on my account. The sweetest tears of joy, and no others.”
I smiled, even as fresh tears slid down my cheeks. Such a beautiful promise to make, such a perfect vow from him.
How I wish it was one he’d been able to keep.
* * *
Soon after Alexander left with a small party for Amboy, a town on the Raritan Bay that overlooked Staten Island, and that served as the way station and ferry stop for travelers between New York and Philadelphia. It had also become something of an informal meeting point for the two armies, with our forces occupying Philadelphia and the British still holding New York. This was why Alexander had gone there to negotiate the mutual exchange of various prisoners from both sides.
Amboy was not far from Morristown, perhaps forty miles, but on account of the roads being rutted with ice, Alexander and his party required three long days to make their destination. I know this because he wrote to me as soon as he arrived, sending his love and informing me of his safe arrival.
I was, of course, delighted to receive his letter, and all the others that followed, for if I thought he’d written often to me when we were both together in Morristown, now, with a county between us, he seemed to have doubled his daily words.
He recounted the details of the negotiations, the officers he met and liked and the ones he didn’t, what he ate and what he drank, and any sundry scraps of gossip from New York involving acquaintances of my family’s. Forgetting (or choosing to forget) how far-reaching the Schuylers were in New York, he was simultaneously baffled and irritated by how my sisters Angelica and Peggy as well as I were mentioned in the nightly toasts of British officers. He also devoted much ink and paper to how thoroughly he missed me, and how much he longed to be with me again, and many small, private intimacies and endearments besides. No gentleman wrote a more devoted love letter than my Alexander, and no love letters were treasured more completely than I did his.
The only drawback to his literary devotion came with my replies. I couldn’t keep up with him, leastways not at the pace which he desired. I had never been facile with a pen in my hand, nor did inspiration come easily to me, the way it did to him. My spelling could be various and my hand lacked grace, and too often in the time it took me to capture an anecdote or sentiment upon the page, the words would fly clear away from my possession like a bull through an open gate, never to be recaptured. These lines which you read here, in all their clumsiness, are sufficient proof of how much I labored over my missives to him. Whereas his letters could cover sheet after sheet, mine were seldom more than a single page in length, and every word hard-fought at that.
It didn’t help matters that Papa arrived at his new lodgings in Morristown soon after Alexander had left. I bid thanks and farewell to my aunt and uncle and the crowded house of the Campfields, Rose packed up my trunks and belongings, and we shifted to the house my father had taken for the next few months. Yet I’d scarcely settled there before Papa announced that, as a treat, I was to accompany him back to Philadelphia, where he continued to hold his seat in Congress.
With the worst of the winter’s snows and ice behind us, our journey to Philadelphia was uneventful. When I’d been younger, New York had always been the city that we’d travel down the Hudson River to visit, but being patriots, we had not returned there since the British had seized control of the main island in the fall of 1776. Although some of Philadelphia’s citizens with Tory sentiments had fled, it was now the largest of our country’s cities with wide streets, grand homes, and handsome public buildings and churches built mainly of brick.
There was much to entertain me while my father tended to his political business: plays and musical gatherings, teas and suppers held by friends old and new, sermons to heed on Sundays, shops to visit, and parks to stroll. Because of Papa, I received more invitations than I could accept.
There was another side to all this company and entertainment, however, and I found it both discomfiting and disrespectful. While in Morristown, where everyone I met was connected in some fashion to the army and to His Excellency, the talk had always been of the deprivations our troops endured, especially during this winter’s storms and hardships, and how little support the general and men were receiving from Congress. But here in Philadelphia, the home of that same Congress, the conversation over tea and supper was of how the army scandalously squandered whatever was granted them by the magnanimity of Congress, and worse, how much His Excellency exaggerated the needs of his forces to squeeze more from Congress.
None of this was true. In fact, the truth was quite the opposite of these assumptions, and I didn’t like how these fine, wealthy Philadelphian ladies made such free assumptions. I didn’t like how they sat before their warm fires and whispered about soldiers who had spent the winter shivering in makeshift cabins, and soon would be heading off to risk their lives once again on the behalf of us safely at home.
I knew the truth, because I’d witnessed it myself, and I knew many of the officers they slandered, including the one I loved. I was my father’s daughter to the core, and to his delight (and Alexander’s, too, when I told him), I spoke up as often as I could in those elegant drawing rooms and parlors, and corrected as many ladies as I dared. It wasn’t in my nature to keep still in the face of falsehoods. I doubted they believed me, as people who are misinformed seldom do, and I’m certain they considered me ill-mannered, but at least I had not given the impression of agreeing with them through silence.
Was it any wonder, then, that I soon tired of Philadelphia? What my father had intended as a pleasurable journey quickly came to feel more like a punishment, keeping me farther away from Alexander.
I missed him more than I’d believed possible. He filled my thoughts awake, and my dreams when I slept. I was certain I heard his voice and his laughter from the next room, or his footfall in the hallway. Whenever I glimpsed an officer in a uniform like his in the street, my heart beat faster until he turned, and I realized the man’s face was not the one I wished most to see.
My only solace came in Alexander’s letters, speaking to me across the miles. I replied as swiftly as I could, filling them with pledges of my own love and devotion. But instead of bringing him the same comfort I took from his letters, mine seemed only to make his doubts grow.
He took my brevity as a sign not of my lack of talent for letter writing, but proof that I was enjoying the pleasures of the city and forgetting him. It wasn’t so much that he was jealous, or picturing me in the company of other gentlemen. Instead he worried that I’d had time to reconsider my love for him, and that I’d decided he lacked the qualities I required in a husband.
He tried to cover his fears with playful witticisms, but I wasn’t fooled. Already I knew him so well, my dear Alexander. No matter how I reassured him, his uneasiness persisted in the saddest way possible, telling me he’d understand if I cast him away for being too poor. I was at a loss for how a gentleman who could bravely command a regiment in battle could feel this unsure of his own considerable merits. There was one sentence in particular that struck me with its truth, and reverberated within my heart—“You must always remember that your best friend is where I am”—and that made me long to fly to his side to reassure him both of his worth, and my love.
He was indeed my best friend, and all I wished was to be where he was.
On my last day in Philadelphia, I made one final call on a lady who sorely needed company. By rights Mrs. Peggy Arnold and I seemed fated to enjoy each other’s company, we’d that much in common. We were close in age, and her husband, a major general, had served with my father, who held General Arnold in the highest regard for his bravery and military prowess in the northern campaigns.
But General Arnold had not fared as well in his most recent post as the military commander of Philadelphia, however, and had garnered
