Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(18)

Alex turned to see the general holding out a sheet of paper. He could have sworn he saw the tiniest smile playing around the corners of the older man’s mouth. “Your Excellency?”

General Washington merely shook the page at him. Alex crossed to the desk and took it. To his surprise, it was the very letter he had written in the general’s name, promoting him to field commander. And there, at the bottom, was Washington’s signature. Alex had signed the name himself so many times that he knew it better than his own. He stared at it as if it might be a forgery, but it was indisputably real.

“Your Excellency,” he said again. “I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”

“You can thank me by driving the redcoats off American soil in three months’ time. For now, I suggest you get acquainted with your men. Those New York regiments have something of the frontier spirit about them. You will have to inspire them to follow you, or risk losing their respect and loyalty.”

There was undeniable pride in General Washington’s voice, and Alex had to take a moment before he could answer. It was a long time coming, and Alex soaked it up.

“I have your example to guide me,” he said finally, then bowed and walked from the room, holding the piece of paper tightly in hand.

A battle command at last! Glory and bloodshed would be in his future! He could hardly wait.





7





The Home Front


   The Schuyler Mansion


    Albany, New York


   July 1781


Spring was over (and so were the berries, to the relief of everyone’s waistlines). High summer was always slow to come to upstate New York, but when it did arrive, the heat could be as oppressive as a Maryland or Virginia bayou. The advent of summer also brought a slew of letters from the front lines, letters that Eliza read and reread again and again, lingering on the effusive declarations of love from her absent husband. She wrote back with the profusions of forgiveness he desperately asked for, as well as admonishments that he take good care of himself so he could return to her before long. She told him she was proud of him for having secured his long-desired command. He wrote back that he was grateful for her strength at the news, and that he could not wait to fly back to her arms as soon as the war was ended.

But the war was not over, not yet, and since Albany was a riot of mists and odors raised by the heat, Eliza and her sisters avoided town as much as possible. Despite its name, the Pastures was perched on a hill above the fields, and its wide entrance hall caught the easterly breezes and kept the main body of the house relatively cool.

The front parlors and front bedrooms also stayed cool, and though Mrs. Schuyler’s old Dutch soul felt that it was “gauche” for a lady to sleep in a bedroom facing the road, practically “risqué,” even she consented to move to an east-facing room after three sweltering nights when the mercury refused to dip below eighty degrees, and nipped at one hundred during the day. This being Mrs. Schuyler, she insisted on taking her bedstead with her, despite the presence of a perfectly comfortable bed in what was, after all, the Schuylers’ finest guest room, which had slept many a general and governor. (Perhaps that was the issue. Though Mrs. Schuyler would never say so out loud, Angelica speculated to Eliza and Peggy that their mother could not abide the idea of laying her body where a man who wasn’t her husband had slept.)

By now the house had become a women’s abode. General Schuyler had gone to the Schuylers’ summer residence near Saratoga, both to oversee its ongoing reconstruction after its burning by General Burgoyne in 1775, and to attend to the replanting of the estate’s orchards and fields, from which much of the family’s income derived. He had initially refused to go, saying that he needed to be close to his wife during her lying-in, but Mrs. Schuyler had shooed him away, saying that he had done nothing but fret during her eleven previous childbirths. She did not expect that to change for her twelfth. “Nature will take its course as it always does,” she said, “and Providence shall see to the child’s well-being or call her home as God wills.”

“Her?” General Schuyler had asked softy. “How can you know?”

“I have been with child enough to know. Your sons were feisty, even irksome, during their time with me. But your daughters are demure even before they are born.”

“Demure?” General Schuyler said with a laugh. “Are we talking about the same daughters?”

Mrs. Schuyler patted his knee, pretending to be annoyed. “Like kittens,” she said. “And this one has been the easiest of all. Were she not so big, and were I yet a younger woman, I imagine that I would still be up and about supervising the servants and children.”

“Put any such thought out of your head at once!” General Schuyler commanded, but in a soft, even worried voice. “If anyone has earned her rest, it is you.”

Mrs. Schuyler patted his knee again, gently this time, and sent him off to husband his crops. Alex was also gone by then, and John Church had traveled to Boston to see to his mysterious importing business, accompanied by Stephen Van Rensselaer, who was attending classes at Harvard University. Aside from the servants, the oldest male in the house was sixteen-year-old Johnny. In another house, he might have strutted his stuff a bit, but in the absence of General Schuyler he knew his place, and deferred to his sisters and mother in all matters of household organization. He and thirteen-year-old Philip Jr., who seemed immune to the sweltering heat, spent most of their time playing soldier, “patrolling the perimeter” of the Schuyler lands, as Philip put it, armed with a pair of matchlocks and trailed by eight-year-old Ren (whose request for a rifle of his own had been roundly refused). Though they never caught wind of any redcoats, they often returned home with a brace of hares or grouse to liven up the dinner table.