Dedication

  For all those little sister and smart-girl Peggys out there,

  past, present, and future.

  And, as ever, for Megan and Peter.

  Epigraph

  More than kisses, letters mingle souls,

  for thus, friends absent speak.

  —JOHN DONNE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  Part One: 1777

  One: Almost Spring

  Two: Spring

  Three: Summer

  Four: Midsummer

  Five: Late Summer

  Six: Early Autumn

  Seven: Mid-Autumn

  Eight: Late Autumn

  Interlude

  Part Two: 1780

  Nine: Winter

  Ten: Winter: The Same Night

  Eleven: Early Spring

  Twelve: Spring

  Thirteen: Summer

  Fourteen: Late Summer

  Fifteen: Early Autumn

  Sixteen: Autumn

  Seventeen: Early Winter

  Interlude

  Part Three: 1781

  Eighteen: Winter

  Nineteen: Spring

  Twenty: Summer

  Twenty-One: Late Summer/Early Autumn

  Postlude

  Epilogue: June 1782

  Afterword

  Author Gratitudes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Books by L. M. Elliott

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prelude

  THE FIRST LETTER ARRIVES:

  Alexander Hamilton to Margarita Schuyler

  Morristown, New Jersey, February 1780

  Though I have not had the happiness of a personal acquaintance with you, I have had the good fortune to see several very pretty pictures of your person and mind which have inspired me with a more than common partiality for both. Among others your sister carries a beautiful copy constantly about her, elegantly drawn by herself, of which she has two or three times favoured me with a sight . . .

  You will no doubt admit it as a full proof of my frankness and good opinion of you, that I with so little ceremony introduce myself to your acquaintance and at the first step make you my confident.

  PEGGY SCHUYLER KICKED OUT FROM UNDER HER heavy blankets, too preoccupied with a letter she had received to sleep. It came from an aide-de-camp to General Washington who proclaimed to be besotted with her sister Eliza—some silver-tongued man named Alexander Hamilton.

  She shoved back the green toile bed curtains, gasping as frigid air pierced her linen chemise. “Good God! Can it possibly be this cold? Again?”

  Teeth chattering, Peggy stirred the embers in the fireplace and dropped a split log from the basket onto them with as little noise as possible. It was still dark. She didn’t want to wake her three younger brothers, slumbering next door. Endearing boys, but what a raucous rabble—especially the seven-year-old, Rensselaer, who had just gone through breeching and was racing around the house crowing about the fact he had finally graduated to wearing pants instead of dresses. For sure, he’d rouse little Cornelia, still in a trundle bed in her parents’ room. And Peggy wanted to analyze Alexander Hamilton’s words more closely, privately, without her mother insisting she read them aloud to the family.

  The splintery wood sparked, sputtered, and caught flame as Peggy hurriedly bundled herself in shawls and slipped her feet into soft buckskin moccasins that the Oneida tribe once gave her father, General Philip Schuyler. They were artfully decorated with porcupine quills and blue-jay feathers.

  Peggy never let her mother see that she had pilfered the colorful slippers from her father’s closet. They were definitely not proper lady shoes. But her feet ached with a strange malady sometimes, especially on shivering days like this, and the moccasins were soft and forgiving. They also reminded Peggy of the vast New York wilderness just a few dozen miles north of their Albany mansion, and the elusive Iroquois who remained loyal to her father and the Patriot cause. Silently gliding through forests of towering oaks and chestnuts, they gathered information on Loyalist Tory Rangers who could strike the city at any moment.

  Quaking, Peggy toasted herself by the fire. “It’s cold enough for Hell to freeze over,” she muttered. “All right, Lord, maybe this is proverb. Are you sending us a sign that our improbable Revolution may actually succeed? Please? If we just screw our courage to the sticking place?”

  Peggy preferred quips to prayer, intelligent bargaining to pleading. Wit was her bayonet, her way of leading a charge. She detested the woman’s role of patiently sitting, smiling like a painted fashion doll while men battled and argued philosophy that could end tyranny. But she knew talking out loud in this manner was ridiculous. Her imaginary conversations were a recent habit, born of being deserted by her two older sisters, with whom Peggy had shared her bed and her every thought for all twenty-one years of her life.

  Born in less than three years from oldest to youngest, the Schuyler sisters had been a giggly, triplet-like brood, tight-knit and entwined. As a trio, they complemented and balanced one another, each recognizing and coaxing out the best in the other two. Like pieces of those new jigsaw puzzles, only put together did the Schuyler sisters present a complete portrait, with the most beautiful and vibrant image of each clearer.

  But Angelica had married, seduced by an ever-so-charming card gambler. And now Eliza, logically next in line to marry, was gone to Washington’s winter headquarters at Morristown to visit their aunt and her husband, who was surgeon general to the Continental Army.

  And Peggy? Here she remained in Albany, alone, feeling bereft not only of her big sisters’ company but somehow of definition and purpose without her arms linked in theirs. She loved her little brothers and sister. But Peggy couldn’t share her heart with them. They couldn’t finish her sentences with her own thoughts the way Eliza and Angelica could.

  Who was she without her big sisters? She had always been “and Peggy,” introduced third whenever the Schuylers greeted guests to their family houses. Witty, elegant Angelica; kind, affable Eliza; and Peggy. Within the circle of family and friends she was always described according to her older sisters’ attributes: “She’s saucy like Angelica. She’s artistic like Eliza.”

  As she stared at the flames, Peggy’s hurt at being left behind turned to annoyance. It would be nice occasionally to be described purely as herself. In truth, with her sisters, Peggy was often reduced to confidante and accomplice. Rarely was she the center of anything. She was beginning to feel like Cinderella, always helping her sisters dress for balls she wasn’t attending, relegated to chores. Peggy was forever helping their mama and watching after the increasing brood of younger siblings.

  And here was this letter, from another male intruder into the Schuyler sisterhood who seemed to think Peggy would happily become handmaiden to a romance that would take away her middle sister, too. This poet-penned aide-de-camp, this Alexander Hamilton, who wrote to introduce himself and to make Peggy his ally in his courtship of Eliza. And the bait to lure her in was complimenting her person and mind as Eliza had depicted it in a pretty miniature painting? As if Peggy was so easily manipulated by flattery.

  But the thought that had kept her tossing and turning? Eliza was obviously falling for this man. Normally her gentle sister would be far too modest to show her artwork to anyone. This was dangerous. Peggy must remain a watchful sentry to Eliza’s enormous heart. She had learned the pitfalls of not being on guard for a sister the hard way with Angelica.

  After lighting a candle, Peggy pulled Hamilton’s letter out from its hiding spot behind the cushion of a wingback armchair next to the hearth. She tucked her feet up under her, huddled in her shawls, and began to read.

  I venture to tell you in confidence, that by some odd contrivance or other, your sister has found out the secret of interesting me in every thing that concerns her.

  Hmpf. As if the sweet Eliza was some calculating enchantress, fumed Peggy. She squinted at the parchment.

  The handwriting was neat and elegant. One would never know Hamilton had written his appeal in the middle of a war. Or in a camp laid waste by four feet of snow that refused to melt—where stubborn, stoic Patriots slept crammed together in tiny log huts, lying side by side with their feet to a fire, to share body warmth and make it through the night without frostbite.

  I have already confessed the influence your sister has gained over me; yet notwithstanding this, I have some things of a very serious and heinous nature to lay to her charge.

  Peggy fairly growled at that line. What could Eliza possibly be guilty of?

  She is most unmercifully handsome and so perverse that she has none of those affectations which are the prerogatives of beauty. Her good sense is destitute of . . . vanity and ostentation. . . . She has good nature affability and vivacity unembellished with that charming frivolousiness which is justly deemed one of the principal accomplishments of a belle.

  Hmpf again. Well, all right, he had that correct. Eliza was all earnestness. She did not play games. She did not pull on heartstrings for amusement. No, that was Angelica. The famed “thief of hearts,” as one officer had called her.

  Peggy dropped Hamilton’s letter. Her room filled with the memory of her sisters’ mingled chimes of laughter. Their reading poetry aloud to one another’s sighs of romantic appreciation. Their harmless gossiping about the dashing

soldiers surrounding their father when he commanded the Northern Army.

  That had all changed the summer of 1777. When New York was burning and Americans were dying in apocalyptic numbers. When Angelica made her own defiant claim for liberty and breathlessly whispered, “I have a secret. Tonight, my dearest sisters, I elope with John Carter! You must help me escape.”

  Part One

  1777

  These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

  —Thomas Paine, “The Crisis, No. 1”

  One

  Almost Spring

  There is something in the behavior of [General Schuyler’s] daughters that makes you acquainted with them instantly. . . . I sat among them like an old Acquaintance, tho’ this only the seventh day since my introduction. . . . [The girls] would not let me leave them without some mark of kindness, and therefore loaded me with Grapes which they plucked fresh from the vines themselves.

  —Tench Tilghman, aide-de-camp to General George Washington

  “IT IS YOUR PLAY, MADEMOISELLE.” JOHN CARTER smiled at Angelica as she hesitated over her cards. She and he were partners in a game of whist. Across the table, facing each other, Peggy and Eliza were paired against them.

  Carter had laid down a six of spades, Peggy an eight of the same suit. To win the trick, Angelica needed to play a higher card than Peggy’s but anticipate what Eliza might hold in her hand. The deck from which they pulled was getting low. Her choice would likely determine the contest.

  “Hearts is trump,” he reminded her. “I wonder. What will be your trick?” A mischievous challenge flickered in Carter’s blue-sky eyes. “Have you counted the cards in the previous rounds? May I hint at the solution?”

  “Oh, but that would be cheating, Mr. Carter!” Eliza protested. “Partners sharing intelligence is against the rules.”

  Angelica flushed at his implication that she had not been keeping track of the played cards or analyzing her opponents’ strategy—both key to winning whist. Lifting her chin, she lightly retorted, “Chaque joueur doit accepter les cartes que la vie lui distribué. Mais une fois qu’il les a en main, lui seul peut décider comment jouer ses cartes pour gagner la partie. . . .”

  “Ahhhh.” Carter nodded, not taking his eyes off her. “You have read the French philosopher Voltaire.”

  “I have read a great many things, sir. This may not be London, but we are still enlightened. You should see my father’s library.”

  “I have not been invited.”

  “C’est facile à remédier. Après ça tours, alors.”

  Eliza held her cards to her face like a fan and whispered behind them, “I hate it when you speak French, Angelica. You know how I struggle with it.”

  But Angelica did not break her gaze with Carter to respond.

  So Peggy did instead. “All she said, sister, is that a player must accept the hand life deals, and only she may decide how to play those cards in order to win her game with fate.”

  Eliza smiled gratefully.

  Peggy didn’t translate that Angelica planned to take Carter into Philip Schuyler’s library after the card game. Eliza would be shocked at the implication of such a tête-à-tête. Perhaps Peggy would simply accompany them, claiming she wanted to retrieve a book from the two hundred shelved there. She’d been plaguing her pretty sister by shadowing her and her admirers to interrupt their wooing ever since Peggy was twelve years old and Angelica turned fifteen. That’s when her eldest sister’s first suitors had begun to flock to the family’s hilltop Georgian mansion. It had been a favorite amusement for a preadolescent Peggy—when she first resented Angelica suddenly treating her like a child and crowding her out of their sisterly triumvirate by sharing secrets about her romances with Eliza but not Peggy—and the cause of much hair-pulling between them.

  It was so odd. The expanse of years between them was so elastic, sometimes no space of consequence at all and other times feeling as insurmountable as a chasm. Now that she was eighteen and Angelica twenty-one, the difference felt like nothing. Although tonight, Peggy was feeling a canyon-wide draft of cold air between them again.

  Angelica did not play her card. The look between her and Carter was searing.

  To Eliza, Peggy said, “I suspect our Angelica is deciding whether to play an ace . . . or a jack . . . saving her ace of spades for the next trick.” She paused. “I suggest your jack, Angelica.” Peggy gave her eldest sister a slight kick under the table to make her play her card while she looked pointedly at Carter to add: “It is always best to shed a knave.”

  He roared with laughter. “Touché! A hit, Miss Peggy, a palpable hit.”

  Peggy recognized that Carter was quoting from the sword-fight scene in the play Hamlet with his comment. She read, too, after all. Perhaps Carter knew that and was trying to play to her vanity about her intellectualism. She refused to take the lure. Peggy didn’t much like the man. For one thing, he was born to British aristocracy. There was something too courtly, too frivolous, too showy about him in his beige-and-green-striped coat, his silk waistcoat embroidered with pink and green flower sprigs. He had actually donned an old-world wig for the evening, which hardly any real Patriot did.

  Yes, Mr. Carter had reportedly fled England to join the cause. Yes, he was as beautiful a man as had ever graced their home. Yes, his European sophistication was exhilarating, especially for Angelica, who had essentially grown up in New York City when their father served in the colony’s assembly. Now occupied by the British, New York City was forbidden enemy territory. The Schuyler sisters were relegated to their hometown of Albany. With its somber Dutch culture and architecture, trading outpost atmosphere, and narrow, muddy streets, it hardly compared.

  So Angelica was restless—despite the young soldiers occupying the city’s garrison and the parade of statesmen who visited to confer about the war with their father. Peggy’s personal favorite had been Benjamin Franklin. He’d called her “wild Peggy.” The way he said it had been more compliment than criticism. His sardonic commentary made her laugh.

  As to Carter? Peggy just couldn’t trust a man whose eyelashes were longer and thicker than her own. He also couldn’t seem to answer to his whereabouts in the past few years without squirming a bit. Besides, he had been ordered by Congress to audit their father’s military account books, to investigate its accusations that General Schuyler had mishandled the Patriot invasion of Canada the previous winter. That alone was enough to damn Carter in Peggy’s mind.

  She glared at him. The criticism of her father for the Canadian debacle was so unfair. No one had anticipated that Quebec would put up such a fight. Everyone assumed French Canadians would want to throw off British rule, too, even become the fourteenth American state. Yet, as commander of the Northern Army, Schuyler was blamed for Benedict Arnold and Richard Montgomery choosing to storm Quebec City during a blizzard and the disastrous retreat that followed.

  Her father wasn’t even there! He’d been ravaged by a horrendous flare-up of gout and remained in camp at the army’s surgeon insistence. He was so ill Peggy’s mother dared the harrowing journey north to care for him with her special teas. Peggy and Eliza had accompanied Catharine on that hazardous trek. Someone had to. Their mother was six months pregnant at the time—she could miscarry on the journey.

  Thinking on the risks her mother had taken to save her husband’s life and the poor untrained huntsmen-soldiers who slogged through the wilds of northern New York to take on British forces made playing the card game whist seem a superficial pastime indeed.

  “Eliza”—Peggy broke the silence of waiting for Angelica’s next play—“do you remember when we went to Ticonderoga to care for Papa?”

  “How could I forget?” Eliza answered. “Oh my goodness, Mr. Carter, the things we saw.”

  Angelica frowned over her cards.

  “Indeed so. But you were very brave, Eliza. Why, we nearly lost her at the very beginning of our journey, Mr. Carter. You see, our father had made himself deathly ill in service to our country. Knowing how concerned he is—always—for the welfare of his soldiers—even when he is racked with violent fluxes—we stopped first at our Saratoga farm to gather supplies for the fort. At Papa’s own expense, of course. When we crossed the Hudson River, our wagon was so laden it tipped the flat-bottomed ferry. We nearly dumped our beloved Eliza into the currents. She would have been swept away, for sure.”