with Birdy? I find it charming,” said Alex.
“John used to call her that when they were children,” Eliza said, noting how cheerful John looked at the sight of their old friend. “He said she had legs like a chicken’s.”
“My legs were adorable, thank you very much,” Betty said. She extended one now, revealing a polished wooden heel and dainty foot clad in glove-soft leather and, daringly, a bit of silk-clad ankle. “Mama said I could have been a dancer, if it were not such a disgraceful profession.”
“In the opinion of your mother and our mother,” John said, “there are only three professions available to women: general’s wife, gentleman’s wife, or widow.”
“Your mother got two of them,” Betty tittered. “Does that make her a bigamist?”
“Betty!” Eliza gasped, sounding genuinely shocked to Alex’s ears. “You go too far!”
“Oh, relax, sis, we’re all family here,” said John.
“But even so. A little respect for the women who raised us is only fitting,” said Eliza.
“Mother? Raise me?” scoffed John. “I had to ask Nanny for permission to even see her, and it was Nanny’s lap I sat on during the visits, not Mother’s. Frankly, I’m relieved. Mother has such skinny legs. It would have been like sitting on a pair of fallen fenceposts. Nanny’s lap was plump like a pair of pillows.”
“Our mothers are from a different generation than ours,” Eliza said. “Everything was formalized then. The rules came from the king down, and each step on the rung was clearly demarcated. Their roles restricted them, but it also gave them a sense of identity. Our generation is much more open to possibility. We can choose our own roles. We are not bound by expectations of family or class,” she said. “For instance, in the United States, one is free to fall in love with a gentleman as well as with a footman.”
Betty turned to John. “You said she had turned into quite the little sermonizer. I see you weren’t exaggerating. I for one am happy with who I am,” she continued. “My family built this country, both before and after independence, and I am only too content to continue their traditions. Stephen is Patroon, and I, as his sister, will have a special place on our lands. What woman would not want the masses to part for her when she walks by, like the Red Sea for Moses?”
“This woman, for one!” Eliza said, a bit irritated by the young woman’s old-fashioned attitude. “How terrible to feel that one cannot interact with one’s fellow human beings as equals. To wonder if everything they say to you is couched in fear of reprisal rather than honesty.”
“But we are not all equal, no matter how Mr. Jefferson says we are created,” John said now. “Too many people think that he meant we are born equal, when all he meant is that God created us the same all those hundreds of generations ago. But we are born into quite different circumstances. Male, female. Light-skinned, dark. And more tellingly: rich and poor, free man and slave. These circumstances shape us and make us all the more different from one another. To pretend otherwise is simply to deny the evidence before your eyes, and the inherent injustice of the current system.”
“You certainly have a point. But by your own argument,” Eliza responded, “you admit that people change over time. And if they can change in one direction, they can change in another. The high can come lower, the low can come higher, and we can all meet somewhere toward the middle. And slavery is the most unjust of all and must be ended at once.”
“Hear, hear,” said Alex.
John and Betty nodded as well. But Betty soon found her footing once more. “Still, it sounds so dreary. You describe the social version of porridge oats or strained peas. I for one like a little salt and sugar, some spicy pepper from the east!”
“Not to mention some delectable whiskey,” John said, touching her glass to his and smiling at her warmly. They clinked and drank. Alex’s heart sank a little more, but he was enjoying Eliza’s sparring too much to say anything. Though he had had conversations like this with John Jay and James Madison and even Aaron Burr, it was a welcome spectacle to see his wife holding the torch for the American experiment in equality.
“So are you saying,” Eliza said now, leaning forward to Betty. “Are you saying that there could never be anything between you and, say, Mr. Pennington?”
Alex’s eyes went wide.
“I don’t know who that is,” Betty said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Betty. Drayton. The footman. You have met him several times already tonight,” said Eliza.
“Are we still on about the footman?” Betty clutched a hand to her chest.
“Yes, why not? In a new country, with new customs, do you think a landed lass like yourself should fail to find common cause with a lad as handsome and honorable as Drayton Pennington merely because he wears livery rather than a lieutenant-colonel’s epaulets?”
“Good heavens, Eliza,” John said. “It is almost as though you are challenging her.”
Eliza shrugged. “Perhaps I am.”
“Challenging me to what exactly?” Betty said. “I love a good challenge!”
“Eliza, darling,” Alex said now. “A word?”
“Just a moment, dear,” Eliza said, keeping her eyes trained on Betty’s. “I challenge you to look at Drayton as what he is. As a boy, your age, with the same drives and ambitions we all have. To do something worthwhile with his time. To find love.”
“Love!” Betty laughed. “Oh, Eliza, you set me a difficult task!”
“You are only here a few months,” Eliza said nonchalantly. “If the experiment does not take, you can return to Rensselaerswyck none the worse for wear. The Red Sea will part, and you will be back in the promised land.”
Betty just shook her head, but Alex could see her gaze was focused somewhere out of the room. He looked where she was looking, and saw the upright form of the footman. He was proffering a sandwich to Mrs. Jantzen as though it were an emerald ring on a pillow. He offered a winning smile, and Mrs. Jantzen responded by batting her eyelashes at him like a sixteen-year-old.
“I suppose he isn’t bad-looking, is he?” Betty said musingly.
“That’s the whiskey talking,” John said darkly.
Betty shrugged. “Well, there’s always more whiskey, right, Alex?”
Alex glanced longingly at the nearly empty bottle. “Indeed, Betty,” he sighed. “There’s always more whiskey.”
11
Serve and Match
The Hamilton Town House, the Break
fast Table
New York, New York
July 1785
In the middle of the night, Alex startled awake. “I’ve got it!”
Eliza didn’t open her eyes. “That’s good, dear,” she said, pulling his arm more tightly around her. “Now go back to sleep before I stab you.”
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING at breakfast, with a dewy-eyed Emma and a somewhat blearier John seated between them, Eliza asked Alex what he had been raving about last night. He looked at her blankly. “I know I drank a bit and perhaps got a tad boisterous, but I should hardly think I was raving.”
“You got up on an ottoman and recited Marc Antony’s eulogy for Julius Caesar, but that’s not what I’m talking about. In the wee hours of the morning, you woke up and yelled ‘Eureka!’ or some such. I worried that John was going to run in from across the hall to see what was going on.”
John chuckled under his breath, though he didn’t look up from his as yet empty plate, whose pattern he was studying as though it were a passage in Greek he was expected to translate.
Eliza ignored this as Alex considered his wife’s question. At last he shook his head. “I have no memory of any eureka moment, alas.” He smiled in mock self-pity. “No doubt I dreamed up some grand defense of a powerful central government that would bind the thirteen colonies together into a single nation instead of the squabbling confederacy we now are, and it has been lost to posterity forever.”
Eliza rolled her eyes. “That’s what I love about you, dear. Your modesty. But perhaps it was something closer to home? About work? Family?”
Another pause; another shake of the head. “I’m afraid nothing comes to mind. But then, my mind is a little the worse for wear after two bottles, ahem”—he glared at John—“of my reserve batch of whiskey.”
John continued to stare into his plate.
“Perhaps about the Trinity case?” Eliza prodded. She didn’t know why she felt it so imperative to help Alex remember, but his voice had been so joyous, so triumphant. She was sure it was something important, and she still recalled the elation she felt after her own dream revelation had returned to her.
Alex laughed ruefully. “Now that I would remember. But if ever there was a legal Gordian knot, it is the Trinity case. There is no untying it.”
John’s head snapped up, though his eyes still seemed unfocused. “I thought Alexander didn’t untie it. He just cut it open.”
“Perhaps I could explain the concept of a metaphor to you,” Alex said drolly. “Or perhaps I could simply tell you how much each of last night’s bottles of whiskey was worth.”
Alex’s words solicited a weak laugh from John. “If it makes you feel better, I can’t even remember how much fun I had last night, and I have a raging headache.”
“It would,” Alex said, “if I were not in the same boat myself. Also, why are we talking so much instead of breakfasting? Drayton, may I have some coffee, please?”
Drayton, who had been standing by the sideboard like a member of the king’s guard outside Buckingham Palace, stirred himself like a clockwork soldier whose spring had been unfastened. “Very good, sir,” he said, stepping forward with the pot to fill his glass.
“Is this new?” Alex said, pointing to the pot but looking at his wife. It was an elegant silver decanter with slender, gourd-shaped body and a spout as long and graceful as a swan’s neck.
Eliza batted her eyes at her husband. “It depends on what you mean by ‘new.’ I purchased it almost three weeks ago, but you are only noticing it today, so I suppose you could say it’s new to you.”
Alex grinned sheepishly, then took a sip of his coffee. “So what you’re saying is, I can’t scold you for spendthrift habits since I have been too busy with work to notice the nice things you bring into our house?”
“And spiriting off pretty young women to private inns,” said Eliza, who hadn’t been able to get Maria Reynolds out of her mind.
“Excuse me?” John said, at last summoning the energy to look at his tablemates. “Did someone mention pretty young women and hotels?”
“I never said she was pretty,” Alex said, pointedly ignoring his brother-in-law while clinging to his coffee cup like a life preserver.
“No, Eliza did,” John said. “Do tell, sis.”
Eliza didn’t take her eyes from her husband’s. “Get your mind out of the gutter, brother, lest you find another part of your anatomy there. Mr. Hamilton knows I am only teasing him.”
“Mr. Hamilton is relieved to hear that,” Alex said, though he still looked a little green around the gills. It could have just been the hangover, of course.
“Saucy!” John said to his sister. “You never spoke this way at the breakfast table at home.”
“Neither did you,” Eliza said, “but, to the best of my knowledge, only one of us has earned the right to such language, since only one of us is paying the rent on this house.”
“Yes, and it’s me,” Alex said, trying to grin.
“Is that so?” Eliza said. “And whose parents furnished this house when we moved in and vouched for your ability to meet the terms of the lease?”
Alex looked a bit shocked at the acid of her comment, but Eliza did not seem chastened. She was increasingly discomfited that he had lied to her about his whereabouts the other evening, and even more irritated that it concerned a strange woman.
In a stage whisper that could’ve been heard down the block in City Hall, John leaned over to Emma and said, “Don’t forget, she’s an heiress.”
Emma, who had been watching this exchange as though it were a tennis match, tittered.
“Et tu, Emma?” Alex said. With a sigh, he reached for his copy of the New York Journal and unfolded it in front of his face. “If you need me, I’ll be in the news.”
Emma brought her napkin to her lips quickly, but another chuckle could be heard. “Drayton,” she said quickly, “may I have some more coffee please?”
“Very good, Miss Trask.”
“Oh, Drayton. You must call me Emma. It feels improper for you to address me as though I were somehow above you.”
“Very good . . .” Drayton’s voice faded. Fortunately for him, John jumped in before he could force himself to use Emma’s Christian name.
Well, perhaps it wasn’t so fortunate for him.
“Oh, come now, Emma,” John said. “You are sitting at table. Drayton is standing to your left with a coffeepot in his hand. Under such circumstances it seems to me he cannot call you anything but Miss Trask. I am all for egalitarianism, but let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater.”
“Really, John,” Eliza said. “Given the riffraff with whom you’ve been socializing lately, I wonder that you would judge anyone for a little interclass fraternity. Not that I regard you as riffraff,” she said to Drayton, her face going a bit red.
“Very good, Mrs. Hamilton,” Drayton said. “Coffee?”
“Yes, thank you very much.”
“Very good, madam.”
“Drayton,” John said now, catching Emma’s gaze with a wicked glint in his eye. “May I have some coffee, too?”
“Very good, Mr. Schuyler.”
The footman poured, then stepped back to the sideboard.
“Drayton,” John said, winking at Emma. “May I have one of those scones?”
“Very good, Mr. Schuyler. Would you like blackcurrant or fig?”
“You choose.”
“Very good, Mr. Schuyler.” Drayton returned to the table with a small platter of scones and tonged one onto John’s plate.
“Drayton,” John said as the footman was walking back to the sideboard, “may I have some cream with my scone?” Another wink at Emma, who remained stony-faced, though her eyes were sparkling. Eliza couldn’t tell if it was from amusement or anger.
“Of
course, Mr. Schuyler. Very good, Mr. Schuyler.”
Drayton set the scones down and picked up a salver, which held a cruet of cream. He spooned some onto John’s plate, and as he was turning away John said, “Drayton,” yet again. Eliza could only see the footman’s face in profile, but she was pretty sure he winced.
“Could I have some jam with my scone and cream?”
“Very good, Mr. Schuyler.” Drayton gave an inaudible sigh, setting the cream down. “Rowena has opened some grape, strawberry, and orange marmalade. Which may I offer you?”
“Hmmm,” John said, as though he were considering whether to play his ace in a game of whist. “I think I will have . . . marmalade.”
“Very good, Mr. Schuyler,” Drayton said, returning to the table with yet another salver holding yet another cruet and spooning a mound of glistening orange pulp onto John’s plate.
“On second thought,” John said as Drayton was turning away, “I think I will have some grape jam as well.”
“Very good, Mr. Schuyler.”
It seemed to Eliza that Drayton’s back grew just the tiniest bit straighter as he turned back to the sideboard. Another cruet appeared; the spoon sank into its red depths; a mound of viscous compote plopped onto John’s plate next to the marmalade.
“Oh no.” John sighed dramatically.
“John!” Eliza hissed. “Enough!”
“I’m so sorry, Drayton,” John moaned. “But this color combination”—he waved his hand between the red and orange jellies—“simply will not do. Please, take my plate away and bring me another with just a few slices of melon.”
“Very goo—”
“Well, it looks perfectly delicious to me!” Emma said, and, standing so suddenly her chair wobbled on its hind legs, she reached across the table, snatched John’s plate before Drayton could clear it, and slapped her own empty one in its place.
“Oh ho!” John said. “The lioness wakes at last!”
“I am no lioness!” Emma said. “Merely someone who recognizes injustice when she sees it!”
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