“Worry not, Mama. I shan’t let such praise go to my head.” It was so mild a compliment that in the past, I might have taken pleasure in it, knowing it was not false flattery. But even though I’d had no letter from Monroe, our flirtation—and my adventure with the Marquis de Lafayette—had opened my mind to possibilities for my future I hadn’t previously considered. Even as I felt the weight of my responsibilities here, with my family, as never before.
And if my mother should not survive . . . no, I couldn’t think of that.
“But if you do marry . . .” Her words trailed off. “You must promise not to run off with some macaroni like Jack Carter.”
“Mama! I thought you’d come to like him.”
“I do. But oh, to have missed my own daughter’s wedding . . .”
“I won’t give you such a pain,” I promised, trying to soothe her. But my heart ached at the turn of her thoughts, and the fact that a breach between us remained. Moving to sit at the edge of the bed, I asked, “Can’t you ever forgive me for helping Angelica to run off?”
Mama reached for my hand and clutched it with a surprising strength. “It’s forgiven, my dear child. Forgiven and forgotten.”
Blinking back bittersweet tears, I gave a quick nod. But before I could tell her how much it meant to me, she slipped into a fitful sleep.
Then the babe gave a frightening weak cry and I hurried down the stairs, determined to do for him what my mother could not. I found Peggy on the lawn overseeing the littlest children as they played hoops and leapfrog. “Take the baby,” I said. “I’m going to get help.”
I needed to find a willing woman to take my infant brother to the breast, and I wasn’t averse to using our status to secure assistance. Whatever my father’s reputation, the Schuylers, the Livingstons, the Van Cortlandts, and the Van Rensselaers were the great families of the region. If I couldn’t impress upon the people here, then I would cross the river to Fort Crailo, where my mother was born and raised.
“You’re going to leave?” Peggy asked, a little panicked. “Mama is too ill to know her own name, the servants are gone, and someone needs to play mistress of the Pastures.”
The servants were gone to celebrate Pinkster, she meant.
For Dutch settlers, the springtime holiday was a time for religious services, but for slaves it was a week free from work, a week during which they might travel to nearby plantations to visit family, or dance and sing at one of the festivals in Albany or New York City. Papa had been eager for the arrival of Pinkster, from which his servants usually returned cheerful. But now he feared some might not return at all.
For amongst our slaves that spring had passed sullen looks and dark whispers. From the kitchen, Dinah had sent up only cold dishes. Our dairy maid had the temerity to refuse Papa some trifling request with the cows, and he seemed too bewildered by the incident to have punished her.
I initially attributed the insolence of our people to fear. For everyone was fearful. No sooner had the leaves on the trees come to bud, than did four of the Six Nations attack nearby villages and settlements, just as Two Kettles Together had warned. Our slaves might’ve worried about the Indians, who also kept Negroes in bondage and were said to treat them harshly.
I think now, though, upon more mature reflection, that the people of our plantation must have been weighing their loyalty between us and the British, who offered freedom to runaways. Our slaves must’ve wondered at men like my father, ready to die for his own freedom, while holding others in bondage.
And they were not wrong to wonder.
In those desperate hours, though, I thought only of the sick little baby. “You’ll just have to manage by yourself, Peg,” I said, giving her the swaddled infant before bolting for the stable and galloping down the drive, bypassing azalea-festooned festival stalls, dancers, and drummers in town.
I went first to our Livingston relations at the Elm Tree Corner, where I pleaded with an indentured Irish girl who was breeding. But by the time we returned, my infant brother was struggling to breathe, let alone suckle. I’d barely dismounted when the sweet babe, with a head so tiny it fit in my palm, gasped and shuddered and perished in my arms.
In the days thereafter, Papa wrote the baby’s name in the family Bible. A carpenter made a tiny pine coffin. My father dug a tiny grave. “God gives and God takes away; blessed be the name of God,” Papa said, determined to submit to the Lord’s judgment, but Mama was powerfully afflicted, and I’d never felt so terrible about anything.