Alex and Eliza: A Love Story(80)

Aunt Gertrude alighted from the carriage with the footman’s aid, and now held her hand up to Eliza.

“Come, dear.”

“No.”

“Eliza, please. It is the way things must be.”

“No,” Eliza repeated. “I will not hand myself over to my own doom.”

“Then you hand your family over to their doom,” Aunt Gertrude said. “Are you so selfish that you would sacrifice your papa and mama and brothers and sisters so that you don’t have to marry a man you don’t love? Do you think a better man will take you, after word of the scandal gets out?”

“Are they so craven that they would sell their daughter? I tell you, I will not do it.”

“Eliza!” another voice called then. “Eliza, wait!”

Eliza turned. She saw another carriage farther up the lane, wooden-sided and covered with mud, as if it had traveled some great distance. Its door opened, and a blue-jacketed figure was tumbling out of it so clumsily that the carriage rocked like a dinghy in the wake of a whaleship. The fellow stumbled to the ground and nearly fell, his three-cornered hat tumbling off his head and exposing a shock of russet-colored hair.

“It—it cannot be,” Eliza breathed.

The ginger-haired figure looked up at her, and there were the blue eyes that melted her heart.

“Eliza, wait! I’m here!”

“Alex?” Eliza said, afraid to believe it. Still, she was standing up—no, scrambling up—and pushing aside her aunt’s hand and the footman’s and forcing her bustled hips through the narrow door of the carriage so quickly that she heard fabric tear. She pushed herself all the way through and hopped down onto the flagstone bricks of the Livingstons’ front walk.

“Alex?” she said. “Is it really you?”

His face was flushed and he seemed somewhat thinner; he handled his right arm gingerly, as though it pained him. His hands in hers were so hot that she could feel them through his gloves, and hers.

“It’s me,” he said. “I’m here. You don’t have to marry him. You have to—that is—” He sank somewhat gingerly to one knee. “Elizabeth Schuyler, my darling Eliza, my one and only Betsey, will you marry me?”

When Alex knelt, a second pair of figures came into her view, emerging from the carriage that had carried him. Her parents. General and Mrs. Schuyler, looking on with grim but determined smiles on their faces.

Eliza found her mother’s eyes. Her mother looked back steadily, then nodded.

Eliza looked down at Alex, who stared back at her adoringly, nervously, triumphantly. She opened her mouth to answer him, but no words came out.





35





Here Comes the Groom


The Cochran Residence

Morristown, New Jersey

April 1780

“But how did you . . . I mean, you just disappeared . . . and then your horse was found with blood . . . and I wrote and no one answered . . . and Governor Livingston was just so, so—”

“It’s fine, Eliza, it’s fine.” Alex knelt on the carpet and stroked Eliza’s hand where she lay on the sofa in Aunt Gertrude’s parlor. “I’m here now. I’ll explain everything. Or, well, your mother will, because I’m afraid I don’t remember much.”

“You don’t remember?” Eliza asked, frowning. “I don’t understand.”

Catherine Schuyler’s round face slipped into her daughter’s viewpoint.

“Oh, Eliza, this poor boy was so delirious when he arrived at the Pastures that he had no idea where he was. In truth, I have no idea how he found us. It must have been God’s will that he arrive.”

“You rode all the way to Albany and back? In seven days?”

“Four days, really,” Mrs. Schuyler answered. “Three of those days were spent abed—where he should still be, if you ask me.”

“I am quite recovered, Mrs. Schuyler, all due to your good care.”

“You do look rather peaked,” Eliza said. “But please, tell me, what happened? Why did you run off? And how came you to be so ill that you were three days bedridden at my parents’ house?”

Alex shrugged and moved from the carpet to a nearby chair, though never letting go of Eliza’s hand.

“I knew that the only way you would break off the engagement to Colonel Livingston was with your parents’ permission. And I knew that the only way they would grant that permission was if they were told, clearly, and without the tact that a feminine correspondent would undoubtedly put into a letter, exactly what kind of scoundrel he was. And so I requisitioned a horse from the mail coach and made my way there. It was a rainy day, as you recall, and I had already been some six hours on horseback during the journey from Amboy, and awake for some eighteen hours, so I was rather susceptible to the effects of damp and fatigue.”

“And then you were ambushed by those British dragoons. As I said, it is a wonder you made it to us at all,” interjected Mrs. Schuyler once more.

“Ambushed!” cried Eliza.

Even if Alex were at liberty to divulge the evidence of treason he had uncovered regarding General Arnold and Major André, he couldn’t think of the words to describe it. He wasn’t entirely convinced that he hadn’t dreamed up the whole thing.