The ball was opened by his Excellency the General. When this man unbends from his station, and its weighty functions, he is even then like a philosopher, who mixes with the amusements of the world, that he may teach it what is right, or turn its trifles into instruction.
—Pennsylvania Packet
His Excellency . . . danced upwards of three hours without once sitting down. Upon the whole we had a pretty little frisk.
—Brigadier General Nathaniel Greene
AS GUESTS ARRIVED, SHAKING SNOW FROM THEIR outer cloaks, Peggy hid in a corner, her back turned to the dance floor. She was desperately trying to yank up her dress and fluff out some of the lace ornamenting the neckline of the ball gown Angelica had put her into. If one could call it a neckline. Cut tight from the shoulders, the ruby-colored satin dropped to her waist in a wide-open V that was filled by a stomacher of overlapping rows of puffed, creamy lace. Along its top and from under the edges of her shoulders peeked a diaphanous fringe of neatly embroidered silk organza—floaty, gorgeous, but so . . . so revealing.
Plus, Angelica had tied her stays so tight and the stomacher was so stiff, Peggy’s breasts were compressed and pushed up in the most embarrassing manner. She was terrified they might escape during one of the dance’s bows or skipping circles. If only she could pull the stomacher up a bit, she thought, as she squirmed and tugged. Or maybe she could tuck her breasts down some. . . .
“Huzzah! Here she is—Aglaea herself.”
Startled, Peggy whirled around, her hand still stuck in the top of her dress.
The man chuckled, quickly lowering his eyes, and bowed. “Miss Schuyler.”
Peggy dropped her hands to her sides, mortified, hastily curtsying. As she rose, she realized with horror who stood before her: Alexander Hamilton.
“Finally, I have the honor to meet the last of the three Schuyler Graces.” His violet-blue eyes quickly flicked up and down her figure as he added, “I see the Greeks were right; the youngest is aptly named splendor.”
Did he think she didn’t see his amusement at her, that rapid undressing look, or his rather shameless smirk? Peggy felt her eyebrow shoot up although she kept her answer ballroom-courteous. First, to let this cocky aide-de-camp know that she knew precisely the reference he was making to Greek literature. “You are too kind, sir. I would hardly claim the role of superior beauty that mythology grants the youngest of the three Graces. But Eliza is surely the middle Grace—Euphrosyne—the epitome of delight and joyfulness. Don’t you think?”
“Indeed, Miss Peggy, your sister Eliza is all that.” His smile twitched—with surprise, a tinge of admiration?—before he continued, “Her lovely portrait of you certainly captured your beauty. She did not warn me, however, of your—”
“My education?” Peggy interrupted, but her tone was light, almost flirtatious. What was the matter with her? There was just something about this man that invited such frothy repartee.
“Your quick wit,” Hamilton bantered back.
“We have met before, you know,” said Peggy.
He frowned. A moment of uncertainty clouded his smooth, fair face and then dissipated. “I think not, mademoiselle,” he said. “I would not forget you.”
Using her French to emphasize her point, Peggy told him that it was indeed true they had met and that he had called her a nymph: “Mais c’est vrai. La dernière fois que nous nous sommes rencontrés, vous m’avez appelée une nymphe.”
Hamilton crossed his arms, stepped back, and shook his head. But he grinned, intrigued. “Impossible. You are a nymph, certainement. Mais une telle beauté est inoubliable. Your beauty is completely unforgettable.”
She shrugged. “Whether you care to admit it or not, we have met.”
“Perhaps in a dream, then?” he quipped.
“Hardly. More of a nightmare, I’d call it.”
Hamilton clutched his chest. “A nightmare? Ouch! Shot through the heart, Miss Peggy.” He squinted at her a bit, searching his memory, which gave her a moment to assess him. He was trim and delicate, not much taller than she, but his lithe build kept him from seeming short. And as beautiful as those huge, intense eyes were, they were close-set. The bridge of his nose was also low, almost like it had been pressed flat by a hot poker, so that when he frowned, his eyebrows seemed to truly knit together. It was, above all else, an expressive face—his moods probably easy to read despite any efforts he might make to hide them.
Finally, Hamilton confessed that he simply could not remember. “Clearly a moment of madness on my part. Please tell me why our meeting was almost a nightmare?”
Now Peggy frowned slightly as memories of the injured at Albany’s hospital rushed into her mind. “It was in Albany. At the hospital. I was speaking with General Arnold and—”
“That was you?” he asked with genuine surprise. “I am very sorry, Miss Peggy, but”—he gestured toward her as he continued—“you look very”—he paused—“very different now, mademoiselle.”
Peggy flushed. “It is Angelica’s dress,” she blurted.
“Ah, it has her . . . aura. But it is most becoming on you, Miss Peggy. You will most certainly achieve what I had hoped with your presence—denying your sister’s absolute sway over our hapless officers by dividing our attentions.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Peggy answered without thinking. She had become so accustomed to playing second fiddle, to Angelica especially.
He cocked his head. “You are too modest.”
“Not really,” Peggy said with a small laugh. “Just honest. And speaking honestly, you might remember that day we met, I was rather annoyed for my father that you did not bother to go see him in Saratoga when you visited General Gates. It was my father who set up our army to be able to vanquish Burgoyne. You know that, don’t you?”
Hamilton was taken aback. “I . . . I . . . my mission was so rushed, Miss Peggy. And politics . . . Congress . . . your father at that time . . .”
“Was persona non grata?”
Suddenly, Hamilton looked very young as the realization sank in that he may have once deeply insulted the father of the woman he was now courting. “I hope General Schuyler will not hold that against me.”
“Papa is not like that.” She paused, noting Hamilton called her father “general” even though he no longer served as such. “That is if we—his three Graces—tell Papa not to be.” Peggy was not ready yet to make things easy for this man in his pursuit of Eliza. The aide-de-camp had much to prove.
Hamilton considered her a moment before speaking again—clearly unsure of stratagem. He chose sincerity. “I will depend upon your mercy, then, Miss Peggy. Because surely no man has been as struck through with love as I am with admiration and feeling for your sister’s generosity of spirit and beauty.”
Well, she thought, no verbal strutting in that, no claiming that against his better judgment was Eliza luring him into love—as he had bantered in his letter. She’d give him a chance at least.
Hamilton clearly observed Peggy soften. “Have we negotiated an alliance, then?”
“I will discuss it with my sisters, my fellow Graces,” Peggy quipped, defaulting to ballroom playfulness. “Perhaps we must cast dice to read the future regarding you. Will there be some at the card tables tonight?”
Hamilton followed her lead. “If not, I will ride to the soldiers’ huts to find some! May I escort you to your sisters, Miss Peggy? You must not stand in this corner, hiding your glory.” He held out his hand.
She took it. As they crossed the sanded floorboards of the recently built army storehouse that would serve as the night’s dance hall, Hamilton added, “We must find you an appropriate suitor. No Hephaestus for my Aglaea.”
Peggy made a face. “I would hope not! The deformed, cast-off lover of Aphrodite? Wasn’t he her half brother, too?”
Hamilton laughed outright. It was an honest laugh. Peggy liked it.
“I can see finding an appropriate match for you is going to be quite the challenge, Miss Peggy. But tonight will be a good start. Tonight’s snowfall seems to have kept most ladies at home. They are not blessed with the Schuyler sisters’ intrepidness. There are a mere sixteen ladies to almost sixty officers. I hope you are ready to dance.”
“Oh, look!” Eliza caught her breath and squeezed Peggy’s hand. “The general!”
At the threshold stood His Excellency, General George Washington. The room hushed.
Tall, broad-shouldered, lean, with long-stretched, muscular legs, Washington towered over all the other men in the room. He bowed his head to the assembly, noble yet unassuming, as he quickly began the circuit of greeting everyone. On his arm, barely reaching his chest, was his diminutive wife, Martha, or Lady Washington, as the soldiers fondly called her. She was slightly plump, and her heart-shaped, dimpled face carried a sweet impishness in it.
“I so wish to be like her,” Eliza whispered as she waited with Peggy and Angelica for their turn with His Excellency. “She is kind to everyone, even preening fools. Aunt Gitty told me that when Mrs. Washington made it through the snows to camp, all the Morristown ladies donned their most elegant dresses and jewels to call on her. They arrived at the arranged time and there she sat, in a very plain brown dress of homespun, a neat frilled cap on her head, and no ornamentation except a miniature portrait of her husband hanging from her neck.
“Mrs. Washington was knitting stockings for the soldiers!” Eliza laughed lightly. “The ladies were quite stunned that she was not all done up as they. But Mrs. Washington was her amiable, cheerful self, chatting about her pity for the poor, naked soldiers, and ‘my old man,’ as she calls His Excellency. Her knitting needles were going the whole time, a ball of yarn in her outside pocket. She was careful to make her guests feel at ease with her welcoming conversation. Yet they were ashamed of their idle hands. They left and immediately started up several sewing circles.”
Eliza beamed, bouncing slightly on her toes as the Washingtons neared. “Oh, and she also told me that she keeps more than a dozen spinning wheels going round the clock at Mount Vernon. Imagine. We must talk to Mama about doing the same in our barn. Mrs. Washington has learned to design her own dresses, too, with what can be found here in our states. No reliance on Europe. We can do that, Peggy. She made two dresses of cotton, striped with silk—the stripes coming from ravelings of old, crimson damask chair covers. Isn’t that marvelous!”
“Hmpf. Well, I don’t think I will be making gowns for myself out of frayed furniture,” mumbled Angelica. “And someone should tell her to take that enormous satin bow off the bodice she wears tonight. It does nothing for her figure.”
Eliza and Peggy looked at her with shock. Their eldest sister’s sense of humor had always been rapier sharp, but never catty, never envious or mean.
Noticing their surprise, Angelica murmured, “I can’t believe I just said that.”
“Eliza, my dear.” Martha Washington held out both hands to clasp Eliza’s and kissed her on the cheek. “You look absolutely radiant. I’m sure our Alexander is swooning. There is much talk about you two among the general’s family.”
Eliza blushed.
Martha Washington turned to Angelica. “Mrs. Carter, what a lovely dress.”
And then she came to Peggy. “This must the youngest of the Schuyler sisters. Your sister brags much upon your talents, child. I look forward to our friendship.” She turned to her husband. “Mr. Washington.”
“Yes, my dearest?”
“This is Philip Schuyler’s third daughter we have so looked forward to meeting.”
Peggy felt her knees go weak as His Excellency approached, took her hand, and bowed. “I am relieved to see you have made it here safely, Miss Schuyler. I hope your trip was not too taxing. Although I can imagine the dangers and the discomforts you experienced. I am truly sorry that we are not able to better guard and maintain the roads for our fairest visitors. The best we have been able to do is send the infantry out to tramp down the snows so sleds can pass.” His voice was resonant, deep, but breathy, as if he pulled in air with effort. Peggy knew his brother had died of consumption, and the general’s face was pockmarked, a lingering sign of having survived smallpox. Don’t let this man become ill, she thought. The country would not survive General Washington dying.
Aloud she demurred, “No, sir. Not too uncomfortable. The trip was simply long.”
“Ah, you are as your uncle described—a spirited young woman. Bravo. He is quite proud of you, you know. And protective. Good Dr. Bones was beside himself when he learned that you had embarked on this journey. I thought he might demand I send out a regiment to collect you.”
“Dr. Bones?”
General Washington nodded. His smile was drawn tight across his lips—he was reputed to rarely laugh outright or grin, but he was clearly entertained with a memory of her uncle. “We call him that because of an amusing song he sings to lift our mood. I don’t know what we would do without his medical acumen and his jokes.”
“He is a man of great mirth, indeed, sir.” Peggy marveled at how Washington looked at her so deferentially, so full in the face with his gray-blue eyes, as if he had all the evening to spend listening to her, as if there were not dozens of far more important guests impatiently awaiting his attention. “I should not monopolize you, Your Excellency.”
“I suppose you are right. And yet truth be told, I would far prefer retreating to a corner to talk with you, your sisters, and my beloved wife. May I beg a dance with you later?”
Dancing with His Excellency, the supreme commander of the War of Independence, the man all fighting Patriots depended on to lead them to victory, to protect them against starvation and disease, and to save them from hanging as traitors! “Yes, please, sir,” she answered.
General Washington bowed again with sincere courtliness. Seemingly unaware of—or perhaps studiously ignoring—the effect he had on people, His Excellency moved on to the next group eagerly awaiting an audience with him.
To begin the dancing, Washington led Lucy Knox, the wife of his trusted artillery general, out in front of the assembly for a minuet.
“Now there is someone worth talking to,” Angelica said to Peggy. “Mrs. Knox is quite the scholar. Everyone in Boston talks about it. That’s how she met her husband. She frequented his bookshop constantly. He advised her on what to buy and read next. He is a self-made intellectual, you know. His knowledge of cannonade and warfare is completely gleaned from reading books. Isn’t that marvelous—a wondrous irony if ever there was one given how he has bested the most trained of British artillery units. Mrs. Knox’s father, on the other hand, was a royal provincial governor of Massachusetts. He was incensed when his daughter fell in love with a poor man—no pedigree or breeding, a mere merchant. And a Patriot! Her parents completely disowned her when she married. Lucy gave up everything—wealth, her family—for love.”
“For love of General Knox?” Peggy couldn’t help her surprise. It was a marvel much discussed that Knox weighed something like three hundred pounds while the Continental Army starved.
Hamilton was standing beside the sisters and the Cochrans and laughed at Peggy’s astonishment. “One cannot predict love, Miss Peggy,” he said.
Eliza blushed again. Peggy realized her sister was going to be blushing on and off all night long.
“Aye, child,” Cochran chimed in. “For his part, General Knox is besotted with his bride, despite her dollop of autocratic tendencies and fits o’ passion. He is a good soul and laughs along with jests at his expense. The night before we attacked those blasted Hessians at Trenton, our men stood for hours. Standing in sleet, wet to the bone, waiting to cross the Delaware River clogged thick with ice, in nothing but rowboats—their apprehension grew like a rising fog. His Excellency sensed it and dispelled their fears by teasing General Knox. Before setting foot into a boat in which General Knox already sat, His Excellency prodded him with his boot. ‘Shift yourself over, Harry,’ he said, ‘but do it slowly or you’ll swamp the boat. And don’t swing your’”—Cochran winked for the word—“‘or you’ll tip us over.’”
Peggy laughed. She knew she shouldn’t at such off-color jokes, but she delighted in her uncle’s outrageous sense of mischief.
“Dr. Cochran!” protested Aunt Gertrude.
“Now then, Gitty, it’s just a bit of fun that His Excellency did a-purpose to help the lads laugh a bit. The question—‘What did the general say?’—went down the line of those poor, freezing bastards, followed by hearty laughter and renewed energy.”
“Honestly, husband,” she reprimanded him. “The girls.”
Cochran winked at Peggy as the military band, augmented with some fiddlers, French horn players, and flutists from Morristown, raised their instruments.
According to custom, the musicians were waiting for Mrs. Knox to select her music. A ball’s opening minuets followed a strict, formal ritual. The ranking gentleman and the most important lady present danced first, followed in descending order of social standing by other couples, one after the other. Each pair danced solo, performing for the assembled watchers. It was theater not for the fainthearted. A minuet’s steps were complex, intricate, requiring the two dancers to move in symmetrical patterns across the entire dance floor, away and then back to each other—so there was no hiding mistakes or clumsiness during those five minutes of music. Dancers were expected to glide as if they skated along ice, four steps to six beats of melody, while never breaking their gaze from each other and ignoring the witnessing throng that analyzed and gossiped about them.
“Watch this,” murmured Hamilton with obvious awe. “His Excellency is as good a dancer as horseman.”
Mrs. Knox called an old favorite, the “Philadelphia Minuet,” and the musicians began a 3/4-time melody that Peggy knew well from her dancing classes. Mrs. Knox and the general did “honors” to the crowd and then to each other—sinking, slowly, by bending their knees, heels together, their arms extended slightly in an open arc, like birds sunning their wings. Then they promenaded, his right hand palm up holding her left hand, palm down. Forward then backward in small tiptoe steps, a pause as a foot was held up, heel down, another slight plié bend of the knees, and repeat.
Halfway through the minuet, they drifted apart, mirroring each other in Z patterns that pulled away to opposite corners of the floor. A few elegant jetés switching from one foot to the other midleap, a few hops ending with one foot extended, toes pointed, always on the beat, always exactly together.
Finally reunited, hands held, General Washington returned Mrs. Knox to their opening position, parading backward, to conclude with an elegant bow.
Everyone applauded. Women sighed and murmured how they hoped the general would ask them for a dance as they awaited the next brave pair to step onto the floor. General Greene led out Widow Ford, whose home served as headquarters. Washington took the floor again with the vivacious twenty-four-year-old Caty Greene. Senior officers performed one after another, and then it was the turn for the next tier of importance, the general’s “family”—his five aides-de-camp. There was a long silence and pause as his cohorts turned to Hamilton.
“Go on, Hammie. The general typically puts you at the head of our table opposite him. So you must have rank,” prodded Tench Tilghman. Peggy had recognized him instantly—he was the Marylander who Washington had sent to Albany five years earlier to help Schuyler negotiate an alliance with the Iroquois Confederacy. His hair was now graying, and the ten or so years’ difference between him and Hamilton showed clearly.
“Yes, you’re our little lion,” teased Robert Harrison, another thirtysomething Marylander on the general’s staff. He elbowed Hamilton.
“Of all of us, you best know the ways of Cupid,” added an Irish-born doctor named James McHenry, who now acted as secretary to Washington. “And what better way to show it than by the minuet.” He ribbed Hamilton. “Besides, your head is totally in the clouds these days, my friend, so you will float across the floor.”
Eliza blushed.
“It is true, my dear.” Martha Washington took Eliza’s arm. “I heard from one of the Ford children . . .” She paused and explained to Peggy, “Mrs. Ford is kind enough to rent her house to the general for his headquarters, but she and her four children remain in residence as well. Her eldest son told me that Colonel Hamilton shares our daily password with him so the boy can visit friends in the village and still gain entry to his own home after dark. These poor villagers, we certainly disrupt their lives.”
“Madam, I beg you not to share this story; it will show me for the fool I am,” Hamilton pleaded.
“Oh, you must tell, then, Lady Washington!” said McHenry.
Martha laughed, like a charming little bell pealing. “It seems our Colonel Hamilton’s mind—which we all so admire—completely failed him after a visit with our dear Eliza. He was so preoccupied he could not remember that day’s password. Had Master Ford not snuck out and whispered it to him, our guard would never have let Colonel Hamilton reenter. He would have spent the night like that tomcat I named after him, yowling at the perimeters of the house, looking for a way in.”
Hamilton’s friends guffawed and punched his shoulder.
“A tomcat?” Peggy asked.
“Yes, Miss Peggy,” Harrison answered. “Our young squire has been looking for love ardently.”
“And now, it seems he has found it,” Martha concluded. “Come, Colonel. The minuet awaits you.”
Peggy stepped back so nothing but air stood between Hamilton and her sister. Yet Hamilton hesitated. Peggy suddenly realized there was a shadow of panic on his face. Did he know how? There was no faking a minuet, no way to simply mimic a partner’s movements. One had to know the steps, had to have internalized the rhythms, as they weren’t always obvious with the music’s phrasings. Peggy knew nothing about Hamilton’s background—whether he would have had the advantage of a dancing master. She glanced at Eliza.
Her sister’s luminous rich-brown eyes were fixed on Hamilton’s and radiated reassurance. Eliza nodded ever so slightly at him, smiled, and mouthed, “It’s all right.” Hamilton took a deep breath and took her hand.
It was magic.
Eliza swept out onto the floor with a poise that stunned Peggy. Such confidence—the likes of which she had never witnessed in her middle sister before. As Eliza turned, the pleated train of her à la française dress sailed in pretty swells behind her, like a swan on still waters. At first Hamilton moved with stilted, stiff dignity. But with each lilting phrase of the flutes, each near pass with Eliza, each momentary brush with her beautifully billowing skirts, each fleeting touch of hands, he gained a buoyancy, a beauty of step that was breathtaking. Their movements gained harmony until together, Eliza and her suitor embodied the musical metaphor of courtship that the minuet was first designed to celebrate and display.
It was all palpable, poetic urgency as they slowly spiraled toward each other in gradually shrinking circles for that exquisite moment they touched, right hand to right hand. Two delicious rotations with their hands held and then the bittersweet agony of withdrawing, hands still outstretched and beckoning, a plea for reuniting, before they had to repeat those separating snake patterns of steps away from each other. Even then, never did their gaze break—Hamilton’s an insecure hunger, Eliza’s a shy acceptance. When they did their final honors to their spellbound audience, Peggy could see that Eliza and Hamilton breathed in-out, in-out in tandem—the strings of their souls now tuned to match each other’s pitch, their hearts’ pulse now beats of the same melody.
The poise Peggy had noted in Eliza—it wasn’t mere confidence, she realized. It was the power of love, the largesse gained by coaxing out the best of another human being, the promise of being there during dangers and unknowns, the leap of faith needed to take a risk together. In that minuet, Peggy witnessed her sister give her enormous heart to Alexander Hamilton.
No one dared follow that heart-wrenchingly gorgeous minuet. So the band struck up a lively 6/8-time piece called “Lady Washington’s Quick Step” for the contredanse, or “country dances”—where couples danced together in long facing lines, men on one side, ladies on the other. For hours Peggy danced. Hop-step-step, forward-back, clap-clap, circling and changing places, skipping down the outside lines, weaving and threading through chains of dancers.
Laughter, breathlessness, joy. This was what she had been craving.
She danced with Tilghman, Harrison, another aide-de-camp named Robert Kidder Meade, the captain of Washington’s personal guard, Major Gibbs, another dozen lads whose names she never caught, and His Excellency’s very own nephew, a tall, pretty boy named George Augustine. Hamilton partnered her twice as well, but mostly he tried to occupy Eliza.
Around midnight, General Washington asked for Peggy’s hand to a dance. Trembling at the honor, Peggy followed him to the lead couple position, at the top of the two lines. There, it was her privilege to call the song. She hesitated—many dance songs had been renamed to political references or to honor battles. Her choice would be akin to a man making a toast. She caught Angelica’s eye. Her sister stood with Hamilton in the third couple position. Angelica returned her gaze quizzically, as if to say, Everyone’s waiting, little sister.
Peggy looked back to the general, and with her chin lifted and her eyebrow raised, she called for “Burgoyne’s Defeat.” Even over the fiddlers, she could hear it—the general chuckled. So clearly he did know that her papa had contributed just as much as Gates to that critical battle!
The next eight minutes were perhaps the best of her life to that day. She and His Excellency—the legendary General George Washington—joined hands with the couple next to them, circled to the right, then to the left, let go, cast off so that she and the general walked down the outside of the two lines, to rejoin at the funnel’s bottom and parade back through. Then they moved down to the position of second couple for the repeat. As she joined hands with Angelica for a four-person circle, her big sister leaned over and whispered, “Excellent choice!”
For such a tall man, Washington was remarkably light on his feet, catlike in grace, and completely delighted with the spritely melody. Peggy memorized the feel of every turn, every bow, every skip with him. She knew that if they all came out of this war, independent, alive, and whole, she would recount the privilege of “getting a touch of General George Washington”—as all the women that night called the experience of dancing with the man in whom they placed all their hopes and trust their very lives.
At the end of their dance, she was limping a bit. She had been dancing for hours at that point. She didn’t care. But General Washington did. “Miss Schuyler, I must insist that you sit for a moment. We have taken advantage of your generosity. You dance with such grace and good humor, we have all forgotten that you arrived just this evening, after hours of hard, cold travel. You must be exhausted.”
“Oh no, sir, I could dance for hours more.” She beamed up at him.
“Then I defer to your mercy, for my legs are fatigued.” He guided her to a chair.
She knew it was a gracious lie and sat gratefully.
“Gentlemen,” Washington called, holding his hand up to silence the musicians. “We must pause for a moment to allow our gallant ladies to catch their breath and our wonderful musicians to rest their fingers.”
All sixteen ladies smiled with relief, and suddenly looked tremendously tired. As they fluttered into seats, Washington announced, “I have been waiting to bring out my punch until such a break.” He motioned to the servants standing along the walls, who promptly carried in a large bowl. “A glass for everyone, and then a toast.”
When everyone held a tin mug or glass filled with aromatic liquor, Washington raised his and said, “To liberty, our fellowship, and most particularly tonight to the ladies who braved the fiercest winter of the century to bring us happiness.”
“Hear, hear!”
One sip and Peggy’s eyes watered and throat burned.
Tilghman, Harrison, McHenry, and Meade had all ended up standing near Peggy and Angelica. Tilghman noticed her grimace at the punch. “Be careful of that, Miss Peggy, there is quite a bit of whiskey, rum, and Madeira in that.”
She sniffed at it, preparing to try again, and decided against the adventure. “Perhaps I’ll just hold it,” she said.
“Oh, I’ll take that off your hands,” said McHenry. “We mustn’t waste such excellent spirits in this awful winter.”
The aides noticed Eliza and Hamilton across the dance floor, talking.
“Hamilton’s a gone man,” quipped Harrison.
“How could he not be?” said Tilghman. “Miss Eliza has the most lively dark eyes I have ever seen. They radiate good temper and benevolence.”
Angelica and Peggy looked at each other knowingly. They had suspected in that visit Tilghman made to Albany that he was smitten with Eliza.
“Poor Cornelia,” Tilghman murmured. “I hope Alex didn’t break her heart.”
“I warned her,” brayed McHenry. “I told her that one man is oft more dangerous to a woman than a whole army. And I could tell she was a passing fancy. She has turned, as I suspected into, ‘a mere rant, th’effusion of a brain oppress’d with love’s distempered train.’”
“Quoting yourself, Mac?” Harrison asked with a laugh.
“Ah no. ‘Twas penned for Hammie by our dear friend Samuel Blachley Webb last month. It is nicely turned, so I memorized it. He wrote all the right sentiments: ‘She’s but—sweet sir, nay do not fret, She’s but—a beautiful brunette.’”
Peggy did not like this McHenry at all. Was he the source of Hamilton’s letter calling love a weakness? Who was Cornelia? And what about Hamilton’s flirtation with Kitty Livingston that Benedict Arnold had mentioned?
But before Peggy could ask the aide-de-camp who he was talking about, before she could rise up to protect her sister, the music started again. McHenry pulled Peggy back into the crowd, as people again gathered to frolic on the dance floor.
Peggy tried to keep her eye on Eliza, to gauge her interaction with Hamilton. But her watchful eye was always drawn to Angelica, even within the lovely sea of dancers. Angelica kept surfacing like a beautiful shimmering fish. Her dress was slim and form-fitting despite her recently giving birth to a baby girl and the most elaborate of any that night—a cream-tissue taffeta shot-through with silver metallic threads, its skirt ornamented with ribbons of twisted silk gimp. Peggy wondered fleetingly where Carter was—in the flurry of getting her primped and dressed and into the sled and back into the snow for the ball, Peggy hadn’t thought to ask.
Of course, that night, since there were four men to each woman, the ladies partnered with many officers besides their husbands. So Peggy wasn’t shocked that Angelica danced with the same abandon and flirtatious effervescence she had before she married. Not even when she noticed Hamilton draw Angelica in a bit too close as she pirouetted under his arm, not even when they lingered in that allemande turn, when couples’ arms entwined in a pretzel-like clasp. That night, against the bitter cold dark of the worst winter anyone could remember, snow falling yet again, and the sure knowledge that come spring, their desperate fight against the British would renew, everyone danced with a do-or-die kind of exuberance that might have scandalized in peacetime.
At two a.m. the revelers scattered through the snow back to their quarters, the ball over. Peggy, Angelica, and Eliza bundled together in their sled, exhausted, Eliza flushed with the kiss Hamilton had pressed to the palm of her gloved hand. As their sleigh pulled away, they could hear Washington’s aides-de-camp defiantly singing to the heavens the Patriots’ cheeky takeoff on the British grenadiers traditional fight song:
“Vain Britons, boast no longer, with proud indignity,
By land your conquering legions, your matchless strength at sea,
Since we, your braver sons, incensed, our swords have girded on . . .”
As the male voices reached the song’s final line, Peggy linked arms with her sisters, and laughing with rebellious abandon, the Schuyler women shouted with them:
“Huzzah, huzzah, huzzah, huzzah, for war and Washington!”