He looked at her blankly.
She was about to repeat herself when Prince materialized. “Excuse me, Miss Peggy. We have a message that a group of French officers will make the ferry across the Hudson this morning. Want me to send your father’s sleigh to the wharf to retrieve them?”
Peggy gasped. “French officers, you say?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Oh, it must be. Finally! Fleury had come!
Peggy felt like she could fly. “Oh, yes, Prince! Harness the horses, but please tell Lisbon to wait for me. I am going to ride to the wharf with him!” Realizing her voice was way too giddy, she made herself sound like a lady of the manor. “One of us needs to greet them properly.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Prince nodded as he excused himself.
Peggy hoisted her skirts and ran to the door to fetch her cloak and muff.
“Peggy!” Hamilton called after her.
But she was already to the bottom of the stairs.
“Peggy, wait!” he cried.
She ran up the steps two at a time.
“Peggy!” He climbed after her.
She darted into her bedroom. Hamilton dashed into his, where Eliza still slumbered. He reemerged in time to block his new sister as she skipped to the stairs—flustered, ecstatic, wrapped in fur and hope. “Peggy, stop.” Hamilton held a letter in his hand.
“Oh, I don’t care about that anymore, Alexander! Fleury is here!” she exulted.
She kissed him on the cheek and made for the steps.
But he caught her arm. “I doubt it. You don’t want to rush down to the wharf.”
She tried to yank her arm away, but he held fast. “I need to tell you something.”
“What?” She laughed. “That you are a secret playwright? It doesn’t matter.”
“Peggy, I’m not sure what you are talking about. But I need to tell you something.”
His expression stopped her. He led her to a chair and made her sit in front of a wallpaper medallion of a wrecked temple. Peggy felt her heart sink. “What is it?” she whispered anxiously.
“I need you to hear something that Fleury sent me.” Hamilton knelt and took her hand. “He wrote to me of politics mostly and then he . . .”
Peggy snatched away the letter to read for herself:
Mrs. Carter told me you was soon to be married to her sister, Miss betsy Schuyler. I congratulate you heartyly on that conquest; for many Reasons: the first that you will get all that familly’s interest, & that a man of your abilities wants a Little influence to do good to his country. The second that you, will be in a very easy situation, & happin’s is not to be found without a Large estate. The third (this one is not very Certain) that we shall be or connect’d or neighbors. For you most know, that I am an admirer of Miss Pegguy, your sister in Law; & that if she will not have me; Mr. Duane may be cox’d into the measure of giving me his daughter; this Litle jest is between you & I. It woud be very improper for anybody else.
Peggy looked up, ashen, nauseated. “M-Mary Duane? Or Sarah? Adelia?” Their father, James Duane, was another New York delegate to Congress and a family friend. She knew his daughters—they were lovely creatures. “Fleury has courted one of the Duane girls?. . . As well as . . . as me?” Her hand flew to her mouth to stop herself from retching. The letter was dated late October, well past that good-bye kiss at Hartford. If he really loved her, how could he even consider a second choice?
Head swimming, Peggy was vaguely aware of what Hamilton was saying. “He is a valiant fighter, Peggy. Fleury is quick to act with courage and decisiveness—at every battle, every chance for heroism. He is the best of the professional soldier in this way. He responds with the same zeal to a chance for glory in civilian life as well, for”—he paused—“for conquest. But just as the heat of a skirmish well fought subsides, so do perhaps his affections.” Hamilton grimaced as Peggy shook her head, putting her hands over her ears.
Gently he took her hands so she could hear him. “I have also heard that Fleury may be already committed, my dear, to a cousin in France. Not that such an engagement could not be broken. And I do not doubt that you captured his heart, Peggy. I saw it myself. But I also see with what unshaking devotion you can love, with what passion of spirit. You remind me of . . .” He hesitated, and his voice lowered with a sense of tragedy. “You remind me of my mother, my beautiful, fiery mother. She adored my father. But he was shallow in his ardor. It evaporated like a puddle of water in a tropical sun, and he left her. Left her to raise my brother and me alone. Left us with the stigma of being illegitimate in the eyes of the law, bastards.”
Gone was all Hamilton’s usual posturing. His voice grew raspy. “My mother was much abused by the men in her life. When she dared to leave her first husband—to whom her own mother had essentially sold her into a loveless marriage when she was but sixteen years old—the brute convinced the Dutch court of Saint Croix to jail her for several months for disobedience and alleged promiscuity.” He shook his head. “But she was not cowed by them. When they released her, my mother defiantly fled to another Caribbean island rather than return to her husband as ordered. She had a dreamer’s heart and a soldier’s bravery.”
“Much like you.” Hamilton squeezed Peggy’s hands. “I say this with all brotherly love and admiration: you deserve, my Peggy, to have someone whose gaze is for nothing and no one but you.”
Shakily, Peggy stood. She untied her cape. She forced a polite smile and murmured “thank you” before retreating to her room. She wished to let her heart break in private, although Peggy was sure the sound of its crack would rumble like an earthquake.
There was little time for her sorrow, however. By that evening Peggy was helping to play hostess for the four French officers who had arrived to visit—the chevaliers de Chastellux and de Mauduit, Comte de Damas, and the Vicomte de Noailles. Their army settled into its winter hiatus in Newport, the four Frenchmen had decided to spend a month touring the sites of the Revolution. They wished to meet the renowned General Schuyler, to learn of his Canadian expeditions, and to see the battlefield of Saratoga. Given their closeness with Rochambeau, Schuyler needed to fete them well to keep them happy and enthusiastic about the American cause.
So Peggy bubbled like the fermented cider she raised during their toasts. She danced with them as Noailles played the violin. She listened politely to Chastellux discuss his translation of Romeo and Juliet into French, in which he had added a happy ending. Far more satisfying that way, he declared. And far from the truth, thought Peggy, but she said nothing.
If Hamilton believed she was a gifted actress, Peggy proved it that night. She was polite, gracious, flattering—while completely dead inside. Until she heard McHenry respond to a comment made by one of the officers who wished Peggy would smile. “Surely then,” the Frenchman said, “she would be as beautiful as Mrs. Carter.”
Always Angelica, fumed Peggy. She slowed her walk as she passed behind them, to hear what the men said next.
McHenry clearly did not realize Peggy was within earshot. “Mrs. Carter is a fine woman indeed,” he gushed. “She charms in all companies. No one has seen her, of either sex, who has not been pleased with her.”
The French agreed.
“Peggy, though,” he continued, “perhaps a finer woman, is not generally thought so. Her own sex are apprehensive that she considers them to be poor things, as Swift’s Vanessa did. To be admired as she ought, Peggy needs to please the men less and the ladies more. I have told Hammie he must tell her so. If he does, her good sense will place her in her proper station.”
McHenry took a sip of his cider and lowered his voice to finish. “I must tell you, though, you should not desire too many smiles from her. She wants better teeth to be as pretty as her sisters.”
Peggy stopped in her tracks. Jonathan Swift’s character of Vanessa was condemned and ostracized because of her wishing to discuss philosophy and matters of state with men. She was a kind of literary Diana or Athena, but without the respect
granted those ancient mythological figures. And Peggy was supposed to smile at these men, no matter what she was feeling? And her teeth? Her hand shot to her mouth, humiliated. They were a tad crooked and she was indeed missing one or two, but that was how God or Nature had made her. There was nothing to be done—no ribbons, no curling irons, no corsets that could change their appearance.
Had McHenry said these things to Fleury? Had he lowered Fleury’s opinion of her somehow with such gossip? Her soul seethed.
Perhaps the heat of her humiliation and fury radiated to them, because the men suddenly turned. The French blanched at seeing her. McHenry smirked.
Peggy lowered her hands from her mouth, balling them into fists by her side. If only she could challenge this jackass to a duel, to avenge her honor. Men could. Why couldn’t she? Why did she—required by society’s scriptures to be ladylike—have to passively accept such affronts?
But perhaps she didn’t. Hamilton’s admiration for his defiant mother came to her. And if the Revolution had taught Peggy anything, it was that there were all sorts of tyrannies that needed to be challenged and turned upside down. Carter’s quip about the sword of her wit came to Peggy. She drew her weapon.
Taking a step forward, she fluttered her eyelashes as she had seen Angelica do a thousand times, to make what she said next a total surprise attack. She kept her voice silky. “You needn’t worry about my ever smiling on you, Colonel McHenry. And I fear with such . . . gallantry”—that word she said with steely sarcasm—“few other women will, either. Indeed, Colonel, I worry for you that Swift’s Vanessa would consider any man ‘a poor thing,’ who seeks to entertain and garner the friendship of other men by gossiping and criticizing women. If you are to ever find happiness with a woman, Colonel, I suggest you follow your own advice: please the men less and the ladies more.”
Peggy flipped open the feathered fan that hung at her wrist. Fluttering it back and forth, she curtsied to the Frenchmen, gracing each of them with a wry, close-mouthed smile.
Then she swept away, leaving them guffawing at McHenry for the rapier hit she had laid him. “Touché!” They could use her in battle, they said.
Indeed they could, she thought with a raised-eyebrow smile meant just for herself.
Interlude
THE FIRST LETTER FROM MRS. ELIZA HAMILTON
WITH A PS FROM HER NEW HUSBAND:
Elizabeth Hamilton to Margarita Schuyler
New Windsor, New York, January 21, 1781
Dear Margaret
I am the happiest of Women. My dear Hamilton is fonder of me every day. Get married I charge you. . . . There is no possible felicity but in that state imagined me my Sister. I was much in want of it. Adieu. Give my love to Papa and Mama and our friends and the others. With every regard, Eliz Hamilton.
PS Because your sister has the talent of growing more amiable every day, or because I am a fanatic in love . . . she fancies herself the happiest woman in the world, and would need persuade all her friends to embark with her in the matrimonial voyage. But I pray you do not let her advice have so much influence as to make you matrimony-mad. ’Tis a very good thing when their stars unite two people who are fit for each other . . . But its a dog of life when two dissonant tempers meet . . . Get a man of sense, not ugly enough to be pointed at—with some good-nature—a few grains of feeling—a little taste—a little imagination—and above all a good deal of decision to keep you in order; for that I foresee will be no easy task. If you can find one with all these qualities, willing to marry you, marry him as soon as you please.
A. H.
LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW AT FEBRUARY WHITENESS, Peggy tapped the pane with a letter just arrived for her from Eliza and Hamilton. So her brother-in-law was going to revert to playfulness to give her advice. In her present mood, she’d prefer his blunt sincerity. How could he expect her to be lighthearted, given how her romance with Fleury had vaporized? But certainly Hamilton’s banter shielded her from gossip if the letter fell into enemy’s hands along the mail route. And Peggy could decipher the code in his PS and the cloaked empathy he was trying to send her. It made her smile—one of the first to grace her lips in weeks. Perhaps that had been his aim.
Since he and Eliza left for headquarters—at New Windsor on the Hudson River, ten miles north of West Point—Peggy had sunk into sadness and retreated to her room. Even though she had read Fleury’s letter to Hamilton only once, and that in a flash fire of anguish and shock, his words were seared into her memory. In the heat of that awful conference with Hamilton, she’d focused on the fact the man she had fallen in love with seemed just as content to wed a Duane daughter as he would be her. In her second blaze of grief, though, alone in her room, she’d remembered Fleury’s congratulating Hamilton for marrying into the Schuyler family’s interest and influence. It would help him do good in his country. And then there was Fleury’s calculating pronouncement that happiness is not to be found without a large estate.
Peggy had been an afterthought all her life. Meet the Schuyler sisters: the scintillating, enrapturing Angelica, the saintly sweet Eliza. Oh, and Peggy, their little sister. Was she also only to be an appendage of her father’s, her attractiveness to potential suitors defined by what her papa’s wealth and sphere of influence could bring her eventual husband? Clearly, if she were honest about it, such benefits must have occurred to both her brothers-in-law.
No, Peggy certainly would not be “matrimony-mad,” as Hamilton put it!
Peggy had laughed outright at his warning her to avoid a man ugly enough to be pointed at! She wondered if Hamilton had written the humor into that line purposefully, suspecting she needed a good giggle.
Several things were quite obvious in the letter, however. Given their messages, both Hamilton and Eliza were happy together. Perhaps now Eliza could shed her worries that she might prove inadequate for the intensity of her new husband’s intellectual prowess and poetic passion. Peggy could also tell that Hamilton had not shared with Eliza what he knew about Fleury, or how he had saved Peggy from humiliating herself by rushing to the wharf to meet a lover who had not come. She was grateful for his discretion—especially with her papa.
Schuyler was so busy right now, the last thing he needed was to hear that one of his daughters had been jilted. And by a Frenchman. As much as he loved the language, her papa couldn’t quite shed a distrust of the onetime enemy he’d fought in the French and Indian War. And surely he might think less of Peggy if he knew she had thrown herself—literally—at one of them.
Right now Schuyler was serving in the New York legislature and trying to quell a mutiny by troops guarding Albany. The soldiers were threatening to march to Washington’s headquarters to demand back pay, which would leave the city naked to attack. Schuyler was extending his own credit to raise subscriptions of grain, meat, flour, and wages to pacify the soldiers.
Congress was also ignoring his plea for clothing and food for the Oneidas and Tuscaroras. He had been horrified when the Iroquois delegates told him of their living conditions. Appealing to Congress’s sense of humanity hadn’t worked, so Schuyler tried explaining that starving and freezing might drive their loyal Iroquois allies to join the enemy. He was still waiting impatiently for their response. If Congress offered no help, he would somehow have to find funds to supply the Oneidas and Tuscaroras as well as Albany’s soldiers.
Peggy worried her papa was working himself into the gout that was crippling him that winter. He was also tense and anxious about Catharine, who was bedridden, due to give birth any minute.
Peggy reread Hamilton’s PS one last time. It would require a good deal of decision to keep you in order; for that I foresee will be no easy task. There were two ways to read that sentence. First, that Hamilton disapproved of her high spirits. She knew that was false. The second was that he was teasing, in that slightly flirty way of his, to prod her out of her melancholy. To remind her of her pluck.
Peggy chose the second interpretation, knowing that while many damned her tendency t
o speak her mind as being unattractive or intimidating—that cad McHenry, for instance—Hamilton applauded it. Peggy felt a hint of spring, a reblooming of her rebellious nature.
Hamilton was encouraging her to move on. To not let the world know of her broken heart. That way the fissure line in her steel could be reforged in a way any future opponents would not know where to find the weak point.
Keep her in order? Ha! This was the Revolution.
Peggy folded the letter, kissed it, and tucked it in a drawer. She had been acting like one of those foolish females in Pamela. Enough of moping about in her room.
Peggy marched herself downstairs to see how she could help her papa. For right now, her focus would be on the Patriot cause. She was lucky. History was being made all around her, and her papa’s study was a hotbed of Revolutionary stratagem and news.
Part Three
1781
To guard against Assassination (which I neither expect, nor dread) is impossible—but I have not been without my apprehensions of the other attempt—Not from the enemy at New York—but the Tories & disaffected of this place; who might, in the Night, carry me off in my own Boat and all be ignorant of it till the Morning.
—General George Washington
Eighteen
Winter
Alexander Hamilton to Philip Schuyler
Head Quarters New Windsor, New York, Feby 18, 81
My Dear Sir,
An unexpected change has taken place in my situation. I am no longer a member of the General’s family. . . .Two day ago The General and I passed each other on the stairs. He told me he wanted to speak to me. I answered that I would wait upon him immediately. I went below and delivered Mr. Tilghman a letter . . . Returning to The General I was stopped in the way by the Marquis De la Fayette, and we conversed . . . I met [the General] at the head of the stairs, where accosting me in a very angry tone, “Col Hamilton (said he), you have kept me waiting at the head of the stairs these ten minutes. I must tell you Sir you treat me with disrespect.” I replied without petulancy, but with decision “I am not conscious of it Sir, but since you have thought it necessary to tell me so we part.” “Very well Sir (said he) if it be your choice” or something to this effect and we separated. . . . Thus we stand. . . .
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