was of middle age when we met, still handsome if a bit stout, her large, dark eyes full of warmth and her speech soft with Virginia gentility. She was known for her rich taste in dress, and tonight she wore a dark green damask gown with a neckerchief of fine French lace and a magnificent garnet necklace with earrings to match.
“Miss Eliza, I am so glad that you have joined us,” she said as I curtseyed before her. “How your beauty graces our little gathering!”
“Thank you, Lady Washington,” I said, blushing with pleasure at her compliment. “You are most kind.”
She raised her gaze, frowning slightly as she studied my hair. “You are wearing the powder I gave you, yes? That slight tint of blue is so becoming to us brunette ladies.”
“Thank you, yes,” I said, my hand automatically going to my hair. She’d given me a box of her scented hair powder as a kindness, though I’d had to use a prodigious amount of it to dust my nearly black hair.
“You see I am wearing the cuffs you gave me as well,” she said, holding out her plump, small hand toward me. The ruffled cuffs were of the finest white Holland with Dresden-work scallops, sent along with me by my mother as an especial gift for the general’s wife. The cuffs were Paris-made, for although our country was under a strict embargo for foreign goods, my mother (like most ladies of the time) still had her ways of securing the little niceties of life from abroad.
“You must be sure to thank your dear mother again,” Lady Washington continued, “and please tell her how honored I am to be remembered by her.”
“I shall, Lady Washington,” I said. I took this as my dismissal, and I bowed my head and began to back away.
But she had other notions, and took my hand to keep me with her.
“A moment more, Miss Eliza, if you please,” she said. “Here I am prattling on and on, without recalling the one bit of knowledge I was entrusted to share. You note that my husband is not yet here, and I am acting in his stead. He and Colonel Hamilton have been detained on some military business, but they expect to join us as soon as it is concluded. The colonel in particular asked me to share his considerable regrets at being detained, and prays that you shall forgive him.”
I couldn’t keep from smiling broadly with relief, so broadly that Lady Washington chuckled.
“There now, I’d venture he has your forgiveness already,” she said. “You may grant it yourself directly.”
She was looking past me, and without thinking I turned to look in the same direction. The crowd rippled with excitement as His Excellency entered the room, towering over most other men with a stately presence that could command attention without a word spoken. Instead of his uniform, he wore a suit of black velvet, neatly trimmed with silver embroidery and cut-steel buttons, and in every way he epitomized how the leader of our country should look.
But I wasn’t looking at His Excellency. Instead I saw no one but the gentleman behind him, slighter and shorter by a head and yet the only one who mattered to me. He was easy to find, his red-gold hair bright like a flame, and uncharacteristically unpowdered for this formal occasion. To my gratification, Alexander was seeking me as well, and as soon as our gazes met I saw him smile and unabashed pleasure light his face, as if no other lady than I were in the room for him.
The general came forward to claim the first dance with Mrs. Lucy Knox, the wife of Major General Knox, and led her to the center of the room to open the assembly with the first minuet. The rest of the guests stood back from the floor to watch them dance with respect (and admiration, too, for together they cut an elegant figure), and as the musicians played, the general and Mrs. Knox—he so tall and lean, and she so stout—began the minuet’s elegantly measured steps.
Yet Alexander hung back and I remained with him, away from the dancing and the other guests.
He took my hand. “Pray forgive me,” he whispered, “I was with His Excellency, and the delay was unavoidable.”
“Of course you’re forgiven,” I replied. “Your orders and your duties to the army and to the country must come first. I understand, and always will.”
“You will, won’t you?” he asked, his voice rough with urgency. “You’ll understand, no matter what may happen?”
“Of course I will,” I whispered, and it seemed more like a vow, an oath, than a simple reply. “Never doubt me.”
He raised my hand and kissed the back of it, a bold demonstration in a place so crowded with witnesses and ripe for gossip. But no one was taking any notice of us whilst the general was dancing, and I did not pull free.
Gently he turned my hand in his and kissed my palm. I blushed at his audacity, but it was far more than that. I felt my entire body grow warm with sensation, melting with the heat of his touch. This was what I’d wanted, what I’d longed for. When at last he broke away, an unfamiliar disappointment swept over me, and I felt oddly bereft.
If I felt unbalanced, then he must have as well, for his expression was strangely determined and intense. Within the General’s Family he was called “The Little Lion,” and for the first time I understood why. This was not the Alexander I’d seen this last fortnight sitting politely in Mrs. Campfield’s sitting room. This was a different man altogether, and while part of me turned guarded and cautious, the larger part that contained my heart, and yes, my passions, was drawn inexorably toward him.
“Orders had nothing to do with why His Excellency and I were detained,” he said to me, his fingers still tight around mine. “It was instead the matter of my future, my hope, my very life, and yet he will not listen, and refuses it all.”
I glanced at the general, dancing as if he’d no cares in this world or worries for the next.
“Then tell me instead,” I said.
“Come with me outside,” he said, leading me toward the door. “We cannot speak here with any freedom.”
Venturing outside alone in the dark with a gentleman was one of those things that virtuous ladies did not do. But for the first time in my life I didn’t care what anyone might say or think. I fetched my cloak and he his greatcoat, joined him at the storehouse’s rear doorway, and together we slipped outside.
“This way,” he said softly, leading me behind the storehouse and away from where the sleighs and horses were waiting with their drivers gathered for warmth around a small fire. “No one will see us on the other side.”
Most times when a gentleman and lady leave a ball or assembly, there is a moonlit garden with shadowy paths and bowers to welcome them. But here in Morristown, all trees and brush had long ago been cut by the army for firewood and shelters, and the only paths were ones trodden by others into the snow. There was no pretty garden folly or contrived ancient ruin; instead we stood beside the rough log walls of a military storehouse. The only magic that Alexander and I had was the moonlight, as pure and shining as new-minted silver spilled over the white snow and empty fields.
But that magic, such as it was, held no charm for Alexander now.
“The general still refuses to promote me for an active post, and will not consider a command for me to the south,” he said, his voice taut with frustration. Despite the cold, he hadn’t bothered to fasten his greatcoat, and the flapping open fronts only exaggerated his agitation.
“Oh, Alexander,”
