Page 45 of My Dear Hamilton

Chapter Forty-Three

Spring 1825

Harlem

T HE WINDOWLESS ATTIC didn’t make for a majestic courtroom. The only light to be had was from lanterns I hung from the wooden rafters. The only witnesses, the spiders. Perhaps that was best, since, pushing through the cobwebs of this place—and my memories—I alone would play judge and jury.

And as for Hamilton, well, he would represent himself. He’d been a magnificent lawyer in life. But in death, the words he wrote would have to stand for him without addition or deletion or the animation of his voice or expression.

And in seating myself before a trunk of letters—the personal ones, the painful ones—I prepared to review the evidence again. In the interest of justice, I told myself. Nothing more.

Because Lafayette was right. Alexander Hamilton deserved to be better remembered by his country. His story deserved to be written. But neither would happen unless I became his champion again, and I didn’t know if he deserved that from me .

Thus, I examined the first charge against him. Did my husband take my sister for his lover?

I’d so often heard him argue in court that I could well imagine what he’d say.

It hasn’t been proven!

What was the evidence, after all? There was no direct admission of guilt by either of them. Not in life nor in death. The most damning thing, in the end, hadn’t been the letters or tokens or gossip or befuddled utterances under the influence of laudanum. The most damning thing had been my husband’s accounting book, which proved he paid Angelica’s expenses and rented for her a mysterious apartment.

And yet, if I took that for proof of an affair, must I not also note that, except for that one visit, nothing like it ever appeared in his books before or after? If there’d been an affair—

If, Hamilton’s voice echoed in my mind with pointed reminder.

Yes, well, if my husband took my sister for a lover, the intimacy was most likely confined to that one visit when Angelica was estranged from Church. When Hamilton was drunk on power—drunk enough to fall into bed with Maria Reynolds and pay a blackmailer besides.

When he’d confessed that, I hadn’t asked him if there were other women.

And yet you said you forgave me everything, Hamilton’s voice echoed again, and I glared at a dark corner of the attic where I could almost see him pacing, formulating his arguments.

I had said that, hadn’t I? It was just like him to remember a finer point.

When, thinking we were dying of yellow fever, I might have insisted that he confess all his sins. But I hadn’t demanded an accounting of his infidelities or vices, nor a listing of the things he said he’d done to imperil his soul. I’d merely accepted him, the whole of him, and forgiven.

As if the yellow fever had burned us both clean of all our sins.

Perhaps that’s what he believed. What good would it have done then to confess something that would’ve destroyed my relationship with my sister—the strength of which was sometimes the only thing that kept me alive?

And what if they were innocent?

I slammed the account book shut and put it back into the trunk as the notion sent a trickle of sweat down my spine. I remembered my father once saying how vile a knave he would’ve considered himself if he were to have accused my mother, and been wrong. It was entirely possible that Angelica’s last words were only confused mutterings mixed with her determination in hiding her illness from me. Not an affair. Entirely possible that my sister kept tokens of a beloved brother-in-law, just as I’d kept tokens of beloved friends. What if I’d allowed my own heart to blacken against a loving sister and an innocent husband who had already been so unfairly slandered by others...

I’d forgive you anything, so long as you loved me, Hamilton had once said to me.

I did love him. For all the good it had done me. Maybe I’d even loved him enough to forgive the unforgivable. Because my sister was right to say that love was a thing beyond reason... even if it were a crime.

Before we met, Hamilton loved a man named John Laurens. But that was not the crime with which I charged him. Instead, I asked, Did Hamilton love me?

In the heat of our courtship, when I suggested eloping, Hamilton claimed to worry he’d be thought a self-seeking, fortune-hunting seducer, angling for advantage. Was that what he really was, in the end?

I remembered—with a start—that the girl I was then had decided to love him, even if he were all those things. And that it was Hamilton who insisted it must all be done right. Hamilton who risked losing the fortune he told John Laurens he was after. The fortune I represented, if that was his aim...

I pulled from the trunk the bundle of letters more yellowed and faded with age than the first time I had read them more than ten years earlier. Touching that dark lock of hair belonging to the South Carolinian gentleman who’d haunted my life seemed to unlatch my sanity a bit. Or perhaps it was merely the heat rising to the attic and addling my senses. Whatever the cause, the next words, I spoke aloud. “Well, Mr. Hamilton, your friend Lafayette has offered you a defense. Let us see what you have to say for yourself.”

Straightening my spine and taking a deep bracing breath, I unfolded the pages. I’d committed the painful words to memory but was determined to give them a just reading.

Next fall completes my doom. I give up my liberty to Miss Schuyler. She is a good-hearted girl who I am sure will never play the termagant; though not a genius she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes—is rather handsome and has every other requisite of the exterior to make a lover happy.

That was as far as my heart had been able to see through my tears when I first read this letter. But now I noticed the next line.

And believe me, I am a lover in earnest.

I noticed the date on this letter and the ones before it, too. How curious that Hamilton should’ve waited four months to tell his friend that he was to marry. As if jilting a sweetheart. One didn’t, after all, praise a new lover to the one being replaced. One deprecated, made light of the new infatuation. And Laurens begged my husband not to withdraw from him the consolation of his letters. Perhaps he understood it was an ending.

How to balance this against all the letters Hamilton sent me? Since I didn’t have a scale, I read them again. All of them. Even the one I tore to bits, ten years before, in rage and anger and grief. I’d ripped apart the sonnet he wrote me in Morristown. Hamilton’s first declaration of love. I’d torn it up but—tellingly, I suppose—I’d kept the pieces.

Now, with a needle and thread, I sewed the fragile words back together. And with each stitch, I felt closer and closer to binding the wound.

My eyes swam with tears as I read the reassembled lines.

Before no mortal ever knew

A love like mine so tender, true

Did you mean it, Alexander? I asked myself as I pierced the final scrap of paper with the needle’s tip. Did you truly love?

Dear God, the indignity of being interrogated after death. Whatever else might come of this trial, I decided that I would never leave my own letters behind to be cross-examined and vivisected. Like the corpses in the bloody Doctors’ Riot so many years ago. Like Alexander’s motives, investigated by several inquests and the whole country. And by me...

Which brought me to the third charge. The one I scarcely allowed myself to acknowledge.

Was the duel with Burr a fight for the nation? A vainglorious exercise in futility? Or something worse? One, last, suicidal chariot ride across the sky?

I’d read the witness accounts. I knew both men. I’d even seen Burr recently—two years ago when, by happenstance, he slunk onto a ferry just as I was getting off, and the anxious crowd parted so we were face-to-face, leaving me to stare into those eyes in search of the truth. But seeing only the pathetic emptiness of his soul, I’d left Burr with a withering glare and without answers.

For there was nothing Burr could say to right one single wrong between us.

So maybe I could never know what Alexander intended that day at Weehawken. Because the people we love are not entirely knowable. Even to themselves. But we love them anyway.

The only other choice is to live without love, alone.

What then, is the verdict? the spiders seemed to ask, as if they were weaving a web of memories around me.

Studying the patchwork sonnet now repaired in my lap and my wedding ring beside it, I didn’t know what the verdict was. A judge and jury must deliberate, after all, so I adjourned the court. And the place I deliberated was in my garden, where I gathered the last blooms of purple hyacinths.

But a verdict was finally forced upon me by a calling card.

And by James Monroe.