Page 26 of My Dear Hamilton

Chapter Twenty-Four

August 1793

Philadelphia

B RING OUT YOUR dead!”

In the high stink of summer, when Philadelphia’s outhouses overflowed gutters and dammed up alleys filled with trash, an outbreak of illness emptied the streets of rioters. An illness that may well have prevented the overthrow of the government. For now, instead of mobs shouting in front of our house, we heard only clacking carts carrying fly-bedeviled corpses.

Yellow fever.

The same horrible illness that had killed Jenny.

The fever started, they said, amongst the dock workers. They suffered chills and tremors that eventually gave way to blackened, bloody vomit. The illness spread swiftly, with fatal effect and without known cure. People in good health one morning would drop dead the next day. In the hurry to stop the spread of the contagion by getting the victims into a grave, some were likely buried alive. And when vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs and garlic offered little safeguard against the disease, everyone who could flee the city did so.

Everyone, it seemed, but us.

As late summer turned to early autumn, Hamilton believed that the business of keeping the government going in the face of anarchy was more vital than ever. “Jefferson will make much of my supposed cowardice if I leave now. I have to set an example. If I flee, it will only increase the panic, which is depopulating the city and suspending business. But you and the children should go.”

He looked away when he said this, his profile a study in agony. And I realized that he was giving me permission. Acknowledging my power to abandon him, as I had so recently threatened to do. All of it under the face-saving cover of exigency.

No one would blame me for leaving the capital at a time like this. And after the crisis had passed, we could say Mrs. Hamilton simply can’t abide Philadelphia, but the secretary visits his children at the Schuyler home from time to time...

That’s how it was done in high circles. Perhaps I could make that choice. Perhaps I would make that choice. But I was not ready to make it today. “We can rent a summer house a few miles outside the city,” I suggested. “Close enough that you can return for work if need be.” Encouraged by his nod of agreement, I added, “And I could ride with you, some days. Except for the few free blacks in the city who volunteered, nurses in Philadelphia cannot be had for any price. I’ll help tend the sick.”

“I cannot allow that. You’re a mother with small children, and there’s no known immunity to the disease.”

Alas, he had no immunity to it either.

The next day, returning from his office at the treasury, he made it only two steps into the front door before falling to his knees and retching into a brass urn that normally held umbrellas. And at the head of the stairs, I nearly stumbled in an effort to get to him. “Alexander!”

We left that night by carriage, the children piled atop one another like cordwood. Hamilton followed on horseback at a distance, fevered and sick, his back throbbing with pain. We made it only as far as our rented summer house two and a half miles from town before he was in a near delirium.

Please God don’t let him die, I prayed, a panic seizing me. Whatever our troubles, I couldn’t bear for him to die. Perhaps especially because of our troubles, and all that remained unresolved between us. I sent straightaway for a physician who was, by happenstance, an old friend of my husband’s from the West Indies.

“Am I done for, Neddy?” Hamilton asked Dr. Stevens. Glowing with fever, my husband complained of aches in his swollen kidneys.

“It’s yellow fever,” the doctor said. “Which means you may seem to get better, but that is the crucial time.”

He didn’t have to explain why. It was only after sufferers of this ailment seemed to recover that they would suddenly jaundice, spew blood and black vomit, and die. And so the doctor said to me, “Send the children far away. All of them. Even the baby.”

I’d already sequestered the children in an adjoining house, bringing meals to the door and waving at the window, never letting them get close enough to spread the contagion. The mother in me refused the idea of sending my frightened children away in such perilous times—especially little Johnny, so recently weaned.

Sending them away felt like asking me to amputate a limb. But I’d learned during the war that sometimes amputation was necessary. Alexander was in no condition to make the choice, so it fell to me to speak very frankly with my eleven-year-old son, who would have to manage his siblings all on his own. “Philip, I need you to take your brothers and sisters to the Pastures.”

My son’s eyes went wide. “By myself?”

The fear on his face nearly broke my heart, but I couldn’t let him see that I shared it. “If you can drive the carriage as far as Germantown, you can stay with friends there. It’s only a few miles and your grandpapa will send a servant to fetch you the rest of the way. You can watch over the little ones and manage the horses just that far, can’t you?”

“Why can’t you and Papa come with us?” he asked from the window.

“Because your father is too ill and I must care for him.”

“Father has a doctor to care for him.” Because Philip had always been a boy who laughed more easily than he cried, it wounded me to see his eyes fill with tears. “If you stay, won’t you get sick, too?”

“The doctor has many other patients to tend to,” I said. “And you mustn’t worry about me. You’re a young man now. You must be the man of the family while your father is ill.” If his father died, he’d become the man of the family in fact, before the age of twelve. And it would be the worst calamity of his life.

Better a mother die than a father; it was a father who could provide for the children.

Saving Hamilton was the best thing I could do for my babies.

In Philadelphia, bodies had rotted in the streets, husbands had abandoned wives in their sickbeds, mothers abandoned sick children, and children forsook their doomed parents. That seemed to me a greater evil than death. And though I’d taught my eldest son many lessons at my knee, now was the time to teach him the most important of all.

Semper Fidelis . Always loyal. Always faithful.

“I’m not going to leave your father alone when he needs me. Get ready to go, now. See your siblings to safety. Can we depend on you, Philip?”

Manfully, our boy swiftly wiped tears away and nodded with determination. “Yes, Mother. I can do it. But you must come as soon as you can.”

“We will,” I promised, watching gratefully, from a distance, as he coaxed the children into the carriage that would take them away. My heart ached that I couldn’t hug or kiss them in farewell, that I couldn’t inhale the baby scent of their hair. And as the carriage rolled away, I wept bitter tears, fearing that our separation might be of the eternal kind.

For what I’d not told Philip, nor even wished to admit to myself, was that I, too, now felt aches and chills...

Inside the house, I found Hamilton submerged in a bath of cold water, his teeth chattering. It wasn’t the treatment recommended by the city’s foremost physicians, like Dr. Rush. But Dr. Stevens refused to induce vomiting or bleed my husband with leeches. No, he said that he’d successfully treated this fever with baths and bark tonics. And so that’s what he did.

He cared for both of us, though I was barely aware of him because my head now throbbed intolerably and my eyes burned. Scorching heat stole my ability to think, as if I stood on the precipice of hell’s fires. Then I was cold. So frightfully cold, that not even the warmed Madeira wine the Washingtons sent us chased away the chill.

My husband and I were put into bed together as, at this point, it could do no harm. “My poor Betsy,” Alexander whispered beneath the blankets, trying to warm me within the embrace of his own trembling arms. He was trying to give me the last of his warmth, though he couldn’t spare it. “Now I’ve done this to you, in addition to everything else...”

It was this embrace, I think, that cracked the wall of anger I’d erected between us. It was our first truly intimate embrace in months, and I knew it might be the last. Together we tossed and turned in sweat-soaked misery upon pillows that Dr. Stevens had stuffed with lavender, chamomile, and peppermint. Until—to our terror—we both awakened feeling better.

No fever. No chills. No aches. Not a trace of them.

I’d gone to sleep so weak I couldn’t walk, much less dress for breakfast. But now I had the appetite for a hearty meal and the energetic desire to cook it. Doctor Stevens forbade that we should exert ourselves in such a way—but he said that no harm could come of a gentle stroll, to stretch our limbs. So I gingerly donned a muslin chemise and Alexander pulled on only a shirt and breeches. And together, warily, we emerged blinking into the bright yellow sun, walking together to a quiet field where lingering wildflowers dotted the dried stalks, and where yellowing leaves rained gently down upon us from the trees.

I couldn’t remember a time walking anywhere with my hus band when the world was so quiet and peaceful and beautiful. A portrait of nature painted by a divine hand. Perhaps we’d already died. Perhaps this was the quiet and peace of heaven. But then, where was God?

Matching my husband’s stride, I asked, “How do you feel?”

“Much recovered,” he said. “And you?”

“Much recovered, too.” And though I feared to speak the words aloud, I thought it best to face it bravely. “Which means we are soon to die.”

“ Betsy ,” Alexander scolded with enough sternness to tell me that he had his wits about him and knew the strange progress of the disease as well as I did.

“Aren’t you afraid?” I asked, knowing he hadn’t made his peace with God.

And yet my husband, who’d once seemed to crave oblivion, asked, “What have I to fear? A pleasing calm suspense. Let the Earth rend. Let the planets forsake their course. Let the Sun be extinguished and the Heavens burst asunder, were it not for the dread of our children to be left alone.”

I crossed my arms at an answer that could only be made by a man who had given the matter some thought. “So, you fear that we’re dying, too.”

“But I wouldn’t have said it.”

This hardly seemed the time for him to finally learn to govern his tongue. “I’d rather not waste time pretending all is well.”

His eyes squinted in vague amusement. “Do you know that is the first thing I loved about you? You’re entirely without guile.”

Now I felt vague amusement. “Such flattery.”

His shoulders rounded defensively. “It’s true. I didn’t want to love you, Betsy. In truth, I tried not to love you. But your sincerity allowed me to trust you. And I’ve never completely trusted in anyone else.”

“Surely that is to overstate it.”

In answer, he stared far away down the dusty road. “I was too often the victim of bad characters in my childhood. Unscrupulous persons happy to make a dirty, hungry, begging, bastard boy imperil his soul for a bit of supper.”

He never told stories about that childhood. Never explained how he’d been made a victim of unscrupulous persons. Certainly, he’d never revealed anything he’d done to imperil his soul for a bit of supper. “Will you tell me how?”

Hamilton’s jaw tightened, released, then tightened again. “Only if you insist, because it’s deeply humiliating. It will also likely vanquish anything that remains of your love and make me hate myself as an inveterate sinner besides.”

I didn’t insist. I only walked beside him in silence.

Finally, he cleared his throat. “Poverty leaves a tarnish on a boy with no parent to guide him. An indelible stain. But when I met you, a pure angel without pretense, I was vain enough to hope that loving you would cleanse me instead of spatter you with the muck of my past. And I am sorry, Elizabeth. I am unworthy of you. I am a creature of a mud pit that I never can seem to climb out of, no matter how hard I try.”

Yet, he did try. Everything he’d done had been a mad scramble to escape. To persuade the world that he was not that dirty, hungry, begging bastard boy, but a man of true stature.

To persuade me of it.

I’d watched him climb and claw his way back again when he slipped. And I loved him best when, in cold adversity, he’d find within himself the spark of his genius and stoke it to an inferno. But I didn’t need him to blaze with glory. I only needed his love.

Anger, after all, does not obliterate love, I thought.

And I still loved him as strongly as the day I first consented to be his wife, perhaps stronger now that I knew him better. In these moments, which might be my last, I had to honor that love or die bitter and alone. “You were never unworthy of me, Alexander. If anything, I’ve been unworthy of you. I’ve not been the wife that you’ve needed. I hope you’ll forgive it.”

“You have been the best of wives and best of women, beyond what I deserve—”

“Alexander,” I broke in, belatedly realizing that though he’d failed me, I’d failed him, too. I’d known how to be a soldier’s wife. I’d grown up knowing. Be strong, be brave, be like my mother. But I’d had no inkling of how to be Alexander Hamilton’s wife.

And how could I? How could any woman know how to be the wife of a lightning rod? A man who electrified his enemies as well as his friends. He was not merely a soldier nor a statesman. He was a man who was, almost single-handedly, forging an economy, a government, and a nation. He didn’t need the Finest Tempered Girl in the World.

He was a lion who had needed a lioness. And I had been a lamb.

I’d been too attached to our friendship with the Burrs to have foreseen or prevented that betrayal. Too awed by Jefferson’s reputation and eloquence to suspect him for the cold-blooded Jacobin that he was. And too fond of James Madison to suspect he might be an enemy in truth.

And now, when we were so soon to meet our maker, I wished that I’d never threatened to abandon my husband. It had made me feel stronger to threaten it, it made me feel more valuable to put him in fear. But now I wanted our marriage to be a fortress against all fear in this world and the next. “Please forgive me, Alexander, as I forgive you.”

In the midst of that peaceful, country field, he stopped me with a hand upon my elbow. “You forgive me?”

“For everything. With all my heart.” I reached for his hand, which he took and squeezed like a drowning man.

And yet he didn’t look convinced. “You say this only because you want to die at peace with me. But what if we live? Can you live with—” He shook his head and swallowed, as if remembering our last quarrel. “Can you choose each morning to live with me in forgiveness, despite what I’ve done?”

What had he done, after all? He’d put his hands on another woman. He’d taken momentary pleasure in guttural breaths and animal spasms. Yes, Alexander had done violence to my feelings and to my pride and to our wedding vows. But it all seemed so transient, so temporal now. For whatever wrongs he’d done me, he’d also given me a happier life than I’d believed myself destined for. He’d opened my heart and my mind; he’d taught me to think and to see injustice where I’d not seen it before. He’d taught me to stand for righteous causes. I could do more.

And if I lived, I would do more.

But first, I forgave my husband. Because I was a Christian, because I loved him, and because I must never allow Maria Reynolds to define us. “I do so choose to live with you, Alexander Hamilton,” I said, as if it were a wedding vow. “In forgiveness and grace and love, so long as we draw breath.”

I expected he would kiss me.

But either the illness or the weight of my words forced his knees to go soft. He lowered himself onto the grass of that isolated field, where insects buzzed amongst wildflowers, and the coming harvest stood in a golden line in the distance. And I sat beside him in the waning sun as we leaned, shoulder to shoulder.

“You mustn’t think that what I did stems from some deficiency in you,” he said. “The fault was mine. And I’ll make of myself a better husband, Betsy. I promise you.”

“And I will be a different wife,” I vowed. I wasn’t entirely sure how yet, but I felt more like a woman and less of a girl than I’d ever before been. “I think... I should prefer henceforth to be called Eliza. Or Elizabeth. Not Betsy.”

He nodded, clearly moved, his eyes blazing from blue to violet in the late-day sun. “So be it, my Eliza .”

Of course, starting anew depended on our surviving. But, for now, we had this moment. “Perhaps... should we write our last wishes while we’re still capable?”

After a moment’s thought, he said, “Just letters for the children. After all, we own nothing outright but some furniture, clothing, and paintings.” He gave an exceptionally wry grin. “At last, an advantage to marrying a man without means.”

We laughed. We actually laughed.

It all seemed so trivial now. The trouble we went to in getting lights and upholstered divans and imported wallpaper with trellises and vines to impress our Federalist friends. We could take none of it with us to the grave, and little good it should do our children.

When yellow fever took us, we knew it would be gruesome. We would, by tomorrow or the next day, bleed from every orifice and pore. Which made me grateful that I’d sent the children away, so they might never witness the ghastly spectacle. But Alexander and I would not look away. I knew we’d hold one another through every agony, until the last drop of blood.

Fortunately, God had given us this one last beautiful day. And so we found each other’s lips, until we found each other, skin to skin, as if for the first time, and there we made love beneath His blue sky, revealing ourselves in all our weaknesses to each other, and to the Lord.