All I have to do is surrender to James Monroe’s wish for reconciliation.
And I should. I know that I should. I have every reason to put the past behind me.
But as I stand here, trying to form conciliatory words, I am over aware of my husband’s portrait in its gilded frame, his extraordinary eyes looking down upon me. I turn my head toward the arched entryway, where his ghostly marbled bust has beckoned me, each night, like an intimate and a stranger. And I glance past that, to the doorway of the little green study in which I can still remember him toiling at his mahogany and satinwood cylinder desk, leather-bound books piled high on either side of him, ink smudges upon his hands, his quill scratching and candle burning late into the night.
Forgiven and forgotten.
If I am famous for anything, it’s for being a forgiving woman. And as for the forgetting . . . there are so many things I should like to forget. Forgetting would lift the weighty cloak of the past from my shoulders and make the present so much easier. But memory unalterably sets our compass, and guides us down paths we might have preferred never to have walked at all. And my path goes back all the way to the start. To the fathers of this country who fought and bled beneath a starry banner of red, white, and blue. To the mothers who were the menders, the sewers of flags, the darners of uniforms, the binders of wounds. And, in my case, the quilter of the torn scraps of old paper that remind me why we ever fought in the first place . . .
Part OneA War for Independence
Chapter One
You have called together a host of savages, and turned them loose to scalp our women and children and lay our country waste.
—ANONYMOUS AMERICAN SOLDIER TO BRITISH GENERAL JOHN BURGOYNE
October 17, 1777
The Pastures
Albany, New York
I WAS SOMEONE BEFORE I met Alexander Hamilton.
Not someone famous or important or with a learned philosophical understanding of all that was at stake in our revolution. Not a warrior or a philosopher or statesman.
But I was a patriot.
I was no unformed skein of wool for Hamilton to weave together into any tapestry he wished. That’s important for me to remember now, when every thread of my life has become tangled with everything he was. Important, I think, in sorting out what can be forgiven, to remember my own experiences—the ones filled with my own yearnings that had nothing to do with him.
I was, long before he came into my life, a young woman struggling to understand her place in a changing world. And torn, even then, between loyalty, duty, and honor in the face of betrayal.
Torn as I stood in my family’s potato field surrounded by wounded soldiers, debating a choice that would never have given me pause before. Should I tend to the injured Redcoats while under the gaze of mistrustful American soldiers?
“Water, please, Miss Schuyler,” croaked a British regular, lying in a furrow beneath one of our orchard trees.
He’d been evacuated here to Albany with at least a thousand others from Saratoga, where a brutal battle had been fought ten days earlier. Our hospital, churches, and pastures were now overrun with casualties from both armies and we struggled to care for them all. The least I could do was fetch the Redcoat a pitcher of water.
Instead, I hesitated, a knot of anxiety tightening in my throat, for I was now the daughter of a disgraced American general who had been relieved of his command under suspicion of treason.
Facing court-martial, my father already stood accused of taking bribes from the British and surrendering an American fortress to the enemy. For his daughter to be seen caring for the same enemy now . . .
I feared for anything I might do to worsen Papa’s situation, so even as my face heated with shame, I turned away from the Redcoat to help others, forcing myself to remember that these British had been ravaging the whole of the Hudson Valley for months and terrorizing my countrymen.
They are the cause of this bloodshed, I told myself.
For the king’s men had captured and occupied New York City, burned our state’s first capital at Kingston to the ground, and during the fighting upon the plains of Saratoga, they had set fire to our summerhouse, leaving it in ruin. From here in the relative safety of the Pastures, we’d seen only the faintest glow of battlefield fires against the distant evening sky, but even now the acrid smell and taste of soot carried to us downriver. And I thought, We’ve set the whole world on fire.
Two summers before, our thirteen colonies declared independence from the British crown, but now our celebratory bonfires had given way to the flames of war. I hoped, following this American victory at Saratoga, that we were finally winning it. So I tended to a Continental scout who held a gory wound on his scalp that had reopened since a doctor last saw him.
“How bad is it, Miss Schuyler?” he asked, grimacing against the pain as I washed the wound and pulled my needle through the gash at his hairline.
“Fortunately, your brow is cool and it does not look to have festered,” I replied. Fresh red blood oozed warmly over my fingertips. “Try not to pull it open again,” I told the young soldier as I finished my stitches and cut the thread with a hunting knife.
While my father taught me to ride, fish, and know my way in the wild, my mother had trained me in rudimentary medicine while tending tenants, Indians, and one frontier army or another. And since I
