It was so revealing a comment that I could have cursed myself. How cloying and hopeful and obvious. He must have taken me for a perfect child.
For in that moment, he stared. Then straightened up again, patronizingly fastening my hood tightly beneath my chin. “I can see why Tench fancies himself in love—and also why you should accept his courtship. He is the right sort of man for you, Miss Schuyler.”
“I scarcely know him,” I said, not liking the turn in the conversation or how the spell had broken. “I scarcely know you, for that matter. Which makes it all the more confounding that you should presume to guess what sort of man is right for me.”
“You’re a very earnest girl,” Hamilton replied, as if this fact made him angry. “My friend Tench is a very earnest fellow. From a good family. He has money. You’re well matched. He’s almost as much a saint as you are.”
I had the distinct impression he was making a case, as if before a jury. But he didn’t like his own arguments. I didn’t like them either.
Abruptly, he tipped his tricorn hat. “Good day, Miss Schuyler.”
Thereafter, our every encounter was inexplicably strained and abrupt. We crossed paths at headquarters, where I went to help Mrs. Washington mend socks and hats and breeches for the soldiers, and Hamilton stood dumbly in the doorway of the anteroom. A ball of wadded paper had rolled at his feet, no doubt pitched by one of his laughing comrades from where they labored with ink and quill pens. And without acknowledging me, Hamilton stooped to pick it up, then walked away without another word.
A few days later, he even begged off taking us to the sledding party with a very curious note.
Colonel Hamilton’s compliments to Miss Livingston and Miss Schuyler. He is sorry to inform them that his zeal for their service made him forget he is so bad a charioteer as hardly to dare to trust himself with so precious a charge; though if he were to consult his own wishes, like Phaethon, he would assemble the chariot of the sun, even if he were sure of experiencing the same fate. Colonel Tilghman offers himself a volunteer.
“This is just the dance that takes place outside a ballroom,” Angelica said when I told her what had happened. “Men advance, they withdraw, they advance . . .”
What she didn’t say, but I instinctively knew, was that Alexander Hamilton was not in the category of men that ought to concern me as dance partners in or out of a ballroom. He had already blazed a brilliant career. He was a prodigy, an ambitious man. A peacock who ought to be matched with some society bird of showy plumage.
He’d been perfectly clear about his hostility toward marriage. Any flirtation between us was merely an amusement. And I hadn’t come to Morristown to be amused.
*
THERE ARE PLACES in this world that wash you off the solid ground and, like a waterfall, send you hurtling over the precipice onto the jagged rocks of hard reality.
Jockey Hollow was, for me, such a place.
The first thing to strike me as our sleigh jingled into the forested hills of Jockey Hollow was how the pine forest suddenly fell away—only stumps of trees remained as far as the eye could see, almost as if some Goliath had reached down to strip the earth bare. The second was the eerie silence, as if every bird and woodland creature had fled—or been devoured. As a military sled piled with logs glided past, pulled through the snow by a bag-of-bones horse and a ragged little fifer boy, the scent of human waste assaulted my nostrils. And a worse scent, too. A scent that I could only name, even now, as suffering.
For we stood amidst the real encampment of the Continental army.
Four miles away from the orderly streets of Morristown, where Washington and his officers conducted the business of war and hosted glittering winter’s balls, the ten thousand unwashed, unclothed, veteran soldiers lived in a wilderness city of log huts, made only of notched oak logs sealed with mud and straw.
Trapped by snow. And starving.
I’d seen soldiers in hard times before. In Albany, I’d seen undisciplined Yankee riflemen, untrained Negro boys sent as fodder, and soldiers with neither tents to shelter them nor hats to cover their heads. But that was three years ago.
This was a gaunt ghost of an army now made up of scarecrow men whose hollowed, haunted eyes left me to wonder how they were alive at all. They were so hungry they had resorted to boiling their old leather shoes. Shoes they needed, lest they stand upon the snow in bare feet and frostbite deaden their toes, a fate they avoided by wrapping them in rags.
I didn’t know that while I’d donned heels and danced and drank rum punch with officers, ordinary soldiers were sleeping twelve to each log hut, living on half-rations, and wearing what only laughingly could be called a uniform. And now that I did know it, I wanted to retch up every morsel I’d eaten for the shame of it.