Our cook, Dinah, had spent the day preparing local delicacies under Mama’s supervision. All the servants were so busy catering to the needs of our guests that Mama had enlisted us and Dinah’s daughter, our Jenny, to help. Like her mother, Jenny had a petite stature, but where our lady’s maid had always been shy, Dinah issued orders like a battlefield commander.
Even to us.
“Miss Betsy and Miss Peggy, we’ll start with the oysters. Take in the trays. Jenny, go fetch the butter.” Peggy wrinkled her nose even as Dinah gave us a look that brooked no argument.
We did just what she said.
Burgoyne and his officers joined Papa at the long banquet table while the womenfolk of the household served them oysters followed by a course of striped bass our servants caught fresh from the river, along with seasoned cabbage and carrots, all to be washed down with Papa’s best claret and Madeira wine and finished with a dessert of spiced bonnyclabber made from soured milk.
And if I’d not been a Christian, I’d have wished that they choked on it.
It was no small trouble to keep the British officers and their wives and children fed, especially since some rascal was milking the cows before our servants could get the cream. And though I tried to keep my little brothers from trouble, the next morning Jeremiah flung open the door to the room where Burgoyne and his officers slept. “You’re all my prisoners!” he cried, then slammed the door again, laughing like the arch little fellow he was.
Prince, our butler, was not amused.
Carrying himself with a royal demeanor that defied his enslavement and justified his name, Prince was a dark, stately man, who was the most trusted servant in the household and whose disapproving tone was almost more intimidating than Papa’s. “It would reflect best upon you, Miss Betsy, to keep your brothers in better order. And tell Miss Peggy I have my eyes on her.”
I swallowed. “What’s Peggy done?”
Prince tilted his head in the direction of the main hall. “She’s flirting with the Redcoats. Flashing those dark eyes of hers. Don’t either of you girls get in your heads that you can play the same trick on me twice.”
I bit my lip, remembering how we’d lured Prince from his bed near the back door so that Angelica could slip away to meet her beau. He hadn’t forgotten, and might have been angrier about it than either of my parents. Trying to reassure him, I said, “Don’t worry. Neither of us have any use for these lobsterbacks.”
So imagine my surprise to find my pretty sister sitting next to Burgoyne, the monster himself. The two of them, just sipping coffee there amongst Mama’s silver, glass, and candles!
Peggy was laughing, having somehow charmed the British general into giving her his silver shoe buckles as a token of esteem. Worse, only a moment later, an unmarried British officer asked if Peggy might take him for a turn in the nursery where we grew Papa’s plums, and she agreed.
Pulling my sister aside under some pretext, I asked, “What can you be thinking?”
“Papa said to be kind,” she replied, clasping the general’s sparkling shoe buckles with no intention of giving them up. “Besides, I don’t remember you shunning that handsome Lieutenant André when he was here.”
“The war was different then.” More civilized, it had seemed. And farther away. Besides, I didn’t have to shun men; they never noticed me with my sisters flitting about. But André was the sort of man who seemed to notice everything, and when he’d commented favorably on my drawings, I’d beat down the stirrings of attraction by reminding myself he was an enemy.
“The war is no different now,” Peggy argued. “After all, we’ve only won a battle at Saratoga. If we should still lose the war, one of us might have to marry a king’s man to save the family.”
I sputtered in exasperation and more than a little astonishment. She should’ve known better than to behave in a way that might confirm suspicions that our family sympathized with the British. And as a general’s daughter, she should’ve known better than to speak openly about defeat. But I was most horrified by her apparent willingness to wed an enemy, no matter her reasons. “I’d sooner marry a Barbary pirate!”
“Well, I wish you would,” Peggy called over her shoulder as she flounced off. “Because I fear Papa will never consent to let me marry until you do.”
I would’ve been more cross with her if it weren’t for the fact that the kinder we were to the prisoners, the more it shamed them. A lesson I learned that evening as we gathered in the blue parlor near the fire and the British general offered my father an apology.
I wanted to think Burgoyne meant to apologize for the poor people who had the misfortune to be caught before his advancing army. Or even that he might apologize for the king, who had forced us all to this war. But instead he said to Papa, “Your hospitality is too much for a man who has ravaged your lands and burned your home. I regret the event and the reasons that occasioned it.”
All eyes turned to Papa, who regretted the loss of life and his command more than the loss of his house—all three of which were occasioned, in part, by this man. And yet my father forced himself to a nod of acknowledgment. “It is the fate of war. If I had thought it necessary to save the lives of my men, I’d have done the same. Say no more about it.”
This was, I thought, what it meant to be noble.
Not a title conveyed by a king. Not by birth or blood. But through a learned and practiced strength of
