Alex and Eliza: A Love Story(78)
Limping slowly and mouthing soothing words, he made his way to the nearest one. Its nostrils flaring at the scent of blood, it was clearly an experienced warhorse, waiting cautiously while he approached it. Alex found he couldn’t heave himself up with his right arm, and so had to pull awkwardly with his left, but eventually managed to get himself into the saddle, still warm from the heat of its last rider.
He took one last look at the three spies strewn across the road.
“No one will ever believe this,” he said and, spurring his mount, jumped over the nearest corpse, and resumed his journey north.
THE NEXT THING he knew he was waking up in an exquisitely soft feather bed. His shoulder ached and his vision swam, but when he could focus again he saw the handsome trappings of a well-appointed bedroom, a boy’s room, judging from the articles of clothing he saw here and there, and the musket and sword mounted on pegs in the wall.
“Are you awake?” a voice asked then.
Alex turned. Though he had never seen the boy before, who looked to be about eleven or twelve, he would know him anywhere. He had a Schuyler face: blue-gray eyes and high forehead and small, almost delicate mouth. This must be Philip Junior.
Alex nodded weakly.
“How—” His voice broke, and it was a moment before he could speak. “How came I to be here?”
Philip stared at him blank-faced for a long moment, then opened his mouth to call:
“Papa! The deserter is awake!”
34
Can’t-Runaway Bride
Outside the Governor’s Mansion
Morristown, New Jersey
April 1780
Tap-tap-tap.
The knock at the door was as soft as the scratch of a mouse behind plaster, but to Eliza it sounded like the blows of an axe against the trunk of a two-hundred-year-old oak. As long as the door to her bedroom remained closed, she was safe. She was Eliza Schuyler, with her whole life still in front of her. But once it opened she would be Eliza Livingston, counting down the days until it was over.
“Eliza . . . dear.” Aunt Gertrude’s voice was soft, but it rang in Eliza’s ears. “It’s time.”
She looked at herself in the three standing mirrors Kitty had had Loewes drag into her room. Kitty had brought the dress, too, a crème moiré number with a double bustle saved from being too wan by an elaborate green motif on the overskirt, and an emerald underskirt in watered silk. It looked like the desert blooms she had read about, when a once-a-year rain falls and the sands erupt in shoots that will live and flower and die in a single day. The corset—her first in who knew how long—months, maybe even a year—gave her a waist almost as thin as Peggy’s, and the décolletage was more than she had ever dared. She reached reflexively for a shawl, but Kitty slapped her hand away lightly. Lightly, but definitively.
“Not today,” she said, dusting a little powder over Eliza’s bosom. “Today you become a woman, and you display yourself with pride.”
The wig was one of Kitty’s, scaled down slightly, because Eliza could not hold still when it was piled too high, yet taller than any she had ever worn. The feathered hat perched atop it looked comically small to Eliza’s eyes, but Kitty said it reminded her of the crest of some exotic jungle bird.
“A parrot?” Eliza whispered, thinking of Peggy’s wig from the party last week.
“You’re a cuckoo!” Kitty laughed, slapping Eliza lightly with the flat of the comb she was using to tease up the wig. Lightly, but not so lightly. “Now look!”
She turned Eliza to the mirrors, arranged so that she could see herself from three sides. Eliza looked like a painting of herself, a painting that the artist had done from memory. Instead of capturing her likeness, he had simply created an idea of womanhood—widened hips, tiny waist, full breasts, rouged lips—and animated it with traces of the girl who used to be Eliza Schuyler.
“I-I do not look like myself.”
“Exactly!” Kitty gushed. “Isn’t it grand?!”
Eliza found her childhood friend’s eyes in the mirror.
“Tell me. Does it hurt?”
Kitty’s brow furrowed, but then smiled it away. “You mean, the secrets of the marriage chamber? A thousand generations of women have survived it. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
“No,” Eliza said. She reached for her old friend’s hand. “I meant does it hurt when you hide every last shred of your individuality and self-worth behind acres of silk and cups of powder and smiles that never, no matter how hard you try, reach your eyes?”
Kitty’s smile grew rigid on her face, and did not, as Eliza had said, reach her eyes, which were cold and condemning.
“You are nervous,” she said, pulling her hand away from Eliza’s. “I will give you some time to yourself.”
ELIZA SAT IN her bedroom listening to the rush of footsteps in the hall outside, the hushed voices of women getting themselves dressed for the wedding and maids making the house ready for the reception afterward. Three times she had heard a hand on the door, three times someone—Peggy first, then Stephen, then Aunt Gertrude—had told whoever was at the door to leave Eliza alone.
“She will come out when it’s time,” Aunt Gertrude had said.
And now it was time.