But the most disturbing news came in September. After meeting with the French in Hartford, His Excellency and a number of his officers arrived near West Point with the intention of inspecting the fortifications there. While nearby, however, a spy was intercepted with incriminating papers and maps proving that West Point’s commander, General Benedict Arnold, had sold himself to the enemy. He’d purposefully let the fort’s defenses fall into disrepair with the intention of making a capture easy for the British, and had been forwarding many of His Excellency’s confidential letters and dispatches as well. This was a treasonous act of complete betrayal to the American cause, and to so many of his fellow officers (including as my own father) who had previously extended themselves on his behalf.
Alexander himself was the first to read the dispatches of the captured master spy who oversaw the maneuvers of countless smaller villains in thrall to the king. The melancholy task of relaying Arnold’s betrayal to His Excellency also fell to Alexander, as did riding with his fellow aide James McHenry in furious pursuit after the fleeing Arnold, who managed to escape to a British ship waiting for him in the river. Mrs. Peggy Arnold, whom I had met earlier in Philadelphia, was seemingly left behind and abandoned with her child by her cowardly husband, and had been discovered in a raving fit of madness caused by her husband’s wicked acts.
It took Alexander two letters to convey so much, written hours apart, and numbered (as was our habit) so I would know which to read first. As I read them, I couldn’t keep back numerous gasps and exclamations at Arnold’s perfidious disloyalty, and the grief that His Excellency must feel at his betrayal. Once again Alexander had been thrust into the very center of a perilous situation, and it was only by merest luck that the spy had been caught in time to keep His Excellency, his officers, and West Point itself from falling into the enemy’s hands.
I thanked Almighty God for keeping Alexander safe, and preserving His Excellency and the others from harm. But what stunned me the most was that in this particular tale of Alexander’s escapade, two of the major players in the drama were known personally to me.
The first, most obviously, was Peggy Arnold. I hadn’t liked her when we’d met the single time in Philadelphia, but I still could pity how her traitorous husband had fled, leaving her and their child once again in a vulnerable position.
But the second was the captured spy himself, Major John André, a gentleman known well within my family, and especially to me.
“Read this,” I said, thrusting Alexander’s first letter into Angelica’s hand. She had received a letter from her husband by the same rider who had brought me Alexander’s, and we’d taken them outside to a bench in the garden to read in relative peace.
Angelica’s brows rose with curiosity as she put aside her own letter to take mine.
“Are you certain you wish me to see your billet-doux from your beloved Hamilton?” she teased. “Once read, such things cannot be forgotten.”
“There’s nothing in it that you cannot read, though you may wish you hadn’t,” I said. “Major André has been taken up as a spy.”
“What?” she exclaimed, now reading the letter with more interest. “I’ve heard rumors, of course, but I never thought he’d been engaged so deeply behind our lines. And with General Arnold! Oh, Eliza, this is very bad.”
I nodded, my heart racing so fast that I felt ill. “You do remember when he stayed here, don’t you?”
“How could I not?” she said, glancing up from the letter. “He was with us for nearly a month, and at Christmas, too, which made him feel much more like a guest than one more British prisoner hoping to be exchanged. Such an entertaining fellow he was, with so many talents! We were all sad to see him leave.”
“Yes,” I said softly, struggling to control my sentiments. “Yes, we were.”
To describe John André as an “entertaining fellow” was to do him the gravest injustice. Born in London, he was the most perfectly accomplished gentleman I’d ever met, able to speak several languages, tell amusing stories, dance with grace, cut silhouettes, draw, and paint to a wonder, and sing and write verse. As if those accomplishments weren’t sufficient, he was also tall, charming, and prodigiously handsome.
André was, in brief, exactly the sort of gentleman to turn the head of an impressionable girl of seventeen, which was what I had been in November of 1775. Seven years older than I and a lieutenant in the British Army, he had been among the prisoners taken by Continental general Richard Montgomery after the siege of Fort Saint-Jean in Quebec. My father has always observed the formal dignities of war: although André was a prisoner, he was foremost a gentleman and an officer, and although he was on his way to his eventual imprisonment in Pennsylvania, Papa made sure that he and several other British officers became our guests for the Christmas season.
Oh, I was smitten! Although he took care not to beguile my affections, he was so kind to me that I’d wept when he’d left. I’d not seen him since, but I always remembered him as a friend—a friend whose actions in war had now put him into the greatest risk possible.
“How terrible that he’ll suffer because of Arnold,” Angelica said. “I cannot imagine a greater tragedy.”
All I could do was sigh and shake my head with sorrow. As our father’s daughters, we both knew the sentence for spies was execution. If André were judged an unfortunate officer following British orders, then he would be shot as a gentleman. If it were determined he was an out-and-out spy, then he would be hung in disgrace like a common criminal.
“What has Alexander written in the second letter?” asked Angelica. “Are there more details of André’s capture?”
I passed it to her. “It’s mostly about how shocked Mrs. Arnold was by her husband’s villainy. I suppose they must be two of a kind, for I found her a sly, conniving woman when we met in Philadelphia. Papa wished me to like her, but I could not.”
“Men have always been fooled by her,” Angelica declared vehemently. “I’m certain that all this thrashing about by her, pretending to be mad, was only a performance. Even your Hamilton clearly feels nothing but pity for the creature, and he like all worldly gentlemen should know better. What manner of lady languishes in her bed to receive officers?”
I lowered my chin with a mixture of disapproval and dismay. I’d observed myself the charm of Mrs. Arnold en dishabille, and I’d rather she weren’t displaying herself similarly to Alexander. One of his most endearing qualities was his constant desire to assist the weak and powerless; he could be the kindest man! But the eagerness with which Peggy Arnold appeared to have accepted his offers of compassion irritated me, knowing how false her motives likely were. That Alexander should write to me that he longed to be her brother, the better to be her defender, and that he’d offered her every proof of friendship—that was, to me, taking gallantry a shade too far.
But I wasn’t pleased, either, with my sister’s breezy remark about Alexander. I couldn’t deny that there had been other women (I shall not dignify them as ladies) in his life before me, or that he still would smile at a pretty face other than mine. It was simply part and parcel of who he was, and I accepted it, knowing his heart was truly devoted only to me. But that didn’t mean I wished my own sister to speak as if he were still a wandering rogue about the camp, especially not after he and I had been apart for the entire summer.