The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “We will do what we must,” he said resolutely. “Mary, we know what kind of world we’ll have if we do nothing. Isn’t it worth fighting for the chance to create one that’s better?”

  There was no quarreling with him, and I sadly knew that nothing I could say would change his purpose. He was determined, and he’d company enough with the same beliefs.

  In December, Lucas had told me of how the grand mansion of New York’s royal governor was burned to the ground, with all the governor’s belongings inside. He said the flames were the brightest he’d ever seen: the flames of the righteous destroying the corruption of the Crown. What I saw in the newspaper was the price of this righteousness: the cost of the damage was placed at over five thousand pounds. I feared for Lucas, knowing how he and his Sons of Liberty took credit, though not a one was charged with the crime.

  In April, they grew bolder still, and copied the actions of their brothers in Boston. As soon as the tea ship London arrived in the harbor, they painted their faces like savages and set upon the customshouse and ship itself. They dragged every crate of the tea from the hold to the deck, and took care to break the crates open with hatchets before heaving them over the side, so the tea could not be salvaged.

  “The harbor was afloat with these tea leaves, Mary,” Lucas told me afterward. With a carelessness that terrified me, he hadn’t bothered to wipe away the last daubs of paint along the edge of his jaw and around his collar. “They say the governor wept with fury when he heard the news—not that his tears could undo what’s already been done.”

  On the kitchen table before me, he placed a long leaf of tea that he’d fished from the water, still wet with salt water. He’d thought I’d want it as a memento of liberty’s cause. I refused to touch it, and I was glad that the next morning Chloe tossed it into the fire.

  By June, the rebellion—for so it was—came closer to us in New Jersey, with most of Mistress’s neighbors declaring themselves as Whigs and openly supporting the new Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Those who did not were branded as Tories.

  In public, Mistress took no sides, and continued to welcome old friends to her home, regardless of their beliefs. She gaily, and bravely, made it a rule that no politics would be discussed in her parlor, and because of the goodwill and hospitality she’d so carefully created over the years, her friends obliged.

  But Lucas told me her loyalties were openly discussed and questioned and Major Prevost’s continued absence only fueled the talk for both sides. Some of her oldest acquaintances began to speak against her in public, and I heard guests in her own house question her allegiances the instant she stepped from the room.

  I now could see for myself how on edge New Jersey had become, not only in Mistress’s parlor, but on market days and at Sunday worship. The more I witnessed and overheard, the more I began to fear for my own safety, too.

  One rainy morning late in April, Lucas came to me full of excitement, and waving the newssheet that told the world of what had occurred in a small village outside of Boston, a village that could just as easily have been Hopperstown. The heading was “BLOODY NEWS,” and indeed it was: an unprovoked attack by the king’s soldiers on a group of humble farmers and townspeople before their own homes, as their wives and children watched in terror.

  Last Wednesday the troops of his Britannic Majesty commenced hostilities upon the people of this province.. . . We are involved in all the horrors of a civil war.

  Nothing in my life would ever be the same.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Hackensack Valley

  Province of New Jersey

  May 1776

  “That is not an inspiring sight, is it?” Mistress said to her sister and mother. “I wouldn’t wish to trust my welfare to the defense of soldiers such as those.”

  “Not at all,” Mrs. DeVisme said wryly. “But then Dutchmen aren’t by nature fighting men.”

  They were standing on a small bluff overlooking the field set aside for the local militia’s training and drills. The three women in tailored habits and feathered hats were so well known in the county that they’d already been recognized and greeted by most everyone they’d passed.

  I stood a short, respectful distance behind Mistress and her mother, but still within hearing in case they required me. We had come here to Hackensack, the largest town in the County of Bergen, so that Mistress, her mother, and her sister could visit the shops. I’d been brought as well to carry their purchases, and while I’d waited for them I’d picked a few bright yellow dandelions and tucked the nosegay into the front of my bodice. Their cheeriness matched my humor. How could it not when the sky overhead was a cloudless blue and the sun was warm on my back and shoulders?

  Our final stop had been to come here to the militia drill, where we stood among several other little groups of spectators. But Mistress and her mother were right: there was little enjoyment to be found watching this ragtag drill.

  The first war fever that had infected the country with patriotism in the spring of 1775 had long since faded.

  It became clear that the British army wasn’t at all intimidated by the patriot resistance and militias made up of farmers, and instead of retreating, as most believed would happen, Parliament sent more troops to Boston. But as long as they remained in Boston and posed no immediate danger to New Jersey, then New Jersey had become less and less interested, and instead went about their own affairs as usual.

  The company of militiamen drilling here before us in Hackensack was the sorry proof of that. There were fewer than a score of men, when last autumn the number had been a hundred or more.

  Mrs. DeVisme left no doubt of which side she supported.

  “Mrs. Lynch told me just last week that General Washington’s army was melting away because their enlistments were ending,” she said. “Meanwhile good King George has so many men clamoring to join his side that I’ve heard they’re being turned away.”

  Mistress glanced at her sideways from beneath her hat. “What you heard, Mama,” she said evenly, “is that British agents are offering a five-guinea bounty and two hundred acres of land to any Jersey man who’ll fight for the king. That’s hardly the same as the Jersey men accepting.”

  Mrs. DeVisme sniffed. “What will it matter, when this sorry excuse for a war will be over before it’s begun?” She waved her hand absently toward the drilling militia. “Consider your brave husband and his men, Theodosia. Then consider these sorry fellows.”

  Mistress ignored her. Her younger sister, Miss DeVisme, did not, pointedly turning and flicking her petticoats away from the militia’s field.

  “This isn’t why I came here today,” she declared peevishly. “I expected to see fine military gentlemen of honor, not stripling lads with tufts of hay poking from their ears.”

  “We are here to show our appreciation to these men for following their duty, Caty,” Mistress said, raising her voice so that the other spectators around us might hear her, too. “We are not here for you to find a new beau.”

  That startled me: not that Mistress would scold her sister, but that she wished to make a public demonstration of her own support for the local Whig militiamen. What of her husband the British major?

  “You can say what you will, Theo,” her sister said, “but if you can marry an officer of the king, then so can I—not that I’ll ever so much as glimpse a gentleman like that here.”

  She turned briskly, petticoats in her hands, and came up the rise of the hill toward me.

  “Mary, have you my new gloves?” she demanded. “I trust you haven’t mislaid them.”

  “No, miss,” I said, reaching into the basket. “They are here, miss.”

  “I should hope so,” she said. “You can be so slow with even the most simple of tasks, Mary.”

  Silently I handed her the new kid gloves she’d bought earlier, still wrapped in paper. She pulled off her old gloves, dropped them in a crumpled ball into the basket on my arm, and pulled on the new gloves instead, letting the shopkee
per’s paper drift across the grass.

  “Don’t be wasteful, Catherine.” Behind her, Mistress picked up the paper herself, folded it, and tucked it into her pocket for some later purpose. “Now pray that you take care of those gloves. If New York and Philadelphia are blockaded like Boston, then it will be a long time before you’ll have another pair from London.”

  Miss DeVisme didn’t answer. Still standing before me, she snatched the little dandelion nosegay from my jacket, crushed it, and tossed it away.

  “Slaves don’t wear flowers, Mary,” she said tartly. “It’s vain of you to do so.”

  I flushed, and looked down at the yellow petals scattered on the grass. I told myself that they didn’t matter. Dandelions were only weeds. I slipped the basket’s handle over my shoulder and trudged after the others.

  And yet as Caesar drove the carriage back to the Hermitage, with me squeezed onto the bench beside him, I still wasn’t nearly as resigned as I wished to be. Miss DeVisme’s harshness was likely more difficult to swallow because we were close in age. I believed this to be my sixteenth summer, though I wasn’t certain. Regardless, I was by now a woman grown, with a woman’s form and manner, and a woman’s passion as well, though I was loath to admit it to myself.

  Chloe, however, had no such qualms.

  “Was Hackensack as fine as you’d hoped, Mary?” she asked as soon as I’d returned to the kitchen with spices and other sundries that Mistress had bought for cookery.

  “It was well enough,” I said, terse with ill humor.

  Chloe glanced over her shoulder. “Was it now?”

  “Miss DeVisme was unhappy that there weren’t any gentlemen to admire her at the drill,” I said as I unloaded the basket, slamming each item down on the table as I did. “She turned sharp as any bitch toward me.”

  “I’d guess she wasn’t the only one disappointed at that drill,” Chloe said. “I’m guessing Captain Vervelde wasn’t there, either?”

  “No, he wasn’t,” I said. “It was only the militia that was drilling, and besides—”

  I broke off before I said more.

  Chloe raised a single brow. “You were hoping that much to see Captain Vervelde, Mary? Or maybe it was someone who’s with Captain Vervelde, someone who—”

  “Lucas Emmons wasn’t there, either, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said tartly, even as I knew I sounded every bit as sharp as Miss DeVisme had been earlier.

  “I wasn’t asking,” Chloe said. “But there’s no harm in wanting to know how Lucas is faring with the army. It’s been a long while since we saw him here.”

  “Weeks and weeks,” I said, then frowned when I realized again how she’d led me to speak more than I’d intended. “A long while.”

  “There’s no harm in caring, either,” Chloe said softly. “Even a fool could see that you and Lucas are fond of each other.”

  I sighed, the irritation fleeing from me before the truth. “Lucas is my friend,” I said carefully. “But to him, I’m sure I’m no more than a child.”

  “Maybe when you first came here, but not now,” Chloe said. She spoke not to tease me, but as fact. “He’s not so old, and you’re not so young. You’re clever, like he is. Why wouldn’t Lucas admire the woman you’ve become? I saw how you looked at each other before he went away.”

  I dropped heavily onto a stool, trying to make sense of what I didn’t want to acknowledge. I’d last seen Lucas at the end of February, when there’d been a long thaw in the weather. Soon after that, he’d gone off with Captain Vervelde to Long Island or Staten Island (I wasn’t sure which) to help with fortifications there.

  Although Lucas was a free man, his affairs were still closely tied to the Captain, who paid his wages and provided his lodging on the Vervelde property and expected loyalty and gratitude for that, the way white people did. I’d long suspected that it had been Captain Vervelde, now an officer in the militia, who had entangled Lucas further into the politics of the war. It would have been easy enough. Lucas was a fervent patriot, and eager to help the cause of freedom any way he could. It was part of the reason I found his conversation so exciting, and also why I’d picked the dandelions for my bodice today, because I’d hoped Lucas would be there. I’d wanted to look pretty for him.

  That seemed so foolish now, as foolish as anything that Miss DeVisme might say: I’d wanted to look pretty for Lucas. No wonder her spite had stung me. I usually could ignore her, but this time her meanness had been able to creep right into me through the weakness of my own disappointment. I couldn’t let that happen again.

  Still I worried for Lucas, wherever he was, and the longer he was away, the more I feared for him. He wasn’t a young man to be out digging fortifications and sleeping in a cold field. For small comfort, I knew he wouldn’t see any true fighting. As a Negro (even a free man), he wasn’t permitted to enlist in the army.

  Was that worry what Chloe meant? Did that translate into the fondness and caring that she’d seen?

  Chloe sat on the stool beside mine, bringing with her the basket of apples from the cellar that she’d been peeling.

  “Mind me, Mary, and what I say,” she said gently as her knife slid deftly beneath the next apple’s skin. “People like us don’t know what each day will bring us, or what it won’t. This war’s only making it worse. We must find our happiness wherever we can. If that means you love Lucas, why, then, you make sure you tell him so the instant he returns. Don’t you wait. It’s better to tell him than to be left with only a heart filled with regrets and wonderings.”

  I nodded, hugging my arms at my sides and trying to understand. I’d no experience with love of any kind, and the very thought of it made me skittish and uncertain.

  I’d no such trouble recalling Lucas: his heavy-lidded eyes as he watched and listened to me, his slow, wide smile that could warm me like a fire, the burnished gleam of his skin, the way he’d finish a thought by spreading his hands and fingers wide, like the rays of sunshine.

  “You’re smiling,” Chloe said as a perfect, unbroken curl of apple peel slipped from her knife into her apron. “That’s answer enough.”

  “Lucas is a free man,” I said softly. “I’m Mistress’s property.”

  “Mistress doesn’t own your heart,” she said, bending to reach for another apple. “It’s yours to give or keep. You’ve found plenty of ways to see each other before this, haven’t you?”

  I didn’t answer, unable to let myself dream that far.

  “There’s plenty of people who make do between houses,” Chloe continued. “If the love’s strong enough, then that won’t matter. And if Lucas loves you so much he can’t live without you beside him, then he could buy you from Mistress, and make you a freewoman.”

  “Free?” I repeated, stunned by such a possibility. “But I can’t—”

  “Don’t go thinking of what can’t happen, Mary, and think instead of what could,” Chloe said firmly. “He wouldn’t be the first freeman to buy his wife from bondage, and there’s been some who’ve bought whole families of children, too.”

  The Major had paid over three hundred livres, or about twenty-five pounds, to Monsieur for me. Now, four years later, my value would only have increased. I spoke both French and English, and from being so often in Mistress’s company, I spoke her English, with her words, and with only the faintest accent remaining from Pondicherry. I’d learned the arts of housekeeping, mending, and laundering, and I’d become a passable lady’s maid. I could cook in both the French manner that I’d learned from Perroquet and the English manner from Chloe, and I still recalled how to make a fine curry, if anyone in New Jersey would desire it. I’d also survived Saint-Domingue; the English called this seasoning, a prized quality.

  I did not want to consider exactly how much I now was worth. But Mistress surely would, if Lucas were to ask to buy my freedom.

  Love and freedom, freedom and love, and now entwined together. It had taken Lucas years to buy his own freedom, and it could take him more years to buy m
ine.

  Could he love me that much? Did I love him enough to ask that of him?

  I turned on my stool to face Chloe. “Did you—have you loved, Chloe?”

  “I have.” Her knife paused, a curl of red peel hanging from the blade. “His name was Jem. He was bought by my old master in the same sale I was, so we came to the house together. From the start, we just belonged together. After a time, he asked Master if we could marry. It was a fine wedding, Mary, in the garden behind Master’s house, when there were pink flowers in the trees. Master watched from the steps. We even had the minister from meeting wed us, so we’d be sure to stay married. We was happy then. Oh, my, yes, we was happy.”

  She paused, lost in memories, before she roused herself with a shake of her shoulders. She finished peeling the apple, tossed it into the bowl, and reached for another.

  “We had scarcely a year,” she said, her voice heavy. “One morning Jem was helping the blacksmith with one of Master’s horses and the beast reared up and kicked him in the head. Just like that, he was gone. Then Master died, and his son sold me to Mistress here.”

  I reached out to rest my hand on her forearm, the way she’d often done to me. “I’m sorry.”

  “I am, too,” she said wistfully. “But I had that time, and Jem’s with me still.”

  She placed her palm over her chest, over her heart like a pledge. “I keep him right here, where no one can ever take him from me.”

  I nodded. Finally I could understand. So much had been taken from me that having Lucas forever as my own—that would feel right.

  “You mind what I say, Mary,” Chloe said. “You tell Lucas your heart when he comes back. You tell him, and the rest will follow as it will.”

  * * *

  Toward the end of June, not long after we’d gone to Hackensack, Mistress decided that the weather was warm enough for a good cleaning of the house. She ordered all the windows thrown open as far as they could be so the fresh air could come inside and clear away all the winter, and set Chloe and me to scrubbing everything that could be scrubbed. Floors and windows and steps and sills, all were to be scrubbed to her satisfaction, until I thought I was back on my hands and knees scrubbing the decks of the Céleste.