dinner the party returned to the sitting room, where I played several pieces on the fortepiano and Peggy and I sang together, as we always did. Polite applause followed our performance, and as I rose from the bench, I knew the evening was mercifully nearly done. Soon carriages would be sent for and our guests would say their farewells, including Colonel Hamilton. Soon he would be gone, and with luck I’d never see him again.
But tonight luck was with him, not me. I’d scarcely stood from the fortepiano’s bench when he appeared beside me.
“I must thank you for the pleasure of your songs, Miss Elizabeth,” he said, bowing in a way that neatly blocked my escape. “You rival Calliope herself.”
I busied myself with the sheet music to hide my discomfort. “You are too kind in your praise, Colonel Hamilton, too kind indeed.”
He had appeared small when he’d stood next to my father, but here beside me I had to raise my gaze to meet his. Now his smile seemed warm and genuine, and without the mockery I’d been so certain I’d seen earlier, which confused me even more.
“So you know my name, Miss Elizabeth,” he said, “even without an introduction. I am honored.”
I blushed again, and hated my cheeks for betraying me.
“You are a guest in our home, Colonel Hamilton,” I said briskly, squaring the edges of the sheet music into a tidy stack. “I would be remiss not to know your name.”
But he was looking past me, to the window behind the fortepiano. “Your father told me I should admire the view from here, from the southeast.”
Of course, the view was familiar to me, but I turned about anyway, seeing it anew through his eyes. Our house overlooked the part of Albany set aside for grazing cattle, with an unimpeded view of the surrounding lands. Above the dark hills, the night sky was pierced by only a handful of stars and a shivering new moon. As if to answer, the lanterns on the sloop tied to my family’s dock in the river offered their own meager light, reflecting and dancing across the inky water.
“Your father is a fortunate man,” the colonel said softly beside me, his hands clasped behind his waist as he considered the landscape. He didn’t say it as a mere pleasantry, but as a definitive statement, and with a touch of wistfulness that clearly encompassed far more than the view alone.
“Papa chose this site himself for the house,” I said, deciding to ignore whatever strange mood possessed the colonel. “He is so partial to how the lands slope away to the river that he won’t permit the shutters to be closed against the windows at dusk. That’s the North River, as we call it, though you likely know it as the Hudson, having sailed along it from New York to Albany.”
“But I didn’t,” he said, turning to look back over his shoulder to me. “I rode directly from Valley Forge. Sixty miles, some days.”
I frowned, skeptical. That was hard riding for any man. “Sixty miles in a single day?”
“For five days,” he said, smiling again to take away any hint of boastfulness from his claim. “When His Excellency’s orders require haste, they must be obeyed. Duty forbids me from saying more, Miss Elizabeth.”
“Recall that I’m the daughter of a soldier, Colonel Hamilton,” I said. I liked his smile, and I realized I wanted to hear more from him. “Discretion, even secrecy, are imperative for the security of the country. I know to respect the confidence of your orders.”
He nodded, his expression stoic, while the candlelight from the sconce to his left turned his hair bright as flames around his face. I might not be entitled to learn the reasons for General Washington having sent him racing here at breakneck speed from Pennsylvania, but I could see the toll that that haste had taken upon the colonel. Now I saw the weariness around his eyes, and understood why his clothes hung loosely about his shoulders. To ride nearly three hundred miles in five days meant he’d barely paused to sleep, let alone eat. I respected him all the more for it.
“I can tell you that His Excellency regrets the accusations that have been made regarding your father, Miss Elizabeth,” he continued, still lowering his voice so none of the others might overhear. “There’s no secret to it. Congress should not dictate military decisions tainted by politics. Nor does His Excellency find General Gates a particularly trustworthy successor.”
“He isn’t,” I said, indignation welling up on my father’s behalf. “The country, and the army with it, deserves much better than General Gates’s self-righteous conniving. The man has merely reaped the success of what my father worked so hard to put in place. He has shown no regard for honor, or for the brave men from this state who fought for the cause of liberty, and not for him. Yet he was praised as a hero after Saratoga, an honor he’d no right to claim. None at all!”
The colonel’s jaw tensed and he frowned, as if there was much he wished to say but couldn’t. “You speak with passion, Miss Elizabeth.”
“Pray do not forget that I am a Schuyler, sir,” I declared fervently. “I know the cost of liberty, and victory besides.”
He cocked a single brow with interest. “Those are brave words for a lady.”
“Brave words born of truth, Colonel,” I said, “and from what I have witnessed. Ill and in pain, my father insisted on his duties where others would have taken to their beds. When all others were fleeing Saratoga and the coming British, my mother bravely went toward them, to our farms and property there. With her own hand she set fire to the entire season’s crops, acres of wheat and corn, to keep from feeding the enemy. Still, General Burgoyne and his officers commandeered our house in Saratoga as their own, and when they had drunk all my father’s brandy and plundered my mother’s goods, they burned our house, our barns, our mills to the ground for sport before they surrendered to General Gates.”
It had been a shocking, sorrowful day when the news of that destruction had reached us. Our family had spent more time in that house in Saratoga than this one here in Albany, and I’d only but the sweetest memories of sleeping with our bedchamber windows open in the summer. I’d hear the breeze in the trees, and gathered berries in the fields, and danced with my sisters out of doors beneath the stars. Now that home and the trees and the berry fields were burned and blackened by war and my father’s name cast into disgrace, and with it all had gone much of my childhood innocence, too.
Yet the colonel said nothing in return, and I feared I’d prattled on too much. Many other families had lost their homes to the British, and most did not have a second house in which to live, as we did. Doubtless I sounded spoiled and indulged, a rich man’s daughter and nothing more. I tried to smile, tried to explain, tried to make light of what still hurt.
“There was an old tabby-cat at the house who always slept with me on my bed,” I said foolishly, unable to help myself. “Her name was Sally, and she had only one eye and a crooked tail, but she was the sweetest cat. The servants told me that one of the officers thought she was an ugly nuisance in the house, and had her thrown into the river to drown. And when afterward those same Englishmen—Burgoyne and his men—came to stay here in this house for ten days as prisoners-of-war, Papa obliged us to be as gracious to them as we would to any guest. He called it the fortunes of war, and said we must do it for the sake of liberty. Yet each time I dined with the English officers, or sang songs for them, all I could wonder was which one of them had drowned poor Sally in the river.”
I bowed my head, looking down at the ivory fan in my hand. I’d only made things worse, not better, and I blushed again from misery.
But
