Torn as I stood in my family’s potato field surrounded by wounded soldiers, debating a choice that would never have given me pause before. Should I tend to the injured Redcoats while under the gaze of mistrustful American soldiers?
“Water, please, Miss Schuyler,” croaked a British regular, lying in a furrow beneath one of our orchard trees.
He’d been evacuated here to Albany with at least a thousand others from Saratoga, where a brutal battle had been fought ten days earlier. Our hospital, churches, and pastures were now overrun with casualties from both armies and we struggled to care for them all. The least I could do was fetch the Redcoat a pitcher of water.
Instead, I hesitated, a knot of anxiety tightening in my throat, for I was now the daughter of a disgraced American general who had been relieved of his command under suspicion of treason.
Facing court-martial, my father already stood accused of taking bribes from the British and surrendering an American fortress to the enemy. For his daughter to be seen caring for the same enemy now . . .
I feared for anything I might do to worsen Papa’s situation, so even as my face heated with shame, I turned away from the Redcoat to help others, forcing myself to remember that these British had been ravaging the whole of the Hudson Valley for months and terrorizing my countrymen.
They are the cause of this bloodshed, I told myself.
For the king’s men had captured and occupied New York City, burned our state’s first capital at Kingston to the ground, and during the fighting upon the plains of Saratoga, they had set fire to our summerhouse, leaving it in ruin. From here in the relative safety of the Pastures, we’d seen only the faintest glow of battlefield fires against the distant evening sky, but even now the acrid smell and taste of soot carried to us downriver. And I thought, We’ve set the whole world on fire.
Two summers before, our thirteen colonies declared independence from the British crown, but now our celebratory bonfires had given way to the flames of war. I hoped, following this American victory at Saratoga, that we were finally winning it. So I tended to a Continental scout who held a gory wound on his scalp that had reopened since a doctor last saw him.
“How bad is it, Miss Schuyler?” he asked, grimacing against the pain as I washed the wound and pulled my needle through the gash at his hairline.
“Fortunately, your brow is cool and it does not look to have festered,” I replied. Fresh red blood oozed warmly over my fingertips. “Try not to pull it open again,” I told the young soldier as I finished my stitches and cut the thread with a hunting knife.
While my father taught me to ride, fish, and know my way in the wild, my mother had trained me in rudimentary medicine while tending tenants, Indians, and one frontier army or another. And since I couldn’t fight in this war, I contributed the way women could. I sewed. Uniforms, socks, flesh. “If all goes well, you’ll be left with a battle scar to prove your bravery.”
He grinned. “Thank you.”
As a general’s daughter, I knew what soldiers liked to hear. But it seemed, these days, I never knew what to say to please my mother.
“Betsy,” she snapped from where she stood at the back gate removing an apron she’d dirtied helping soldiers in the nearby pastures. “Go in the house with the other children and clean up. Your father is expected shortly from the surrender at Saratoga. We must prepare to receive his guests.”
I winced, fearful the scout beside me would misconstrue her words. For we were not expecting guests, but British prisoners. Nor was I one of the children. In fact, I’d just turned twenty. But I knew better than to point any of this out to my mother, a stern Dutch plantation mistress who’d been exceedingly vexed with me for months now.
You’re the sensible one, Elizabeth, she’d said in the heat of our quarrel. I expected better.
As if I could stop the tides of change any more than she could. I didn’t say that, either. I merely wiped my hands, bobbed my head, picked up my skirts, and went. Broken oyster shells crunched underfoot on the drive as I passed the stables and made my way to my father’s handsome brick mansion, which stood upon a bluff overlooking the majestic Hudson River.
The house was a flurry of activity as I hurried past kerchiefed Negro slaves moving the heavy mahogany table into the grand entry hall and went up the stairs to the bedroom I shared with my sisters. Well—just one sister, now, since Angelica had run off to marry a mysterious suitor against Papa’s wishes a few months before. Now it was just me and eighteen-year-old Peggy who shared the spacious pale-green room with its wardrobes, armchairs, and canopied bed.