February 19, 1778
Albany
MEN THINK STITCHERY the most demure of occupations—all they see is gently bred girls, their heads bent in domestic pursuit, their hands kept busy and out of mischief. But my mother knew sewing circles for the wheels of conspiracy that they actually are. At least amongst sisters. Which was why Mama wasn’t about to leave us to our own devices.
Papa might have forgiven me, but my mother was still wroth. “You girls are dallying,” she accused from her rocking chair in the yellow parlor, her own knitting needles clicking and clacking under her experienced hands. “Especially you, Betsy.”
I pressed my lips together without offering a defense of myself, intent on not losing count of my stitches. But Peggy lifted her pretty head of dark curls to complain. “We’ve been knitting since sunrise; if we don’t take a rest, we’re going to split stitches and ruin the stockings.”
“There’s no time to worry about workmanship,” Mama snapped. Her special urgency was because the Committee of Safety and Correspondence was offering eight shillings to the first family in Albany to produce three pairs of two-threaded stockings for the soldiers billeted in our town.
Being one of the wealthiest families, we would not take the money, of course. But because we were beset by recent scandals, and Papa’s court-martial had not yet been convened to clear his name, Mama wished to burnish our reputation by knitting stockings for the cause. After all, with Albany consumed in a near hysteria of suspicion and accusation, our jail was currently filled with formerly prominent citizens accused of being enemies to this country.
I was still desperate to do something to redeem myself and my family—something more than knitting stockings in a warm parlor with frost on the windows. Fortunately, an opportunity presented itself when my father emerged from his study and called for Prince to fetch him his hat and coat.
“I’m going to the hospital,” Papa announced.
He was restless. For years, urgent letters from General Washington had come to us day and night, under seal and from riders on frothing mounts, but once the British were gone from our home, we no longer received any word from headquarters at all.
And the silence was deafening.
In what seemed almost a fit of defiance, Papa rebuilt our Saratoga house in a mere twenty-nine days, salvaging nails and hinges and knobs. Then he paced at the windows, staring beyond the fine trees to a country that was still at war . . . without him. He was a general without a command. A soldier without a battle to fight.
And somehow, I felt that way, too. As my father stooped to kiss Mama on his way out, I quickly finished my stocking and asked, “Can I go with you, Papa?”
I think he knew that I shared his restlessness and discontent, because Papa rescued me from my mother’s withering glare by asking, “Can you spare Betsy? She’d be a help today. Peggy doesn’t have the stomach for it, but Betsy’s good with the soldiers. And Arnold likes her.”
Benedict Arnold, he meant. The Hero of Saratoga.
Having led a charge in the battle amidst a hailstorm of grapeshot and musket balls, General Arnold had taken a bullet to the leg that shattered his bone. And his patriotism was so unimpeachable that his friendship bolstered Papa’s badly bruised reputation.
It was probably for that reason that Mama agreed to part with me. I was a little sorry to abandon Peggy, who feigned the long-suffering look of a wounded soldier left behind. Still, Papa wasn’t wrong about Peg’s delicate stomach; she’d retched at the sight of a soldier whose face had been half torn off by a cannonball and none of the doctors wanted her back, whereas I knew how to make myself useful.
“Hurry while the horses are being brought out,” Papa whispered. “Before your mother changes her mind.”
I grinned. It was a grin that faded when we neared the barracks and passed a small gathering of patriot soldiers huddled together around campfires upon which they made paltry cakes of nothing more than water and flour.
These men did not salute.
One of them even spat as we passed.
Green Mountain Boys, I thought. Rude backwoods riflemen Papa once commanded who adored General Gates and had spread the rumor about Papa’s supposed treason. Dr. Franklin famously said we must all hang together, or we would surely hang separately. Well, I wished he’d told the militia.
But if Papa feared them, he didn’t show it.
Instead he rode on, contemptuous of the insult. Still, I knew he felt it, because he said, “I spoke for independence when I served in the Continental Congress. Now, blood has been spilled, widows made, children orphaned, and soldiers left half-naked, sick, and starving. I count it my duty to do for them what I can, whether I am in uniform or not, with rank and dignity, or without. Whether they spit at me for it, or not.”
Letting go the reins of my mare for a moment, I reached with one mittened hand to touch him on his mount beside me, to let him know how much I felt pride in being his daughter.
And I hoped to make him proud of me, too.
When we reached the piazza at the two-story hospital, I dismounted like a soldier and collected a parcel of shirts and bandages from the saddle, tucking it under my arm. Then I took a deep breath, knowing the hospital air was often putrid.
And yet, those lingering in either of the hospital wings were the lucky ones. They had a roof and walls to protect them against the snowfall. The hospital could only accommodate five hundred beds—and even the floor of our church at the center of town had no more room, so many wounded soldiers had to make do with tent covers. And there weren’t enough of those either.
We’d scarcely gone through the front door before a grizzled veteran with a bloodstained bandage tied about one eye actually had the temerity to shout in Papa’s face, “Where’s our pay?”
I
