2

Troop Inspection

Eliza’s bedroom & the hallway, the Schuyler Mansion

Albany, New York

November 1777

It was almost an hour later when Eliza returned home. She stashed the last bundle of fabric behind a wall with the others and slipped into the house without being seen by anyone other than a garden boy raking the gravel paths of the garden and a kitchen maid ferrying foodstuffs from the kitchen in the north wing. Inside, half a dozen servants scurried up and down the stairs, but she came upon no one from the family or worse, any guests.

As she scampered down the hallway, a towheaded boy peeked out of the nursery. “You’re late.”

“Does Mama know?” Eliza asked her brother. John Bradstreet Schuyler, twelve, nodded somberly. The heir-apparent was deemed too young for the ball. Annoyed to have been left out of the festivities and stuck in the nursery with the littles, he frowned at Eliza’s carelessness.

Philip Jeremiah, nine, appeared next to his brother and tugged on Eliza’s skirts to entice her to play. Rensselaer, four, followed with glee and honey-covered hands. Cornelia, the baby, cooed from her nurse’s arms, eager to join in the revelry.

Eliza laughed, took her little sister, and kissed her on both cheeks. “You’re all getting me sticky!” she told the boys, who were running circles around her. “All right. One quick loop around the room. Catch me if you can!”

She was a favorite of the nursery, being the only older sister who would play on the floor with them or chase them around. After obliging them for one run around the chimney, she dashed upstairs and ducked into her room, which was the only dark one in the house. Inside, Dot was lighting the lamps on the wall sconces and atop the bureau.

Eliza collapsed in the middle of her four-poster bed. “I made it!”

“Miss Eliza! For shame!” said Dot. A stout woman of indeterminate middle age, Dot had once been the sisters’ wet nurse, and long years of intimacy had led to an easy—some would say too easy— familiarity of discourse between the maid and her charges. “Your sisters are ready and you look as if you had just come back from a run in the countryside.” She opened the wardrobe and reached into the thicket of clothing inside. “We don’t have much time!”

Only then did Eliza notice the gown hanging on a dress form in a corner of the room. She caught her breath. The gown was undeniably gorgeous, with a burgundy overskirt and pale green brocade petticoats. It sagged awkwardly in the middle however, without a pannier to hold up its ample skirts—which is what Dot held in her hands when she turned from the wardrobe.

Eliza did her best to focus on the tangle of straps and slats of the pannier, which looked as cumbersome as a carriage horse’s harness, rather than the gorgeous gown.

“But I told Mama I didn’t want a fancy gown,” she wailed. “It’s unseemly for civilians to be dressed in frippery when our soldiers are fighting for our freedom in rags!”

Dot shrugged. “It’s here now. And you didn’t ask her to have it made.” She stifled a giggle. “And it’s not like our boys can wear it to battle.”

Eliza frowned, unwilling to give in. “It’s not right. For the past year I have spent all my time canvassing the ladies of Albany to spend less on themselves and more on the war effort. If I appear in a gown as sumptuous as this, they’ll think I’m a hypocrite.”

“If you don’t appear in it,” Dot said, “your mother will jerk a knot in your neck.” She grabbed the loose end of the bow cinching the bodice of Eliza’s dress and gave it a sharp tug.

Eliza slid across the bed, out of her maid’s reach.

“And that hue is much, much too red for my coloring! I’ll look like a bruised peach.”

“A little powder,” Dot said practically, reaching again for the ribbons on Eliza’s bodice.

Eliza was shaking with fury. “This is so manipulative of Mama! She must know it contravenes all my principles! And she shouldn’t be wasting so much money on a dress when the family fortunes are so tight!”

Dot bit back a smile, which Eliza wouldn’t have seen, because her eyes were still glued to the gown. “Don’t put it on for your mother. Put it on for Colonel Hamilton,” she teased. Dot had been spending too much time talking to Peggy it seemed.

Eliza almost snarled. She did not care a whit what the celebrated soldier would think nor what any man would think. She dressed for comfort, not for competition.

“But, Miss Eliza . . .,” pleaded Dot. “Your mother.”

“Fine! Fine! I’ll wear it!” she said, as if she were agreeing to spend the day with her spinster aunt Rensselaer, who was so pious that all she would allow her nieces to do was to read to her from the Bible for hours on end, and so deaf that they had to shout themselves hoarse to be heard. Besides, she knew full well Mrs. Schuyler’s wrath would fall on Dot if she did not put on the dress. “I suppose we’d better get started. It will take at least an hour to put it on—”

But she was interrupted by a pair of peremptory claps from outside her door.

“Girls! Inspection time! The first guests will be arriving any minute!” Mrs. Schuyler may have been the wife of a general, but there were times when Eliza thought her mother sounded more like a Prussian instructor before a drill.

With glee, Eliza realized there was no time to put on the fancy dress now.

“Quickly, just help me look presentable,” she told Dot. She smoothed her hair and straightened her dress as Dot brushed a little powder on her face and dabbed a little color on her lips. Her maid looked back longingly at the dazzling new dress.

Angelica and Peggy were already standing in the hallway when Eliza sidled behind them, hoping to escape notice. Angelica was resplendent in an amber gown, heavily embroidered with trails of green-leaved purple irises. Wide panniers beneath her dress gave her a striking hourglass silhouette, accentuated by a ribbed corset that cinched her already tiny waist even smaller, and pushed her breasts up and out. The expanse of bare skin was heavily powdered, as was her neck, face, and forehead, so that her skin had a moon-white purity, broken only by the pink pout of her mouth and flashing eyes. A powdered pompadour wig added nearly half a foot to her height, densely curled on top of her head and trailing between her bare shoulder blades in a few simple rag curls.

Mrs. Schuyler, dressed in a heavy gown of purple so dark it was nearly black, looked her eldest daughter up and down, then nodded once. “Impeccable.”

She motioned Angelica back and Peggy forward. Her gown was sea-foam green, complementing her emerald eyes. It was embroidered with blooming flowers rendered in brilliant amethyst, and connected by a delicate tracery of vines woven from thread of gold. Her panniers were smaller than her oldest sister’s, which only brought out the natural advantages of her lithe figure, as supple as a willow’s branch. Though her skin was more lightly powdered, her cleavage was just as pronounced as Angelica’s. As usual she had elected to wear her own hair. The waist-length tresses had been elaborately piled on top of her head in a pouf nearly as tall as Angelica’s wig. Eliza couldn’t imagine how Peggy and Dot had achieved such a sculptural effect in so short a time, but judging from the whiff of bacon she caught, they must have used enough lard pomade to fry up a full rasher.

Mrs. Schuyler pursed her lips and pinched the fabric of her youngest daughter’s sleeve between her fingers. “I do not believe I recognize the flower, Margarita.”

Peggy smiled bashfully. “It is called a lotus, ma’am. Apparently, it grows in the gardens of Cathay.”

Mrs. Schuyler was silent a moment. Then she nodded her head—the equivalent, for the sober matron, of a bear hug.

“Flawless,” she said. Then, sighing: “Elizabeth. Step forward, please.”

Eliza bit back a sigh of her own. She should have known she wouldn’t get away so easily.

Angelica and Peggy parted like theater curtains, and Eliza took a step forward. She was dressed in what she’d been wearing all day, a simple gown of solid mauve, its skirt pleated but unamplified by hoops or panniers, and delicately draped to reveal a darker purple panel beneath. The purple lacing in the bodice ran up the front rather than back, leaving almost no décolletage in view, though what skin was left uncovered was all but concealed beneath an intricately worked lace shawl, which Eliza had stitched herself.

Mrs. Schuyler’s expression didn’t change, but when she pinched Eliza’s sleeve as she had Peggy’s, she caught a little skin with her fingers. Eliza did her best not to wince.

“Is this . . . cotton?” Mrs. Schuyler said in a horrified voice.

Eliza nodded proudly. “American grown and woven, in the province of Georgia.” She shook her head. “I mean, the state of Georgia.”

Mrs. Schuyler turned away from her middle daughter even before she finished speaking, her dark eyes finding Dot’s, who stood well back against the wall behind her mistress. “I thought I selected the burgundy gown for Miss Eliza to wear.”

“It’s not Dot’s fault, Mama,” Eliza interjected. “The burgundy gown is too dark for my skin tone.”

Mrs. Schuyler didn’t take her eyes from Dot’s. “If she would spend less time in the sun as I ask,” she said, not to her daughter but to her daughter’s maid, “she wouldn’t have this problem. She is as freckled as a farmhand, and what boy wants to see that? A little powder to bring the down the tone and it will look regal.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Dot said.

“Mama,” Eliza tried again, “I think it incumbent upon patriotic ladies to lead by example. How can we deck ourselves out in exotic frippery and stuff ourselves with sweetmeats and pastries when so many of our soldiers are shivering in threadbare rags and subsiding on bones and beans?”

Mrs. Schuyler didn’t answer immediately. Then:

“Any moment now this house will be filled with more than a hundred representatives of the province, including more than a dozen suitable bachelors. Your sisters are suitably prepared to meet them, but, alas, you seem bound and determined to alienate them by downplaying the gifts with which our Creator has blessed you. In a more perfect world, you might be able to attract a husband with your mind, but as women we must play the hand that was dealt us. You will put on the burgundy dress that I procured for you—at no inconsiderable expense—and the wig and powder, and you will appear downstairs with a smile on your face, whether that smile is painted on or genuine. And you will do so within the hour.”

Eliza felt her cheeks color and wished she had used more powder, so she wouldn’t give away her anger. “New York isn’t a province anymore,” she said. “It has been a state since fourth of July, 1776.”

Mrs. Schuyler bit her lip. She drew in a calming breath before speaking. “Young men don’t like drab dresses,” she said in a clipped voice, “let alone girls who know more words than they do.” She turned back to Dot. “You will dress Miss Eliza in the gown I selected and not let her out of her room until her skin is powdered as white as the Catskill range.”

“No,” said Eliza, “she will not.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said no, Mama. I won’t wear that dress. I am perfectly presentable and I have no wish to change, nor is there time. If I’m not mistaken, the first guests have arrived.”

Mrs. Schuyler looked as if she would boil over like a kettle, but the sound of carriages in the driveway seemed to change her mind. “I suppose there is always one spinster in the family,” she said coldly. “You two,” she continued, addressing Angelica and Peggy. “Downstairs on hostess duty. I want your smiles so bright that no one even notices the wallpaper peeling in the entrance hall. As for you, Elizabeth, try to be as inconspicuous as possible. Perhaps I can convince the gathering I have only two daughters.”

Angelica and Peggy flashed sympathetic looks at Eliza before following their mother downstairs.

“I don’t understand you, Miss Eliza,” Dot said, tying the bows in the back of the dress a little tighter to accentuate Eliza’s waist. “You had already decided to wear the dress. Why kick up such a fuss? It just draws Mrs. Schuyler’s wrath down on you.”

“Oh, if it wasn’t the dress, it would be something else,” Eliza said as Dot pushed and tugged at her dress. “Mama needs no excuse to scold me.”

Dot had to agree with that.

“I don’t know why she cares so much,” Eliza said now. “This is hardly the most prominent party of the year.”

“Yes, but the Van Rensselaers are coming and the Livingstons and, of course, that famous young Colonel Hamilton. Husband season is open. The hounds are on the loose.”

Eliza’s face brightened. “A good thing, then, that I have no intention of being a fox!”