Hamilton and Peggy!

by L. M. Elliott

  “Why, yes, Miss Peggy,” Burgoyne answered. “Your father desired me to think no more about it. He said that the occasion justified my orders. You see, the buildings were being used as protective barricades and shields by the Colonials and—”

  “You mean our American troops?” she interrupted.

  Burgoyne laughed. “Yes, Miss Peggy, quite right. The soldiers of the American Army were firing upon us from the protection of buildings on your father’s estate. To protect my men, your father’s buildings had to be removed. General Schuyler, with great courteousness and understanding of military matters, said that according to the rules and principles of war, he would have done the same.”

  “Really?” Peggy asked, feeling her eyebrow shoot up archly and hoping it revealed that what she was about to say was sarcastic, no matter how polite the words. “How magnanimous Papa is. We all try to emulate his largesse.”

  Burgoyne’s answering smile was wry, and his eyes twinkled; clearly he caught Peggy’s jab. He stood and raised his glass, playing along. “To the Honorable General Schuyler and his gracious family.”

  Mirroring their commander, the officers stood and thumped the table as they said, “Hear, hear.”

  At least Peggy had managed that hit for her papa’s honor.

  “I have been most impressed by the mercy of all the Americans,” the baroness said, continuing the thread of conversation. “During the battle, when a terrible bombardment trapped us in a house with many wounded, we desperately needed water. Nobody wanted to risk going to fetch some, because the rebel enemy . . . forgive me . . . because the Americans shot every man who went near the river. We are much in awe of your marksmen, madame.”

  “That would be Daniel Morgan’s riflemen, probably,” Peggy offered. “They are quite legendary.” Peggy was fully aware that Morgan’s line, shooting from treetop roosts, had taken down a dozen Redcoat officers. She knew she was being rude, callous even, but the fact of their being at her table and treated to such deferential entertainment considering their swath of destruction and cruelty to Patriot New Yorkers was too insufferable for her to simply smile and offer them more baked rolls.

  But the baroness went on, “Finally a soldier’s wife offered to go. The reb . . . the Americans did not hurt her. We would have perished had we not had that water.” She cleared her throat. “I must add that when I rode into your camp, after our army’s capitulation, I feared jeering, or . . . or worse.” She hesitated. “But not one American glanced at us insultingly. In fact, your soldiers bowed to me. Some even looked with pity to see a woman with small children there. I . . . I am afraid that might not have been the scenario had the reverse been true and your men were our prisoners of war.”

  Peggy’s instantaneous reaction popped out of her mouth: “And that, Baroness, is why we fight against you.”

  Silence fell around the table. Several officers froze, forks midway to their lips.

  Peggy turned defiantly to her mother, expecting to be sent to her room.

  But all Catharine said was, “More wine, anyone?”

  Peggy took a big gulp herself to keep from laughing out loud in triumph.

  Burgoyne and his entourage finally vacated, a week later—after Catharine had emptied their cellars to feed them and the encamped American guard had plundered their chicken coops, dug up their root vegetables, torn down fencing for shelter, and milked their cows dry in the night. Gentleman Johnny did not apologize for the wreckage, but he did leave behind a beautiful pair of shoe buckles ornamented with lines of brilliant diamond-like paste baubles—for Miss Peggy, he said, “a most spirited and delightful child.”

  Child! So Burgoyne got the final cut in their verbal swordplay.

  As Catharine handed them to her, she said, “What a tribute to the fine hostess you have become, my dear. I will be sure to tell your papa.”

  Peggy eyed her mother, trying to gauge if there was a double and disapproving meaning to her words. Catharine had never said anything about Peggy’s impertinence at dinner. Nor had she punished Peggy for egging on her little brothers—nine-year-old Jeremiah and four-year-old Rensselaer—to charge through their bedroom, where a dozen British officers were billeted, and to shout, “You are our prisoners!” before dashing out and slamming the door behind them.

  “Mama?” Peggy began.

  Catharine just patted Peggy’s cheek and said, “Pack those in a bit of silk and keep them as souvenirs to show your own children someday—all that’s left of Gentleman Johnny here in America.”

  Eight

  Late Autumn

  General George Washington to Alexander Hamilton

  Head Quarters Philada: County 30th: October 1777

  Dear Sir:

  It having been judged expedient by the Members of a Council of War, held yesterday, that one of the Gentlemen of my family should be sent to Genl: Gates in order to lay befor him the State of this Army; and the Situation of the Ene(my) to point out to him the many happy Consequences that will accrue from an immediate reinforceme being sent from the Nothern Army; I have thought (it) proper to appoint you to that duty, and desire that yo will immediately set out for Albany . . .

  I wish you a pleasent Journey And am Dr: Sir Your most obt. Servant Go: Washington

  “MISS PEGGY, I SIMPLY DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO do,” Varick said with exasperation.

  Peggy tossed aside her needlework. She was botching her design of roses anyway. Eliza was the artist with the needle. Peggy would stick to her watercolors and sketches. She was sitting by the hearth in the family’s less formal yellow parlor to toast her feet by the fire against the sudden, sharp cold of November in upstate New York. Her foot had been bothering her again. She was praying that the needles of pain were simply a reaction to the frigid temperatures and not a harbinger of inheriting her father’s malady. It was too terrifying a thought to contemplate.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Varick, what did you say was the matter?” Peggy pulled her feet off the stool to tuck primly beneath her skirts. She hadn’t really paid attention when the colonel first blustered into the room.

  Catharine had gone to Saratoga to help Schuyler rebuild their country house and left Peggy in charge of the household. Everyone was turning to her now for direction and to negotiate squabbles. It was proving a heavy, and insufferably boring, responsibility for the nineteen-year-old. Especially thinking on the Boston dinner parties and balls her two older sisters were probably enjoying. Before she knew it, Peggy might be covered with fire dust, just like the ever-suffering Cinderella!

  Peggy had tamped down her resentment of being left behind by her sisters as long as her papa was in Albany and there was the chance Peggy might help him with Patriot espionage. But now that he was in Saratoga, she felt adrift, without purpose. This running of a house was supposed to be her goal in life, she knew, but what a small dream it felt in the context of the Revolution. She suddenly longed to share in whatever action her sisters were seeing in Boston. Even if it was just watching Angelica sweet-talk European financiers into supporting the rebellious Patriots.

  Varick began again: “Mrs. Schuyler requested that I send to Saratoga our whitewash brushes, but Mary refuses to give up the one she has. And Charles forgot to put the apple cider Mrs. Schuyler wanted into the wagon that has already left with the stovepipe and chimney irons your father has been waiting for. I fear your mother will be most dissatisfied when the shipment arrives and the cider is missing.”

  Sighing, Peggy pushed her dark curls back off her forehead, trying to look authoritative. “Surely, Mr. Varick, some of our tenants in Saratoga would have brushes.”

  “Most were burned out of their homes, too, miss.”

  Of course. Peggy wasn’t thinking. Most every farm around Saratoga had been laid waste. “Damn Burgoyne,” she muttered.

  “Miss?”

  Peggy stood and made herself smile graciously, as she knew Catharine would. “I’ll convince Mary to give up her brush, and if you put it in the wagon with the cider tomorrow, Mama won’t
mind about the cider being a day late.”

  “Thank you, Miss Peggy.” Varick beamed at her.

  Peggy tried to ignore his admiring gaze. She liked the man, truly, a great deal. But Richard Varick had none of the dash, the daring, the wit—the savoir faire—of the heroes of her books and which, in her loneliness for her sisters and their conversation, Peggy was coming to realize her heart craved. So she was careful to keep their conversations to business. Surely, though, there was something more interesting than paintbrushes to talk about. “Is there anything else Papa needs, Mr. Varick? Anything related to our great cause of liberty?”

  “Oh yes, miss! I gather one of General Washington’s aides-de-camp, Alexander Hamilton, is here in Albany. He has come to see Gates about releasing troops to reinforce General Washington’s Continental forces to the south. Since Philadelphia—unfortunately—has fallen to the British, General Washington is trying to blockade them and hold the Delaware River to starve them of provisions.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, miss.” Varick lowered his voice. “And I have it on authority that Gates is so bloated with self-importance—now that he is hailed as the victor of Saratoga—that he is refusing the young Hamilton’s entreaties. In fact, General Arnold suspects Gates of trying to convince Congress to replace General Washington with him. Just as he stole your father’s command of the Northern Army. What better way for Gates to accomplish that than to deny Washington needed troops and let him fail in Pennsylvania?

  “The man is so conniving! He does not acknowledge Benedict Arnold’s role in our victory at Saratoga and even ordered Arnold off the field during the second battle so that Gates alone won glory.”

  Peggy would have dismissed such gossip if she hadn’t witnessed such petty rivalries herself, firsthand, in the fate of her father. So many of the delegates to Congress and the army’s generals seemed far more concerned with elevating themselves than with actually defeating the British. This could not happen—not now that the Patriots had won their first decisive victory after two years of humiliation and disaster, not after so many had died.

  “I am going to see Benedict Arnold,” she announced, charging toward the door.

  “Miss?” Varick looked at her questioningly

  Peggy stopped, recognizing that it was not the place of a young woman to rush off to see a general, sounding like she wanted to discuss politics. Although it galled her to do so, she racked her brain for more acceptable motivations. Arnold still lay in Albany’s hospital, critically ill, his leg shattered. “Your speaking of General Arnold reminded me that I should visit and ask after his health, the poor man.”

  Varick smiled. “A visit from a beautiful young lady would surely do his heart good, miss.” He raised his eyebrows meaningfully, hope all over his face.

  “And a basket of apples,” Peggy added as if she hadn’t heard. “Surely, the general would appreciate some good fruit.” With that she hurried from the room.

  As her horse climbed the steep hills bordering the west end of town to the stone-walled garrison and hospital, Peggy was stunned by the crowded horizon of tents, shanties, and smoldering campfires stretching before her. She knew the Northern Army had more than doubled Albany’s population of 3,500 people. But until she actually saw it herself, she hadn’t realized what putting a tent city atop a town of four hundred houses would look like. The hospital was jammed with hundreds of sick and injured Americans. Hundreds more were being tended in private homes and the Dutch Reformed Church, which had turned its sanctuary into a medical ward. Albany hadn’t exactly been picturesque before the war, but now it looked like one of Dante’s circles of hell.

  Peggy dismounted, handing her horse’s reins to a private on post. Immediately, she held to her nose the sachet bouquet women carried to survive street smells. The stench of camp cooking, makeshift necessaries for four thousand men, animal dung, trash, and mud was overwhelming. She nearly retched.

  As she approached, Peggy trembled at the sounds emanating from the hospital—the large H-shaped building seemed to pulse like a gigantic hive, humming with moans and weeping. She forced herself forward, step by step, her heart jumping at each outcry of anguish from within. She reached the threshold and beheld dozens upon dozens of mangled men, lying on straw, elbow to elbow, contorting in pain, whimpering for a drink of water. Others lay so still, crawling with green bottle flies, they seemed already dead. Many were missing limbs and were wrapped in bandages that oozed blood. The air was putrid with the smells of rot, dysentery, stale whiskey, and tincture of myrrh.

  Peggy gasped, swayed, and dropped her basket, apples bouncing and rolling away. She caught herself on the doorway and damned her corset, her mind chanting don’t throw up, don’t throw up. She looked down, away from the horrors, and fought blacking out. In the swirl of her almost faint, she saw a hand pick up one of the scattered apples. She made herself focus on that hand as it picked up apple after apple to drop back into her basket. Plunk . . . plunk . . . plunk. Then the hand lifted the basket toward her and a voice said kindly, “There, miss, it’s all right. Take a deep breath.”

  Peggy followed the hand to an arm to a face—a beautiful, sweet-child face of a foot soldier. No beard, not even the hint of stubble on that smooth skin. Her gaze met green eyes framed by baby-soft tendrils of honey-brown hair. As young as he was, those eyes carried a sad wisdom of having already seen far too much of the world.

  “Thank you, sir,” she murmured. “I am ashamed of my weakness.”

  “Don’t be, miss; we are a terrible sight for a lady such as yourself.” He smiled, the kind of innocent dimpled smile that made a mother easily forgive a child waking her in the night. “I believe you dropped these?”

  Peggy looked down to take her apple basket and bit back a gasp. The boy had only one arm.

  “Who are you here to see?” The boy kept talking as she fought to collect herself and to not tear up at his injury.

  “Gen . . . General Arnold,” she stammered.

  “Lucky man. He is back where the officers are being tended. Would you like me to show you?”

  Peggy nodded.

  “I think I best take you to our commanding surgeon first. General Arnold can be a mite prickly. If he is having a bad day, that doctor will know it. Follow me, miss.” The boy swept his one hand out as graciously as if guiding her to a ballroom floor for a minuet.

  Fleetingly, Peggy wondered if the boy would ever be able to dance again.

  The hospital was enormous—two stories high, with forty wards. Keeping his hand on her elbow to steady her, the boy picked their way through rows of pallets and groaning men. Good thing, because when she saw a doctor begin to wind the crank of a huge screw into the skull of a patient, she nearly fainted again.

  “Good Lord, what is that doctor doing?”

  The boy grimaced and turned her to face away. “I’m sorry, miss. I should have taken you a different way. But don’t worry. The surgeon’s just trepanning a fractured skull. To relieve some of the pus and blood.”

  “Wh-wh-what?” Peggy was sure her face had turned as green as the boy’s eyes.

  “Oh no, miss, seriously. It will relieve the pressure and give the soldier a chance. He would die otherwise for sure. You’d be amazed by what a man can live through.”

  “Miss Schuyler, what are you doing here?” The hospital’s surgeon-commander approached, wiping blood from his hands hurriedly. Peggy recognized Dr. Thacher from her long-ago trip to Ticonderoga to nurse her father.

  “I bring General Arnold greetings from my father and some apples from our orchard. May I see him?”

  “Hmm. General Arnold is quite peevish. The femur was shattered. Yet he refuses an amputation, which leaves him in great pain and in danger of infection.” He paused, considering if she should really see Arnold or not. “But I hear he is also quite the wooer of women, so he is like to better behave with you. This way.” Dr. Thacher strode away.

  Peggy hurried to follow, but not before thanking the youth. “Go
dspeed, sir,” she whispered, and handed the lad an apple. He held it to his heart and bowed.

  Catching up to the surgeon, she asked, “Will that young soldier be all right?”

  “As long as he doesn’t catch camp fever,” Thacher muttered in reply. “He’s one of the lucky ones. He has education and can earn a living with his mind. These other poor men, who can no longer do manual labor having lost an arm . . .” The doctor shrugged. “That worry is for after we win our liberty.”

  He stepped into a small room. “Here we are. General Arnold,” he called. “I bring you a visitor.”

  Benedict Arnold’s scowl turned to surprise as he saw her. He struggled to right himself in his bed. His leg was held together by a wooden press, and he winced and grunted as he dragged the cage-like contraption along the mattress.

  “Let me help you.” Peggy instinctively hurried to pull the pillows out and retuck them more comfortably behind his back as he sat up.

  Arnold looked up at her with intense gray eyes. He was dark in complexion and hair and possessed a strong, athletic build, rather indecently exposed in his open nightshirt and his bared, broken leg. He was so . . . hairy. She blushed and pulled back.

  “Thank you, Miss . . . ?”

  “Miss Peggy Schuyler, General.”

  “Ahh.” He nodded. “You must be Philip’s youngest. Colonel Varick told me of you when we served together at Saratoga.”

  At this, Peggy more than blushed. She could only imagine what mush Richard Varick might have said.

  Arnold chuckled. “You are already too much woman for him, Miss Peggy, I can tell.”

  “Sir!” she exclaimed, flattered and shocked all at once.

  Arnold waved her toward a camp chair. “Accept the praise, Miss Peggy. Do sit down. How is your father?”

  “At our homestead in Saratoga, rebuilding.”

  “We should have had him at the battle. Perhaps I would not have been shot through this leg yet again, had he been issuing orders that day.” He looked down at it and muttered, “Would to God the musket ball had passed through my heart instead.”