Page 11 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

Attend the Court of Errors and hear the Arguments of the adversary—Hamilton is desirous of being witty but goes beyond the Bounds and is open to a severe dressing. . . . Col Burr is very able Hamilton, on the other hand, had taken the cause of Le Guen extravagantly to heart, laying about at the opposing counsel as if they were barbarians at the gates and not honorable colleagues. He’d all but accused them of arson and barratry and had probably refrained from that only for want of time.

So acrimonious had the case become that Isaac Gouverneur had brought in his honored kinsman Gouverneur Morris. The man hadn’t litigated for years, but his eloquence was legendary, his stature as a statesman undisputed, his alliance with Hamilton of long standing. Aaron could have told them that wouldn’t work; when Hamilton’s blood was up, friend became foe with the same ease with which a bit of judicious flattery could turn one from foe to friend again. Hamilton had savaged Morris without compunction but with a great many extraneous adverbs.

Even for Hamilton, his performance had been extreme; one might even say, intemperate.

The air here was crisper than in the city of New York, the color of the sky a deeper hue. Aaron breathed in appreciatively. “Gouverneur Morris has expressed his desire to give you a severe dressing.”

“He doesn’t mean it,”

said Hamilton, with undue confidence. Aaron strongly suspected that if there had been a horsewhip to hand, Morris would have applied it with the outraged panache of a French nobleman lashing an impudent upstart.

Morris had so far lowered himself to demand of Aaron if Hamilton were in his cups.

No, Aaron had replied wryly. Merely drunk on his own oratory.

That had earned him the reluctant appreciation of Gouverneur Morris—an event to remember in itself—and the curt advice to rein in his co-counsel before someone gave in to the temptation to give him a damned good thrashing.

Aaron estimated that Hamilton’s oratory had kept him from his supper by an hour—but it had lost Hamilton at least one ally, so perhaps one might make allowances.

“Comparing Isaac Gouverneur to Shylock might have been a bit extreme.”

Aaron couldn’t resist twisting the knife a bit. “You brought Robert Troup nearly to tears.”

“Robert Troup! A creature it is almost a vice to name.”

That was a fine way to dismiss one of one’s oldest friends. Troup had followed Hamilton about like a faithful puppy ever since their days rooming together as students at King’s College. Right now Troup was a whipped puppy.

A whipped puppy might bite his master.

It had been, Aaron thought, really quite a useful day’s work. Hamilton had eviscerated their opposition and, in the process, alienated two of his closest allies, allowing Aaron to position himself as the sensible voice of reason in contrast to Hamilton’s intemperate ravings.

Men remembered that sort of thing when it was time to go to the polls.

“If you continue upsetting your friends at such a rate,”

said Aaron mildly, “you will have no one with whom to dine.”

“Better a dinner of herbs than a stalled ox and hatred within,”

said Hamilton stubbornly.

Hatred, was it? The man was as changeable as the weather, while thinking himself constant as the tides. He had been spending too much time in Hamilton’s company, thought Aaron grimly, if he was beginning to think in such labored metaphors. He would have to spend some time reading Voltaire to clear his mind, a literary purgative.

“I can offer you better than herbs if you wish,”

said Aaron, knowing it was a safe offer. Hamilton always stayed with his wife’s parents when he came to Albany.

“Mrs. Schuyler is expecting me,”

said Hamilton promptly.

He didn’t invite Aaron back to share the bounty of General Schuyler’s table. Aaron hadn’t expected he would. Schuyler had had little love for Aaron ever since Aaron had relieved General Schuyler of his senate seat nine years ago.

The Schuylers knew how to hold a grudge.

That didn’t matter. Against Hamilton’s Schuylers, Aaron had Brockholst’s Livingstons. Where once the Schuylers might have been royalty here in Albany, their power was waning, the old general consumed by gout, beggared by bad land deals, increasingly dependent on his brilliant but erratic son-in-law.

The Livingstons, on the contrary, had only continued to expand their influence. General Schuyler was of the old school, tied to the land, to a patroon system of feudal patronage that was fast evaporating. He was the past. It amused Aaron to see Schuyler cling to Hamilton as the rising star who would revive his fortunes, as Hamilton flung himself into the bosom of the Schuylers in a desperate attempt at legitimacy.

They would both lose.

But there was no reason Aaron couldn’t be generous in victory. Hamilton was useful—in his way. When he wasn’t carried away by the charms of his own voice.

If only one could stow him in a cupboard and take him out when needed. Aaron amused himself with the image: a pocket Hamilton, to be set to work as desired, drafting contracts and formulating bills, and then shut away again as his tiny voice grew too shrill, like the homunculus of the Renaissance alchemists.

“When do you return to New York?”

“As soon as our arguments are concluded. I told Eliza I plan to leave on Sunday and hope to be with her by early next week.”

Hamilton’s ruddy face glowed as he spoke of his Eliza, like a boy in the first throes of calf-love.

How quickly the affair of Maria Reynolds was forgotten.

“Your military work calls you, I imagine,”

said Aaron casually. He didn’t think it had occurred to Hamilton to arrange anything like the organization he had put in place preparatory to the election—but the thought of Hamilton bustling uncontested through the city while Aaron pursued allies elsewhere in the state gave him a bit of pause.

“Yes, and the Weeks matter.”

It took Aaron a moment to recall what Hamilton was talking about; the case of Ezra Weeks’s amorous brother was not one of his priorities. “We’ve only a month until trial and still know little more than when Ezra Weeks first came to us!”

Us, was it? Aaron gave a delicate cough.

Hamilton was too busy speaking to notice. “I took Harison with me to speak to Elizabeth Weeks before I left for Albany—but there are still some points on which I wish to be satisfied. I hadn’t time before I left to get to the truth of the matter.”

It was just like Hamilton to set himself up as the arbiter of truth, a stone statue on a pedestal, undoubtedly holding gilded scales. And blind. Dangerously blind.

“Truth,”

said Aaron delicately, “is the daughter of time, not the product of the courts. Our remit is to establish our client’s innocence, not the truth of the matter.”

“Aren’t those one and the same?”

demanded Hamilton, as if it weren’t quite plain they weren’t the same thing at all. If he didn’t know that by now, Aaron wasn’t going to be the one to explain to him. But then, as Aaron had learned over the course of their very long acquaintance, Hamilton had a remarkable capacity for self-delusion.

“Ezra Weeks is the man who pays our fee.”

“We owe a greater debt to justice. Don’t you think the girl deserves as much? What if it were your own Theodosia?”

Privately, Aaron felt quite secure his Theodosia would never be in such a position. He had raised her to be superior to the rest of her sex in judgment and reason. Not to mention that she wasn’t a common girl of no breeding and less sense; she was mistress of Richmond Hill.

For so long as he managed to retain Richmond Hill.

No, even if he failed to recoup his debts, his Theodosia was not unprotected. She was hardly some little Quaker milliner to be used and cast aside.

Not that blood and position were always a protection. There had been that business of Nancy Randolph . . .

But his Theodosia would never be such a fool. It was absurd. Aaron blamed Hamilton for putting ridiculous thoughts in his head. Apparently, foolishness was catching, like the grippe.

If he could deliver New York into the hands of the Republicans, his influence would be assured; it would be a short step from there to the vice presidency. It was what he and Jefferson had agreed.

No one would dare presume to take advantage of the vice president’s daughter, no matter how fathoms deep in debt he might be.

“Do you see your Angelica in the role?”

Aaron asked idly.

“It might be anyone’s daughter,”

said Hamilton, which was palpably untrue. Elma Sands wasn’t anyone’s daughter. She was the illegitimate child of goodness only knew who, which made her, in a way, no one’s daughter.

Rather like Hamilton.

“By that logic, might not Levi Weeks be anyone’s brother? The boy is personable; the girl is dead. Witnesses—many witnesses—saw her threaten to drain a bottle of laudanum.”

“If a thing is to be done, it should be done right,”

said Hamilton stubbornly. And by right, as Aaron knew all too well, Hamilton meant his way. If there was one thing of which Hamilton was assured, it was that he was right and everyone else was wrong, co-counsel be damned. “To merely acquit the boy isn’t enough; we ought to bring the guilty to justice.”

“Unless,”

Aaron pointed out, “the girl was the means of her own destruction.”

Hamilton’s chin jutted out. His nose was very red in the cold and beginning to drip. “If the girl was the instrument of her own destruction then Weeks has nothing to fear by my investigations.”

It was truly impressive how quickly Hamilton had gone from inviting himself to participate in the case to taking charge of it. Or so he thought. Aaron was willing to allow him to think so. Up to a point.

It was a delicate balance. On the one hand, it was very useful to have Hamilton occupied. On the other. . . . It was well that the prosecution was being headed by Cadwallader Colden, who could be trusted to see only the obvious, and that only if it was put directly in front of him.

“My dear Hamilton, your eloquence has persuaded me.”

In truth, it was less his eloquence, and more the chill, which was making itself felt beneath Aaron’s greatcoat, jacket, and waistcoat. His current lodgings were uninspiring, but they were warmer than the steps of the Stadt Huys. And there was work to be done, a great deal of work. “I believe I see the general’s sleigh.”

General Schuyler had sent his own sleigh to carry his son-in-law to the family homestead, as if Hamilton were an errant schoolboy being brought home.

“My regards to the general and Mrs. Schuyler.”

Nothing annoyed people more than courtesy from a foe.

Hamilton looked at him uncertainly. “Might I offer you a ride to your lodgings?”

The poor man; the courage it took him to offer the hospitality of his father-in-law’s sleigh.

Aaron might be in debt to creditors from Philadelphia to Boston, but at least he was his own man. “The walk is short and the night is clear. I’ll see you here tomorrow.”

On nights like this, Albany was full of ghosts. If Aaron closed his eyes, he could be back nearly twenty years ago, in the large but inconvenient house to which he’d brought his Theo as his bride. They’d married here in Albany, he in his old coat, Theo in borrowed ribbons. Even the parson had been borrowed. They had been married in a double ceremony with Theo’s half sister Catherine and Dr. Joseph Browne.

But that was all in the past. Theo had been gone these six years now, and he refused to give way to mawkish sentimentality. Theo would have mocked him for it more than anyone, more even than he mocked himself.

The veil between past and present was too thin; he missed her unbearably.

It would pass.

There was a summation to write for tomorrow—let everyone see how cool and reasonable he could be compared to his excitable co-counsel—and lists to draw up of potential donors to his Republican faction. Oh yes, there was plenty of work to occupy him—and a letter to write to his Theodosia scolding her for not writing more frequently in his absence.

Aaron set his face against the wind, trudging down the road to his lodging house as a brightly lit sleigh jingled past him in the darkness.