Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(6)
3
Cousins and Confidences
The Schuyler Mansion
Albany, New York
April 1781
After supervising the cleaning of the kitchen and making sure everything was set for the party later that evening, Eliza traipsed up the stairs to her parents’ bedroom, where she knocked on the door lightly. “Mama,” she called through the closed portal. “It’s Eliza. I’ve brought you a bit to eat.”
A pause, and then her mother’s strong voice came to her. “Enter.”
Eliza eased the door open. The chamber on the far side was dimly lit, with muslin-backed silk curtains pulled entirely across all four windows. “Oh, Mama, were you sleeping? I’m so sorry, I’ll come back later.”
“No, no,” Catherine Schuyler said, the bedsheets rustling as she sat up. “I was only drowsing out of boredom. This forced indolence is far more taxing than my condition. Please, please, let a little light into my dreary cave.”
Mrs. Schuyler’s “condition” was revealed as soon as Eliza pulled open the curtains. Though her mother was covered by heavy cotton sheets with handmade lace borders and a light woolen blanket, not to mention her rather shapeless dowager’s nightgown, it was still obvious that she was very, very pregnant.
“How are you feeling?” Eliza asked, carrying the tray of food to her mother’s bedside.
“As I told Dr. Van Vrouten, I am absolutely fine. This is my twelfth time with child. I should think I’d have it rather figured out by now.”
“Oh, Mama!” Eliza laughed. “Papa says that, despite your patrician pedigree, you are as hearty as a farm lass.”
“Your father is a wise man. I only wish he were not in cahoots with that fool of a doctor.”
Eliza smiled. The truth was that this pregnancy had been hard on her mother. Her ankles had swollen alarmingly with retained water, and her breath grew short when she walked up even a single flight of stairs—signs, according to Dr. Van Vrouten, that the large size of the baby was putting pressure on Mrs. Schuyler’s internal organs, and inhibiting their full function. Two weeks ago, she had stood up from a settee, wavered a moment, then fallen back onto it in a faint. That was all General Schuyler needed to see: Since then he had insisted, following the doctor’s instruction, that Mrs. Schuyler keep to her bed until she had been delivered of her final child.
“Now, Mama,” Eliza said as she cut an ample slice of blueberry pie and drizzled a bit of clotted cream over it. “You are indeed a strong woman, but you are six and for—”
“Ah-ah, my child,” Catherine cut off her daughter. “I may be old enough to require bed rest, but I am not so ancient that I will tolerate having my age said aloud, even in the privacy of my own bedroom.”
Eliza laughed again and handed her mother the dish of pie. “You are as handsome now as you were when I was a girl.”
Though Mrs. Schuyler was generally rather reserved, she couldn’t quite keep a smile off her face. A stout woman, the plumpness of her cheeks had staved off the wrinkles that marred the visages of others her age, and she did indeed look much younger than her unmentionable years.
“But not as handsome as my three grown girls,” she said as she took a bite of the pie. “The berries cannot still be in season?” She laughed. “How I look forward to apples and pears.”
“The grounds are almost picked clean. It was a bumper crop this year. We’ll have preserves all through the winter, and won’t run out in the middle of February like we did this year,” said Eliza with a smile.
“I think that had less to do with the size of the crop than the number of people eating the harvest. I must say, we are an exceptionally full house these days.” She took another bite before speaking. “Have you and Colonel Hamilton given any thought as to where you will settle down?”
Eliza sighed wistfully, half at the notion of leaving her childhood home once and for all, half in impatience at being fully ensconced in her own home with her own husband, beginning her own life.
“I was just discussing the matter with Angelica and Peggy. Colonel Hamilton wants to be officially relieved of his commission and witness the end of the war before he decides. There are those who are pressuring him to join the government when the war ends, but since we don’t even know where the capital will be, we have no idea where we would have to live for him to do that. His own preference is for New York City, where he says a young man such as himself can most easily make a fortune. I prefer New York as well. It is too far from the Pastures for my liking, but not nearly so inaccessible as Philadelphia or something farther south.”
Her mother nodded. “Schuylers and Van Rensselaers have lived in upper New York since Dutch times. I never imagined I would have a daughter live on the coast, but if there is one of us with the equanimity to survive the hustle and bustle of that teeming metropolis, it is you.”
“Do you think?” Eliza said nervously. She looked out the window at the rolling green fields covered in ordered rows of fruit trees and grazing cows and sheep, sheltered over by a sky of liquid blue. “I do feel like such a country girl sometimes. The idea of living in one of those, what do they call them, town houses? With all those stairs, and the rooms stacked one on top of each other? It sounds so . . . uncomfortable.”