Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(64)
The three eldest Schuyler sisters (well, not so much Peggy) were a fair hand at capturing what they called “outlines,” which is to say the silhouettes of draped skirts, but when you looked at them you never got the sense that these garments were actually being worn by a human being. They could have been filled with air or straw. But Earl’s drawing somehow captured the tenseness of Eliza’s stilled legs and the constriction in her chest from trying not to breathe, or not to expand her rib cage when she did so.
She was so taken by the masterful way her body had been depicted that she almost didn’t notice her face. Then she caught herself staring into her own eyes. Saw the curiosity there, and the amusement, and even the intelligence. It was as if she had caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror before she had time to compose an expression. She flushed to think of herself that way, but she hadn’t drawn the picture after all.
She was suddenly conscious of eyes on her, and looked up to see Earl staring at her with a gesture that was both proud and questioning, as if he knew he had done a good job but was curious what sort of effect it had had on Eliza. It was almost as if he were wondering what sort of hold it might give him over her.
But Eliza was so taken with the sketch that all she said was, “Oh, Mr. Earl! It is remarkable.”
“Bah!” Earl said, grabbing the bottom edge of the page and flipping it over roughly, exposing a fresh sheet. “It is all wrong. Your face looks as though you had just looked up from a psalter when it should be as if you had just read an account of a shipwreck or a great battle or the moment when Romeo holds a sleeping Juliet in his arms and mistakes her for dead. We start again! But first—”
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the flask Alex had sent. After a long drink, he sighed contentedly.
I’ll have to bring a bigger flask next time, Eliza couldn’t help thinking.
“It gets so chilly in here,” he said, then wiped a few beads of sweat from his brow and started drawing again.
19
Out and About
Hanover Square
New York, New York
February 1784
After more than a month in virtual isolation, the Hamiltons were suddenly discovered by society. Eliza attributed their newfound popularity to Peggy—“she’s in town for one night and already knows more people than we do”—though the truth is, Peggy was simply a conduit, and it was Helena Rutherfurd who provided the real entrée.
The week after the impromptu dinner party at the Hamiltons’ Wall Street home, the Rutherfurds reciprocated with an invitation to “a small supper” at their town house on Hanover Square. The stone-fronted mansion was twice as wide as the Hamiltons’, much deeper, and a story taller, with an interior as opulent as those grand proportions would suggest. The floors in the entry were stone instead of wood, while the parlors were laid with yellowy pine planks at least a foot wide, and bordered by intricate marquetry work in oak, walnut, and limewood. The ceiling coffers were more elaborately patterned than the mandalas of Hindustan. The wainscoting was a rich ebony as dark as tar, yet so naturally lustrous that Helena and John had made the daring choice simply to varnish it rather than paint it in one of the muted pastels that was all the rage—Wythe blue or tawny port or dusty rose.
The paneling’s Spartan restraint, however, was more than made up for by the elaborately flocked wallpaper that covered each parlor in yards and yards of the deepest crimson and richest emerald, the most buttery of yellows or the surprising luster of burnished silver. Each chamber was its own jewel box, and Helena and John led the Hamiltons through them, one by one, with a pride that somehow managed to not be obnoxious.
Eliza whispered to Alex at one point, “If their taste had been one whit less perfect, this would all be too much.” But the Rutherfurds had done a superb job and they knew it, and so instead of feeling as if their hosts were bragging, Alex and Eliza simply marveled at the beauty to which they were being treated.
The silk-lined chambers were the perfect setting for the dazzling pieces of furniture the couple had accumulated, with many examples by the three great English masters: Sheraton, Hepplewhite, and Chippendale, as well as a virtual museum of American practitioners: Gilbert Ash, James Gillingham, and dozens of others from Boston to Charleston and everywhere in between. The Rutherfurds talked about the individual pieces of furniture as though they were paintings, a Jonathan Gostelowe here, a Samuel McIntire there, and of course they also had a stunning collection of paintings, including the American portraitists Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and even, Alex pointed out to Eliza, a Ralph Earl, all of which were hung in a stunning salon they called the galleria.
The silver. The china. Even the servants, in bespoke livery (“John has a passion for buttercup yellow,” Helen confided to Alex). It was all too perfect. The mansion was everything he wanted in a home, and more.
Because it wasn’t just the mansion he coveted, but the people who filled it. Despite Helena’s remark about “a small supper,” the Rutherfurds seemed to have invited a representative from all the major families of New York and the surrounding environs, starting with the Morrises (Gouverneur was there, along with two of his and Helena’s cousins), and William Bayard and his fiancée, Elizabeth Cornell, and Lindley Murray, a lawyer like Alex, but also an aspiring writer. His mother, Mary, was revered throughout the Continental army for having invited General William Howe “to tea” at Inclenberg, the Murrays’ estate north of the city, and entertaining General Howe so well and so long that George Washington and his soldiers were able to escape the advancing British army. (“Mama won’t admit it,” Murray joked, “but I’m pretty sure she spiked General Howe’s tea with opium.”) There were also Pierre Van Cortlandt, Jr., and his brother Philip, the former yet another aspiring lawyer, while the latter was the heir apparent to the vast Van Cortlandt Manor north and east of Morrisania, which was rivaled in New York State only by the Livingston and Van Rensselaer holdings.