Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(56)
“And, Stephen,” Eliza said, turning to her brother-in-law, “let me thank you for bringing Peggy down to the city. A familiar face is much welcome in this fascinating but still strange town.”
At nineteen, Stephen was starting to come into his own. His body had thickened out of reedy adolescence and the whiskers on his chin and cheeks, though hardly constituting a beard, gave his lean face a bit more maturity. “I? Bring Peggy anywhere?” He scoffed. “I assure you that I merely follow along in the wake of your incredible sister, and endeavor to make the journey as comfortable as possible.”
Nineteen or not, Stephen had always enjoyed talking like a forty-year-old. Perhaps it was the pressure of knowing he would be Patroon when he came of age. It was cute now, but Eliza wondered what it would be like when he was actually forty.
“I am told that we owe our aperitif to you,” Eliza said now.
“Allow me,” Stephen said, reaching for a decanter filled with golden liquid on the sideboard. Before he could grab it, however, a small figure darted out of the shadows and grabbed it first. Simon was back in his blue velvet footman’s coat, with a matching pair of breeches having materialized to complement it.
“A cordial, Miss Eliza?” he said in a voice that was less formal than loud.
“You should refer to your mistress as Mrs. Hamilton,” Violetta said from the dining room, where she was fussing with the table settings.
“A cordial, Mrs. Hamilton?” Simon boomed, already pouring some of Stephen’s honey wine into a glass.
Eliza accepted the glass and sent him on his way, hoping no one would notice the youth or inexperience of their so-called footman.
The next two hours passed in pleasant conversation, although Eliza was hardly aware of it. As 7:00 p.m. gave way to 8:00, and 8:00 to 9:00, she kept glancing at the clock on the mantel, wondering when Alex was going to come home, wondering if he’d received Simon’s note, wondering if he was caught at one of the wealthy estates north of the city with no safe method to make his way home in the darkness, or if perhaps he’d tried to make his way home and gotten lost, or fallen into a ditch and injured himself, or perhaps even been waylaid by the bandits who had returned to Manhattan Island with the settlers.
She tried to shake such morbid thoughts and reminded herself that Alex had not been home before 10:00 p.m. since he’d taken the Childress case, and most nights he came in well after she’d fallen asleep—and she usually stayed up sewing or reading past midnight. He might be late, but there was no call to start indulging in fantasies of his death.
But what if he’d never received the note? He could be sitting in his office right now, poring over old law books in search of legal precedents to use for the Childress defense, while his first real opportunity to mix in New York society passed him by. Should she send Simon out again?
While these thoughts were spinning around her head, the men were comparing the relative merits and drawbacks of farming in lower and upper New York and New Jersey, crop yields, the quality of milk the cows gave, how big were the eggs laid by hens, whether it was better to charge one’s tenant farmers high rents and allow them to cheat you on the yields or go leniently on them and earn their friendship and loyalty but make less money. Eliza had never paid much attention when General Schuyler talked husbandry of the land and found it even harder to focus now, but Helena and Peggy’s conversation was equally strange to her.
They were sharing the trials and tribulations of managing a large household—servants, siblings, in-laws, the number of parties to throw each month, how often to replace one’s china, upholstery, wallpaper. These things seemed like pipe dreams to Eliza and, moreover, not a place she was eager to get to. Her life might be a bit drab when compared to Helena’s or Peggy’s, but right now all she wanted was to see Alex while the sun was shining. To share a cup of coffee with him in the morning and a meal with him in the evening, to have a conversation with him more substantial than “Will you be home for dinner tonight?” and “How was your day?” If this was adult life, it was for the birds.
If Alex was going to be so engrossed in his work that he had little time for anything else, then she should be just as busy, Eliza decided. Perhaps there was a charity or a cause she could lend her services to, like her earlier work with orphaned children—anything to be useful instead of just decorative. She would look into it soon, determined that she would spend no more days feeling sorry for herself.
Meanwhile, Violetta kept tromping between the parlor and the kitchen with an increasingly dour scowl on her face. She looked first to Eliza for direction, but as the party stretched into its second hour and the group made no move toward the table, she turned her attention to Peggy. Peggy waved her away, but by nine thirty, she, too, was looking at Eliza with a worried expression, and at one point, under the guise of pouring herself a bit more honey wine (as their “footman” had fallen asleep in a chair in the dining room), she leaned over to whisper:
“I fear that the honey wine will go to the men’s heads if we do not get some food into their stomachs soon.”
Eliza nodded and rang the bell. After two hours of shaking the pictures off the wall, Violetta appeared as if on felt slippers.
“Yes, Mrs. Hamilton?”
“Violetta, I wonder if we might bring up the first course, and—” Eliza’s voice trailed off as she caught sight of the shiny silver pieces in the china cabinet in the other room. She suddenly realized that most of them would have to come down to serve the meal. At the Pastures, when they took the display plate down for a party, they always replaced it with other pieces, so the shelves wouldn’t be empty. As empty as Alex’s seat at the head of the table.