Alex and Eliza: A Love Story(57)

So now she was going to have to marry Henry Livingston, a boy she had last seen nearly a decade ago, when he had pulled her pigtails until her head was so wobbly she thought it would fall from her neck.

“If he so much as touches my hair now,” she said out loud, “I swear I’ll cut his hands off.”





25





No Guts, No Glory


Continental Army Headquarters

Morristown, New Jersey

March 1780

The news of Angelica Schuyler’s elopement with John Barker Church made the rounds of the Morristown encampment with the magical haste of gossip. Upon hearing the news, General Washington remarked to Alex that if he could learn of British troop movements with the same speed as he learned of love affairs, he would have won the war two years ago.

In the long run, few were surprised that the marriage had finally come to pass after Mr. Church’s extended courtship. To the degree that people were familiar with the character of Miss Schuyler-that-was, she was understood to be a brilliant young woman who would only accept a husband who could gain her access to the very highest levels of society. And John Barker Church, despite the questions that remained about his past, was obviously the kind of man who could provide it.

If his bearing was not quite as martial or athletic as some other young men’s, he had the wooer’s gift of giving a girl his undivided attention—of flattery, yes, and the sorts of gifts and romance that the modern girl expects from a suitor—but also of genuine interest in the things that held a girl’s fancy. Where another man would be content to charge a lady’s maid with procuring a bolt of cloth from which a dress could be made, Mr. Church would not only pick out the fabric himself, but commission a seamstress to craft the most flattering cut for his belle. If a girl expressed an interest in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, he would gift on her a complete set of the Englishman’s work—including even the scandalous Moll Flanders!

“They are well met,” Lafayette said to Alex when he heard the news. “He will keep her on her toes, but she will keep him honest as well. It will be a tempestuous marriage, but if they can handle each other’s tempers, I predict a successful union.”

Alex had found the news out from Eliza herself. She had written him a brief note apologizing for Angelica’s outburst at the dinner table, saying that her elder sister was feeling the pressure of the coming elopement, which had occurred that very evening. The words were obviously meant to mollify him, yet the note’s being addressed to “Colonel Hamilton” rather than to “Alex,” and signed “Yours very sincerely, Miss E. Schuyler” instead of “Yours, Eliza” left him on pins and needles. More devastating, she pointedly did not encourage him to visit her or make any mention of coming to see him. Perhaps Angelica’s words had had their effect on her?

Regardless of Angelica’s motivations for speaking so bluntly to him, Alex knew that she was right. The Schuylers would expect Eliza to marry someone rich. Indeed she, and they, deserved it. The family had worked hard for three generations to establish and increase their status as one of the first families of the northern states, and they would not grant access to their inner circle to just anyone. To be sure, the New World was a place where a man could come from nothing and become a person of great power and wealth. Look at Benjamin Franklin, who had started out a humble printer’s apprentice yet became one of the wealthiest men in America.

But Alex had not Mr. Franklin’s scientific mind. He would not invent a kind of spectacles or a type of stove, let alone discover something as momentous as electricity itself! He had only his wits—his ability to see through to the heart of a situation quickly and to render that truth persuasively in words. Such a talent boded well for a career in law or in public service, perhaps even newspapering or literature. But none of those paths was a route to quick wealth, and he could not propose to Eliza—let alone to her parents!—on the basis of some hypothetical future success.

However, Alex did have a head for numbers as well. After his mother died, he had been apprenticed as a clerk in the mercantile house of Beekman and Cruger. There he discovered a flair for keeping books and anticipating the movements of the market and knowing when to sell and buy to maximize profit. Alex had been all of fourteen at the time. To him, it was a game, but many men made careers of this kind of trading—and fortunes. It was base work, to be sure, devoid of glory, and full of questionable morality as well. What man wants to make his living peddling the vices of tobacco or alcohol to the besotted, or manipulating the price of vital goods such as grain or mutton so that he would profit greatly while his thousands of customers might lose? But if he didn’t do it, someone else would.

And yet . . . could he give up everything just for Eliza? Could he be miserable in business for the sake of a happy wife? And would she be happy, if he were miserable? It seemed to Alex that Eliza did not care for money the way her parents did, or her sisters. It might be that, as a rich girl, she had never had to worry about it, but that was selling her short. She was simply not a material individual, and if she saw Alex throw away his beliefs for the sake of buying her from her family like a piece of livestock, she would lose all respect for him.

There was one other way, but it was uncertain and dangerous to boot. In all the world, for all of history, there has always been—for men, at least—one aspect of their character worth more than money, and that was glory. The kind of glory that only valor on the battlefield can gain. Horses churning beneath a soldier’s body as swords flash and rifles sound and bullets cut the air. To risk one’s life for a worthy cause—and what cause was more worthy than democracy?—was the kind of endeavor that made a man beloved of his fellow countrymen, and granted him influence in the highest circles, whether it be government or industry or society. Glory brought fortune more surely than an investment in gold bullion or Barbados rum. And unlike those other endeavors, it brought respect, too. The kind of respect that even the Schuylers must surely acknowledge.