“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 the colonel wasn’t laughing at me. “Nothing about this war is easy.”
“Not for you,” I said ruefully. “You risk your life in battle, while I weep over a cat.”
“No,” he said firmly, so firmly that it startled me. “It’s not the cat alone that is causing you distress, is it?”
Taken aback, I shook my head warily, unsure of what he intended. “I don’t see what—”
“But you do, Miss Elizabeth.” There was a fresh intensity to his expression. “None of us can deny that this war has turned all our lives upside down. The old dreams of our future are gone. Nothing is as it was, and nothing is the way we’d always expected it would be. But this new country that we have claimed as our own will be better, braver, more glorious than anything the world has dared imagine.”
Other officers, including my father, spoke of the war in droning, practical terms of cannons and maneuvers, casualties and regiments. But none of them spoke like this, about dreams and glory, nor with this fervor. I understood now why Papa had been so intrigued with the colonel’s conversation at dinner: his manner was that exciting, and contagious, too.