Page 37 of My Dear Hamilton

Chapter Thirty-Five

July 11, 1804

Harlem

M AMA, SOMEONE’S AT the door!” Lysbet said, dancing in front of it while William sat on the floor, playing with a set of marbles.

“Yes, yes, I’m coming,” I said, giving my youngest daughter a smile. She looked so much like I imagined I must have at her age. Dark hair, dark eyes, and a smile that came to life anytime we ventured outside into the gardens or the grove of trees. I pulled open the door to find a man standing hat in hand, his head bent. “Yes? May I help you?”

“Mrs. Hamilton?” he asked, just barely meeting my eye. “Ma’am, I’ve... I’ve been asked to send for you. There’s been... well, you see... General Hamilton has need of you.” He gestured to the horses behind him. “I’ve brought a carriage.”

Despite the growing warmth of the day, ice tingled down my spine. “What’s happened?” I asked, keeping my voice even for the children.

The man couldn’t seem to meet my eyes. “The general isn’t well. He... has spasms.”

“His kidneys again?” Just when I thought Alexander was over his old ailment.

“I’ll wait in the carriage,” he said, hurrying down the steps.

In a matter of minutes, the four children and I were on our way. I took solace in knowing that the older boys had gone into the city with Alexander two mornings before when he’d departed on his weekly trip to his office. At eighteen and sixteen, Alex and James could look after him until I arrived.

The trip was faster than I expected, given that it was the middle of a fine Wednesday. That is, until we began to encounter small crowds of people on every street corner, abuzz over some news I couldn’t make out. And then I was distracted from that oddity when the driver turned the wrong way. “Sir! Driver! Where are you taking us?”

“Mr. Bayard’s house,” the man called in reply.

I didn’t have time to process that before I heard my name. From the crowd . Again and again. “Look, it’s Mrs. General Hamilton! His poor wife!”

A dark, hazy memory assaulted me. The crowds. The crowds in front of Angelica’s house when my son was shot dead. And my heart began to hammer. Then it all but stopped when the carriage slowed in the drive before Mr. Bayard’s grand mansion on the river, where another crowd parted like the Red Sea as the driver guided us through.

Wailing . The women were wailing. And gloom hung on every man’s face.

We’d barely come to a halt when I sprung from the carriage unassisted, my voice shaking with certain knowing dread. “ Not well, ” I said to the driver when he offered his hand. “You said the general was not well .”

I saw the truth in his eyes before he spoke. “He... he asked me to give you hope.”

Bile crawled up my throat as I remembered what Alexander once said to me.

I thought you might take easier to a thing if it was gradually broken to you, my angel.

He was wrong then, and he was wrong now. Already moving toward the house, I rasped to Ana, “Stay here. All of you.”

Oh, merciful God, why?

“Alexander!” I cried, finding him amidst onlookers gathered round Mr. Bayard’s grand bed. And when my husband’s head turned to me, it nearly took me to my knees.

I’d seen that look before—the gray pallor of blood loss, the waxy sheen of fever, the cloudy eyes of laudanum. The look of death.

“Eliza,” Alexander wheezed. “My angel.”

Taking his hand, I nearly collapsed onto the edge of the bed. And that’s when I saw the bloodied bandages around his waist. I knew the truth before it was even explained to me. He’d been shot. He’d been shot in a duel .

Voices I could barely hear recounted how he’d met Aaron Burr across the Hudson upon the cliffs of Weehawken, New Jersey. How, like my son, Alexander had thrown away his fire. How his opponent had taken lethal aim anyway.

“ Will he live? ” I asked the doctors, panic squeezing my throat and making it hard to choke out the words.

Four doctors huddled in the room—two Americans, and two French surgeons I later learned were stationed on a frigate in the harbor who were much experienced with gunshot wounds. The French had been our saviors in the revolution; maybe their expertise could save us now. “Can you save him? Please save him! ”

“Mrs. General Hamilton.” One of the doctors finally stepped forward, wearing an expression of brutal sympathy, an expression mirrored on the other men’s faces. “I’m afraid the bullet has fractured a rib and, I suspect, ruptured the general’s liver. The bullet remains lodged in his spine...”

I could hear no more. I couldn’t see, couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. This couldn’t be happening again. How could it possibly be happening again? Was I, like my eldest daughter, caught in some delusion, except in my waking dream everyone I loved was to be taken from me?

Frantic with grief, I sobbed a desperate prayer to a God who had already required so many sacrifices from me.

Not Alexander, too . Not my dear Hamilton .

Though his weak pulse yet gave proof of life, I already sensed his withdrawal from me. And I felt his loss in my bones, in my flesh, as if the very heart of me was being violently rent asunder. It was an unbearable agony of spirit. One loss too many, and far too soon.

As I wept and bargained and prayed and raged, Alexander murmured, “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian.”

The first time he said it, pale and aware of his impending death, I believed he was offering me consolation, beseeching me to find comfort in my religion. Delirious with pain, he murmured it again as Angelica arrived, weeping her heart out as if joy no longer existed in the world and never could.

And I couldn’t decide if my sister’s anguish halved or doubled mine. I fanned Alexander’s feverish face and mopped his brow and when his precious blood soaked through the bandages and the mattress to pool upon the floor beneath the bed, I begged Bishop Moore to consent to give my husband communion, despite the sin of the duel. When the bishop finally relented, Alexander declared, “I have no ill will against Colonel Burr. I forgive all that happened.”

I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Not ever.

But Alexander said again to me, “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian . ”

I knew then that it was a plea not for my comfort, but for my forgiveness. And I nodded my head, eager to give him what he wanted and needed before the Lord took him and I could give him nothing else. But in that crucial moment, I also turned and fled the room, because I knew I’d told my dying husband a lie. After all, how can one forgive what one doesn’t understand?

How had I not known? How had I let this happen? Why hadn’t I predicted that the long rivalry between my husband and Aaron Burr would come to this?

After I composed myself, I returned to my husband’s side. Then, all we could do was wait and wonder if each labored breath would be the last. In the morning, though those blue eyes appeared clearer and tinged with violet in the light of dawn, my beloved lay nearly motionless. And so I did perhaps the hardest thing I’d ever before had to do as a mother—I gathered my darling babies around me and somehow uttered the words, “Your father is dying, my little loves. And we must now say farewell.”

It was a scene of shattered innocence and grief that I still cannot allow myself to recall too closely. The way those little faces crumpled. The disbelieving despair. The younger ones who cried because the older ones did, not because they understood what was happening, or ever really would.

I’d lived forty-six years and I would never understand, either.

I led the children into the room and lined them up at the foot of the bed so that Alexander might be able to see them all. The fruit of our love. I lifted Little Phil, too short to be seen, to give his father a kiss, and then we waited as Alexander gave each child a final look, as if committing them to memory. Suddenly, seeing them became too much, and my husband clenched his eyes shut and pressed his lips into a tight, trembling line. Over the protests of my oldest sons, my sister took them from the room. And I was grateful for it.

I wanted to do something, but there was nothing to be done but wait as a man who had always burned so hot grew ever colder. So I simply held Alexander’s hand—determined to hold him through every agony until the last drop of blood. I held on to him with the full knowledge that, after this day, I’d never get to do it again.

The clock over the mantel ticked out a mournful cadence as the last of Alexander Hamilton’s life bled away. Though he couldn’t move, and had trouble breathing, he retained his beautiful mind and his warrior’s spirit until the very end.

“If they break this Union, they will break my heart,” he said, eyes unfocused.

Finally, the chimes on the clock struck twice. Alexander breathed no more. And the silence of his passing stole what was left of mine.

For I knew that no breath I ever took again would be the same.