“Good God, Miss Eliza! I am grateful you were spared.”
Angelica shot Peggy a withering look, clearly annoyed that Peggy was hogging Carter’s attention and sharing a story about an adventure she’d missed, choosing instead to stay in New York City to enjoy what would end up being its last season of Patriot balls.
Peggy ignored Angelica’s glare to continue bedeviling her. “Oh, but that was only the beginning, Mr. Carter! For days, our wagon jolted along that path on the river’s eastern shore. Whenever the wagon’s wheels stuck fast in mud, Mama had to get out and yank on the oxen. Oh, how she pled with those stupid beasts. Eliza and I had to push from behind.”
“What?” Carter asked. “You didn’t have a military escort to help?”
“Oh no, Mr. Carter.” Peggy smiled prettily to hide her inward smirk at her sudden mental picture of the immaculately dressed Carter trying to brave the wilderness road. Why couldn’t Angelica see him for a popinjay fop? But aloud she said, “Following our papa’s unselfish example, we only asked for one guide. We did not want to take any more men from the defense of our nation.”
Peggy was about to continue her travelogue when she was suddenly beset with harsher memories of that exhausting, one-hundred-mile journey through the forbidding forests. She shivered involuntarily, even though she sat next to a fire blazing brightly in their ornate yellow parlor, soft with a florid Brussels carpet and cushioned chairs. How she, Eliza, and their mother had shivered back then—through bone-chilling downpours, and terrorized by the howls of wolves hunting in the thick, primeval woods all around them. What else, who else might be out there in the shadows was their constant question.
They had been so relieved to reach the safety of their halfway point—Fort Edward—hoping for a cot and a hot meal. But the fort was a burned-out ruin, and the soldiers holding the skeletal fortification had no provisions. In pity for the bedraggled women, they managed to shoot a bear and cook it over open fires to feed them. That scorched fresh-kill bear meat had tasted better than any carefully dressed turkey presented in their mansion’s elegant dining room. It tasted of staggeringly beautiful, untamed frontiers, of a gut euphoria at reaching safety after being in danger, of a freedom from Old Europe parlor-room niceties and banalities.
As Peggy had torn the meat off her roasting stick with her teeth, one of the soldiers proclaimed her as good a woodsman as ever a boy was. Catharine had been horrified. Peggy had grinned, grease running down her chin, loving the compliment.
Carter tapped his cards on the table, interrupting Peggy’s musings. He laid them facedown, crossed his arms, leaned back, and tossed a dimpled smile of encouragement toward Angelica. Smooth, unblemished features; wide-set, luminous eyes framed by almost feminine brows. God, he was irritating with his sculpture-perfect face, his pampered refinement!
“Have you ever eaten bear meat, Mr. Carter?” Peggy asked abruptly.
He startled. “No, I have not, Miss Peggy.” But he was clearly amused by the out-of-the-blue question. “Is it good?”
“Deeee-li-cious.” Peggy drew out the word.
This time Angelica kicked her under the table.
Carter went back to dreamily staring at Angelica. The man had recently finished his Congress-ordered audit and found Schuyler’s records beyond reproach. But still he lingered about their house, like a bee drunk on honeysuckle. Peggy kept expecting her father to shoo him off. But Schuyler seemed to think Carter might be useful for intelligence gathering among Loyalists, since he was such a recent émigré from Great Britain.
That, at least, Peggy could understand. Having an ear to Tory homes was critically important. Longtime neighbors who remained loyal to the Crown had proven quite dangerous. Just a few weeks before, her father had uncovered a Tory plot to blow up Albany’s powder magazine and set fire to the city. The wretches had even planted incendiaries all around town. Peggy had known one of the conspirators all her life.
But did this highborn Carter have what it took to be a spy? How Peggy wished she could volunteer for that job instead. She could dress up and act like a boy to hide her identity, just like Viola did in her favorite Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night. Shaking her head slightly, Peggy snapped herself back to their card game. “Angelica, play your card. We are all waiting.”
“I would happily wait a century if your sister asked it of me,” said Carter. “Frankly, each card she plays, Miss Peggy, brings our game closer to its end. A melancholy thing.”
Eliza sighed, charmed. Of course Eliza would be charmed.
Ever so slowly, Angelica pulled out a card and laid it on the table. The queen of hearts. “Voilà! I believe hearts rule?”
A delighted grin lit up Carter’s countenance. “The queen of hearts commands all she surveys or touches.” He bowed slightly.
Oh, for pity’s sake. Peggy rolled her eyes. Angelica was a smarter player than that. There was no need to pull out such cannon fire for this trick. By Peggy’s calculations, Angelica had the spades to win the play easily without resorting to a trump. It was pure flirtation. Deftly done, though, she had to admit.
“Well, with that move, we can only capitulate, Peggy.” Eliza tossed down her cards and held her hand to her heart. She was in complete awe of her big sister’s coquettish wordplay.
Angelica stood. Shaking out her sapphire satin skirt and the tiers of creamy lace peeking out from her elbow-length sleeves, she asked, “Voulez-vous voir la bibliothèque maintenant?”
“Ah, oui!” Carter rose. “Est-il permis d’examiner les volumes?”
The impertinence! Did he have permission to examine the volumes, indeed. I should say not! thought Peggy. Seeing Eliza’s hurt at being excluded once again by Angelica’s French gave her an idea. “Eliza,” she chirped, and purposefully mistranslated: “Mr. Carter was just saying how much he longed to hear you play the pianoforte.”
How that sweet, heart-shaped face brightened. And how Angelica’s clouded.
Again, Carter burst out laughing.
Well, at least he had a sense of humor, thought Peggy.
“Mademoiselle.” He held out his hand to Eliza to escort her across the parlor. Eliza giggled, blushed, and took it. She settled in front of a polished mahogany square-box piano, her billowing pink taffeta gown making a pretty picture against the room’s gold-flocked wallpaper.
Eliza took a deep breath before beginning the Allegro first movement of a Haydn sonata. With nimble delicacy, her fingers danced up and down the octaves in crystalline runs. Then, with the piece’s Andante, Eliza shifted moods, drawing out the expressive melody, lingering over its melancholy phrases. She swayed slightly as she touched the ivory keys, in complete communion with the lyrical movement, becoming a graceful personification of its airy, sublime tune.
Angelica and Peggy smiled at each other, all irritation between them extinguished. Their middle sister had that effect on them. Angelica and Peggy could be spit and rasp. Eliza was balm. She might not read as much as they. She might not speak French well, nor quip with their alacrity, but she far surpassed them in the arts and in the sincerity of her joys. Her music was magic.
Peggy glanced up at Carter, who stood directly behind Angelica. He was as rapt as they. Peggy softened. All right, he had a soul. Peggy always warmed to anyone who appreciated Eliza.
Coming to the end of her incantation, Eliza reluctantly pulled her hands back from the keyboard. She turned to face her listeners as they clapped—Carter impressed, Angelica and Peggy filled with affectionate pride.
“Sing with me, sisters,” Eliza beckoned.
“Please, dear ladies, grant me that rapture,” exclaimed Carter. “I will hold the image to my heart all my life, a shield against future unhappiness.”
Angelica beamed.
Oh my, thought Peggy, how her sister succumbed to poetic rhetoric. How she wore her passionate heart on her sleeve. Who was Peggy to break it? She relented and decided to help rather than hinder Angelica’s obvious love affair. She wasn’t that good of a singer anyway.
“Not I, Mr. Carter. I feel a bit hoarse. But Angelica has the voice of a seraphim angel.”
Mouthing “thank you,” Angelica swept across the floor to join Eliza.
The two conferred in whispers, holding their lips to each other’s ears, their enormous nut-brown eyes and luxurious dark curls lovely mirror images. Peggy had the same eyes, the same curls—although hers tended to frizz—and the same dimpled cleft in her chin. But her sisters were graced with their mother’s long neck, high cheekbones, and delicate jawline. Peggy had inherited their father’s more aquiline nose, his slightly longer face and crooked teeth. Still attractive, she knew, but not as softly alluring. Whenever she saw her older sisters framed together like this, she felt a jealous pang, a fear of inadequacy. They were much to live up to.
Her sisters chose their aria. As Angelica’s dulcet voice lilted through the room, Carter remained mesmerized.
“Can you play any of the music from The Beggar’s Opera, Miss Eliza?” he asked when the girls concluded.
“Goodness, sir, no,” demurred Eliza. The work was a wildly popular satire of Italian opera, but scandalous in its featuring of London’s thieves, prostitutes, and debtors’ prisons.
“I know it!” Angelica piped up.
They all did, of course. But only Angelica would admit so.
“Please, then, permit me.” Carter cleared his throat and began a cappella the lines sung by the rogue Macheath. “Were I laid in Greenland’s coast, and in my arms embraced my lass . . .”
His tenor voice was as resonant and silky as any actor’s Peggy had seen in New York City theater. She felt her left eyebrow shoot up in approval, an unconscious reaction that she knew gave away her thoughts.
The song was a back-and-forth between Macheath and the heroine. Carter strode across the floor to take Angelica’s hands so they could harmonize together. She joined in singing:
“And I would love you all the day.
Every night would kiss and play,
If with me you’d fondly stray
Over the hills and far away . . .”
They stopped and simultaneously drew in a sharp breath. Before Peggy could interrupt, Carter leaned over and kissed Angelica. On her mouth, lingering, searching, in a way that made Peggy blush for her sister. Angelica did not draw back.
“Sir! What is the meaning of this?”
“Papa!” the girls squeaked.
None of them had heard the enormous back door of the hall open, their father handing his cloak and tricorn hat to Prince, his personal attendant and the enslaved servant he trusted to greet all guests to the mansion. Nor had they heard Schuyler enter the room. They were that bewitched by Carter’s musical seduction.
“I repeat, sir,” Schuyler bellowed. “What is the meaning of your behavior?”
Tall, muscular, lithe, their father—when he wasn’t ill—exuded a commanding prowess. He’d spent years traversing New York’s upper lakes and dense forests—first learning to trap and trade with the Iroquois, then as a colonel in the French and Indian War. The Oneida—one of the Iroquois Confederacy’s six tribes—had named him Thoniondakayon, one who walks young with old wisdom. With such bearing, rarely did Schuyler need to raise his voice.
Angelica’s creamy, soft hands balled into fists at her side. Peggy could imagine Angelica’s silk-slippered foot stamping with indignation under her gown—a gesture that always preceded impassioned speeches about her rights, peppered with quotes from Thomas Paine.
Schuyler’s shout brought their mother scampering down the staircase, from where she had been putting her thirteenth child to bed. Having lost six children in infancy already, Catharine tended her babies with an anxious carefulness herself, despite having several enslaved female attendants who could help.
“Kitty.” Schuyler turned to her. “Why were you not chaperoning?”
Catharine looked with bewilderment at her daughters before answering in her blunt Dutch-housewife way: “I expect them to safeguard one another’s virtue.”
“They have failed one another in that tonight.”
“How so, sir?”
“I just caught Angelica . . . here, in our parlor . . . behaving . . . allowing this man liberties.”
Catharine frowned. She wagged her finger at Angelica as if she were a toddler. “I should have known. I have never been able to teach you proper modesty, daughter, or proper restraint.”
Angelica’s face turned red with humiliation. “And who was it failed you in that regard, Mama?” she shot back. “When Papa was courting you?”
Peggy’s and Eliza’s mouths popped open at Angelica’s salvo. No one had ever dared acknowledge the fact she had been born only five months past her parents’ wedding day. A shocked silence fell. The clock ticked; the fire in the hearth popped and threw sparks; one of the grooms could be heard calling for lanterns to be lit in the back courtyard.
Angelica stood her ground, smoothed her skirts, and took advantage of her command of the stage. “I love him, Papa.”
At that Carter gasped. But it took him only a moment to regain his gallantry. He bowed low. “General Schuyler, may I ask the honor of your daughter’s hand in marriage?”
Eliza about swooned at the romance of all she was witnessing.
Peggy inwardly groaned. Angelica seemed more defiant than beguiled by love. She longed to ask her sister what in the world she was thinking.
But Schuyler’s reaction was immediate and vehement. “Good Lord, man. No!”
“Papa!” Angelica wailed.
“My beloved child,” he began.
“I am no child!”
“Then do not act like one, Engeltje.” When their father used the original Dutch version of their Christian names, the sisters knew they were in serious trouble.
“I do not have time to debate this,” he continued, holding his hand up to stop Angelica’s protest. “Canadian Oneida have warned me of British plans. As soon as the roads thaw, they will invade New York, coming south from Quebec down Lake Champlain. General Burgoyne has amassed eight thousand British and Hessian solders. One hundred pieces of artillery. Those numbers triple ours.”
“Goede God,” murmured Catharine.
“He is also recruiting Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Mohawks as scouts and New York Loyalists to join his ranks.
“At dawn, I must ride for Philadelphia to meet with Congress. First to deal with the nonsense this man”—he gestured toward Carter—“was sent to investigate me for. And then to plead for more troops, more horses, more salted meat, more ammunition.” He rubbed his forehead. “I swear Congress expects us to fight on nothing but self-sacrifice and rhetoric.”
Schuyler paced, worrying more to himself than to the other people in the room. “The war could be lost right here in the coming weeks.”
“But, Papa,” Angelica interrupted him, “this has nothing to do with Mr. Carter and me.”
Absorbed by impending catastrophe, Schuyler didn’t hear her.
“Papa?”
He paced on.
Angelica reached out and stopped him. He blinked, then focused on his daughter. Somehow his voice gentled. “You cannot marry this man, Angelica. I am not even certain of his real name. Carter is an alias. I have just learned that he fled England because of a duel. Perhaps over a woman. Perhaps over a gambling debt. I do not care which. This man is not for you.”
Oh, Papa, thought Peggy sadly. How could he know so little about Angelica’s willfulness? Now that he’d commanded her obedience and denied her wants, Angelica wouldn’t give a fig what he might uncover about Carter. Intrigue would only make her suitor more romantic and tantalizing in Angelica’s mind.
Schuyler swung around to face down Carter. “Be gone, sir. Do not return to this house. You are no longer welcome around my daughters.”
Two
Spring
Colonel Richard Varick to Major General Philip Schuyler
Albany, April–May, 1777
Dear General:
It is reported here t
hat the Enemy are preparing to come up the River [from New York City]. You may easily conceive how Mrs. Schuyler feels on the business, however, we have almost induced her to vacate. . . .
Last night brought an account of [British] frigates and transports . . . above Peeks Kill. The ladies were in a distressing situation for an hour or better and I am getting boxes made [for packing] for fear of the worst.
[We are] in very sanguine expectations of receiving some letters from you . . . but our most earnest wishes were disappointed, which induces the ladies to think that you are . . . unfortunately fallen into the hands of the Tories.
—I am Dear Sir, Your Most Obedt & Very Hblsevt, Richd Varick
“RIDER APPROACHING THE HOUSE!”
The cry by one of Schuyler’s guards sent the Schuyler family scrambling from their breakfast to the window.
“It’s an express messenger!” shouted twelve-year-old John. He pressed his nose against the glass as his younger brothers, Jeremiah and Rensselaer, climbed on his back to look. “He’s wearing blue and buff.”
“Praise God,” murmured Eliza, taking Peggy’s hand. “Maybe it’s finally a letter from Papa.” The family had been worried sick about their father now that the British had sailed up the Hudson River. There had been no word from Schuyler at all. What if he had been taken prisoner?
The horse was lathered, its breathing labored. Whatever the news, it was urgent enough to gallop. A reassuring note from their father would not necessitate pushing a horse so hard.
In the past days, they’d been bombarded by unnerving reports of British ships and troops moving quickly toward them, of Loyalist Tories torching barns in the night and kidnapping Patriot leaders. The guards placed around the Schuyler mansion to protect the home and family of the Northern Army’s commander were jumpy. Most of them were old or semi-crippled from wounds—probably of little help in real trouble.
Hamilton and Peggy! Page 2