I would’ve been more cross with her if it weren’t for the fact that the kinder we were to the prisoners, the more it shamed them. A lesson I learned that evening as we gathered in the blue parlor near the fire and the British general offered my father an apology.
I wanted to think Burgoyne meant to apologize for the poor people who had the misfortune to be caught before his advancing army. Or even that he might apologize for the king, who had forced us all to this war. But instead he said to Papa, “Your hospitality is too much for a man who has ravaged your lands and burned your home. I regret the event and the reasons that occasioned it.”
All eyes turned to Papa, who regretted the loss of life and his command more than the loss of his house—all three of which were occasioned, in part, by this man. And yet my father forced himself to a nod of acknowledgment. “It is the fate of war. If I had thought it necessary to save the lives of my men, I’d have done the same. Say no more about it.”
This was, I thought, what it meant to be noble.
Not a title conveyed by a king. Not by birth or blood. But through a learned and practiced strength of faith and character. And insofar as our revolution was to teach that lesson to the world, I prayed it would succeed.
I wished to be as noble as my father. And I was shamed anew as I remembered the wounded Redcoat’s face. The one who had asked me for water. The one from whom I had turned away. I’d been wrong—worse, driven by fear, I’d been cowardly.
And now I determined to be brave.
*
PAPA’S LITTLE STUDY at the back of the house, with its emerald flock-papered walls, and its books, maps, and calculations arranged in orderly fashion, was a place forbidden to my younger sisters and brothers. They never dared interrupt Papa’s work, but because I had mastered the art of sitting with him without disturbing his thoughts, he sometimes indulged me to stay while he wrote his letters. So, bracing for the reprimand I deserved, I took the liberty of knocking upon the door.
Papa summoned me inside, and I closed the door behind me. But instead of slipping quietly into the window seat where I liked to read, I waited for him to finish his letter.
Finally, he poured a circle of wax upon the folded page and stamped it with his seal, then glanced up at me quizzically where I leaned with my back against the door. “What is it, my child?”
“What are you working on?” I asked, not quite finding the courage to tell him why I’d come.
He didn’t press me on the matter. “I’m preparing my defense for the court-martial.”
“Good,” I said, guilt souring the dinner in my belly. “Then your name can be cleared of wrongdoing once and for all.”
Papa wasn’t always a calm man—he’d once threatened to dash the brains of an incompetent underling upon the ground—but he strove to conduct himself as a gentleman. And one of the ways he attempted to discipline himself was by the working of mathematical problems. He must have been struggling with something now, because he absently scratched figures into a notebook before saying, “Unlike you, my dear child, I am not entirely confident that I will be exonerated. But at least I will have a consolation which no one can deprive me of: the conscious reflection that I have done my duty, even if I am to suffer unjustly for my country.”
I followed his gaze as it cut to the silver falcon coat of arms affixed above the fireplace.
Semper Fidelis. Always faithful. Always loyal.
That was our Schuyler family motto, one that had been flung in my father’s face by our Tory neighbors when, in ’75, Papa had exchanged his red officer’s coat for a blue general’s uniform and declared himself a soldier for the American cause. And now, because of me, he found himself accused of treason by some patriots, too.
I swallowed around a knot in my throat and finally said what I should have said months before. “I’m so sorry, Papa.”
When my mother discovered that we’d helped my eldest sister run off, she’d said some very unhandsome words to Peggy and me, in both English and Dutch. And yet, my father had never let one word of blame pass his lips. Which somehow made it worse.
Tears now blurred my vision as I blurted, “I’m so sorry for what I helped put in motion with Angelica . . .”
For my sister’s elopement had given the fractured and fractious soldiers of the Northern Department yet another reason to distrust Papa. My father should have been celebrated for cobbling together an army of fur-trading, river-going New Yorkers and unruly New England backwoodsmen. He should have been hailed as the general who staved off the invasion by felling trees over roads, destroying bridges, blocking rivers, and burning whole fields of golden wheat so as to leave the British with nothing but scorched earth. Instead, he’d been belittled as a general who could not command his own daughters, much less hold Fort Ticonderoga. I worried that my role in Angelica’s elopement had cost Papa the confidence of his men, allowing them to believe the very worst about his loyalties and competence. Perhaps it had even cost him his command.