Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(38)

Both the Dutch Reformed Church and Church of England had established small foundling homes for orphaned children. Eliza raised money and resources for each one, even though the Schuylers had been Dutch Reform all the way back to the Reformation, and the Anglicans—later Episcopalians—counted many loyalists among their parishioners. Some of the women whom she had been canvassing for the past seven years looked a little askance at her nonpartisan activities, but Eliza took an even firmer stance on this line than Alex. In the first place, many of the loyalists were family friends, including men who had served with General Schuyler when he was in the British army, before an American army ever existed. But it was more than that.

“It is not a child’s fault,” Eliza insisted, “if her father fought for King George any more than it is to her credit if he served in the Continental army. Children do not have a political affiliation. They are all God’s innocents, and deserve our compassion and our aid.” Not only did she gather funds, food, and clothing for the parentless children, she frequently insisted that her friends accompany her on visits to the orphanages in hopes they might adopt a child there. “Now, Kate, you have already an eleven-year-old and a six-year-old at home. I don’t see why you cannot take nine-year-old Louisa back with you. She will be able to wear Henrietta’s outgrown clothes and look after Natalia while Henrietta is at her studies. Why, she will practically save you money!”

And so two years passed, an interim period bookended by two events in the lives of the young married couple, one tragic, the other joyous. In the late summer of 1782, Alex’s cherished friend, John Laurens, perished in the Battle of the Combahee River. As with New York, the ravaged British forces had managed to hold on to several other cities, including Charleston in Laurens’s home state of South Carolina. Laurens had returned to his native state to help free it from the pestilence of British occupation. Under the command of General Nathanael Greene, he led numerous raids against the besieged but still numerous redcoats, until, on the 27th of August, he was “shot from the saddle” during one such encounter.

Some witnesses said that Laurens’s party had been ambushed, while others maintained that the heir of Mepkin had recklessly led a charge against an enemy brigade that outnumbered his troops three to one, which General Washington seemed to allude to in his remembrance of the fallen soldier: “He had not a fault that I ever could discover, unless intrepidity bordering upon rashness could come under that denomination.”

Alex, as was his wont, kept his grief largely to himself, but in a letter to General Greene he wrote: “How strangely are human affairs conducted, that so many excellent qualities could not ensure a more happy fate! The world will feel the loss of a man who has left few like him behind; and America, of a citizen whose heart realized that patriotism of which others only talk. I feel the loss of a friend whom I truly and most tenderly loved.”

The pall of Laurens’s death hung over the Pastures for many months, until June 1783, when Margarita Schuyler—Peggy to her family and friends—at long last married Stephen Van Rensselaer III, who had been courting her for the past five years. It was an occasion so long delayed that Peggy joked to Eliza and Angelica that she feared the principal emotion at her wedding would be “not joy but relief.” For her parents’ part, General Schuyler congratulated his daughter on a “game well played,” while Mrs. Schuyler commended her nephew/cousin/son-in-law for “staying the course.”

The young couple was married at Rensselaerswyck, in the so-called New Manor House north of Albany, which Stephen’s father had built when Stephen was still a child. As grand as the Pastures was, the Van Rensselaers’ home was grander still, with stone quoins of New York State brownstone and rich chocolate stucco troweled over the bricks to give it a stately, if somber, appearance, complemented by a wide porch with elegant torus-shaped balusters and Corinthian capitals on the stone columns.

Inside, however, in the first-floor great hall, was the same Ruins of Rome wallpaper that graced the Schuylers’ home (General Schuyler pointed out, not so very sotto voce, that he had commissioned his set more than five years before Stephen II ordered his, ahem). At the wedding, Peggy was resplendent in a burgundy dress with a brilliantly embroidered mint-green underskirt and a wig that threatened to brush against the chandeliers hanging from the twelve-foot ceiling, while Stephen looked stately in a midnight-blue velvet frock coat that recalled the uniform he had been too young to wear during the war. When bride and groom had at last said their “I dos” and kissed each other on the lips, a hundred Schuylers, Van Rensselaers, Ten Broecks, Jansens, Vromans, Quackenbushes, Van Valkenburgs, and Van Sickelens, along with a handful of Livingstons, stood up and cheered this (re)uniting of two of the state’s dynastic families.

For if Angelica had married “the Englishman” and Eliza had married “the genius,” Peggy had married “gentry” through and through, and between the Schuylers’ military and political connections and the Van Rensselaers’ vast fortune, the new couple’s future as the first family of New York was assured.

And so, two years passed even more quickly than Alex or Eliza realized, Alex busily laying the groundwork for a career that would enable him to support a family and Eliza accumulating the skills that would enable her to raise one. If only her husband would slow down a little, as the two years were such a whirlwind, there was little time to focus on starting the family she began to crave more and more. For while she supported his efforts in the founding of the nation, she wished he would put in a little more effort in the founding of their own little establishment.