Alex and Eliza: A Love Story(25)

Eliza gasped. She turned around in the saddle, mere inches separating her from her accuser. “As God is my witness, sir, there was never a note from my hand to yours.”

Alex could see the truth as plain as the soft moonlight on her face.

Eliza turned her back to him and slumped over the saddle.

In that moment, Alex felt two years of expectation slip away onto the cold road to Morristown. In the past two years he had started to write but then discarded a number of letters addressed to this very maiden. He had stayed his hand for fear of sending the wrong message. What to write, after all, to a lady who sent midnight missives? He worried about being too presumptuous a lover, and instead had waited patiently for the right time to make her acquaintance once more, and had been champing at the bit when he’d heard she was to join her relatives in Morristown.

But alas and alack, of course it hadn’t been Eliza who had sent him the note! She was made of sturdier stuff than that. Someone else had sent his handkerchief back to him. Someone had been playing a trick on him—a trick that happened to be at her expense.

But who could have done it?

A memory came to him: of John Church swabbing Peterson’s pink face with Alex’s handkerchief, and Peterson snatching it up and pocketing it.

Eliza seemed to have come to the same conclusion that he had been pranked, and badly. “Peterson!” she said. “It must have been Peterson who sent the note. You see, Colonel, I’d lent your handkerchief to Angelica to wipe a stain off her dress, and when you were arguing, she handed it to Mr. Church, who—”

“Gave it to Peterson! And the man decided to return it to its owner.” Alex shook his head. “Ill-minded mischief, and one I was a fool to fall for. I do apologize, Miss Schuyler.”

“It was Peterson, for certain,” said Eliza.

“I have half a mind to go straight back to Albany and confront the man,” said Alex grimly.

Eliza spoke in a dull whisper. “I do not know which is more offensive to me—that you think me capable of such an action . . . or that you find this an attractive feature.”

“Miss Schuyler, please,” Alex stammered. “I am undone. I genuinely thought the note was from your hand . . . that is to say, I would never think you, of all girls, capable of such—”

“And yet you did,” Eliza said. “And not only that, you used it as an excuse to extend your flirtation with me. I am appalled.”

“I assure the appallation is all mine.” Alex banged a fist against his forehead, nearly knocking himself off the back of the horse. Appallation? On top of everything else, he suddenly seemed to have forgotten how the English language worked.

“If you please, Colonel, I would prefer if you did not speak for the rest of our journey.” Eliza sat tall in the saddle, her back stiff as a board. “Were circumstances less unwelcoming, I would run for safety. But given that I am for all intents and purposes your prisoner, I am forced to remain in such repulsive proximity to you until we reach our destination. But for God’s sake, please, cease speaking, or I really will throw you from this horse.”

Alex opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it. There was nothing to say to make the situation any better. He could only make it worse. Alexander Hamilton, widely reputed to be the most eloquent man in the United States of America, had, for the first time in his life, been rendered speechless.





10





Lean in to Me


Near the Cochran Residence

Morristown, New Jersey

February 1780

The moon slipped under a blanket of clouds as the first snowflakes landed on Hector’s shoulders. It had taken the big bay a mile or so to get used to the current arrangement on his back. While a warhorse is able to withstand the roar of cannon fire without flinching, tolerating the tickle and swish of petticoats behind any horse’s head is something altogether different. This brave gelding could neither see them nor shake off their bothersome lacy itch. But he quickly came to trust that the lightweight human perched on his back had the sort of skilled hands he could put up with.

Eliza reached out and patted the bay’s strong neck. “Walk on, Hector.”

A mile or so back, the young colonel had pointed out final directions to the encampment before lapsing once more into an abashed silence. Thankfully it wouldn’t be long before this nightmare was behind her.

The soft clip-clop of Hector’s hooves beat quarter time to the racing march of her thoughts. It riled her to think about how Alex had accused her of the basest harlotry. The absolute cheek of the man—to think she of all people would have acted in such a way. To think he had believed her the type of girl who would send a boy notes outside of an approved courtship, with a tryst in a hayloft of all places!

And yet the memory of taking his handkerchief was clearer now . . . the saucy way she, Angelica, and Peggy had cut the legs out from under the young aide-de-camp—that is, secretary—who was busy putting on airs in front of a posse of second-rate society girls, who were only flirting with him because they had neither fortune nor beauty enough to attract a more prestigious suitor. It was easy to see how her words could be misconstrued as flirting—pretending to cut down a boy to test his mettle. She had even felt the same thrill she got when she flirted with other boys. So maybe she had been flirting with him. Still, that gave him no right to make such gross presumptions about her.