She glanced over and saw Emma pull a bolt of dark cloth from John’s hands and replace it with another from the shelf. John’s face lit up; clearly Emma had given him a fabric of superior quality to the one he had picked out, too.
“And it even costs less!” she heard her brother exclaim. “Miss Trask, you are remarkable!”
Yes, Emma would make someone a good wife. And she thought she might already know who that someone could be.
* * *
• • •
“JOHN, EMMA,” SHE said once they were back on the street. “I am thinking of having a little party in a few weeks—maybe a month to do it properly—to celebrate the new additions to our household. Although my confinement is still some time away, I feel as though I have to get all my entertaining in now before I retreat into seclusion. What do you think?”
As usual when they were out together, John had taken Emma’s arm and served as her escort. If at first she had seemed somehow shy about John’s gallantry, now she took it in course, and even looked up at him to allow him to speak first.
“What do I think about you going into seclusion?” her brother said. “Or what do I think about a party? Because I think the idea that a woman must hide her pregnant body is a little silly myself, although I suppose it saves some money on dress fabric.”
Emma blushed a little at this outré comment, though a smile also flickered at the edges of her mouth.
“Oh, John, you’re incorrigible!” Eliza laughed, although if she were being honest, she agreed with him. Her mother had spent almost a quarter of her adult life above stairs when company was over, lest someone not of the family catch a glimpse of her in the motherly way—as if they had not seen exactly the same thing in their own homes! “I meant the party, and you know it.”
“Well, if Peg’s and Angie’s stories are to believed, my rather boring middle sister somehow throws the most exciting parties in New York City, so I think my answer is obvious: Let’s pop some corks!” said John.
“And you, Emma? You would be the party’s second guest of honor. Have you any thoughts on the matter?”
She was pleased to see Emma glance at John before answering, as though he might speak for her. Her deference was a sure sign of their growing connection.
“Oh, Mrs. Hamilton,” Emma said with genuine modesty, “there is no need to honor me. I am a housemaid in all but name, and more than content to fulfill that role.”
“Nonsense,” Eliza said. “You are a Trask, and a niece of Prudence Schlesinger, and as such fit to dine at any table that plays host to my wayward brother.”
“Hey!” John protested. “Who are you calling wayward?”
Emma looked timidly up at John’s face. “I hardly think I deserve such an honor.”
John smiled down at Emma. It was a wry smile to be sure, but charming as well, and Emma lowered her eyes demurely.
“Allow me to tell you something about my sister, Miss Trask,” John said. “Although Eliza has this way of phrasing things so that it sounds as though she’s asking you a question, the truth is she’s simply telling you how things are going to be. In my experience, it’s always best to just smile and nod, and allow her to move your arms and legs about as though a marionette. Because in the end that’s what’s going to happen anyway.”
“Why, John Bradstreet Schuyler!” Eliza laughed. “You make me sound a positive battle-ax!”
“Trust me,” John said to Emma, ignoring his sister. “If she hadn’t been born a lady, I’m pretty sure she’d have ended up as a muleteer or drill sergeant. She may wear silk and powder, but underneath she’s all steel.”
“Who are you accusing of wearing powder?” Eliza said. “My complexion is wondrously fair!”
“It seems I have no choice then but to accept,” Emma said—meekly, of course. She stole another shy glimpse at John, and Eliza could see she was trying not to smile.
“Perfect!” Eliza said. Then, in a leading voice, she added: “You know what a party means, don’t you?”
Emma could only shrug.
“We have to shop for dress fabric!”
“And that’s my cue,” John groaned. “I’m going to meet some of the lads from school.” He bowed to Emma and winked at Eliza. “Don’t wait up.”
Part Two
Footmen and Gentlewomen
6
Paterfamilias Panic
The Law Offices of Alexander Hamilton, Esq.
New York, New York
July 1785
The news that Eliza was expecting their first child had a curious effect on Alex. At first he was elated. Over the moon. He literally couldn’t wipe the smile from his face. He would smear his hand over his lips, and when it came away they would still be curled in an upward-facing curve, like a bowl set out to catch a fresh spring rain. Eliza teased him that he had the same goofy smile on his face that Thomas Jefferson was wont to sport after he’d drunk a cup or two of his famed poppy tea.
As a fatherless child, all Alex had ever wanted was to shower paternal love on a family in a way that had never been shown to him. Since he’d met Eliza, his dreams had been filled with children. He wanted a huge family, as big as William and Susannah Livingston’s, as big as Philip and Catherine Schuyler’s. Bigger even. Like the biblical Jacob, he would have a dozen children—a score—and he would pour love and kisses and presents and prestige down upon them, and spawn a family lineage to rival those great American dynasties. The Hamilton name would live on in his descendants for countless generations and enable this country that he had helped found to reach its greatest potential.
“I feel like Abraham himself,” Alex told Eliza as he covered her face, her hands, her belly with kisses that evening.
“You’re being silly,” Eliza said, although the truth was she felt a little like Sarah.
“I’m just so happy,” he told her.
* * *
• • •
AND THEN HE panicked.
Alex went to bed that first night with his wife in his arms and a smile on his face, and he woke in a sweat from a terrible dream in which a group of faceless creditors—is there an uglier word in the English language!—broke down his door and turned him and Eliza and their son (his name was going to be Philip, Eliza had already told him) out of their house, transforming them at a stroke from one of New York’s first families into a just another gang of sooty-faced beggars. Alex was a rational man. He didn’t put much stock in dreams. But Eliza told him that her pregnancy had been revealed to her while she was sleeping, so if he rejected the omen of his own fantasy, wasn’t he forced to reject hers as well?
But that’s not how it works, he told himself. Sometimes such visions are gifts from Providence, informing us of the future, and sometimes they’re just manifestations of our own fears. Alex’s own childhood had been rocked by bad luck and worse behavior. His father had absconded, his mother had drifted from man to man until she succumbed to illness at a young age, he and his beloved brother, James, had been torn apart and sent to live in separate homes. It was only natural that he would be nervous about starting a family of his own.
Why even Eliza’s childhood, which could seem idyllic, was marked by tragedy! Her mother had given birth to fifteen children, but seven of them had died as infants or toddlers. And so, yes, what if his and Eliza’s baby died? What if Eliza died? What if he died? What if the tide of public opinion turned against him, and instead of a brilliant lawyer who could win the most hopeless cases he came to be regarded as just another amoral conman, a man who would say or do anything to defeat his opponents?
And what of his political ambitions? They had been placed in suspension for the past couple of years as he worked to establish himself financially, but he had always believed that his true destiny was not to be just another well-heeled lawyer, but a civil servant—a civic leader. But all of that would be over before it began.
He would be forced to forgo all his prestigious clients for a blundering procession of grifters and graspers seeking to use the law to defraud law-abiding citizens and businesses and even the government out of their hard-earned money. If he managed to get his name on a ballot, voters would scratch it off. The people who actually won elections would refuse to appoint him to even the lowliest clerkship. He would be a joke.
It was as if all the promise of his early life and career had been revealed to be a treacherous lure, a piece of meat sitting in a pair of concealed iron jaws that would snap shut the minute he reached for it. How could he have ever been so stupid as to think that a nameless boy from a tiny little island in the Caribbean—not Cuba or Puerto Rico or Saint-Domingue or Jamaica or one of the other colonial jewels, but poor pathetic Nevis!—could talk his way into power in a new country? How could he have ever been so brazen as to believe he could join the upper echelons of society? What a fool he was!
* * *
• • •
“OH, ALEX, YOU’RE being a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” Eliza laughed the next morning over tea, when he confessed his anxieties and recalled his dream. “Calm down, for heaven’s sake. I’m the one who’s growing a baby in her belly, after all.”
Alex couldn’t calm down, but he could do what he always did when he found himself overwhelmed by ephemeral fears: He threw himself into his work.
Since his dramatic success with Caroline Childress last year, he had acquired dozens of new clients in similar straits: one-time Tory supporters who had pledged allegiance to the United States after independence was won rather than return to a country on the other side of the Atlantic that most of them had never seen. But their new country, or at least their new government, had not always returned their amiability, and in many states—especially New York, under its rapacious blond buffoon of a governor, George Clinton—the retaliation had been especially punitive.
Because the new nation did not yet have a supreme court with the ability to set legal precedents, each and every case had to be tried individually. One after another, aggrieved farmers and landlords and merchants and tradesmen and tradeswomen came to Alex asking only to be allowed to hold on to what had always been theirs, and one after another Alex pled their cause for them, forcing the government of New York to live up to the words with which Mr. Jefferson had begun the Declaration of Independence, and to allow its citizens to claim their unalienable rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And one after another he won.
The damages ranged from a few dozen pounds to many hundreds, and Alex spent as many as fourteen hours a day writing brief after brief to earn his ten percent of the takings. To speed his task, he hired a trio of clerks with the colorful names of Nippers, Turkey, and Bartleby, and with their help he was able to double his output (though his profits increased rather more modestly, because of course the new employees did not work for free, and the larger office he was forced to take on was an additional expense).
Alex loved the work, but he couldn’t help but feel it was a bit of a distraction from his true calling, which was politics. He had been elated when he won a seat as New York’s representative to the Congress of the Confederation back in ’82, but he resigned in disgust after less than a year in office. In the absence of a strong central government, the Congress was like a dysfunctional family of thirteen feuding siblings all fighting for their parents’ inheritance.
Everyone was more concerned with getting something for themselves than in choosing the course that would make the whole family stronger. Alex had spoken with a few other political leaders about the need for a new Constitution that would truly unite the thirteen states. Several of them had agreed with him, including the brilliant James Madison, but as yet their plans had not proceeded, not least because Alex was too busy with his law practice to devote much energy to politics.
If he was ever going to make an impact on the national stage—let alone establish himself as the true paterfamilias of a large and powerful clan—he would need to shift away from these small-time cases, or at least augment them with more lucrative work. And so, once he had set his clerks on course, he turned his attention to the charter Reverend Provoost had showed him just minutes before Eliza shared her own momentous news. It was a fascinating legal question to be sure, but to Alex it was also a life raft: his big chance to ensure his financial stability and turn his mind to the kinds of great questions that would ensure his place in history.
As Alex studied the document, he found the church’s charter was admirably concise and frighteningly clear, and why shouldn’t it be? Since Henry VIII created the Church of England in the 1530s, the British government had had two and a half centuries to perfect its management of that nation’s ecclesiastical affairs. The kernel of the document was that, as a “religious rather than fiduciary concern,” the church was directed to run its affairs for “the enrichment of the community” rather than itself, and as such could not “use, lease, grant, demise, alien, bargain, sell, and dispose of” properties “exceeding the yearly value of £5,000.” From what Alex could see, the church had been pulling in nearly twice that amount for the past three decades, with the exception of the war years, and had only managed to come in under the £5,000 mark by dint of some rather creative accounting: In 1784, it had shown net income of £4,999.98, which was cutting things about as fine as you could. Alex saw ways in which he could manipulate the numbers still further and perhaps eke out another £200 or £300. For example, the church had not deducted the cost of the wheat it purchased to make its communion wafers, perhaps not wanting to admit that the Heavenly Host had earthly origins. Ditto the wine used for sacrament. But these would hardly make a dent in the church’s financial woes and, more to the point, verged on dishonest manipulation of both the law and mathematics, if not religious doctrine itself, which ran contrary to Alex’s deepest principles, not to mention the church’s. Try as he might, Alex could see no loophole that didn’t flirt with crass opportunism or outright criminality.
In desperation, he asked Reverend Provoost if he could see a complete accounting of the church’s holdings. The rector seemed to have anticipated this request, for within two hours of Alex’s sending a messenger over, three porters arrived bearing nineteen large wooden crates of musty documents going back nearly a century. The pile took up nearly half of Alex’s private office, filling the room with the smell of sour, yeasty mold; but until someone invented a way to turn paper into ether, there was nothing else to do but dive in. Alex threw open the windows, letting in the warm summer air, pried the lid off the first crate, and set to work.
It took him the better part of the month of July to begin to make heads or tails of things. From a filing standpoint, at any rate, the church certainly wasn’t run like a business. There was no discernible order to the documents that Alex could make out, and he would peruse one twenty-page tract thoroughly only to wade a few inches deeper and discover another that superseded the one he’d just studied so thoroughly. After a week of this, he realized he was going to have to sort and classify the thousands of files before he could actually review them, a task that took over a week. With each dusty, unpaid minute, Alex was painfully aware that his chances of actually making any money off this case were growing as dim as the filthy, worm-eaten papers he was sorting.
But in for a penny in for a pound (or five thousand, as the case may be): Alex’s fingers turned darker than a ditchdigger’s and he was coughing like a coal miner, but eventually he had what he thought was a fairly clear grasp of the situation. Shortly after its charter in 1697, the church had acquired large tracts of land on the island of Manhattan, including a two-hundred-acre grant by Queen Anne in 1705. Most of that land had been empty at the time, its rocky, rolling soil heavily forested, and had been let to area farmers to clear, level, and till.
But as the city grew, a good portion of the farmland was developed for urban use and now housed a variety of businesses whose
rents, in order to artificially lower the parish’s income, were kept at a fraction of market rates, if not waived entirely. Dozens of buildings on church property stood empty and decrepit because the church was forbidden to rent them due to the income limitation, nor could it afford to maintain them because of a shortage of funds. Similarly, more than half of its remaining pasturage lay fallow, or was farmed by squatters who had no legal right to the land but recognized that Trinity would do little to drive them away. The church even owned the land on which Columbia’s College Hall had been built, for which it received a mere fifty pounds a year in rent. That was hardly more than Alex paid for one pew in the church. It was absurd.
And punitive as well. The more Alex researched the matter, the more it appeared that Trinity’s income restriction had been imposed on it because the mother church back in England didn’t want a “mere colonial” parish growing too powerful. So it hobbled Trinity’s finances, and whenever the New World church found itself in straitened circumstances, the mother church back in England provided the money from its own deep coffers, which, connected directly to the crown’s treasury, weren’t restricted in the way Trinity’s were. And yet it was all perfectly legal. Furthermore, since the church and New York State had agreed to maintain the charter in the wake of independence—Governor Clinton was unwavering in the matter—there was not even the claim of bad faith upon which to challenge it.
It took Alex nearly a month to work this out. A month of exhausting fourteen- and sixteen-hour days, and for no pay as well. A month of lost income, and meanwhile two new mouths to feed in the form of John and Emma, and a footman’s salary for Drayton and a nursery to be appointed—and in a manner suitable to the Schuylers’ expectations to boot.
By the end of the month, Alex’s panic had returned, and doubled. He glanced around the stacks and stacks of brown moldy paper that made his office look like the inside of a termite’s nest.
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