Military Journal, Dr. James Thacher,
January 3, 1780, Morristown
We experienced one of the most tremendous snowstorms ever remembered: no man could endure its violence many minutes without danger to his life. . . . Some of the soldiers were actually covered while in their tents and buried like sheep under the snow.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS . . . SLOOOOOSHHHHHHHHH . . . sssssssssssssss . . . slooooooooshhhhhhh.
For hours, the only sound Peggy had heard was the sweep of her sleigh along the ice-crusted snow, the horses’ struggling trot, and the wind. No birds. No squirrels leaping from branch to branch, scattering ahead of her. Nothing. The world was frozen, suspended in cold and silence.
She wrapped the beaver pelts up around her face so that only her eyes peeped out from the fur. The sun was low in the sky now. If they didn’t make Morristown within two hours, she and the two men escorting her—Private Hines of her father’s guard and Lisbon, the enslaved servant her father most trusted with his horses, his sleds, and the safety of his family when traveling—might freeze to death on the road in the killing night cold. What had she been thinking?
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a’ tiptoe when this day is named. Peggy thought of Shakespeare’s Henry V, convincing his troops to stay the course against their enemy, promising them legendary memories. “All right, Lord,” she murmured, “I absolutely promise that if I make it safe to Morristown that every year on this day I will say my hosannas.”
She had felt so jaunty when they left Albany. Peggy had been bundled happily, sucking in the brisk air, the sun bright, the sky a spring-promising blue. The winds had tasted of freedom. But south of Kingston, in deserted countryside, Peggy may have murdered a pair of kindly draft horses. Not directly, of course, not by her own hand, but it was her fault that the sweet old mares might perish.
A tear crept out of Peggy’s eye and stung her wind-chapped face thinking on the catastrophe. On their second day, when they came to the frozen Wallkill River, Lisbon urged the horses onto the ice to cross. They’d just witnessed another sledge do the same safely. But halfway across, one of the mares spooked and reared, its hooves piercing and cracking the ice as it came back down, plunging both horses into the water up to their chests.
Such accidents happened frequently enough in their frontier world that Peggy and Lisbon knew what to do to save the horses, the sleigh, and themselves. But it had to be done quickly, within moments—or the horses would fight to save themselves and break the ice further, sinking the sleigh and all of them. Or the poor animals would simply expire from the shock of the frigid waters.
“Hurry!” Peggy had cried, tumbling herself off the back of the sled-carriage, where the ice was still solid.
She could hear the horses swimming with their front legs to stay afloat. Panic in their eyes, snorting with terror, the mares stretched their necks out, straining, with their heads sliding back and forth on the unbroken ice in front of them. Thank God the ice was so thick—the horses were engulfed in a self-contained hole cut by their hooves. The white ice around them remained unshattered—for the moment.
“The plank!” Peggy cried.
The men yanked out a flat beam that had been put on the back of the sleigh for this very kind of emergency. They rushed to slip the long board against the horses’ chests, bracing it on the solid ice beyond the animals’ circumference. The mares could then scramble up onto the wood and lunge out of the water. But the peril would not be over with that—the horses would need to hasten forward to jump the sled over the hole, so that it did not sink in the water as well.
“Quickly!” Peggy urged. The men rushed to the horses’ heads, knelt, grabbed the bridles, and pulled, hard, as they scrambled backward, slipping and sliding themselves.
“Come on, girls! Walk on! Get!!” Peggy shouted and clucked.
With the brute muscle and force of fear, the heavy old mares wiggled their knees onto the wooden flooring and then, pushing up, sprung and popped out of the water, sprays of ice shooting off them.
“Trot on! Trot on!” Peggy shrieked as the men ran, careening along the ice, dragging the horses with them. They didn’t stop sliding and skating until they all—humans and horses—scrambled up onto the bank, heaving.
Swiftly, Lisbon wiped down and rubbed the wet horses to get their circulation going, talking to them gently as he worked. But the frost was settled into their legs and the mares could only stumble into Poughkeepsie, wheezing. There, a tavern owner took them, promising to do his best to warm them up and save them. Had he not been a Patriot, Peggy might have been stranded there. But her father’s good name—or perhaps in truth it was the good repute of his riches—convinced the man to swap out a pair of horses to pull her to Morristown. On Schuyler’s credit and her promise, the new pair of horses would be returned to him, or her father would pay the tavern keeper 200 pounds, or $20,000 in Continental currency.
Private Hines had whistled at the price. It was a fortune. The Continental Army was paying him only six dollars a month—and that only if Congress actually coughed up the wages, preferably in hard coin and not its grossly devalued paper money. But that was how precious horses had become in the war-ravaged land.
What if she maimed this pair of horses, too? Or killed them with the cold. Peggy glanced back to gauge the shadows cast on the Watchung Mountains now behind them and to the east. She knew they were nearing Morristown—finally. Washington had chosen the village specifically because the mountain range shielded it from British scouting parties and attack. But the sun was going down. Soon they’d be engulfed in darkness and plummeting temperatures.
“We’ll make it, miss,” Private Hines shouted to reassure her through the scarves wrapped around his head and face. A forty-year-old who’d been assigned to the easier job of Schuyler’s guard after he’d suffered a ruptured hernia, Hines always hunched with some pain. But he seemed devoted to her father, having grown up in the city of Albany. Private Hines had volunteered for the journey, crossed sheepskins across his chest to withstand the winds, and now braced himself on the rails behind her seat, ready to shoot at anyone who threatened her.
Peggy nodded, grateful, and turned around. Her feet were prickling with cold, and she knew that soon she’d be shivering all over.
Another mile dragged on with nothing but thick forest and snow.
Then, what seemed a miracle. Peggy spotted a lone, thin figure standing atop a stump, backlit by the sunset. It seemed to have wings, opening and closing, like an angel. A guardian? Or one of death? Peggy held her breath. Was she so cold she was hallucinating?
But within a few more yards of the sled sliding along, she realized the figure was a sentry. He was slapping his arms to keep warm, and the shawl of his linsey-woolsey hunting shirt was flapping up and down with the motion of his desperate flagellation.
“Ho! Stop and identify yourself!” the sentry shouted in a thin voice as three other fellows dashed from out of a lean-to they’d fashioned of sticks, and aimed muskets at them.
“Peace, lads,” Private Hines called. “We’re friends.”
Peggy flinched at the sight of the soldiers’ ragged appearance. Their breeches and wool stockings were torn and patched. Thin, worn blankets were tied as tight as possible around their bodies with twine. She could barely see their gaunt faces through the towels they’d tied over their tricorn hats and under their chins to cover their ears. One had wrapped whatever pitiable shoes he wore in scraps of cloth. Another—the boy couldn’t have been more than fifteen—stumbled in tall Hessian boots he’d obviously commandeered from a dead foe, which were far too big for his feet.
But to Peggy, they were possibly the most beautiful creatures she’d ever seen.
“This is Dr. Cochran’s niece, come to visit him,” Private Hines called out.
“What’s the password?”
“No idea, son,” Hines called back.
The soldiers didn’t move, eyeing them.
“You going to keep a lady cold and caught in nightfall?” Lisbon demanded.
Peggy was grateful for his bold question and protectiveness of her. But she knew some might not respect an enslaved man being that brave and confident. He had always been like that. Lisbon should be a soldier, thought Peggy, even though she knew her father disapproved of Black troops.
Three of the soldiers lowered their guns. The fourth kept his Brown Bess aimed.
The man on the stump asked, “What’s the name of the good doctor’s wife? Not her Christian name. What her family calls her?”
Peggy pulled the beaver pelts from her face. “G-G-Gitty,” Peggy said. The shivers now had her and she was shaking all over.
One of the sentry posts smacked the arm of the man still pointing his musket at her. “Now look what you gone and done. You must have given her fright. The poor lady is a-shivering.”
The angel-soldier jumped off his stump, landing thigh-deep in snow, and waded to the sleigh. Pointing down the hill and then to the right, he explained to Lisbon how to find the Cochrans’ house. He touched the brim of his hat to Peggy, saying, “Give my respects to your uncle, miss. He saved me from a rattlesnake bite. My skin turned blood-orange. One side was completely paralyzed. Thought I was long gone to Hades, but Dr. Cochran rubbed the bite with mercury ointment and made me drink a quart of olive oil. And here I be.”
He was standing close enough to the sled that in the eerie silence of that snow-muffled forest she could hear his stomach whine and roll over and over in a long, anguished growl. And in the fast-falling twilight, she caught the flash-grimace of starvation pain on his face.
“Oh, sir, please, let me share the dinner I packed from home. I fear I have eaten most of it on the road here. But there is a little roasted chicken and some biscuits left, and dried apples.”
Peggy nearly cried at the response on their faces. The boy swimming in those enormous boots gasped and staggered forward. The man who’d been last to lower his musket bit his lip and rubbed his eye, looked away and wiped his nose with his sleeve, trying to mask his tears. Damning herself for gluttony, she pulled a basket from under her blankets.
The head sentry’s hands trembled as he reached for her offering. “Much obliged, miss,” he choked out, and then carefully divvied up the food equally among them before handing her back the basket.
As Lisbon clucked the horses and they slid away, Peggy heard them saying grace.
Ten minutes gone and they were engulfed in darkness, but not far below and beyond them in a gentle valley, candles were being lit inside houses she couldn’t yet see, little beckoning stars. Finally, in rising moonlight they reached the village and the little white-clapboard house on its edge that held her family—just as snow, big lacy flakes, began to drift down from the heavens.
“Hello in the house!” Lisbon shouted.
The front door opened and out spilled light and warmth, relieved joyful greetings, her uncle, her aunt, Eliza, and then Angelica, too! Peggy had had no idea that her eldest sister had traveled to Morristown as well. No letters with that news had made it through to Albany.
The Schuyler sisters! All together again!
Swept up in a tight embrace of laughter, kisses, and taffeta, Peggy was scooped out of the sled, out of the night, into the little house and its glow.
“That was the cussedest, most foolhardy . . . what a nincompoopa!”
Despite her face being so frozen she could barely feel it, Peggy grinned. “Good evening, Uncle Johnny.”
“Good evening, indeed,” fussed the blunt Irish-American surgeon as Eliza guided Peggy to a chair by the fire. “Quick, girls, pull off those boots and stockings. Rub her feet down. Brisk now. That’s it. The child is like to be frostbit.”
Dr. Cochran poured a golden liquid into a glass, waiting for Peggy’s hands to stop shaking with shivers so he could hand it to her. “And what if you hadn’t made it through, and lay in a snowbank somewhere? You’d be nothing but a pretty corpse, you would. Not found until the thaw when the crocus sprouted. I can hear the poetic laments for you now. And all for the thought of basking in some sunshine of jollity!”
“But I did get through, uncle,” she answered gleefully, despite her teeth chattering.
Cochran snorted. “Aye. The faeries looked after you, sure, Miss Meaghan-fay-Meaghan.” Hearing him use his Irish endearment of her name, Peggy knew he was amused as well as worried. “Here, now.” He took her hand, blew warmth on it, and handed her the goblet. “Drink this. All of it. Straight down.”
“What is it?” Her nose wasn’t working yet, either. It certainly didn’t look like olive oil, although she was as paralyzed with cold as if she had been rattlesnake-bit.
“Rum.” He finally grinned himself.
“Rum?” she asked with surprise. She’d never been allowed spirits other than Madeira before.
“She’ll smell like a pirate, Uncle John,” Eliza whispered.
“And so she should, with the antics she’s been up to!” Cochran crossed his arms. “Drink!”
Angelica winked at her. “Go on.”
Peggy downed the searing liquor. Suddenly she felt her toes.
“Now then,” began Angelica, leaning over and taking Peggy’s face in her hands. “You have come just in time, little sister. There is a ball tonight!”
Peggy could hardly believe her good luck.
Angelica straightened back up. “No time to unpack your trunk. But I have the perfect dress for you.”
Peggy nodded happily. How many times she had longed to borrow her eldest sister’s exquisite gowns!
“Perfect dress for what?” Cochran demanded, placing the decanter on a table and coming back to the hearth to keep watch on his patient.
“For the ball!”
“What? No, madam. This child needs to stay by a fire.”
“Oh, Uncle J,” Angelica crooned, “what better way for her to warm up than to dance?” She threaded her arm under his and squeezed it. “Eliza and I will keep watch over her.”
Peggy nodded. Angelica always made the best arguments.
Cochran hesitated, then blustered, “You are full of the blarney, you are, Mrs. Carter. And dangerously so, I might add. To think I saved the Marquis de Lafayette from his wounds at Brandywine, only to have him almost expire from merrymaking at your Boston home. There was hell for me to pay with His Excellency for letting that lad’s departure to France be delayed because of overconsumption at your table. Washington was desperate for Lafayette to plead our cause to the French king.”
“Surely the marquis will return with good news from King Louis this spring,” Eliza interrupted. “Don’t you think, uncle?”
“Good Lord willing. We are surely in need.” Cochran inspected Peggy again. “There. I see some rose in your cheeks now.” He smiled.
Peggy nodded. All better now. Always better when the Schuyler sisters were together, plotting merriment.
“Then she is absolutely fine to accompany us to the ball.” Angelica pressed her point.
Peggy nodded emphatically. “Please, uncle?”
Cochran ignored Peggy and continued fussing at Angelica. “Do you want her developing quinsy? Is good-timing that important to you that you would risk your sister’s health?”
At that, Angelica finally bristled. “It is important for morale. General Washington endorses these assemblies himself, as you well know, uncle. He and thirty officers have paid four hundred dollars apiece to subscribe to a series of balls.”
“Four hundred dollars!” breathed Eliza.
“Yes,” Angelica continued, “quite a financial sacrifice on their part to create a happy diversion for the officers in camp. Your gallant Colonel Hamilton told me just the other day that he only draws sixty-dollars-a-month salary. So this subscription has cost him more than a year’s commission. Poor man.” She looked pointedly at Eliza.
Peggy frowned. Even in the haze of the rum saturating her body and mind, she wondered why Eliza’s suitor would be telling Angelica about his wages.
“Poor man, pshaw,” Cochran snorted. “The man is living on air these days anyway—he doesn’t need money.” He smiled at Eliza, but talked to Peggy. “The lad comes to deliver a message from His Excellency and this one,” he gestured toward Eliza, “opens the door. Shot through the heart, he was, at first sight. Every night since I come home weary from the hospital and want to stretch out on the settee for a wee bit of rest before supper and what do I find? It occupied by these earnestly chatting lovers.”
Eliza’s face flushed pink. But she rose to join her sister’s argument. “Oh, uncle, if the officers are paying that much for a night of diversion from all their cares, we must all go to provide them partners on the dance floor.”
Uh-oh, thought Peggy. Eliza was already too protective of this man. Good thing she had come.
Cochran paused, softening as everyone did at Eliza’s sweet-natured concerns. He walked to the window and pressed his face against the panes. “It’s snowing again. Hard. What is this—the fourth storm this month? On top of all that came before.” He watched a few more moments. “From the way it’s coming down, it will probably drop a few more inches.” He looked back to the sisters and to his wife, who had just entered with a bowl of soup for Peggy. “Gitty, my love, talk some sense to these girls.”
“About what, my dear?”
“This infernal ball!”
“Oh, doesn’t it sound wonderful?” The plump little lady brightened. “I hear the general has asked the military bands to come with French horns and flutes. Won’t it be marvelous to have more than just a violin?”
“NO!” Cochran roared. “This child cannot go. She has been out in this below-freezing weather for days. She must go to bed by a stoked fire. Immediately!”
Peggy frowned. Now that her face was unfrozen, she felt her lips pout. She started to open her mouth to protest, but Angelica put her delicate hand on Peggy’s shoulder and shook her head slightly. Looking up into her sister’s beautiful face, Peggy recognized a look of warning that said Angelica had a salvo ready. So she stayed silent.
“Oh, uncle, it’s far too early for bedtime,” Angelica scoffed, adding, “What time is it anyway?”
“Wh-wh-what?” Cochran seemed oddly flustered by the question. He glanced out the window, ostensibly to gauge the fall of darkness for his answer. “I suspect half past five.”
He paced back to the hearth, hands on his hips, looking at Angelica with a sudden nervousness. Then he surveyed Peggy carefully before asking in a completely new tone of voice, “What think you of the outing, lass?”
Peggy hiccuped.
Instantly, Angelica gathered her up, taking Eliza’s hand, too, and danced them out of the room toward the stairs. “Wait till you see how pretty she’ll be, uncle,” Angelica chirped from the hallway.
“I’ll be driving that sleigh, I will,” Cochran shouted after them. “I’ve bandaged too many a local girl tossed into the snow out of overturned sleds, driven helter-skelter by rogues! Lovesick officers! Idiots!”
The girls giggled and swept up the stairs as one.
“Why did you ask him the time, Angelica? And why did that change his attitude?” Eliza whispered.
“Let’s just say, sister, that our beloved Uncle Johnny lost his pocket watch at gaming tables while visiting me in Boston, in a way the retelling would make him blush! He definitely would not want Aunt Gitty to know of it.”