Page 41 of My Dear Hamilton

Chapter Thirty-Nine

I would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. I wish there was a war.

— A LEXANDER H AMILTON

October 1810

New York City

M Y SONS WERE all in rebellion.

I returned from Washington City triumphantly, with arms full of notes and documents for the biography, only to learn that, in defiance of my wishes, twenty-two-year-old James had decided to marry his sweetheart. I suppose it was the Schuyler in him.

It wasn’t that I disapproved of his young lady. It was simply that, as a law clerk, James wasn’t yet established in the legal practice he was pursuing. Fortunately, Mary was a sweet girl who claimed to relish the position of wife to an impoverished young man. And I saw the wisdom in my father’s old admonition that it was sometimes best to frown, make them humble, and forgive.

Besides, it wasn’t only James who was in rebellion.

At Christmas, Alex told me he would sail to Europe. “You needn’t worry about the expense. My cousin Flip and I are going together, and Uncle Church has loaned us the money.”

Having denied my eldest surviving son the opportunity to make a merchant’s career in Boston, I wouldn’t now prevent him from exploring across the sea. For years, Alex had remained at my side, dutifully and uncomplainingly toiling in the law to support me and his siblings. No mother could ask more, and he’d earned a respite.

But what he said next chilled me to the bone. “I’m going to volunteer with the Duke of Wellington to fight Napoleon Bonaparte on the Peninsula.”

Alex wanted to go to war. For England. Horrified, I said, “You’re an American .”

His spine stiffened. “I haven’t forgotten. But when we were in Washington City, President Madison said I should take the opportunity to write to him. If I can report back to him on the goings-on in Europe—”

“ Alex, ” I said, more upset by the moment.

He took my hand. “Mother, there’s no way for a Hamilton to make his name in American politics. Business was foreclosed to me once I abandoned my position in Boston. That leaves only the battlefield. My father was a general. My grandfather was a general. Heroes, both of them, you’ve always told me. How can I want to be anything else?”

How could he want to be anything else, indeed? Alex had the right to determine his own fate. His father had fought for that principle, and I would uphold it. So, the following spring, I stood bravely next to Angelica at the docks as we tearfully saw our sons off to a war on foreign shores, grateful that they were, at least, together.

Just as we’d always been.

And a year later, Angelica and I were still together, worrying about our sons and taking coffee at the Tontine, as was our habit, while all the talk around us was of the war coming to our own shores. Because the British had never stopped visiting humiliations upon American ships—seizing them and impressing our soldiers. Behaving as if we’d never won our war of independence and were still merely a rebellious set of colonies.

This was the chatter of passersby that swirled around us while we warmed our hands against our coffee cups at the curbside table. My sister took hers with sugar and cream and always ordered a pastry that she never touched, saying she’d eaten too large a breakfast before offering it to me.

“I’m not a starving urchin,” I said, though those were, indeed, lean times. “If anything, you’re the one growing too thin.” There was a fragility to her delicate features that had never been there before. Worry over Flip, no doubt. Our fear for our boys was always present, even when we gave it no voice. Maybe especially then.

“I don’t want to grow as stout as Mama did,” Angelica said, pushing the plate to me. “I intend to fight for my beauty to the bitter end.”

Surrendering, I savored a sweet morsel of the pastry. “I believe your vanity is overcoming good sense.”

“You’re one to speak of good sense. You forget I have spies in your household.”

She did. My children told their beloved Aunt Angelica everything. “And what do they report?”

“That you’re considering a foolhardy trip into the wilds of western New York to visit an Indian school.”

It wasn’t just an Indian school, as she had good cause to know. It was the Hamilton-Oneida Academy that my husband helped to found for the advancement of our Indian allies, the plight of whom was always dear to my heart. “It’s soon to be chartered as Hamilton College, and I don’t see why I should not be present for its christening.”

“Because it’s a ghastly journey,” Angelica said, with a sniff. “The only way my son could persuade me to visit western New York was to name a town after me.” Before he left for England, Flip had done that, to the not-so-secret delight of his mother. “Of course, your wanderlust is far less concerning than the other report I’ve received that you spend hours upon your knees, sorting through boxes of dusty papers like a madwoman.”

I gulped at my coffee and shrugged. “I’m looking for Alexander’s draft of Washington’s Farewell Address. It’s as important a contribution as anything else he ever wrote and if I can find his notes, I can prove it.”

“Maybe he didn’t keep notes,” Angelica said. “Or perhaps he sent them to someone for safekeeping.”

“I think someone took them,” I replied. But I couldn’t stay to elaborate, because a glance down at the timepiece suspended from my needlework chatelaine told me I ought to leave soon to interview a new teacher for the orphanage.

My son Johnny was to escort me, and he was seldom late. But on that day, he sauntered to our table slowly and sat beside us with a certain gravity.

At nineteen, Johnny was a gentle, bookish student of literature. Of all my sons, he was the last I might ever suspect would announce that he was to join the military. But he said, “As the son of Alexander Hamilton, I cannot shirk my duty.”

So it was that I lost my eldest sons all at once to the Hamiltonian desire to rise up on the tide of war.

***

March 1814

New York City

It was called the War of 1812, though most of the fighting took place after that year. They also called it the second war for independence, and a new generation of Hamiltons were fighting it. My battle-hardened Alex returned from Europe to serve as a captain in the U.S. infantry. James commanded a New York militia brigade. Johnny served as aide-de-camp to Major General William Henry Harrison. And seventeen-year-old William—a wild and lanky mischief maker whose indifference to his studies, and to wearing shoes, would’ve snapped even his indulgent father’s patience—now trained to be an officer at West Point.

Angelica’s son had returned to fight for America, too. “When our boys come for a visit, we’ll have a veritable army at our table,” she said. We’d just left Sunday service at Trinity Church to stroll, taking our exercise in the brisk air. And I remembered a long-ago night when I’d had another veritable army around a platter of steaming waffles at my table—Alexander, Monroe...

And Aaron Burr.

Which brought me to my purpose in haunting the occupant of a little office on Nassau Street. It’d come to our attention that the tiny tin placard on the door reading M R. A . A RNOT, E SQUIRE was actually an assumed name for Burr, who’d returned to the city after a decade of exile.

After so many years, the criminal charges against him had been dropped, and now, it seemed the younger generation didn’t remember him. Or what he’d done.

But I remembered.

Burr might have chosen any other city in America. But he’d chosen to return to mine. So whenever I passed Burr’s shabby little door, and saw any person about to knock, I’d call, “Oh! Is that your solicitor? You should know that he murdered my husband.”

Soon after I made a habit of this, Burr changed the placard on his door to M R. E DWARDS . And I wondered what name I’d force him to adopt next. If I could take satisfaction in nothing else, I smiled to think I’d deprived him of a name—the thing my husband died for.

“If it’s your purpose to make him a miserable recluse,” Angelica said as we walked. “I’m told you’re succeeding...”

Burr’s grandson had died of a childhood illness the previous year. Then his daughter was lost at sea. He was left alone. With out family. Severed from the human race. I wasn’t monstrous enough to take joy in these tragedies.

Somedays I even wondered if these tragedies may have shaken loose some morsel of a soul, so that Burr now understood what he’d inflicted upon me. Other days, I had the absurd thought he might open his office door as we passed and beg my forgiveness.

But he never did. He was hiding from the world. He was hiding from me .

On this day, I peered at the bare snow-dusted window, in search of a glimpse of that crooked man in the shadows. But while I was looking, I felt my sister grasp my arm. “Betsy,” she whispered, and I turned to see her go pale as death. Then, before I could steady her, my sister’s knees buckled and she collapsed onto the icy street.

“Angelica!” I cried, dropping to my knees beside her. As she sprawled, gasping and staring at the sky, I feared that she’d knocked her head or broken a bone. I called for help—and some part of me dreaded that Burr might emerge from his office to lend assistance. But it was actually the Reverend Mason who happened by and helped me convey Angelica back to the warmth of her own house.

“All this for beauty?” I asked, furious when she confessed that she’d simply not eaten that day, hunger the probable reason for her swoon.

“Anxiety of the war leaves me no appetite,” she protested weakly.

But two days later, in a state of delirium, her hair plastered with sweat to a ghostly white face, she whispered, “Don’t tell Betsy.”

I’d come to tend her with a basket of tonics and herbs, but my brother-in-law, in shirtsleeves and dishevelment, stood stone-faced in the entryway of her bedroom. “She’s been unwell. She didn’t wish for you to know.”

“ Unwell ? What can you mean?”

“Cancerous tumors,” Church replied stiffly.

It was several agonizing moments before I could take a breath. “Where have the tumors arisen?” I finally had the clarity to ask. Sometimes tumors could be surgically removed—a painful and gruesome procedure, but one with a chance for survival.

As if he knew what I was thinking, Church shook his head and rubbed his unshaven jaw. “They can’t be cut away.”

Which meant... Angelica was dying. My gaze flew past him to where my once vivacious sister lay withered and frail in her bed, moaning softly in pain. And I could do nothing to help her. I was again to lose someone I loved better than myself. And the crushing weight of our impending separation made me grasp at the doorframe for balance. Helplessly, I looked into the eyes of my brother-in-law. “How long has she been suffering?”

“Quite some time.”

Quite some time. She’d been sick, and fearful, and hadn’t told me. She’d told her husband, but not me, and I resented him, though I had no right. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

“She didn’t wish you to see her this way, with her mind lost to the laudanum and—”

“I don’t care,” I hissed. “You will not dare keep me away. You do not dare .”

He didn’t. Especially since Angelica was soon out of her bed, making little of her illness, putting off my tearful enquiries with teasing. But now that my eyes were open, I saw the laudanum glitter of her eyes, the exhaustion of her thinning body. She quipped that she would be dancing at a ball in no time, but that attack of weakness in the street had been some catalyst of a terrible kind, because she was soon bedridden—and I found it both a cruelty and a mercy that my irrepressible sister was not long bound in the struggle of dying.

When she awakened one morning to find me at her bedside, she took my hand and kissed it. “My dear Eliza. It’s only right that I die before you. I’m the oldest. I should have gone before Peggy. I should go before you. Besides... I am a sinner, and you are a saint.”

“No, Angelica,” I said, shaking my head in denial and anger at the Lord himself. My sister had been my touchstone—before and after my husband’s death. In the worst days of my grief, I couldn’t have remained standing without her steadfast support. And now the only pain worse than the knowledge she was to be taken from me was pity that she should suffer so much.

But closing her eyes Angelica said, “Envy me, my sweet sister, for a merciful God is taking me to see all our lost loved ones...”

Then her pain became too great to bear. We dosed her, and under the laudanum’s spell, she spoke as if she were still a girl leading our troop of children in Albany. “ Go Blues !” Sometimes she imagined herself a young mother again, singing lullabies to her babies. Or a high-society lady in France, confiding gossip about nobles, long since beheaded. Other times she said strange and haunting words about things that never happened at all. But mostly, as she died, it was the same torturous refrain.

Don’t tell Betsy. Don’t tell Betsy.

Then, finally, frantically, and heartbreakingly:

Don’t tell Betsy, Alexander.

Never confess it.

Not even if I am dead.

***

I T WAS ONLY the laudanum, I told myself in the days after Angelica’s death.

After all the other losses I’d suffered, I’d always found some way to get up, get dressed, feed the children, go to church, and work in the causes the Lord had pointed out to me as a sacred duty.

But not this time.

Even though it worried my children. My youngest daughter, fourteen-year-old Lysbet, climbed into the bed next to me. “Mama, it’s past noon,” she chided, trying to rouse me.

I reached for her and tucked a braid of hair behind her ear, even though the sight of her struck me with an arrow of bitter sweet pain. Lysbet had my nut-brown complexion, Alexander’s auburn hair, and her Aunt Angelica’s features. I had the disturbing thought that she was a perfect amalgamation, as if she’d been born from the three of us...

It was only the laudanum, I told myself again.

People said strange things under its influence. Dying people said strange things even without laudanum. One could scarcely be held to account for murmurs halfway between this life and the next. That I should fixate upon my sister’s dying words with dark suspicion was surely some madness of grief.

Yet I didn’t cry for my beautiful brilliant sister. I didn’t cut clippings of Angelica’s hair. I couldn’t think what the point of it might be. What the point of anything was.

Perhaps God knew, but I did not. All I felt was a slow, calm suffocation under the avalanche of relentless losses that started with my son and would not end until I, myself, found oblivion. Which was why I didn’t wish to rise from the warm cocoon of my blankets. My heart felt in the throes of reverse metamorphosis, where the butterfly was to fold its wings and become the ugly, misshapen worm.

Was this Christian Resignation at last?

With her head upon my pillow, Lysbet murmured, “Aunt Angelica must be buried, but Uncle Church... well, he won’t... he can’t...”

That’s what finally roused me. The shocking discovery that my brother-in-law couldn’t afford—or simply refused to pay for—a fitting sepulcher for Angelica in Trinity Churchyard.

Though he’d wooed and won a patriot’s daughter, made his fortune supplying an American army, and was the father of children in this country, Church intended to return to England. He said he couldn’t endure the pain of living in a place where he’d be confronted with memories of his beloved wife. And I believed him.

For Church, too, had been at his wife’s side when she whispered my husband’s name.

It was only the laudanum, I insisted, wondering where I’d find the strength and money to do for my sister what Church could not or would not.

As it happened, it was Kitty Livingston, of all people, who offered to let my sister rest in the Livingston family vault, not far from where my husband and son were buried. After church services, and without looking at me, Kitty straightened her gloves and said, “Your family may be Federalists, but I have, over a lifetime, grown accustomed to having the Schuyler sisters near me, and I’m too old and set in my ways now to wish for a change.”

Kitty was, as always, some strange combination of mean and magnanimous. An example of how virtue and vice could live inside a person, side by side. She was a living embodiment of how I could still be surprised by people I’d known most of my life. Or even, from the moment I was born...

After the funeral, my brother-in-law said, “Take what you like of her belongings.” He sat on a chest at the foot of Angelica’s bed, a drunk, unkempt stranger amidst her intimate things—a brush and a gilded mirror left casually upon the dressing table, bottles of perfume and pots of cosmetics, ribbons and silk stockings, and ornaments that she’d treasured.

Angelica had exquisite taste. Any item that belonged to her was likely to fetch a price, and my brother-in-law ought to have them valued. At the very least, he should save something sentimental for their children. That he seemed not to have thought of it made me wish to take it all. Everything from portraits to pearls to the silver nutmeg grater my sister had purchased in London.

I thought to keep my sister’s elegant hats and dresses for Lysbet. Her leather-bound books, which spanned such a range of intellectual subjects from science to finance, knowing that my sons could benefit from them. Yet what I wanted most was a painted chest with a bronze latch where, for many years now, Angelica had kept her correspondence neatly folded, and wrapped in white silk to keep the broken wax seals from sticking.

“I would be grateful to select a few things for my children,” I said to Church, though I was wary that he might find my next request a terrible intrusion. “But most of all, I’d like to look at her letters.”

He only gave a bleak shrug, the light gone from his once-shining eyes. “As I said, take whatever you like.”

It was only the laudanum, I wanted to shout at him. I wanted to scream it and shake him. Or reach for his hands and reassure my brother-in-law that the people we loved would never have betrayed us. That to let memories of Angelica and Alexander be stained with suspicions was an evil. A sin .

For almost forty years, I’d called John Barker Church my brother, but there had always been a wall separating us. At first, only a little overgrown hedge of jealousy for having won my sister’s love and attention and carrying her away. Then, upon learning of his secret identity, and his marital troubles, I’d wondered about the character of such a man. But most of all, as I found him at the center of nearly every tragedy in my life, a fortification of resentment built between us, stone upon stone. And now, there was no crossing that barrier. So I didn’t offer him comfort or accept any.

Instead, I opened the box.

***

W E THINK WE know the people we love.

We think that love gives us more than a glimpse into one another’s souls. But the idea that human beings are knowable is one of the many lies we tell in the service of love. That’s what I learned reading my sister’s letters.

For I hadn’t appreciated that in her correspondence with princes, philosophers, and statesmen that she commanded their respect, as well as their lustful fascination. And I hadn’t known that in spite of countless letters from esteemed persons—including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Charles James Fox, and Lafayette—only one bundle of letters did she keep separate.

One bundle lay wrapped in a lace garter, with a memorial ring enclosing a tiny braid of auburn hair I knew so well. Alexander’s hair. Alexander’s letters. And as for the garter, I recognized it, for my sister had worn it to Washington’s inaugural ball.

It was the garter that she said had slipped from her thigh while she was dancing, and my husband gallantly swept it from the floor to spare her embarrassment. Angelica had teased that she couldn’t make him a Knight of the Garter in this new country of ours, where we didn’t make such distinctions. And Kitty had confronted me in the middle of the ball, insisting that Peggy had said, “He’d be a knight of your bedchamber if he could.”

Peggy denied it. But was it not precisely the sort of thing that Peggy would have blurted out?

More importantly, Angelica had kept the garter, wrapped closely round treasured letters. And what to make of the ring? I hadn’t given it to her. Had she had made it herself as a memorial after his death, or as a token of remembrance during his life?

I dreaded to find the answer.

Knowing for quite some time of her impending death, surely she would have burned any letters that might have led to painful revelations. But perhaps the reckless girl who’d crept out of our father’s house to run off with a beau—not caring whether it might cost Papa sleep, his rank, or even the war—was too selfish to burn what she treasured, no matter the pain it might cause.

Stop this, I told myself, thumbing through the pages. The flirtation between my sister and my husband had been a private jest among the three of us. I’d encouraged it. I’d read my husband’s letters to Angelica before he sent them. I’d watched him write them! At least once, he asked me to deliver a letter to her personally so that his waggery wouldn’t cause eyebrows to lift amongst those who didn’t share our little joke. And when Angelica’s letters arrived in the post, we read them together.

There could be nothing secret or untoward in any of them, I reassured myself.

But now, to my dismay, I found that I hadn’t seen all the letters. Once, when his hands were cramped writing The Federalist , Alexander somehow had found the time to write a letter to Angelica that taunted her, flirtatiously, about the misplacement of a comma.

I seldom write to a lady without fancying the relation of lover and mistress, he began, adding in closing that I sent my love. But never had I set eyes on this letter.

Surely I would have remembered.

There is no proof of my affection which I would not willingly give you, he wrote my sister a few months before he took Mrs. Reynolds to our bed.

And another, later that year, while he was still bedding that harlot. You hurt my Republican nerves, Angelica, by your intimacy with Princes, while I can only console myself by thinking of you.

Each letter brought new pain, and I held my breath upon opening every one.

Your sister consents to everything, except that I should love you as well as herself and this you are too reasonable to expect, my husband wrote.

But I hadn’t consented to this.

What had Alexander been capable of, this man I’d loved and honored? He was capable of betraying our marriage bed. And I knew, from the stories Angelica told me of her time in Europe, that my sister might have been capable of betraying her husband, too.

Perhaps even with Jefferson, no less. And another thing I knew—had always known—was that at the heart of my husband’s infidelity with Mrs. Reynolds, was the base motive of revenge. If Alexander could be jealous of my sister’s intimacy with princes, I could well imagine his feelings upon knowing that Jefferson may have been smitten with her. Was my sister’s favor another battleground over which the two men fought?

It was only the laudanum, I told myself, now desperate to believe it. But my heart was in shadow and could not see light. Angelica herself once wrote me, You know I love your husband very much, and if you were as generous as the Old Romans, you would lend him to me a little while.

Could she have helped herself to him, and kept it secret? My sister was good at schemes and secrets. And, of course, my husband had kept secrets the entirety of our marriage, even, and perhaps especially, in the last days of his life. At some point or another, both of them hid from me the most vital things, as if I were a child.

And perhaps I had been.

Even Monroe had an inkling of something untoward between my sister and my husband early in our marriage. Was it any wonder that he could believe my husband guilty of any sort of corruption, thereafter? I remembered now that the very first time my husband was ever accused of adultery in print was that same spring that Angelica came to New York without her husband. When I’d pushed them together, insisting that Alexander squire her about the city to mend her broken heart. I’d allowed my sister to play hostess to Alexander and his gentlemen friends and been grateful for it. I’d allowed my sister to take my place .

Sweet, stupid, Eliza, still the fool.

Always the fool.

And now I was left to wonder, who were Alexander and Angelica? Who were they really?