Still I persevered, because even a jumbled letter to Alexander was a way to express my love and regard and desire to him. Although we couldn’t yet choose an exact date for our wedding—that would depend on when His Excellency could spare Alexander long enough to come to Albany—we knew it would be in December. We shared our impatience to be wed, and each summer day that slipped past was one less that we’d have to wait.
I’d ways enough to occupy myself. As usual our house was filled with the cheerful confusion of my five younger brothers and sisters as well as their various friends and pets, and as promised, Angelica arrived with her two dear little babies as well. With my mother often weary from her pregnancy, I took over many of the burdens of our household’s management.
I prepared for my new life, too, as every good Dutch bride would. For the remainder of the war, Alexander and I would likely live not in a house of our own, but in quarters hired for the use of officers and their wives. Whatever I brought to my new household must be easily packed and conveyed, and ready to shift at a moment’s notice. I proudly marked linens—sheets and pillow biers and towels and washing-cloths—with my new initials, and took a special delight in every tiny cross-stitched EH that I made in blue thread. My mother and I together assembled all the sundry pieces necessary to begin a household from candlesticks to iron pans and pots for the kitchen, soaps and kettles for the laundry, and coverlets and hangings for our bedroom.
Because of my future status as wife to the senior officer of His Excellency’s staff, Mamma also insisted that I have new clothes, from stockings and fine linen shifts to silk gowns to wear for evening entertainments. Perhaps I should have relished such lavish expenditure on my behalf, but in truth it made me uncomfortable.
“Mamma, please, no more,” I said as we paused outside yet another mantua-maker’s shop. “I don’t need anything else.”
She frowned. “There’s the question of a new winter cardinal,” she said. “You wore your old cloak so often last winter in Morristown that it’s grown quite shabby.”
“But you and Papa have bought so much—”
“We wish you to begin your marriage with everything you need,” Mamma said. “We would have done the same for Angelica if she’d chosen to inform us of her attachment to Mr. Carter before she married him.”
The truth was that Angelica hadn’t required any of this, having married an increasingly wealthy man who had bought her all this and a great deal more, but I wouldn’t say that to Mamma.
“You know that Alexander worries that he is too poor to marry me,” I said. “He’s sure to see your gifts not as generosity, but that you doubt he is capable of supporting me.”
“I’ve heard this fretting from you before, Eliza,” Mamma said firmly, “and I’ve no wish to hear it again. Yes, you may be marrying a gentleman who is at present impoverished, but your father and I are confident that through his industry and resourcefulness, he will soon remedy that.”
“I believe that, too,” I said, not wanting her to think I lacked confidence in his abilities. “But it’s the present that concerns him, not the future.”
“It shouldn’t,” she said bluntly. “While you may become a poor man’s wife temporarily, you remain at present a rich man’s daughter, and I won’t have your aunts and cousins believe we have slighted you when they arrive for the wedding.”
Thus, I had no say in the matter, nor did Alexander. My mother was a difficult woman to cross, as I tried to explain to him as best I could. At least I’d other things to write in my letters to divert him more agreeably, things that even he could not complain of.
He had suggested that I employ my time in reading, something I hadn’t previously been inclined overmuch to do. As I’ve noted before, I was not Angelica. But because it was his wish, I began—and finished!—several books he’d recommended that were in my father’s library: works by James Boswell, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne, among others. It was not easy work for me, but Alexander praised me much for the accomplishment, and in later years, when we would have learned guests at our table, I was proud that I’d read books they mentioned, and could therefore share my own opinions.
But Alexander obliged my little requests as well. When I begged that I might have a miniature portrait of him to keep by me while we were apart, he didn’t reply, and I’d guessed it was too costly for him. Soon after, however, a small package was delivered to me, and in it was a very fine likeness of Alexander in a rosy-red waistcoat and blue jacket, painted on ivory by the renowned Mr. Charles Willson Peale of Philadelphia. I was overjoyed by such a treasure, and quickly set to work embroidering a special mat to better display it to the world.
In return I sent a little song I’d composed to amuse him, filled with the love and sentiments that were writ upon my heart. To be sure, it was not so fine as the poem he’d made for me, but still it pleased him, which was all I ever wished to do.
Best of all, I hoped he’d be to be steal away from the present campaign for a day or two to visit Albany if his duties with the army brought him within a reasonable distance. His Excellency spoke of traveling to West Point, now under General Arnold’s command, and that wasn’t so very far from us up the Hudson.
In this fashion, it was easy to lose myself in thoughts of Alexander and our wedding. The war seemed far away from us in Albany, and in the summer of 1780, it was. But as summer began to fade into fall, the news that filled Alexander’s letters took a much more somber, even ominous, tone.
First came word of the calamitous Battle of Camden in South Carolina, wherein General Gates (the same foolish general who had stolen credit for the long-ago victory at Saratoga from my father) was routed and humiliated by the enemy. His defeat was so thorough that there were fears that North Carolina and Virginia would be next to fall.
Any possibility of Alexander leaving the army to visit me was now gone for this campaign; it was clear the army, and the country, needed him far more than I. The chance of losing all America had become so real that Alexander even suggested in perfect seriousness that he and I might leave this country entirely for the Continent and live instead in the city of Geneva, in Switzerland—a prospect I found mightily distressing.