Alex and Eliza: A Love Story(69)

“Miss Schuy’er,” he said dreamily, even as his eyes flitted to one of the dancing girls, who had wrapped her shawl around the waist of a shirtless soldier and was using it to pull him behind her toward a ladder that led to the hayloft. “Wouldn’t’ve minded a trip to the haylof’ with the general’s daughter myself.”

Alex’s jaw dropped open, but his fist was faster. A moment later, Corporal Weston was sprawled unconscious on the stained planks of the barn floor, a drunken smile still plastered across his rapidly swelling lips.

Alex stared down at the man in surprise. He had not thought that punching a man in the face would make him feel better, but in fact it had.

Pivoting on his heel, he stalked out of the barn into the rain.





30





Taking Liberties


The Cochran Parlor

Morristown, New Jersey

April 1780

The “party,” such as it was, was over. Kitty Livingston’s coachman, who had spent six hours asleep in a shroud of blankets, had been awakened and clambered sleepily up into his box, to save Kitty the trouble of having to walk a quarter mile to the house she was staying in with her brother and mother, who had come west for the wedding. She had taken Peggy with her, saying Eliza needed a bed to herself on last maiden night, while Aunt Gertrude, who had had perhaps one glass of Madeira too many, had taken herself rather unsteadily up to bed, while Eliza remained downstairs to supervise the lone housemaid still awake in the cleanup of the party.

There was little to do. Dinner had been eaten and cleared more than four hours earlier. The furniture was pushed back into its usual arrangement, the coals banked in the fire, and then Eliza had urged Louisa to get a few hours’ sleep before the madness of the wedding day should dawn.

She, however, remained in the parlor, which was still quite warm, and, taking the lamp near a bookshelf, rummaged through until she came across an edition of Richardson’s Clarissa, which she and Angelica and Peggy had taken turns reading aloud to one another some years ago, when they felt the first stirrings of romance in their hearts. She pulled the first volume from the shelf and flipped through idly for some minutes, until at length a passage leapt out at her, bold on the page despite the dim light cast by a single wick.

I declare to you, that I know not my own heart if it not be absolutely free. And pray let me ask, my dearest mamma, in what has my conduct been faulty, that, like a giddy creature, I must be forced to marry, to save me from—From what? Let me beseech you, Madam, to be the guardian of my reputation! Let not your Clarissa be precipitated into a state she wishes not to enter.

Eliza sighed. She remembered the passage well, of course. She and Angelica and Peggy had each taken turns declaiming it, competing to see which of the three could be the most dramatic, the most forsaken, the most imploring. Now she wondered whether the passage had appeared as some kind of sign, telling her to follow the truth of her heart and flee this marriage, or whether it was simply the idle workings of her mind, looking for an author’s eloquence to express feelings she was too despondent to put into words.

She could run, she told herself. It would be like Angelica’s elopement, except instead of an escape to marriage, she would escape from marriage. The Schuylers had not the ready access to cash they had had before the war, but there was still enough money to get her to Philadelphia, where she could find Angelica and John Church and persuade them to let her reside there until such time as Henry had abandoned his suit. She would take a job, as a governess perhaps, or a schoolteacher, or even as a lady’s maid. She would depend upon neither father nor husband to determine the course of her life. She would be free to pursue those great inalienable rights that Mr. Jefferson had enshrined in the Declaration of Independence: her own life, her own liberty, her own happiness.

But even as a brand-new sort of life flashed before her eyes like a series of paintings in a gallery, she knew the images were no more real than pigmented oils applied to canvas. She was Eliza Schuyler, after all. The middle sister. The sensible one, whose intelligence was steady where Angelica’s was cunning, whose beauty was human where Peggy’s was statuesque. She was the daughter of whom Papa had remarked when she was but seven years old, “A part of me does not mind if I never have a son because I have Eliza. She has a boy’s fortitude and ingenuity without the terrible vanity that afflicts our sex.” Even after Philip was born and had lived past the childhood illnesses that took almost half of the Schuyler children, Papa always said to his namesake and heir, “Take care that you follow your sister Eliza’s example, and you will never bring shame on the family name.”

Because when all was said and done, she was a Schuyler, and she was proud of it. Her family had been present at the birth of this country under the Dutch and had seen it through its first great political upheaval when the English took over, and now were seeing it through to independence. She didn’t want to run from that legacy. She wanted to add to it, to build on it, to help make the United States be what it wanted to be, a place where all souls—black as well as white, and female, too—could realize their full potential, regardless of the circumstances of their birth.

So she would not run. She would stay. She would do her duty. She would hold her head up high, and no one would ever reproach her.

And would it be so bad? Eliza understood that Angelica had chosen John Church not for his jawline or waistline, but because he was attentive to her, and would give her access to the society she craved. They would build a good life together—the life that Angelica wanted. And Peggy had been corralled into allowing Stephen Van Rensselaer to court her for two and half years now, though he was too young and too earnest. Yet he did dote on her, and he was kind, and when they finally married, Peggy said, it wouldn’t be a case of two strangers awkwardly maneuvering around each other, but of two friends progressing in a relationship that had developed for years—although in this case one of the friends had carefully shaped the other into exactly what she wanted in a mate, certain that he would treat her as the drone treats the queen bee, attending to her every need. Eliza was twice as resourceful as Angelica and Peggy. If they could mold their men, then why couldn’t she?