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THERE ARE PLACES in this world that wash you off the solid ground and, like a waterfall, send you hurtling over the precipice onto the jagged rocks of hard reality.
Jockey Hollow was, for me, such a place.
The first thing to strike me as our sleigh jingled into the forested hills of Jockey Hollow was how the pine forest suddenly fell away—only stumps of trees remained as far as the eye could see, almost as if some Goliath had reached down to strip the earth bare. The second was the eerie silence, as if every bird and woodland creature had fled—or been devoured. As a military sled piled with logs glided past, pulled through the snow by a bag-of-bones horse and a ragged little fifer boy, the scent of human waste assaulted my nostrils. And a worse scent, too. A scent that I could only name, even now, as suffering.
For we stood amidst the real encampment of the Continental army.
Four miles away from the orderly streets of Morristown, where Washington and his officers conducted the business of war and hosted glittering winter’s balls, the ten thousand unwashed, unclothed, veteran soldiers lived in a wilderness city of log huts, made only of notched oak logs sealed with mud and straw.
Trapped by snow. And starving.
I’d seen soldiers in hard times before. In Albany, I’d seen undisciplined Yankee riflemen, untrained Negro boys sent as fodder, and soldiers with neither tents to shelter them nor hats to cover their heads. But that was three years ago.
This was a gaunt ghost of an army now made up of scarecrow men whose hollowed, haunted eyes left me to wonder how they were alive at all. They were so hungry they had resorted to boiling their old leather shoes. Shoes they needed, lest they stand upon the snow in bare feet and frostbite deaden their toes, a fate they avoided by wrapping them in rags.
I didn’t know that while I’d donned heels and danced and drank rum punch with officers, ordinary soldiers were sleeping twelve to each log hut, living on half-rations, and wearing what only laughingly could be called a uniform. And now that I did know it, I wanted to retch up every morsel I’d eaten for the shame of it.
“Betsy,” my uncle said, softly, trying to draw me to follow him. But his efforts were to no avail, because in the swirl of my horror, I’d noticed a man hanging by one arm on a picket, tied to one of the few remaining trees, red blood flowing from his shivering ribs, his bare back laid open in gory gashes that revealed bone. And it looked as if his shoulder had dislocated.
“Dear God, he needs help,” I said, starting for the poor fellow, my petticoats dragging in the snow.
My uncle caught me by the arm. “It’s a military matter, Betsy.”
As a general’s daughter, I’d known soldiers forced to run the gauntlet and slashed by their fellows. But the sorts of punishment meted out by the British army—a thousand lashes like to make a man die—I’d never seen in ours. And this man’s suffering seemed an utter barbarity. So I broke away from my uncle and rushed to the bloody soldier.
What I would have done for him, I didn’t know. Untie him. Bandage him. Give him my cloak?
I only knew that I must do something until the miserable fellow looked up at me from his bindings and croaked, “Listen to good Dr. Bones, lass.” His words slurred. “There’s nothing you can do. I was caught robbing the town folks.”
“You’ve been punished for it, amply,” I said. “By whose orders are you left here to—”
“I was d-deserting,” explained the half-frozen miscreant, his eyes glassy and his teeth chattering against the cold and the pain. “Better than the imbecility in staying and starving for a country that cares nothing for us. They’re likely to shoot or hang me c-come morning. So be an angel of mercy and pray for me to die.”
A startled sob caught in my throat.
“Elizabeth!” my uncle barked. This time, he brooked no resistance, pulling me away by the arm and taking such long strides that I was forced to take two steps for his every one.
“He can’t be left there in agony, Uncle.”
“The officers will decide that. I thought your father would have taught you this. I’d never have brought you with me if I thought otherwise.”
As a general, my father, too, must have ordered men flogged or maybe even hanged. I’d never questioned Papa’s decisions, or his wisdom, or his mercy. But to torture a man—to torture all these men . . .
“This is no place for ladies,” my uncle was saying. Yet I spotted women everywhere. Some even with children, also gaunt and starved. Camp followers, we called them, intimating they were prostitutes. Some were, but more were wives of the soldiers who, having been burned out of their homes by the British, had nowhere else to go. The women boiled water. They sewed. They cleaned clothes. And I was shamed at myself for not bearing up better when so many of them managed to.
“I’m sorry,” I said, to my uncle. “I will better conduct myself.”
But he’d thought better of my presence entirely. “What you’ll do is go to the Wick House until I fetch you. General St. Claire has his headquarters there.”
If he’d been the officer to order a man lashed to the bone, I didn’t think I could face him.
Sensing my reluctance, my uncle said, “Don’t keep me from tending the men.”
Sorry for giving my uncle trouble, I nodded and grabbed up my skirts, then marched up a snowy path marked with blood from barefooted soldiers. I knocked upon the door of the little wooden farmhouse, but it wasn’t St. Claire who answered.
It was Alexander Hamilton.
Somewhat dazed, I asked, “Is General St. Claire here?”
“I’m awaiting his return.” Hamilton frowned. “What the devil are you doing here?” At the moment, I was so shaken, I
