Just then, we heard the wail of an infant below, and a sickly terror gripped me.
“Where’s the baby?” Mama cried, her usually stern voice betraying panic.
Dear God. In all the chaos, we’d left my new baby sister, Catherine, sleeping in her cradle by the front door. We’d left her. And now our enemies had breached the door.
“They won’t harm her,” Angelica said. If there were Iroquois with them, they might take her. And that I couldn’t allow. I started for the stairway, but Angelica grabbed my arm. “You’re pregnant.”
“I must get her,” I replied without a second thought. I was the best runner, a strong climber, the one who adventured like a boy while Angelica buried her nose in books and Peggy preened in front of a mirror.
And yet, Peggy said, “I’ll go.”
“No!” I cried after her. But Peggy dashed to the stairs—her figure a bobbing blur along the walnut banister of our elegant staircase. I crept down after her, feeling faint with fear as the shouts and scuffles of fight from the back of the house escalated. A moment later, Peggy rushed back, the baby bundled in her arms. “Hurry!” I cried from the landing, reaching down for Peggy to surrender the baby to me as a crash sounded and war whoops echoed throughout the house.
Just a few steps farther and . . .
A hulking white man with a hatchet lunged from the dining room, grabbed Peggy, and shook her. “Wench, where is your master?”
He’d mistaken her for an indentured servant. Maybe because, due to the heat, we hadn’t dressed for dinner. Whatever the reason, Peggy’s eyes narrowed in contempt and confusion, and I thought it would be just like her to say something she shouldn’t with her very last breath on earth.
Instead, my little sister masterfully transformed her expression into servility. “General Schuyler’s gone to alarm the town. He was warned you were coming. Please, sir, that’s all I know.”
Just then, I glanced up to the hidden top of the stairs to see Papa, pistol in hand, his expression murderous. I shook my head at him and pleaded with my eyes for him to stay where he was, out of sight, because the brute was buying Peggy’s clever ruse.
“Please let me go.” Peggy sniveled. “I tell you truthfully, he’s gone!”
Biting out a silent curse, Papa disappeared into one of the bedrooms. And then, taking advantage of Peggy’s lie, he shouted out an open window. “Come on, my brave fellows, surround the house and capture the scoundrels!”
It was enough to convince our marauders that Papa’s patriot forces had arrived to rescue us. And, in frustration, the villain holding Peggy shoved her so violently that she fell at the foot of the stairs, trying to shield the wailing infant.
The man lifted his tomahawk as if to butcher them both, and I yelled, “Don’t you dare, you devil!”
But perhaps he only meant it to frighten us, for when he brought the hatchet down, the blade buried itself in my father’s fine wood railing with a thunk, sending a spray of wood chips into Peggy’s hair. Then he fled through the entry hall, from whence a clang of falling silver rang out. Meanwhile Peggy called down hell and brimstone after him as he escaped with his booty.
The intruders melted away from the house as suddenly as they’d come, but they’d dragged away three of our guardsmen as prisoners. And before the attack had even subsided, I flew down to help Peggy rise. “Dear God, are you hurt?”
“We’re both unharmed,” she said, though there was a tremble in her voice. “Can you take her?”
I accepted my wailing infant sister into my arms, and an immediate rush of relief flooded me—for her and the baby in my womb. We were safe. All of us. We’d survived the assault. “We all have you to thank,” I told Peggy. “That was incredibly brave.”
She ran shaking fingers along the line where the hatchet remained buried in the wood, then peered up at me with uncharacteristic humility. “I knew it’s what you would’ve done, Betsy, but I could hardly let you do it. So I had no choice but to be brave.”
It was possibly the sweetest, most tender moment we’d ever shared as sisters, and I couldn’t resist hugging her. Realizing that perhaps I had always misjudged her a little.
Mama offered comfort to my terrified siblings while Papa snapped orders to a surviving soldier to ride for help.
And I went to tend the wounded.
Without hesitation, I tore the hem of my own muslin gown to make bandages. I thought nothing of it. Nor should I have. The attack on our home stripped from me and my sisters any remaining illusions that we might go on as dainty ladies in such a fraught enterprise as a fight for freedom. And so much the better. I vowed to myself that if our attackers came back, it wouldn’t only be my father and his sons who armed themselves with muskets.