Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(65)
Aaron and Theodosia Burr, the Hamiltons’ one-time neighbors in Albany, and now their neighbors on Wall Street, were there, as were James and Jane Beekman, who turned out to be siblings rather than spouses. The Beekmans had grown up in a house called Mount Pleasant five miles up the coast of the East River, just across from the southern tip of Blackwell’s Island. Mount Pleasant was known for its beautiful greenhouse—said to be the first in the New World—in which the Murrays grew the exotic delicacy known as the orange. Alex had loved them as a child in the Caribbean, but Eliza had never tasted one. Jane promised to bring her some the next time she called. Mount Pleasant was also famous (or infamous) for its role during the occupation: General Howe had commandeered the mansion as his headquarters (presumably after he recovered from Mrs. Murray’s opium tea); it was there that the dashing Major John André, who had made such a profound impression on Eliza at the Pastures on the very same evening she met Alex, had stayed before sneaking off to meet the traitor Benedict Arnold, a liaison that eventually cost him his life.
There were Schermerhorns, Lawrences, Rhinelanders, and Wattses, and Abraham de Peyster, whose namesake ancestor had donated the land on which City Hall was built (not to mention the Hamiltons’ own house), and of course a few inescapable Van Rensselaers and Livingstons, who were all related to each other in one way or another, and indeed to everyone else seated at the twenty-five-foot-long dining table the Rutherfurds had set up in the galleria. There was even Pieter Stuyvesant, great-great-great-grandson of the last Dutch governor of the colony of New Netherland, who was at least eighty years old. Like his namesake, he spelled his name with an i, spoke English with a Dutch accent, and in a truly eerie coincidence, sported a polished walnut peg leg that rattled the china in the cabinets as he clomped through the Rutherfurds’ exquisite parlors. Though unfailingly polite, he still seemed to regard everyone as a step beneath his station. (“If the blood in this room were any bluer,” Eliza whispered to Alex at another point in the dizzying tour, “we could have used it to dye the uniforms of the Continental soldiers!”)
But of all the guests at the dinner, Alex’s favorites were John and Sarah Jay—although to Alex she would always be Sarah Livingston, eldest daughter of William Livingston, the governor of New Jersey and the man who had sponsored Alex’s passage from Nevis to the northern colonies. Alex had had a crush on her and her sister Kitty as a boy; but as the years passed and Eliza supplanted all others in his heart, he thought of the Livingston sisters as his own kin, the sisters he never had. He was thrilled that Sarah had made such an advantageous marriage. The Jays were perhaps not quite at the level of society as the Van Rensselaers and Schuylers—John’s family were Huguenot merchants, having fled Catholic oppression in France a century ago—but in the New World, one didn’t have to have a title before one’s name to be welcomed into high society.
Gold and silver earned in trade was every bit as shiny as inherited wealth, and spoke to a family’s cleverness and industry besides, and not just the blind cosmic luck of being born into the aristocracy. John was a decade older than Alex, and also a lawyer—“one more and we could start a boxing club,” he joked, which prompted Sarah to say, “Lawyers? Boxing?” and break out into laugher. John had studied with the renowned Benjamin Kissam, as had Lindley Murray, and, like Alex and Gouverneur Morris, was a graduate of King’s College. Alex was pleased to learn from John that their alma mater, which had been closed during the British occupation, was slated to reopen in the spring, and under the non-royalist name of Columbia College.
But what really drew him to John was the older man’s belief in the urgent need for a strong central government to unite the thirteen states, built around a code of laws—“a Constitution, if you will”—that would ensure that whether a citizen was in the Carolinas or New Hampshire or Virginia or Maine, the citizen would enjoy the same privileges and share the same responsibility as any American.
“Local pride is fine,” John Jay said at one point. “Each state, each county even, has its specialty. But if we are New Yorkers first, or New Jerseyites—”
“Jerseyans,” John Rutherfurd interjected.
“—if we are New Yorkers or New Jersayans first, we are Americans last and always. Virginia has its tobacco, Carolina its cotton, Maryland its crab, Massachusetts its miserable winters”—laughter all around at this observation—“but all of them have the American spirit, which is the spirit of freedom of industry and quiet but unshakeable piety. We judge a man not by his name or lineage, but by the accomplishments of his own hand and mind.”
“And what, pray,” Helena said, “do you judge a woman on? The cut of her dress, or of the figure beneath it?”
John reddened, as did several of the other men, while the women at the table all shared a knowing glance.
“Certainly, you would not say that beauty is a detriment for a woman to possess?” John said when he could speak again.
“I would say that it is a distraction,” Helena replied, “and just as arbitrary a measure of her quality as a man’s surname.”
More laughter from the women and red faces from the men. Then, Alex was surprised to hear Eliza say, “I do not think any woman at this table would disagree with you, but I do think yours is a statement only a beautiful woman would dare make out loud.”