Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(41)
Their talk was interrupted by the squeal of a pig dashing down the street. “That is municipal life,” Alex said, laughing. “It has everything the country has, only it’s all smaller, and on top of each other.”
Indeed, after a lifetime spent on the outskirts of a modest enclave like Albany, Eliza had been nervous about moving to a city as large and cosmopolitan as New York. She had been surprised to find a landscape that reminded her a lot of her native village. The southern tip of Manhattan was crisscrossed with a few dozen streets of three-and four-story brick town houses, not unlike the streets that crowded Albany’s riverfront. Their dense, truncated perspectives felt a little mazelike to someone raised with the vistas from the top of a hill in a mansion surrounded by gardens and orchards. But the houses themselves were handsome and generously proportioned, and within a few blocks gave way to more familiar, shingled houses with Dutch gables enclosed by white pickets or rustic zigzagged logs containing well-tended kitchen gardens and chicken coops and rabbit hutches (and, it must be admitted, the occasional pigsty).
About a mile north of the Battery, these close-knit plots surrendered to open farmland. Here, Bayard’s Hill, with its small fort atop it, overlooked the sprawling calm waters of the meandering bays and inlets of Collect Pond, which, she was told, would be covered with ice skaters as soon as its forty-six acres of becalmed water had frozen fully through. To the west was the same Hudson River that bordered Albany 150 miles north. It was wider here, and choppier, thanks to the Atlantic tides. Mirrored on the opposite side of Manhattan was the so-called East River (which Alex had explained to her was not a river at all, but rather something called an estuary, a channel connecting two bodies of salt water, in this case Long Island Sound and New York Harbor). But whatever it actually was, it looked just like a river to her.
And then, of course, there was the ocean itself. Eliza had been as far south as Morristown, New Jersey (where Alex proposed to her), but had not made the trek to the coast because marauding British troops had made the area too dangerous. (She still shuddered to recall how close Alex had come to death when he rode north to persuade her parents to let her marry him rather than the odious Henry Livingston.)
And now they were walking down Pearl Street—so-named for the nacreous shells of the oysters that thrived in the waters surrounding Manhattan. Eliza had seen no sign of their shells, let alone pearls (though a slight odor of fish was discernible in the stiff breeze that blew off the water). In truth, she had turned her gaze out to the vast gray horizon, dotted here and there by anchored ships, a combination of trading vessels waiting for normal commerce to renew so they could fill up their holds before heading back across the Atlantic to the new nation’s trading partners. And, here and there, an American military frigate kept watch for British ships whose captains might not have learned of the peace during the four weeks it had taken them to cross the Atlantic.
Eliza found the endless expanse of water both soothing and alarming. It was the first time she had ever contemplated just how large the world was. It was difficult to conceive that there was land on the other side of all this water—not one continent but three—Europe, Asia, and Africa, whose vastness, she had seen on maps, was far greater than both North and South Americas. Her whole life had been spent in a single town of a few thousand souls, with just a couple of journeys of a few hundred miles to broaden her knowledge of the world. One of those trips—the journey to Morristown in 1777—had resulted in her marriage to Alex, which only underscored that the strangeness of the world wasn’t to be avoided, let alone feared, but to be sought out for the treasures it could bring. She stared out at the white-frothed swells for several minutes, contemplating the journeys that were ahead of her, some physical, some emotional, and then she took Alex’s arm in hers and said, “Come. We have work to do.”
Their path today led away from the water, but they were still close enough that Eliza could feel its wind at her back, the dampness, the omnipresent smell of salt that she was coming to associate with her new home. A coastal winter could be harsher than one farther inland, but Mrs. Schuyler had seen that Eliza went off with two quilted petticoats and a new wool coat with a sable collar, so she was more than warm enough.
As she and Alex strolled farther up the street, she nodded at another town house, nearly identical to theirs (though she couldn’t help noticing that its parlor windows were already adorned by lovely curtains in a rich blue brocade).
“Have I told you about our new neighbors?” she asked her husband.
“You have not,” Alex answered. “How is it that you have made their acquaintance already? We have only been in the city for a week, and all that time was spent interviewing servants and buying necessaries. How have you possibly managed to meet anyone?”
Eliza petted his arm in hers. “Never discount a lady’s network for efficiency of communication.”
“So who are our new neighbors?”
“I suppose it is proper to say that we are their new neighbors, since they have been here for some months, as the sumptuousness of their draperies suggest. It is Mr. Aaron Burr that was colonel, and his new wife, Theodosia, the former Mrs. Prevost.”
She felt Alex start. “You do not mean the wife of General Augustine Prevost, the British officer?” he asked, astonished. Prevost was well-known to Alex as the man who had led British forces during the Siege of Savannah in 1779, when American forces had been decimated when they tried—and failed—to retake the great Georgia city. “I did not realize he had died, or divorced.”