My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  While my eldest donned his best shirt, I found my straw bonnet with its white ribbon, and, leaving the younger children with our newly hired governess, we were off.

  It was a fine, clear, summer day and I was astonished at the size of the crowd. Thousands packed into the square. Not just dockworkers in knit caps and young toughs in homespun jackets, but the better sort of people, too, including ladies with colorful lace parasols and gentlemen in top hats from the finest families. There, too, upon a stoop near our old house, stood my husband, surrounded by half-a-dozen impeccably dressed Federalist lawyers like Robert Troup and Nicholas Fish.

  It was nearly impossible to push closer, given the throng. But at the toll of the clock bell, my husband’s voice boomed out to ask who had convened the assembly. And that’s when I first realized that Alexander hadn’t so much as come to give a speech as to stop one. The gathering was for the apparent purpose of condemning the Jay Treaty, and my husband wasn’t about to let it happen. “By what right does Livingston speak before me?”

  Almost as a rebuke, a quick, spontaneous vote determined that Livingston should speak first. But I stood agape as the rest of the crowd began to heckle. There, on the same hallowed ground where we’d once gathered to watch George Washington take his solemn oath of office, erstwhile respectable members of the business community shouted down the hapless Mr. Livingston, who, now red-faced, suggested a new meeting place where he could be heard. “Come then, all foes of this cowardly treaty, away to Trinity Church.”

  It seemed to me a very wise idea to break up what was swiftly becoming a mob, and I myself searched for some avenue of retreat, prodding my boy up onto the sidewalk in the shade of a buttonwood tree. All the while, my husband was shouting, “There is the necessity of a full discussion before citizens should make up their minds about this treaty!”

  As the former secretary of the treasury, he was used to being obeyed. But this time, he was treated to a chorus of hoots and hisses. My husband’s Federalists had shouted down Livingston, but now the Republicans, slowly but surely coalescing into a party of their own thanks to this treaty, returned the favor, insensible to my husband’s demand to be heard.

  My son was appalled. “The rascals!”

  A gentleman in riding boots clapped Philip on the back, perhaps recognizing him as his father’s son. Meanwhile, to my right, a bearded man in a beaver cap stooped to pull a loose cobble from the street.

  Not again, I thought, prodding Philip toward the fence encircling the nearest yard. I’d been witness to too much disorder in my life not to recognize the danger. “We’re going.”

  I’d learned, after hard experience, to head for the edges, moving diagonally against the crowd. But I didn’t get very far before the man with the cobblestone pulled his arm back and launched it. After that was pandemonium.

  “Angloman! Corrupt Tory!” they shouted at my husband.

  Alexander shouted back, with pugnacious bombast, calling them wicked Jacobins. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité say the French you admire. But what patriot could ally with those who executed the kinswomen of our own imprisoned General Lafayette?”

  To those words he was greeted with a hailstorm of bricks and stones, and I watched, in horror, as my husband staggered, fell, and disappeared into the crowd. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see anything over the blur of heads and shoulders.

  Philip broke away from me, rushing to his father’s defense, elbowing his way into a knot of red-faced, meat-fisted men.

  “Philip!” I cried, trying to stop him, pushing forward past a brine-scented sailor and shoving a carpenter with sawdust on his apron. “Philip!”

  I couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from the furious men. Close enough to see Alexander pop up out of the sea of people, holding his head with one hand even as he spat contemptuous laughter. “Well, if you use such knock-about arguments, I must retire!”

  Almost comically, my husband bowed and ducked away while the crowd broke apart. Some following the Livingstons to Trinity Church. Some marching to the battery, where they promised to burn the treaty and, presumably, another effigy of Jay.

  “Dear God,” I said, reaching my husband’s side, not knowing whether I should tend his head or give it another thump. “What, in the name of prudence, could you—”

  “It only grazed me,” my husband said, wiping blood away with his now-torn sleeve.

  Meanwhile, my son shouted after the retreating assailants, “No doubt you want to knock out my father’s brains! It’s the only way you blockheads could ever win an argument with him.”

  “Philip.” Having barked his name in a fashion so like my mother that I was secretly appalled, I then rounded on my husband, hissing, “Fine things you teach your son.”

  Hamilton had no reply to that. Fetching his now dusty black hat from the ground and straightening his coat, he made ready to walk us home, a number of his friends following us down the block, making me feel less that he was the head of a political party and more that he led a street gang.

  More and more, I wondered if there was much difference between the two.

  We’d only gone a little way before coming upon some lawyers in an altercation on Wall Street. “Gentlemen,” Alexander said, stepping between them. “Why don’t we resolve this matter between us at Fraunces over some glasses of brandy?” Now this suggestion was more in keeping with the conduct I expected, but Alexander said, “Philip, I bid you escort your mother home.”

  As I was in high dudgeon with the both of them, I exclaimed, “By no means! Stay with your father and make no more mischief.” Either of you, my eyes said.

  And with that, I returned home, grateful that my husband had escaped his latest brush with the mob with no more than a scrape on the head. That evening, he said he counted it a price worth paying for having disrupted the protest, but four days later, I was to learn just how high a price he’d been willing to pay . . .

  “Kitty,” I said, startled to find my one-time companion upon my doorstep wearing a broad-brimmed black hat and clutching a black lace parasol. We’d not spoken a word in the six years since the inaugural ball, and the feud between the Livingston family and mine had only worsened since then. Still, I found myself glad to see her, especially since I knew she’d recently been widowed. “Please, come in.”

  She gave a delicate shake of her head. “I should rather—well, I would prefer if we spoke in your garden.”

  This was becoming curiouser by the moment. Nodding, I led her to my herb garden. “I was so sorry to learn of your husband’s passing.”

  She self-consciously smoothed the bodice of her widow’s weeds. “Thank you. Amongst many other sorrows, I’m afraid widowhood has deprived me of fashion. Do you find me much changed?”

  “You look just the same,” I said, though black did not flatter her and her skin no longer glowed. “I didn’t realize you’d returned to New York. Are you visiting?”

  “I’m here to stay. I’m to be married again in the coming year to my cousin, John Livingston.”

  Another Livingston, of course. “I congratulate you.”

  “Thank you,” she said brusquely. “But I’ve come on a matter of more interest to you. Namely, to speak about the man you married. You see, I’m of the opinion that Hamilton is trying to get himself killed.”

  I’d stooped to pluck some flowers for the dinner table, but now stood up abruptly. “Kitty, just because a man expresses an opinion—even an unpopular one—doesn’t justify your family’s faction stoning him in the street.”

  Kitty’s lips thinned. “I’m not speaking of the mayhem at Federal Hall. It’s what happened afterward that has forced me to deliver a warning. Your husband is embroiled in an affair of honor. Two, actually.”

  Affairs of honor. That meant my husband had either challenged or been challenged to a duel. Two of them, if Kitty was to be believed. But I stiffened because experience had taught me not to believe anything from the unholy Jefferson-Livingston-Clinton alliance. “With who
?”

  “With my cousin, for one. I know you may not be disposed to believe me but I heard it from your own husband’s mouth when we crossed paths outside his law office.”

  Now I definitely didn’t believe her. “My husband told you he was going to duel with a Livingston?” I asked, dubiously. Men didn’t tell women such things. It wasn’t gentlemanly. It would cause alarm in a man’s family. And that family might persuade a man to forgo pistols, thereby risking his honor.

  “Hamilton pretended to let it slip,” Kitty said with a fleeting smirk. “I still remember perfectly well what he’s like when he wants something. And in this case, he wanted me to warn my cousin’s wife that he’d shoot her husband dead unless she put a stop to it.” Kitty’s smirk now became more than fleeting. “So I thought to myself, turnabout is fair play. Which is why I’m warning you.”

  I sobered as my doubts were swiftly replaced with the cool chill of dread. “Fair play? Dueling is not a game, Kitty.”

  “Tell that to your husband,” Kitty replied. “Because after leaving Federal Hall on Saturday, he not only embroiled himself in two affairs of honor in the space of an hour. He’d also thrown up his arms and declared himself ready to fight my family’s whole ‘detestable faction’ one by one.”

  The heat of shame it brought to my cheeks to imagine my husband stooping to the level of a street brawler! He, who’d been George Washington’s secretary of the treasury!

  But, of course, now he was not.

  And maybe he didn’t know what he was anymore if not that.

  * * *

  “ARE YOU MAD?” I asked Alexander. I had accosted him in the carriage house, where the heat gave rise to the scent of horse. And though my husband preferred that we have the conversation inside, I didn’t want to give him time to formulate a jury argument. “Aren’t you the same man who toiled to make this country a nation of laws? Yet, you resort to threats of duels and fisticuffs? And in front of Philip? It’s barbarism.”

  He gave a little sigh. “It won’t come to a duel.”

  Remembering that Angelica’s husband had been all but exiled from England for having nearly killed a man in a duel, I asked, “How can you be certain?”

  “Because I’ve been involved in affairs of honor several times before without a shot ever being fired.” This staggering bit of news I’d scarcely digested before he continued, “I manage them to my satisfaction, and my opponents withdraw, which is why I tipped my hand to Kitty.”

  “So you did tell her.” Given the color that darkened his cheeks, this embarrassed him, but not enough. What an incurable schemer!

  “I expected Kitty to warn the womenfolk of her family, who would, in turn, exert pressure upon Livingston to come to terms with me. I never predicted she’d take license to alarm you.”

  “Well, as always, you are too clever by half.”

  “Eliza, this is the way of honor with gentlemen.”

  “If it’s honor that you value, then perhaps you ought to guard the esteem your country still has for you by not offering to brawl in the streets like a madman.”

  “I am not mad.”

  “No?” I asked, thinking his behavior erratic. To prove it, I held up three different scribblings I’d found on his desk. “What do I see here? An essay in defense of the Jay Treaty that you wrote for the papers under one pen name. A second, written under a different name in which you anonymously praise yourself for writing the first. And then a raving third, pretending to add to the imaginary choir! It’s madness.”

  “I am not mad,” he repeated, kicking at a bit of straw on the floor.

  “Then what in blazes is wrong with you? Because issuing the challenges, threatening fistfights, breaking up protests, and throwing yourself into gazette debates with such duplicity . . . all of this seems as if you’re half out of your mind!”

  “I am out of my mind!” he suddenly shouted, and then he pressed his fist to his mouth, his eyes going shockingly glassy. “I . . . I lost a child, Eliza,” he choked out. “I lost a child, too.” He threw down the leather satchel he carried with him nearly everywhere, and sank down onto a bale of hay. He stayed there, silent, as I nearly quaked at the revelation. He’d lost a child. Of course he had. But consumed in a mother’s grief, I’d thought only of the fact that I had lost a child.

  I will hold you together, he’d promised in the darkest hour. He’d done that with tenderness, patience, and devotion. But he’d suppressed his own grief so long that now he was the one flying to pieces, and I’d neither seen the cracks forming, nor done anything to heal them.

  “Oh, Alexander,” I said, going to his side and realizing he always kept something of himself hidden from everyone. Even in the grips of yellow fever, thinking he was soon to die, he’d been unable to reveal himself completely.

  He was not the sort of man to accept pity, not the sort of man to give himself over to a woman, but I wrapped my arms around him anyway. “Let me hold you together, now. Let us both hold each other together from now on.”

  Alexander took a great shuddering breath. “What would you have me do? I should let them call me a coward, let them accuse me, there in the street, of treason, of stealing from the treasury with the connivance of Britain. Is that what you want me to do?”

  “I want you to remember that you’re a father, and that you promised never to leave me alone or desperate again.”

  He was quiet a long time, but then he nodded. “And a promise must never be broken.”

  In the end, one man was persuaded to deny casting aspersions on my husband’s manhood. The other was persuaded to issue a lukewarm apology. My husband was persuaded to say that he was satisfied.

  And I was persuaded I would never again hear another word about duels.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  October 1795

  New York City

  THE SCRAP OF paper in my husband’s coat pocket smelled of French lavender. And upon it, in a very fine feminine hand, was written a street address. Just days ago, Alexander warned that Maria Reynolds had returned to New York. He didn’t want me to be dismayed if our paths should cross. But now I was left to wonder how he knew of her return, and if this was her address.

  I should ask him, I thought. Or perhaps I should throw this scrap of paper in the fire. To investigate would be beneath my dignity. I shouldn’t elevate my suspicions by crossing town to learn who resided at this address.

  But in the end, that’s just what I did, because I couldn’t live with myself if I was, again, a trusting fool. Dressed in my finest gown, I climbed the crumbling steps, took hold of the knocker, and rapped firmly on the door, bracing for the pain. If this was the residence of my husband’s mistress, I didn’t know what I’d say or do. I only knew that I must know.

  The door opened. And the sight of him—the shock of it—nearly stopped my heart.

  It wasn’t my husband but a stranger. And yet, I knew that face. The length of it. The nobility of his form. That ridiculous martial pose. “Bonjour,” he said as ruddy autumn leaves swirled at my feet. “You’re here to see Monsieur La Colombe?”

  Under no circumstances would I pay call to a gentleman’s home by myself, in the middle of the day, as if in assignation. So I ignored his question in favor of my own. “Who might you be?”

  Perhaps it was the directness of my scrutiny that made the youth’s eyes dart away. I could see now that he was a boy. Perhaps sixteen. Seventeen. No more than that.

  “A servant,” he said.

  What a dreadful liar. Because his voice convinced me that my eyes were not playing me false—that I knew who this was. “I am Mrs. Alexander Hamilton,” I said at once.

  Upon hearing my name, the panicked boy motioned me swiftly into the house. “Venez vite. Come in, s’il vous plaît!” Only when the door closed did he give a courtly bow, with a flourish that again reminded me of his father. “Pardon, madame. Forgive the ruse. My name is Georges Washington Louis Gilbert du—”

  “Motier,” I finished for him, sudden
affection gripping me. “Yes. I knew your father. And you will have trouble convincing anyone that you’re a servant, for you are every inch Lafayette’s son.”

  His smile filled with pride, but also confusion. “Colonel Hamilton sent you?”

  “No, I’m afraid our meeting is quite a surprise to me.” And a relief, as well. For the secret my husband was keeping, I realized now, had nothing to do with that woman. “How have you come to be in New York?”

  “My mother sent me. She was spared from the guillotine, thanks to Ambassador Monroe.”

  President Washington had sent Monroe to be our minister to France, and my husband insisted he was bungling the job. But James Monroe had accomplished this, for which I was deeply grateful. “Is she here? Is your mother free?”

  The boy shook his head. “Maman insisted upon joining my father in his prison cell, to shame his captors or share his fate. But she made me go,” Georges said, eyes welling with guilt-ridden tears. “I did not want to leave them behind, but she said I could save their lives. I am to go for help. To the American president himself.”

  I nodded, quickly. “We must get you to Philadelphia.”

  “Colonel Hamilton says it is not yet possible.”

  Not yet possible? I couldn’t imagine what intrigue my husband was about. Or why Lafayette’s son was posing as a servant. But my heart broke at the boy’s obvious terror. “Then you must come home with me.”

  Young Georges shook his head. “It is not safe.”

  I didn’t care. I’d protested my husband threatening to brawl in the streets over a matter of a treaty. But if risks must be taken, then they must be taken for the son of a man we both loved. “I insist,” I said, pained to see how thin Georges was, and appalled at the shabby brown coat in which he’d been clothed. I’d have to find him new breeches and an embroidered coat. Something fitting. “I’ll make you a fine meal.”

  Though hunger lurked in his eyes, he fretted, “But my tutor and our host—”

  “They’re both welcome,” I said. With that I took Georges home straightaway in my carriage, though the boy insisted upon using the servants’ door in the back.