“And I will also be just a boat ride away . . . albeit, a longer boat ride,” Angelica said, squeezing my hand.
“How long will you be in Europe?” I asked, clutching her hand in return.
“Not long enough to see everything that I’d like.” Angelica sniffed. “Which is why you shouldn’t envy me; I’m to have a taste of the fruit without being given the whole apple . . .”
She was teasing to distract me from my sorrow, of course, but the fear that she might believe my sadness resulted from envy was enough for me to force a deep breath and calm myself. My sisters had both married wealthy men who could take them to the ends of the earth, whereas my own husband’s circumstances were nowhere as grand. Still, I would never wish to deny my sisters pleasures I couldn’t have for myself. “You’ll write me? Every day?”
“If I were to write every day, I should have even less time to see the sites,” Angelica protested with a blasé expression her sniffles belied. “But I’ll try to see everything as if through my darling Betsy’s eyes, for that is the kindest and most enjoyable way to see everything.” I smiled through my tears because like Alexander, my sister had a way of rendering me helpless to her charms. “In the meantime, you’ll have an adventure setting up housekeeping for my amiable brother-in-law and your darling little one.”
“I know,” I said, and the idea filled me with pleasure and anxiety in equal measure. We’d be in New York City before year’s end, where Alexander intended to set up his law practice and serve as the agent looking after Mr. Carter’s business interests while he was away.
It was a time for building anew. A family. A home. A country.
So it was in New York City that I finally said a tearful farewell to Angelica. With her little brood of children, she climbed aboard a ship to cross the sea, leaving me with a fear for her safety and an ache even greater than when she’d slipped out that back door of Papa’s house so many years before.
And she was not the only one to go.
At long last, the Treaty of Paris had been signed, granting America her independence—and having won it, we were all eager for the British soldiers to leave. Leave they finally did, and with them went almost thirty thousand Loyalist merchants and citizens, refugees from all over America, who fled that winter to start new lives elsewhere—not to mention thousands of slaves to whom the British had promised freedom, an uncomfortable reminder that our enemy had maintained its promise of liberty to the enslaved much better than had my own country.
We were there in the crowds down at the Battery on that cold but glorious evacuation day as the British boarded their ships and sailed away from New York, making way for Washington’s coming procession with the American army to retake the city. I jogged little Philip in my arms, showing him the sails of our enemies receding, so proud that tears sprang to my eyes. “See what we’ve done?” I whispered in my son’s ear. “We’ve chased a king back across the sea, darling.”
Even the final trick of the departing British could not bring down my jubilation. The British had left their flag flying, tied high to a greased pole. And I laughed that it was a Hollander who gave his wooden cleats to be nailed as rungs to the pole so that it could be climbed and the flag torn down. The crowd’s roar when that Union Jack finally fell to the mud was something I will never forget. A roar that grew to deafening volume when the retreating British fired one final defiant shot and our bold Stars and Stripes were raised before the fleet sailed out of sight.
Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!
The war was over. It was finally over.
And I let out a breath that seemed to come from the very core of me, as if I had been holding it for years. Perhaps I had been. But even that moment couldn’t compare to the crowd’s eruption when our victorious commander in chief and his officers marched into the city. We waved flags and cheered and wept . . .
We were Americans, now. Every one of us.
And I think not a single person there had ever felt it more than when General Washington passed by upon his cantering gray-white horse. Amidst the revelry, still I saw the signs of the sacrifice that’d been required to bring us to this moment. Mothers who had lost sons. Widows who had lost soldier husbands. Soldiers who had lost limbs and eyes and years of their lives to the fight. I felt those losses to the core of me as well, because I knew I could have lost my husband.
I closed my eyes and offered a prayerful thanksgiving that Alexander stood at my side now, that we were together, and that the danger was behind us. Drums, cannon shots, bells, and song filled the air, and celebratory bonfires burned well into the night.