Page 15 of My Dear Hamilton

Chapter Thirteen

August 1781

Albany

O UR ARMY WOULD risk everything in Yorktown.

There, in Virginia, Lafayette had somehow cornered the British general Cornwallis. And success relied upon the trustworthiness of James Armistead, the black spy who was posing as a runaway slave in the British camp and feeding Lafayette critical intelligence. Papa, who was privy to the strategy, seemed confident of victory. And I tried to be, too.

But we’d been losing for so long, and now, with a child on the way, I had more to lose than ever before. After seven years of fighting, we’d so many times seen victory slip away. Only for the flower of our youth to perish ingloriously for a cause that might never be won. And in my secret heart, hope became to me a fleeting mirage. No matter how desperately I reached for it, it felt always just beyond my grasp.

So I dared not believe my husband when he wrote to me at my father’s house, where I’d taken refuge with my family, to promise, Cheer yourself with the assurance of never more being separated after the war. My object to be happy in a quiet retreat with my better angel.

I felt like no angel.

I had neither wisdom nor peace nor the power to protect those I held dear. To keep me safe, Alexander had sent me home, where all I could do was await news of the war.

Until the war suddenly came to us.

“Bar the doors,” Papa said, his command punctuated by a clamor of silver and plates as we sprang from the table.

For years, the enemy had been trying to seize or kill my father. And now our fears were finally at hand. A stranger had come to the back gate, insisting my father come outside.

Fortunately, Papa had been forewarned by his spy network that they would use just such a ruse to lure him out of the house, and now he barked, “Upstairs!”

Racing like a much younger man, Papa took the stairs two at a time to get his weapons. Meanwhile Angelica grabbed her daughter and I grasped the first little one within my reach—my three-year-old nephew, who’d been dozing in the window seat—then hurried up the stairs behind my father.

At the landing, I stopped to pull the shutters closed. That’s when we heard the shrill war cry that turned my knees to water. I caught a glance in the yard below of men in moccasins and feathers—Mohawks or Loyalists disguised as Indians, I couldn’t be sure. But what I did know was that it was a war party, and a loud commotion at the back door told me that they’d overpowered our guards.

They’re in the house! I fought down the panic, for my sake, and for that of the babe in my womb. Would it all end in tragedy before I met my beloved child?

Not if the Schuyler family had anything to say about it. My seventeen-year-old brother, Johnny, grabbed muskets from the cabinet in the hall. Papa threw open a window and fired a shot from his pistol as we heard the grunts of men locked in struggle below stairs.

Meanwhile, my five-year-old sister wept, clinging to my father’s knees. “They’ve come for you, Papa. We won’t let them get you!”

Just then, we heard the wail of an infant below, and a sickly terror gripped me.

“Where’s the baby?” Mama cried, her usually stern voice betraying panic.

Dear God . In all the chaos, we’d left my new baby sister, Catherine, sleeping in her cradle by the front door. We’d left her. And now our enemies had breached the door.

“They won’t harm her,” Angelica said. If there were Iroquois with them, they might take her. And that I couldn’t allow. I started for the stairway, but Angelica grabbed my arm. “You’re pregnant.”

“I must get her,” I replied without a second thought. I was the best runner, a strong climber, the one who adventured like a boy while Angelica buried her nose in books and Peggy preened in front of a mirror.

And yet, Peggy said, “I’ll go.”

“No!” I cried after her. But Peggy dashed to the stairs—her figure a bobbing blur along the walnut banister of our elegant staircase. I crept down after her, feeling faint with fear as the shouts and scuffles of fight from the back of the house escalated. A moment later, Peggy rushed back, the baby bundled in her arms. “Hurry!” I cried from the landing, reaching down for Peggy to surrender the baby to me as a crash sounded and war whoops echoed throughout the house.

Just a few steps farther and...

A hulking white man with a hatchet lunged from the dining room, grabbed Peggy, and shook her. “Wench, where is your master?”

He’d mistaken her for an indentured servant. Maybe because, due to the heat, we hadn’t dressed for dinner. Whatever the reason, Peggy’s eyes narrowed in contempt and confusion, and I thought it would be just like her to say something she shouldn’t with her very last breath on earth.

Instead, my little sister masterfully transformed her expression into servility. “General Schuyler’s gone to alarm the town. He was warned you were coming. Please, sir, that’s all I know.”

Just then, I glanced up to the hidden top of the stairs to see Papa, pistol in hand, his expression murderous. I shook my head at him and pleaded with my eyes for him to stay where he was, out of sight, because the brute was buying Peggy’s clever ruse.

“Please let me go.” Peggy sniveled. “I tell you truthfully, he’s gone!”

Biting out a silent curse, Papa disappeared into one of the bedrooms. And then, taking advantage of Peggy’s lie, he shouted out an open window. “Come on, my brave fellows, surround the house and capture the scoundrels!”

It was enough to convince our marauders that Papa’s patriot forces had arrived to rescue us. And, in frustration, the villain holding Peggy shoved her so violently that she fell at the foot of the stairs, trying to shield the wailing infant.

The man lifted his tomahawk as if to butcher them both, and I yelled, “Don’t you dare, you devil!”

But perhaps he only meant it to frighten us, for when he brought the hatchet down, the blade buried itself in my father’s fine wood railing with a thunk, sending a spray of wood chips into Peggy’s hair. Then he fled through the entry hall, from whence a clang of falling silver rang out. Meanwhile Peggy called down hell and brimstone after him as he escaped with his booty.

The intruders melted away from the house as suddenly as they’d come, but they’d dragged away three of our guardsmen as prisoners. And before the attack had even subsided, I flew down to help Peggy rise. “Dear God, are you hurt?”

“We’re both unharmed,” she said, though there was a tremble in her voice. “Can you take her?”

I accepted my wailing infant sister into my arms, and an immediate rush of relief flooded me—for her and the baby in my womb. We were safe. All of us. We’d survived the assault. “We all have you to thank,” I told Peggy. “That was incredibly brave.”

She ran shaking fingers along the line where the hatchet re mained buried in the wood, then peered up at me with uncharacteristic humility. “I knew it’s what you would’ve done, Betsy, but I could hardly let you do it. So I had no choice but to be brave.”

It was possibly the sweetest, most tender moment we’d ever shared as sisters, and I couldn’t resist hugging her. Realizing that perhaps I had always misjudged her a little.

Mama offered comfort to my terrified siblings while Papa snapped orders to a surviving soldier to ride for help.

And I went to tend the wounded.

Without hesitation, I tore the hem of my own muslin gown to make bandages. I thought nothing of it. Nor should I have. The attack on our home stripped from me and my sisters any remaining illusions that we might go on as dainty ladies in such a fraught enterprise as a fight for freedom. And so much the better. I vowed to myself that if our attackers came back, it wouldn’t only be my father and his sons who armed themselves with muskets.

I would bear one, too. Because there was no safety for the wife or child of a revolutionary but in victory.

***

October 18, 1781

Albany

How strange it is to recall that though I met my husband in the coldest winter, in the darkest hour of the war, I met Aaron Burr on a shining sunny day of thanksgiving.

“They’re saying your husband is a great hero, Mrs. Hamilton,” the man said when I found him waiting in the blue parlor for an interview with my father. One of Papa’s guards informed me that we had a caller—a veteran who’d resigned from service due to failing health, though his unforgettable hazel eyes flashed with vigor. And he appeared every inch the urbane gentleman in a tailored suit of gray satin.

I’d come to tell him that Papa had gone to town, but the promise of news about Alexander completely diverted me. “You know of my husband, Mister—”

“Colonel Burr,” he said, stepping to reach for my hand and bringing it to his lips in greeting. With a mouth set in a mischievous smirk and those shrewd eyes, the colonel was extremely handsome. “Aaron Burr. I served with your husband.”

I could remember no specific anecdote or story about Burr—my husband’s most colorful stories were always about Lafayette and Laurens—but I was too anxious to learn what he knew of Alexander to think of anything else. “I meant... you’ve heard news of him?”

No sooner had I asked than did my heart leap to my throat, for I became suddenly quite fearful that this man in his elegant clothes had come to tell me not that my husband was a hero but that he’d died as one.

Burr’s features slid into an enigmatic expression that couldn’t quite be called a smile. “No doubt your father will receive the dispatch, but a wife on the verge of motherhood ought to know straightaway. So I’m very honored to tell you there are whispers of a great victory at Yorktown.”

“An American victory?” I asked, hands on my protruding belly, my breath quickening.

“An American victory.” He nodded to reassure me. “Madam, if the reports are true, your husband personally led a bayonet charge across a shelled field, dodging fire and springing onto an enemy parapet to take the redoubt.”

The blood drained from my face, leaving me clammy and cold with horror at the danger my husband—the father of my unborn child—had exposed himself to. Even in leading a charge, shouldn’t Hamilton have been atop a horse, commanding his troops, rather than at the front, daring his enemy and braving a bullet? A flash of this image passed before my eyes, and for the first time in my life I fell quite literally into a swoon.

Colonel Burr was forced to steady me, a hand at the elbow and one at the small of my back, before easing me into a chair. “We’ve won,” Burr was saying, but I could scarcely hear over the strange buzzing in my ears. “We’ll have Cornwallis’s surrender soon. Or perhaps it’s already been accomplished.”

Dragging in ragged breaths of air, I pleaded, “And Hamilton?”

He gave a slow blink. “Of course. I didn’t intend to leave you in suspense; your husband secured the victory without a scrape.”

Both hands flew to my cheeks with a mixture of exhilarated pride and relief. “Thank you!” I wanted to run through the house shouting the good news like a crier. But I was still in a haze of half-disbelief, dizzied and trying to remember my manners. “Oh, thank you. Bless you for taking the trouble to come here to tell me!”

“Your father has agreed to help me get established in town, so it was my pleasure to deliver this news, Mrs. Hamilton,” Burr replied with silky gentility. “And the rule of my life is to make business a pleasure, and pleasure my business.”

Do you know, in that moment, how much he reminded me of Hamilton? Slender, with a military bearing, a sly smile, and a clever wit. I liked Burr very much. Right from that first meeting. I laughed and said, “Still—I am not quite myself, sir.”

Glancing at my swollen belly, he smiled. “There is little wonder why, given your happy condition and your family’s recent travails. It would have been a great loss to our country had your father fallen into British hands.”

Though I did blame all that for my momentary swoon, I also blamed the shock of joy at realizing the British were defeated and the relief of knowing my husband would come home to me after all.

But it was also, surely, that for a brief moment, Burr had made me fear that Alexander had died. And, looking back, I wonder now if the dark swirl of my nearly losing consciousness was more than a fear of death but perhaps even a premonition of it. Because though Burr was the herald of great joy that day, he would one day be the cause of my greatest misery.

***

H UZZAH ! H UZZAH ! H UZZAH !

That’s how our guardsmen stirred the household to hail my conquering hero.

In his haste to return to me and our unborn child that autumn, Alexander had ridden so hard from Yorktown to Albany that he’d exhausted four horses, and himself. I ran out the door to meet him and found him stumbling toward the house, his face slathered in sweat and grime, his clothes smelling of horse and the road. I didn’t care—not one bit.

Under a canopy of yellow, orange, and red leaves, I grasped my husband and kissed him on the mouth like the most brazen harlot who ever lived.

Shocked at my conduct, Hamilton startled but didn’t pull away. Instead, he threaded his hand into the hair at my nape, his teeth grazing my lower lip in gentle threat of sweet reprisal.

Behind us at the door, Mama gave a shocked gasp and Prince a disapproving harrumph . But I didn’t care about that either. Let the whole world disapprove, for in that moment, the only thing that mattered was seeing my husband alive and whole. And because I had no words to express it, only the language of a passionate kiss would do.

But once spent of those kisses, and having marveled at the changes nearly six months apart had wrought on my body, Alexander was tired in a way I’d never seen him tired before. As if he’d been feverishly staving off exhaustion with his talents and superlative industry for all the years of the war, and only now, in victory, did his body succumb to its toll.

Once he was bathed and fed and put to bed, he stayed there. Not for a day, or even two. In truth, he scarcely rose from bed for two months. I began to worry he suffered from some contagion, for Cornwallis, exposing a deranged lack of character in his desperation, had infected liberated slaves from southern plantations with smallpox, forcing them to approach enemy lines in the hopes of spreading the illness to the American army. And this, from the man who’d offered them freedom!

Thankfully, my uncle, Dr. Cochran, had helped to inoculate our troops against the dread disease and Mama assured me that Hamilton had no symptoms of smallpox. Moreover, despite the breakdown in his stamina, Alexander remained in good humor. And I will confess, with some delight, that not all the time he spent in our bed was as an ailing convalescent. Despite my being eight months along, I was only too pleased that the comfort he required was not entirely of a medicinal nature...

“Is the war finally over?” I asked in the early days of his recovery as he wolfed down a breakfast of hot tea, eggs, ham, and my mother’s spiced pastries. My question was put softly, in a voice that struggled not to tremble, because even though everyone seemed to think the victory decisive, there had been too many disappointments to put my faith in it.

“Perhaps a few skirmishes are left,” he said, reaching for my hand and brushing his lips to my palm. “But if there should be another occasion to fight, it will not fall to me. For us, my charming wife, the war is at its end.”

How blithely he said it, and I was foolish enough to believe him. Foolish because I was desperately in love and puffed with pride. “And you’ve won it,” I said, having cut out every mention in every newspaper to keep as tokens of his glory. So many others had worked to achieve this victory. Many had died for it. But I believed—and still believe—what I said to him that day. “You are a hero, Alexander.”

And, to think, even Burr had once called him that.

“A small feat in this family,” Hamilton said with a smile that attempted, but failed, to be self-effacing. “Why, after seeing that tomahawk gouge in the staircase, I’m ready to recommend Peggy for a commission in the army. And yet, if you are inclined to reward me as befits a hero, I shall not mind.”

“Oh?” I asked, delighted at the sparkle in his eye. “How shall I reward you, Colonel Hamilton?”

In answer, he trailed his fingers over my swollen belly. “Present me with a boy .”

I laughed, kissing his face. Every inch of it. “Won’t a girl answer that purpose?”

He grinned. “By no means. I protest against a daughter. I fear that with her mother’s charms, she may also inherit the caprices of her father, and then our daughter will enslave, tantalize, and plague every man on earth.”

“I do see your point,” I replied, feeling a bit enslaved by the charismatic pull of his eyes, and tantalized as he drew me under the covers.

I knew that in the coming weeks I would be called on to exhibit a sort of heroism of my own. Though my mother had assured me that giving birth was not to be feared in a family such as ours with such hearty Dutch constitutions, I remembered how sick she’d been after the birth of the little brother who died in my arms. And lest I dismiss that as merely a function of Mama being a matron of nearly forty-seven years, my sister Angelica’s most recent birth had also gone hard. Even now, after two months, Angelica had not quite recovered her health, and the little boy was sickly. So my fears for myself were eclipsed by my fears for the child inside me, whom I loved already, boy or girl.

I would love my child with every breath for as long as I lived, whether it obeyed its father’s commands to be born male or no. And that gave me courage. Then, in the new year, after a whole day’s labor, my child emerged from that first breath, a culmination of all his parents’ wishes and desires, and a reflection of all that was best in each of us.

A son. A little boy with eyes like his father’s and thick, dark, unruly hair like mine. Ten fingers, ten toes, with wondrously fat little legs. Papa affectionately called him a piglet, but in my eyes, my son was perfect in every way!

And if he did inherit Alexander’s caprices, he would undoubtedly enslave the fairer sex, for he’d already captivated me. In truth, my baby stole my heart upon his first little cry.

While Mama oversaw the birth, my sisters had been attending me, Angelica on one side, and Peggy on the other, holding my hands through the screaming while Alexander paced the black and white floor downstairs, knocking back glasses of my father’s best imported wine as if he could not be sober while my sisters forbade him from the birth room. But once the baby was cleaned and swaddled and put into my arms, my sisters finally gave up their vigil, and abandoned their posts so that my husband could meet his son.

Tears sprang to Alexander’s eyes the moment I surrendered the child into his arms. I knew my husband could be tender—there was a softness in him that others might have taken for weakness. But these tears, as he stooped to kiss me and our baby, were fierce expressions of love. “We’ll call him Philip,” he decided, choosing to honor my father rather than his own.

Then he vowed that he would never abandon me, or our son. And I believed him.

***

I FELL IN love with my son that spring. In truth, I fell in love with the entire world. Because with the war nearly over, everything seemed new. And in my baby’s eyes, everything seemed possible.

Philip was as sunny a child as ever lived. One who so commanded my heart that I could refuse him nothing. And I knew my indulgence was not to be remedied by the influence of a stern father. Because in those delightfully domestic months, one might be excused for thinking that—like Ben Franklin and the lightning rod—my husband had invented fatherhood.

Fractured by our son’s every cry and transported to heaven by every gurgle and smile, Alexander doted, day and night. Staring into the cradle, he boasted, “Philip is truly a very fine young gentleman. The most agreeable baby I ever knew—intelligent and sweet of temper. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” I agreed, with a laugh. “Of course.”

Sensing condescension, Alexander turned in mock outrage. “It’s true! He’s handsome and his eyes are sprightly and expressive. And he has a method of waving his hand that announces a future orator.”

A future orator . Such grand plans he had for our boy, before he was even out of swaddling.

But having been abandoned by his own father, it made sense for my husband to draw so close to his infant son. For him to feel not only the natural bonds that draw a parent to a child, but also the desire to make up for what he’d lacked. It was as if Alexander thought to somehow tip the scales of cosmic justice by giving his son all the love he hadn’t received.

“How entirely domestic I’m growing,” Alexander later said, bouncing our little Philip on his knee at Papa’s dinner table. “I sigh for nothing but the company of my wife and my baby, and have lost all taste for the pursuits of ambition.”

Kissing our father atop his head as she slipped into her seat, Angelica gave a delicate snort. “You without ambition? Betsy, call for a doctor. Hamilton must be sicker than we knew.”

The whole family laughed, because she wasn’t wrong to doubt him. Especially when his desk in the upstairs hall was piled with leather-bound, gilt-edged law books. Tory lawyers would no longer be permitted to practice in state courts, which left an opportunity for men like my husband to step into the vacancy, and Alexander had designed an ambitious plan to condense his study of the law and start his own practice.

Though he seemed content to live in my father’s house—and Papa was very happy to have us—I knew Hamilton yearned to make his own fortune. Late one night, he returned from his duties as a tax collector, and settling into a chair next to our sleeping baby, he opened a law book and whispered, “Go on to bed, love. I will now employ myself rocking the cradle and studying the art of fleecing my neighbors.”

Tax collecting by day, studying law by night, and somehow managing, in the midst of it all, to conspire with my father to build this brave new American world.

The Articles of Confederation had made less a new nation than a loose alliance of states. Hamilton and my father dreamed of something grander. And oh, how it filled my heart to see them together each night, talking through ideas, my father’s wisdom tempering my husband’s more passionate arguments—I took great pride in realizing that I’d given my father more than a son and my husband more than a father; I’d given both a trustworthy friend.

We were happy. I was never happier, I think.

In addition to getting to know my own little family that spring, we also had the chance to become better acquainted with Angelica’s. With the war winding down, Mr. Carter found more time to spend with us at the Pastures. He was debonair and worldly, and I could easily imagine how my brother-in-law’s dashing looks had won over Angelica. But his English reserve made them an odd match. Still, watching their four-year-old Philip hold my little boy on his lap for the first time filled my heart to bursting with the idea that our children would all grow up together, running these fields and playing in the river with their own New Netherlander children’s troops just as we had.

The only thing we needed now was for Peggy to add her own little brood...

I decided to broach the matter at the Pinkster festivities, where Albany’s slaves and freedmen performed African dances to wild drumbeats and sold us oysters and herbs from brightly colored carts. Pinkster was a time for setting aside the usual order of things. Blacks, whites, and Indians mingled and played games. Slaves slyly mocked their masters with relative impunity. And sweethearts stole away without any thought to propriety. So when a gentleman admirer dropped a bouquet of azaleas in Peggy’s lap and she rejected his suit out of hand, I said, “Alexander’s no Barbary pirate, I suppose, but I’m married off now, so what’s stopping you, Peg?”

Seated beside me on a quilt, a bucket of shucked oyster shells beside her, Peggy rolled her eyes, some sharp retort no doubt on her tongue. But before she could speak, Angelica dropped down beside us, smoothing her skirts. “What’s this about Alexander being a pirate?”

I chuckled, wondering if my husband’s ears were burning at the foot of the hill where he and my brothers were playing a game of ninepins. “Peggy once wished I’d marry one.”

Peggy batted her eyelashes and coyly threw each of us a glance. “For all you two know, what with how busy you’ve been making babies, perhaps I’m already betrothed.”

I gaped at her audacious reply. “You must tell us all the details at once.”

“It best not be a certain young Van Rensselaer boy,” Angelica said with a sly laugh. Stephen Van Rensselaer from our Blues troop, she meant, who was to turn eighteen in the fall. And who had spent much of the spring paying call to the Pastures. “I overheard Papa say he is far too young to marry.”

“Fortunately, Mama doesn’t agree,” Peggy said with a self-satisfied little smirk.

I could well imagine that our mother might truly approve of the match. Mama had always hoped that her daughters might marry into one of the great families of New York. And given the unconventional choices Angelica and I had made in husbands, Peggy might be my mother’s last hope until our little sisters came of age.

It was a bit unusual for a woman of Peggy’s age to marry a younger man, but then again, Stephen was set to inherit one of the largest and oldest estates in New York, so there were great advantages to the match, too.

I gave Peggy’s hand a squeeze, wanting her to find the same happiness I’d found. “Well, if you have Mama on your side, Papa will surely give his permission.”

Peggy bit her lower lip, then it all came out in a rush. “He has given his permission. On the condition that we wait until Stephen finishes his studies and is old enough that his family should not object. Also on the condition that we don’t tell anyone. Which is too cruel!”

I laughed and felt badly for laughing, because it did seem some manner of cruelty to make Peggy keep this secret. So, to distract her, Angelica and I devised all manner of dinner parties and other socials, where my sisters and I played the pianoforte and my brothers played the German flute to the amusement of all. And some of the most amusing gatherings were attended by the newly married Colonel Burr—whose dry wit was a charming accompaniment to my husband’s more sparkling playfulness.

In the months after our first meeting, Burr had become a near-constant fixture at the Pastures as he and Alexander shared Papa’s library in their studies of the law. At all hours, they could be found hunched over their books and papers, debating one point of law or another. I knew very well, of course, the brilliance of my own husband’s mind. But it surprised me that Colonel Burr proved quite nearly to be Alexander’s equal. For at every meal, party, and gathering, they insisted upon demonstrating their intellects, trying to outshine one another to the amusement and, sometimes, exasperation of all.

Indeed, Burr spent so much time at the Pastures that he had no compunction whatsoever about debating Angelica as if she were a man, good-naturedly disputing with my husband about what should come next for America, and arguing whether the principles spelled out in the Declaration of Independence really would become the basis of the enterprise.

The rest of us were all marvelously hopeful.

So it was notable when, in the midst of one of these dinner parties, my husband received a packet of letters and started for the stairs without a word.

“Where are you going?” I asked, but Alexander only mumbled something inaudible in reply.

I wished to follow him but needed first to politely disentangle myself from a surprisingly learned discussion with Angelica, Peggy, and Mrs. Theodosia Burr, a lady of daring outspokenness whose friendship and frequent companionship had further ensured my fondness for Colonel Burr. “What do you think about voting rights for women?” she asked in her typically provocative way.

“Our Livingston cousins never tire of reminding us that women have been granted the right to vote in New Jersey,” Peggy said conspiratorially.

Angelica nodded and raised her glass, as if to toast. “So why not New York?”

But I was entirely too distracted by my husband’s unexpected withdrawal to be drawn into even such an exciting conversation. “Please excuse me,” I said, forcing a polite smile. “I’ll rejoin you shortly.”

I thought to find Alexander at his desk or, failing that, checking upon our child, as was his nightly habit. Instead, I found him seated on the edge of our bed, his head in his hands.

“Alexander?” When I reached for him, he actually flinched. “What’s happened?”

He didn’t look at me. He didn’t reply. My usually loquacious husband didn’t say a single word, which made me sure something was dreadfully, horrifically wrong. For answer, I was left to glance at a letter, discarded upon the pillow, that informed of the passing of John Laurens.

Quickly grasping the loss, I reached for him again. “Oh, my love...” This time he didn’t pull away, but he also didn’t soften to my touch.

Though I’d never met Laurens, I knew he was as dear a friend to my husband as any other member of Washington’s little military family. Since hearing them talk about Laurens at Morristown, he’d loomed large in my imagination as a man I would admire if only because everyone else admired him.

“How tragic,” I whispered, reading the rest. Colonel Laurens had led a small force to attack a British foraging party in South Carolina, one of several footholds in America to which British forces still clung, but was himself ambushed and mortally wounded in the first volley of battle. He was, I would later learn, one of the last casualties of the war.

An unspeakable, unnecessary tragedy.

And though my heart ached for his family, it also ached for my husband, who still hadn’t moved or spoken. And he didn’t speak the rest of that night, even after Papa had seen out all of our guests. Nor did Alexander utter a word the next day.

“You’re frightening me,” I finally said, when he wouldn’t hold our baby boy. “Won’t you speak to me?”

It was a jest between us that my husband ran hot—his temper, his blood, his skin. And yet, when I reached for his hand that sweltering summer day, it was like ice.

“I can’t,” Hamilton rasped, as if forcing just those two words was an agony.

“Alexander, I’m your wife. I’m—”

“You didn’t know him. You can’t understand.”

He was right. I didn’t understand. John Laurens was not, after all, the first of my husband’s comrades to fall in battle. And though Hamilton always spoke of the fallen with grief and respect, their deaths had not made of him a shell of a man. Not like this. I thought perhaps it was because we believed the war to be finished, that all the sacrifices were now to be rewarded with glory, not loss. Or perhaps it was because, in the army, there hadn’t been time for grief and this was the outcome of Hamilton holding himself together for so many years.

There was something else that alarmed me. Quite beside the pain at having my own attempts to comfort him rebuffed again and again, there was the bewildering realization that my husband had retreated someplace inside himself I couldn’t reach. Some dark place I hadn’t even known was there. And so instead of shaking him, I asked, “Who would understand, then?”

Alexander turned, warding me off with an upraised hand, as if willing me to be silent.

But I persisted. “Who will you talk to?”

He merely went to the window and stared.

Frightened and at a loss as to how I could help him, I again offered, “I’ll bring up tea. Or coffee. Or something to—” I cut myself off, realizing that he wasn’t listening.

He had his back turned to me, maybe turned to the whole world.

Perhaps what he needed was time to grieve in his own way, to make his peace with the sorrow. Perhaps Papa could make my husband see sense. I turned to the door, thinking to do just that, when I heard Alexander whisper, “Lafayette.”

“What?”

“Lafayette would understand.”

And then, suddenly, so did I.

My husband maintained friendships with all his fellow aides-de-camp. But none of them seemed to know the depths of his emotions as well as the Frenchman, who had warned me from the start that behind my husband’s mask was “ great pain and loss. ”

If I could have summoned our friend to the house in that moment, I would have, but an ocean now separated us, because Lafayette had returned to France. So I went to my husband’s desk, intending, I suppose, to take the liberty of writing a letter to the marquis. But there already, to my surprise, was a letter from Lafayette, a fact that nearly startled me with its prescience.

However silent you may please to be, I will nevertheless remind you of a friend who loves you tenderly and who by his attachment desires a great share in your affection.

Though Lafayette had written before Laurens died, the marquis was, like me, faced with Hamilton’s silence and waiting for a reply.

And that decided it for me. I took from the desk a blank sheet of paper, an inkwell, and a quill pen. Then I returned to the window where Alex stood and pressed the pen into his palm. “Write him.”

“Betsy—”

“If you won’t speak to me, speak to Lafayette,” I insisted.

Then I left him.

By the light of dawn, my husband had managed to scribble only two lines.

Poor Laurens; he has fallen a sacrifice to his ardor in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina. You know how truly I loved him and will judge how much I regret him.

Those two lines were enough.

Though he didn’t send them to Lafayette for a few months—and even then, only as a postscript to a letter—it broke the dam open, allowing my husband to flow back to me and to our son.

But he never again spoke to me of John Laurens.

The subject remained closed for the rest of his life.

How I wish it remained closed for the rest of mine.