Alex and Eliza: A Love Story(6)
“No,” said Eliza, “she will not.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said no, Mama. I won’t wear that dress. I am perfectly presentable and I have no wish to change, nor is there time. If I’m not mistaken, the first guests have arrived.”
Mrs. Schuyler looked as if she would boil over like a kettle, but the sound of carriages in the driveway seemed to change her mind. “I suppose there is always one spinster in the family,” she said coldly. “You two,” she continued, addressing Angelica and Peggy. “Downstairs on hostess duty. I want your smiles so bright that no one even notices the wallpaper peeling in the entrance hall. As for you, Elizabeth, try to be as inconspicuous as possible. Perhaps I can convince the gathering I have only two daughters.”
Angelica and Peggy flashed sympathetic looks at Eliza before following their mother downstairs.
“I don’t understand you, Miss Eliza,” Dot said, tying the bows in the back of the dress a little tighter to accentuate Eliza’s waist. “You had already decided to wear the dress. Why kick up such a fuss? It just draws Mrs. Schuyler’s wrath down on you.”
“Oh, if it wasn’t the dress, it would be something else,” Eliza said as Dot pushed and tugged at her dress. “Mama needs no excuse to scold me.”
Dot had to agree with that.
“I don’t know why she cares so much,” Eliza said now. “This is hardly the most prominent party of the year.”
“Yes, but the Van Rensselaers are coming and the Livingstons and, of course, that famous young Colonel Hamilton. Husband season is open. The hounds are on the loose.”
Eliza’s face brightened. “A good thing, then, that I have no intention of being a fox!”
3
Messenger Boy
Outside the Schuyler Mansion
Albany, New York
November 1777
It wasn’t supposed to have been this way.
It was supposed to have been his triumph. After barely a year as General Washington’s aide-de-camp, he had persuaded his commander to send him to Albany on a matter of vital military importance. He was to confront General Horatio Gates, the man who had replaced General Schuyler as commander of the northern forces, and demand that he surrender three of his battalions to the Continental army under the direct command of General Washington. Following the success of the Québec campaign and the recapture of Saratoga, the war in the north was essentially a holding game, and troops were needed farther south to liberate the British-held New York City and stem the onslaught of British troops besieging the southern states, where they were burning the vast fields of cotton and tobacco.
Technically, all Alex was doing was delivering an order from the commander in chief of the American military forces. But the United States was an almost two-year-old country, and the toddler nation was reluctant to be bound by rules. General Gates, like General Washington and General Schuyler and indeed every other patrician patriot— Jefferson and Franklin and Adams and Madison—had one eye on the war, but the other was firmly focused on what would come after. The new country would need new leaders, and a heroic general could parlay victory on the battlefield to high political office: president perhaps, if that was the direction the new republic went.
There were some who said the American states needed to replace King George III with their own monarch, and there were those who said Horatio Gates’s autocratic style lent itself to a throne. Alex’s missive would be less of an order, then, and more a request: one that would have to be delivered diplomatically but also persuasively. Success would bring Alex greater prestige—possibly even his own battlefield command, which he had been agitating for since the beginning of the war—while failure could condemn countless patriots to death. Alex relished the opportunity of putting the imperious General Gates in his place without the older man even knowing what was happening.
But just before he’d left Morristown, New Jersey, where the Continental army was wintering, General Washington had called him into his office and charged him with a second duty. The Continental Congress wanted someone to blame for the debacle at Ticonderoga. If the fort hadn’t fallen in July 1777, the Continental army might have pushed as far north as Québec and brought eastern Canada into the United States as the fourteenth state. Instead the army had been forced to spend the past year simply to get back to where they started. The congress wanted to make an example of someone. And General Schuyler had been the commander at the time of the defeat.
General Washington rubbed his eyes in fatigue. “It appears the good general has been caught in the crosshairs of his own command.”
Alex protested, saying General Schuyler wasn’t even at Ticonderoga when it fell: He had been farther north, preparing the invasion of Québec. And the troops defending the fort had been vastly outnumbered and taken by surprise as well. There was nothing shameful in their defeat. There was, rather, much to be praised in the way they had acquitted themselves against overwhelming odds.
“Indeed, sir, if I may,” Alex pleaded. “How to put it? Punishing General Schuyler for the defeat is akin to punishing a mule for being a born a mule, when its parents were a horse and an ass: Some things were simply meant to be.”
The comparison brought a slight but much-needed smile to General Washington’s face.