Eliza looked up to see Emma coming down the stairs, sporting a sunny dress complemented by a richly embroidered arabesque in an array of pale greens and blues. The dress had been Eliza’s, though she had never worn it in public. Its brightness made her feel as though someone were shining a lantern on her whenever she walked into a room, but it complemented her fair hair and ivory complexion perfectly. In its original form, the dress had had open shoulders, but when Emma had taken it in—the girl was slimmer than Eliza had been even before she got pregnant, and a little shorter as well—she had used the removed fabric to make a pair of delicately pleated shoulders. She had also sewn a double layer of lace into the top of the bodice, making it on the whole a more modest garment than it had been when it belonged to Eliza, but still stunning. It seemed to Eliza that she had re-coiled her braids on her head. If before they had looked like a tiara, now they reminded Eliza of a halo. They emphasized the girlish innocence of her face, but not without sophistication.
“I would whistle,” John said now, “but I’m afraid my sister would turn me out, and then I would be deprived of the sight of your radiant form.”
Emma’s pale cheeks turned bright red, which was all too obvious as she hadn’t applied any powder to her face. She said that it was too difficult to do on one’s own, but Eliza suspected that she simply found it too artful. Emma would rather be scorned than thought the seductress.
In any event, Eliza knew that Emma was just being too humble. John was most certainly interested.
“I-I’ll just check on Rowena in the kitchen,” Emma said to Eliza, without acknowledging John’s flirtations.
“Nonsense!” Eliza said. “Do I ask my guests to supervise the cook? My mother would fly down from Albany and drag me back home by my ear! I’ll check on Rowena. John, why don’t you pour Emma a glass of Stephen’s honey wine?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” John agreed as Eliza skipped through the door to the kitchen stairs.
As soon as she’d closed the door behind her, though, she immediately turned and crouched down so she could spy through the keyhole. She was thankful yet again she wasn’t wearing a corset: She would have never been able to sink low enough to see through the tiny aperture.
“It’s really not necessary,” Emma was saying. “I almost never drink spirits.”
“Be that as it may, the mistress has commanded you to drink honey wine, and so honey wine you shall drink.”
“Just a drop,” Emma said uncomfortably as John filled a goblet nearly to the brim. “That’s much too much!”
“That’s for me,” John said with a laugh, pouring a second, smaller measure. “This is for you.”
Emma chuckled, and when she spoke again, Eliza thought she could hear a trace of the girl who had wrung the necks of chickens on a farm outside of Concorde. “Oh, is that so?” challenged Emma.
There’s the spunk, Eliza thought. Show him who’s boss!
Just then there was a sound behind her.
“Mrs. Hamilton?” Drayton said from the lower stairs. “Are you hurt?”
Eliza stood up quickly, pressing a finger to her lips.
“Mr. Schuyler and Miss Trask are alone in the front salon.”
Drayton frowned in confusion. “Are they . . . that is, do they have need of anything?” He was carrying the soup tureen, and he turned to place it on a table beside him but stopped himself. Perhaps he thought setting it down without permission was a dereliction of his duty.
“They need naught but what nature has already gifted them. That, and perhaps a bit of liquid courage.”
Drayton continued to regard her with confusion. Then his eyes went wide, and he started so much he nearly dropped the tureen. “Oh! Yes! Well, should I . . . ? That is, I mean, well . . . what should I do?”
“Drayton, boy!” came Rowena’s voice from deeper in the kitchen. “I told you to take that tureen up to the dining room and come back down for the mutton. Hurry it up now!”
Drayton looked back and forth between cook and mistress. Rowena, sensing that someone was on the stairs, came into view.
“Mrs. Hamilton? What on earth are you doing crouching there like a pickpocket?”
“Shh,” Eliza said. “I’m keeping the way clear so that Cupid has a clear aim with his arrow.”
Rowena frowned. “You’ll pardon me for the impertinence, ma’am, but have you hit your head? You’re not making any sense.”
“Miss Trask and Mr. Schuyler are in the salon,” Drayton said now. Eliza noticed that a sweat had broken out on his forehead and his arms were quivering slightly. Eliza had once tried to lift the tureen when it was full and had barely been able to budge it. Drayton had been holding it for several minutes.
“Put that down before you drop it,” Rowena said, and Drayton set the tureen on the table with a relieved sigh. “And I understood what Mrs. Hamilton was saying, there being no one else in the house as yet. I just wondered if she’d gone daft.”
“Rowena!”
“Apologies, Mrs. Hamilton,” said Rowena, sounding not at all contrite. “But Emma, Miss Trask, that is, and Mr. Schuyler are not cut from the same cloth. She is a simple girl, in manner as much as in money, and Mr. Schuyler is, shall we say, a certain type of gentleman who requires a certain type of lady.”
“Careful, Rowena. I will tolerate a little of your cheek directed toward me, but I will not have you speak ill of my brother.”
“I do not mean to speak ill of him, ma’am. He is young and full of sauce, and why shouldn’t he be? He is a Schuyler and a rather gifted intellect from what I hear. He should have his fun. But his type is not Miss Trask’s. She would do much better with a boy like Drayton here, than with a boy like Mr. Schuyler.”
It seemed to Eliza that Drayton’s face resembled a turnip he was blushing so hard, but Eliza had not time to soothe her footman.
“Oh, come now, Rowena. Don’t be so hidebound. Why shouldn’t Emma improve her station by marrying a Schuyler? No offense, Drayton.”
“None taken, ma’am,” the footman answered, his face now as red as one of Rowena’s tomato sauces. He was staring at the floor as though he wished it would open up and swallow him.
“This is not about station, Mrs. Hamilton. It is about temperament. Miss Trask is a quiet soul, Mr. Schuyler a raucous one. She wants a man who will read poetry to her, not drag her to one ball after another until the heels are danced off her shoes. They are ill-matched,” said Rowena in a matter-of-fact tone.
Eliza frowned. Rowena had given the matter a bit too much thought entirely, and Eliza was about to say so when there came a peal of laughter from the front salon, so loud that Rowena and Drayton heard it in the basement kitchen.
“Ill-matched, you say?” Eliza said with a smile. “Opposites attract, I say.” She nodded to the footman. “I think it is safe to bring the tureen up now. Love is a like a good soup,” she added to her cook. “It needs to simmer, not boil.”
Rowena rolled her eyes. “All respect, Mrs. Hamilton, but the day I take a cooking lesson from you is the day I go looking for another line of work. Hurry it up, boy,” she added, swatting Drayton with a kitchen towel. “It may be a leg of lamb, but that don’t mean it’s going to scamper itself up the stairs on its own.”
8
Mrs. Maria Reynolds Walks into His Life
Ruston’s Ale House and Inn
New York, New York
July 1785
Alex stared out the window of the carriage, barely seeing the buildings and pedestrians that passed by. His briefcase sat on his lap as he kneaded the leather so violently it was starting to crack beneath his fingers. His sweating palms had stained the leather with dark, ugly, accusatory smears.
Why did I lie to her? he berated himself. What possessed me?
It was such a bad lie, too. The Gunn case was still set for Monday. Should Eliza read the legal notices in the pap
er next week—which she unfailingly did, clipping out any mention of her husband’s name—and take the time to do the math, she would realize that the case had not, in fact, been moved up to the date of their party.
He turned and looked at the pale female face sitting on the carriage seat beside him.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Why didn’t he just tell his wife he was helping a woman in distress? What would have been so wrong about that? Eliza would have been glad to hear he was helping someone in need of it, to be sure.
So why did he lie to his wife?
* * *
• • •
EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON, Maria Reynolds had walked into Alex’s office hesitantly. Alex was used to nervous clients, and by now he was good at categorizing them into types. There were those who were nervous because they didn’t have the money to pay him up front, and they were hoping they could work out a deal. Others hesitated because the idea of interacting with the legal system unnerved them, as if it would suddenly emerge that they had committed some grievous crime that they were heretofore unaware of. Still others had, in fact, done something wrong, and were wondering if Alex would help them anyway, and if they could get away with it.
But Maria Reynolds was different. She wasn’t nervous. She was afraid, but whether it was of him or someone else Alex didn’t know.
“I apologize for the mess,” he said when the silence had gone on too long. “I just took on a new client, and they saw fit to deliver every piece of paper that has ever crossed their threshold.”
A smile flickered over Maria’s lips at Alex’s joke, then quickly faded. Well, he had to admit, it wasn’t a particularly great joke.
“Please, have a seat.”
Maria sat in the one chair that wasn’t piled high with paper. She was silent for a moment, and then she pulled the chair closer to Alex’s desk—as close as it could come and still allow her to sit in it—and then she sat back again, and yet she still remained silent.
Alex offered his warmest smile. “How may I help you today, Mrs. Reynolds?”
A strange mixture of emotions flickered over Maria’s face. Fear, sadness, resolve, guilt. Her lips quivered. Her mouth opened, then closed again. And then, without a sound, she began to cry.
“My dear Mrs. Reynolds!” Alex said. He burst from his chair and hurried around the desk, pulling his handkerchief from his pocket. He fell to his knee in front of her and pressed the handkerchief into her hand. “Whatever is the matter?”
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Hamilton,” Maria blubbered as she dabbed at her eyes with Alex’s handkerchief. “I had not thought I would react so. I thought I had inured myself to it all. I—I’m so embarrassed.”
“There is nothing to be embarrassed about. In my line of work, I see clients cry all the time.”
“Yes, but I do not cry,” Maria said reproachfully, though Alex couldn’t tell if she was reproaching him or herself. “In my position, I cannot afford to cry, or I would never have survived what I did.”
Alex nodded sympathetically.
“Well, you are here now, and I give you my word as a gentleman as well as a lawyer that I will do everything in my power to make sure whatever is grieving you can never hurt you again.”
Maria nodded without speaking. After a moment, she turned and looked at the open door. Alex jumped up and waded through the boxes to pull it closed. When he returned, he pulled the stack of papers off the second chair and sat facing her.
“Please, Mrs. Reynolds. Unburden yourself.”
Maria sat without speaking for another long moment, though the occasional silent sob still wracked her body. Then she raised Alex’s handkerchief to her cheek. Alex thought she was going to dry her tears but instead she began wiping at the powder on her left cheek. At first Alex didn’t understand. But then the dark shadow of a bruise came into view.
Alex’s widening eyes served as Maria’s mirror, and she stopped wiping.
“You see now the nature of my problem,” she said in a voice that was at once defiant and ashamed, defeated and determined.
Once again Alex was on his knees before her, and this time he pressed her tiny hands between his. “Oh, you poor, poor creature!”
He had seen a woman in distress like this before.
His mother.
* * *
• • •
IN THE CARRIAGE, beneath his gaze, Maria gathered herself to speak. “I really did not mean to put you to such trouble,” she said in a contrite voice. “Only I do not know how I could possibly return to my—to my husband’s home.”
“Put it out of your mind,” Alex said soothingly. “I am only happy that I have the means with which to help you.”
“I am in your debt.”
“You owe me nothing.”
“Except your fee, of course,” Maria said with a small smile.
“There will be time enough to talk of legal matters later. Our first priority is to make sure that you are safe and out of reach of that brute.”
The carriage pulled up short, and Alex looked out the window. A cheerful sign proclaimed RUSTON’S ALES in crisp black letters on a bright yellow background. Below that, a smaller sign advertised ROOMS TO LET. They had arrived.
Maria looked at the inn dubiously. “You are sure this is a discreet establishment?”
“I know the proprietress,” Alex said as he handed the driver a couple of coins. “She can be trusted absolutely.”
“Proprietress?” Maria sounded defeated. Then, pulling her bonnet more firmly around her face, she allowed Alex to help her from the carriage.
Alex led her in by the side entrance, which opened on a narrow hallway instead of directly into the ale room. He directed Maria to wait for him and stepped into the main dining room, in which perhaps a dozen people were eating at tables or drinking at the bar. He should have told Eliza the truth of why he was late in coming home, and yet something had stopped him. Mostly, he did not feel like explaining the whole sordid tale, and Maria was in immediate danger, of course, but was there something else?
“Mr. Hamilton!” one of the barmaids said. “We have not seen you here in quite some time! May I fetch you a pint, or perhaps some of cook’s Yorkshire pudding? I know how much you love it.”
“Good evening, Sally. I may well be ordering some food in a bit, but for now I wonder if I could ask you to escort me to Mrs. Childress’s office.”
“But of course, sir. Right this way.” Sally turned toward the front stairs.
“If you don’t mind,” Alex said. “Perhaps we could take the back way.”
“Oh ho, top secret stuff!” Sally chuckled. “Of course, of course.” She walked into the back hall, pulling up short when she saw Maria. She seemed about to say something, then looked back at Alex. Her eyes went wide.
“This is Mrs.—”
“Smith,” Maria said quickly. “Mary Smith.” She kept her face down and mostly shadowed by her wide-brimmed bonnet. Alex could imagine how it might look like she was trying to conceal her identity—which, in a way, she was—but he knew she was more likely concerned about concealing the tell-tale bruise on her cheek.
“Mrs. Smith will be staying here for a while. I trust that I can rely on you to see to it that she’s comfortable.”
Sally looked confused, if not suspicious, but just nodded. “Of course, sir. Let me take you to Mrs. Childress.”
She led them up two flights of stairs and knocked on a door on the third-floor landing before easing it open.
“Mrs. Childress?” she called into the apartment beyond. “It’s Mr. Hamilton here to see you.”
“Oh, how nice!” a voice called from within. “Do please bring him in.”
“This way, sir, ma’am,” Sally said, and led them into the apartment.
Caroline sat at her desk in an office that was larger and more comf
ortable than Alex’s, being furnished with a marble-topped desk at one end and a deep couch flanked by a pair of equally cozy chairs on the other. Since the last time he had seen her, she had traded in her widow’s black for a sober but not quite so dreary midnight-blue dress. It was also a good bit smarter than her previous dresses, her finances having rebounded significantly since Alex won her case against the state of New York. Her face was clearer, too, free of the worry that had clouded her for so many years through the war, and made all the more radiant by the genuine smile of joy with which she greeted Alex.
“Mr. Hamilton, what a treat! I was just thinking to drop you a line to see—”
Caroline’s voice broke off as she saw Maria.
“This is Mrs. Mary Smith,” Alex said. “She is a client of mine. I was hoping that I might be able to rent one of your rooms for her use for the next few weeks.”
“It shouldn’t be a problem,” Caroline said cautiously, clearly sensing that more was going on than just a simple room rental. “Just let me check my books. Sally, bring a pint for Mr. Hamilton and Mrs. Smith, and plates as well.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sally said, and hurried back down the hall. A moment later, the door could be heard latching behind her.
Caroline, meanwhile, had flipped open a large, leather-bound ledger and begun to scan its lined surface. She looked up a moment later.
“Room three is available. It has a lovely southern exposure and a small sitting area in addition to the bedstead. If you’re going to be staying with us for a while, Mrs. Smith, you’ll find it quite comfortable.”
Alex turned to Maria, whose eyes never left the floor. When she didn’t speak, he answered for her. “Thank you, Mrs. Childress. It sounds perfect.”
Caroline stared at Maria a moment longer, then shrugged. “All right, then. I’ll have Sally bring your bags up.”
Maria’s head snapped up, a distressed look on her face. “Oh, I haven’t any bags. I haven’t—” Her voice broke. “I haven’t anything at all.”
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