My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  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.

  * * *

  IT 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 bittersweet 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.

  * * *

  WE 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?

  Chapter Forty

  June 1814

  Harlem

  HOW WILL YOU get on here by yourself, Mother?” William asked while I unlatched the shutters to let fresh air into the long-neglected house at the Grange.

  On leave from the academy at West Point, my nearly seventeen-year-old son had worked himself into a lather carting chairs and lamps and personal items into the house. But now, red-faced and dripping with sweat, William looked ready to pack it all back into a wagon if I should change my mind.

  None of my sons approved of my decision to move to the home we once more owned, away from the city, our friends, and my work at the orphanage. Yet in the aftermath of my sister’s death, I welcomed the isolation of the country where no one would see the darkness that had crept into my heart.

  “I won’t be alone,” I reassured William. “I’ll have Lysbet and Little Phil. And there’s no reason to waste money paying rent in town.”

  That much was true. Having only the youngest two children in my care now, I could undertake their education myself and hire back Mr. and Mrs. Genti to help me keep up the place. Because at least this house was mine, even if the man who built it was not . . .

  Who was Alexander Hamilton?

  A traitor or a patriot? A visionary or a fool? A gentleman or a fraud?

  That’s what I wanted to know, and now it kept me awake all night reading the mountain of letters, pacing in fits and starts. Like Hamilton. Though my project was at once humbler and more ambitious than a pamphlet or a treatise or a book defending a new form of government. Mine was simply to learn the truth.

  And there was more to read now than ever. Because I’d never stopped collecting my husband’s writings. For the biography and for myself, I needed them. And in the ten years since he’d died, I’d hunted down thousands of letters, pamphlets, and reports from everyone and everywhere. Political essays and financial treatises. And, of course, account books, in which I now found that in the year Angelica came to New York without her husband, Hamilton paid her expenses. Not just those I’d known about, for which Church was to have reimbursed him—but unspecified expenses, too, as if Angelica had simply presented him with receipts for her shopping trips. He’d also rented rooms for her, in addition to her house.

  What rooms? Where were they? And why had she needed other rooms when she’d had that luxurious town house? I couldn’t fathom it.

  And, then, in the very next entry in the ledger, I found that Hamilton had purchased himself a closed coach.

  Ugly images rose to my mind.

  I’d never been to Europe, where it was common for noblemen to keep mistresses, but I could guess how a gentleman might plan clandestine meetings. Secret rooms reached by a closed coach with curtains drawn. A beautiful woman inside whispering in French to a man hungry for her appreciation . . .

  I remembered precisely how Hamilton was that year as secretary of the treasury. He’d likened himself to a veritable prime minister with all the powers and privileges. He’d believed himself in command of a whole nation, so why should he be denied the caresses of any willing woman?

  But that was before the yellow fever, I told myself, trying desperately to salvage anything from our life together. Alexander was changed after the fever. A different husband. A better man. And Angelica, when she moved back to America, was a changed woman. The most reliable, generous, and loyal sister that any person could have.

  Because they were guilty, the devil inside me whispered. And they lied to you. They lied to you all your life and all of theirs. To their very last breaths.

  Blinking back acid tears, I realized these poisonous doubts could put the lie to my whole life. Yes, I had evidence, but it didn’t prove the case. Where, but in death itself, might I ever confront either my husband or my sister and have an answer?

  I needed to
stop this mad inquiry.

  Like my father before me, I needed to exert the self-discipline Hamilton lacked, the ability to let a thing alone when pursuing it could end in despair.

  But in the end, and perhaps inevitably, I’d become more like Hamilton than Papa.

  For I carried Angelica’s box of letters, and my inquiry, up to the attic, where, assailed by a cloud of dust motes that floated in the light of my lamp, I made of the private space a makeshift office for my investigation. There, amidst crates of papers in the stifling heat, I sat hour after hour, hunched over yellowed pages, sneering at Angelica’s coquettish missives, taking satisfaction that at least Hamilton hadn’t bundled her letters in a sentimental ribbon.

  Perhaps he hadn’t loved her. But had he loved me? Had either of them ever loved me? Or had Alexander and Angelica clung to each other in the fevered sweat of lovemaking, laughing at me all the while?

  When there was nothing left to read, I spied the engraved wooden strongbox with leather buckles where Alexander kept his old military uniforms and ornamental swords.

  His glory, I thought, with a contemptuous snort. And all at once, I wondered if that was where I’d find the definitive evidence I was seeking. Perhaps my husband kept some treasured token of his love affair with Angelica just as she’d kept that garter. Perhaps I’d find a matching ring, with a clipping of her hair, and then all my doubts would vanish.

  Knowing he was to duel, Alexander would have hidden anything incriminating or entrusted it to someone to destroy if he died. Hamilton was too smart for me. Too smart for everyone, except Burr.

  Nevertheless, I unfastened the latch and was struck by the arresting sight of the blue-and-buff military coat Alexander wore the first day I met him. The wool, rougher than I remembered when I first touched him. When we first kissed. And the pain, oh the pain of remembering that with now jaded eyes, sliced into me like the bayonet beside the uniform.

  Like a wounded soldier, bleeding my heart out, I searched every item in the trunk until it was empty, running my hands over the velvet lining . . . to find the false bottom I somehow expected. And that’s where I found it.