“Isn’t it?” he said without pause. “Then it should be, because I want you to judge me. I am not without flaws. I realize that. But with you as my guiding star, I will strive to be all that you desire. I want you to find me worthy. That is the truth, Eliza Schuyler, my truth, and I’ll swear to it by any oath you please. I’ve never met another lady whom I could trust more than you. I would trust you with my honor, my life, and most especially my heart, and I pray with all my soul that you may in time feel the same for me.”
My eyes widened and my heart raced, my entirety overwhelmed not only by the poetry of his words, but by the unbridled emotion and the sentiment behind them that captured me in its spell.
There could be only one answer.
“Yes,” I said breathlessly. “So long as you continue to be as truthful to me as you promise, then I’ll grant you my trust, freely, openly, gladly.”
His fingers tightened around mine, and he raised my hand to his lips. The gesture was muted by our gloves, but it still seemed the most fervidly romantic thing I’d ever experienced. I sighed with the perfection of the moment, but as I began to tell him so, I glimpsed my aunt, bustling across the snowy path toward us.
“I can’t stay here with you any longer,” I said swiftly, pulling my hand away and thrusting it back into my muff. “My aunt is coming.”
He didn’t move. “The officers are sponsoring a series of assemblies with dancing. The first will be held next Wednesday evening. Say you’ll come, Betsey.”
I loved how he said my name. “You’ll be there?”
“I will be there,” he said, “waiting for you.”
“I won’t disappoint you,” I whispered fiercely, my hand holding tight to his. “Not now, not ever.”
It was as solemn an oath as any young woman my age could vow, and I meant every word of it. How was I to know how sorely my words would be tested over time?
CHAPTER 4
I attended that first assembly not with my aunt and uncle, but with a friend, Kitty Livingston. Kitty had persuaded (or more likely begged) her father to take a house in Morristown while the army was encamped there, even though their home of Liberty Hall was only twenty miles away in Elizabethtown. Kitty was only an acquaintance, but a distant cousin in the way of so many of us from New York, and I was delighted that she was in town for the winter, too.
That night we rode together with her parents in the second bench of their sleigh, our evening finery bundled beneath thick furs as we traveled across the wintery roads. We wore quilted silk petticoats beneath our gowns, and at our feet we each had a carved oak foot warmer filled with hot coals. The skies were overcast, and we all prayed the next snowstorm—for so it seemed inevitable that one would come—would hold until after the assembly. The sleigh’s lanterns cast their wavering light across the snow banks on either side, and the tiny brass bells on the team’s harnesses rang merrily in the cold night air.
Sharing my excitement, Kitty grinned at me, and snuggled a little closer both for warmth and in confidence. She was quick and lively and flirtatious in company, one of three sisters as was I, and always the first with fresh news from everyone and everywhere. I soon learned, however, that for the first time I was the center of tonight’s fresh gossip.
“So tell me, Eliza,” she said softly in a near whisper that her parents wouldn’t overhear, our conversation further shrouded by the fur-edged hoods of our cloaks. “How is it that all the talk in the town and the camp is of you and Colonel Hamilton?”
“Then this place must be tedious indeed, if that is the best talk it can muster,” I said, surprised. “Colonel Hamilton and I have supplied very little to your mill for tattle, Kitty.”
“I’ve heard otherwise,” she said. “In fact I’ve heard of little else.”
I frowned, my hands twisting uneasily inside my muff. I didn’t like being spoken of, especially since I suspected most of what was being said was embellished, if not outright tales. All I could do was hope to correct Kitty, a vain hope though it might be.
“Colonel Hamilton has called upon me at Dr. Campfield’s house in the evening,” I began, “and I’ve received him in the crowded company of my aunt and uncle as well as the Campfields. He has their approval, and my father considers him a worthy gentleman, too. Colonel Hamilton and I have walked together in the town, with my aunt ten paces behind us, and he and I have exchanged greetings in passing as he went about his duties near the headquarters. Oh, and he joined me at Sunday worship.”
“Sunday worship?” she repeated, her voice rising in teasing disbelief. “Hamilton? I vow he’s never seen the inside of a church, the wicked heathen.”
“He did come with me,” I insisted, “and it was by his own initiative, too. That’s all that’s happened between us, Kitty. There could hardly be anything less scandalous.”
I wasn’t exaggerating. Alexander’s regard toward me had been so decorous and proper that, in the telling, it must have sounded almost boring, and without even a flicker of scandal. Yes, there had been times when I’d felt sure he was going to kiss me, but at the last moment he’d held back: he was that intent on proving himself worthy of me.
And to be entirely honest, I rather wished he hadn’t. An honorable gentleman was all well and good, but if he’d shown me a bit—just a bit—of the rakish gallant that I sensed was within him, I wouldn’t have objected. I wanted him to kiss me, because I wanted very much to kiss him.
But clearly Kitty didn’t believe me, and smothered her laughter behind her gloved hand.
“Hardly less scandalous, Eliza,” she whispered, “and perhaps infinitely more. You can’t play the innocent with me, especially not when your dalliance is with Colonel Hamilton. Recall that he’s long been an acquaintance of mine, and that we have no secrets between us.”
“I assure you, there aren’t any secrets for him to share,” I protested, painfully aware of how she might indeed know more of him than I did. Kitty and Alexander had in fact been friends for years. When he had first arrived as a youth in our colonies from Nevis, he had attended Elizabethtown Academy in New Jersey, where he’d boarded with the Livingston family. To hear Kitty tell it (which of course she’d made sure I had), the schoolboy Alexander had been thoroughly moonstruck over her, yet she’d deftly turned his infatuation into a friendship.
“No secrets, no.” Kitty paused now for emphasis, her upper teeth pressing lightly into her lower lip in a way that was unique to her, as if biting back what she’d say next. “No secrets, because where you are concerned, Colonel Hamilton cannot keep them. He wears his heart like another medal pinned to his coat, there for anyone who wishes to see how the name Elizabeth is engraved upon it.”
“Hush, Kitty,” I said, uneasy with her overblown foolishness.
“Then let me tell you this, Eliza,” she said, leaning closer. “You know how the officers are in the habit of having supper together, and how after the cloth is drawn, they will sit for hours drinking and toasting until they tumble into their cups, and their menservants must come claim them.”