I wanted to trust that these Virginians were gentlemen—that they’d never serve us up to the public. But if my own husband couldn’t be trusted, why should I trust anything? Or anyone.
“I—I was on my way home,” I said, trying to catch my breath, hating the edge of fear in my voice, and unable to think of an able lie that would avert their suspicions. If they had suspicions.
By God, what a misery to think like Hamilton, wondering at some poison in every person’s smile! I felt guilty for it when Madison offered me an arm with genuine concern. “Are you quite all right, Mrs. Hamilton?”
“Just alarmed by the crowds,” I said.
The cultured Secretary Jefferson casually pressed his back against the bricks, as if he cared little for keeping his satin coat clean. From his lofty height, he surveyed the vista with eyes he shielded from the sun and pronounced, “There is no need for alarm, madam. Why, I think I spy your boy just across the way, having hoisted himself onto a barrel for a better view.”
“My boy?” I asked, sure he was mistaken.
“Young Philip,” he said, pointing. “There with my youngest daughter Polly. Perhaps we may make a match of them.”
It was meant in jest. And yet, I didn’t laugh. “My son should be at home.”
Jefferson gave a sunny smile. “Ah, but it’s too marvelous a day to be inside. The spirit of ’76 is in the air.”
The spirit of revolution, he meant. And I was struck with the impression that Jefferson still fancied himself a revolutionary in search of a tyrant to tear down instead of a statesman charged with a new government to build. Thus, with a meaningful look at Madison, I couldn’t help retorting, “I prefer the spirit of ’87.”
That was the year we forged a Constitution, and I doubt Madison missed my meaning. “Either way,” Jemmy replied. “A marvelous, celebratory day for the revolution.”
He spoke of it as if it were ongoing. As if the French Revolution was a part of our own. And I knew I should have nodded politely and made chitchat about the weather. But nearly confronting Maria had left me agitated enough to say instead, “I’m afraid I cannot celebrate violence.”
“Oh?” Madison asked, because inside that owlish head was a whirling brain that missed nothing. He knew that I had celebrated our soldiers, our war, our victories, and he probably thought me a rank hypocrite. “Despite the follies and barbarities in Paris, the French Revolution has been wonderful in its progress, and stupendous in its consequences.”
He was wrong. The French Revolution was devolving into anarchy.
I knew—certainly I knew—not to argue with these men. Especially here and now. How often had I counseled my husband to govern his tongue? And yet now, unmoored by my anger at my husband, mine flew free. “It certainly is stupefying that a revolution inspired by our own should turn upon those who fought heroically in the cause of our freedom. Rochambeau and Lafayette both in prison.”
At the mention of Lafayette, Jefferson’s voice gentled and his clear blue eyes filled with sympathy. “Mrs. Hamilton, my own affections have also been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause. But the liberty of the whole earth depends on this contest. And rather than it should fail, I would see half the earth desolated. An Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it now is.”
Though the season was not cold, gooseflesh rose on my arms. What a strange man to be so courtly, so charming—and so blithely condemn half the earth in pursuit of a philosophical ideal. Chilled to the bone by this remark, I glanced, disbelieving, at Jemmy Madison, who had the grace to wince.
As the crowds celebrated a new sister republic with a cannonade, all I could think of was the French king’s downfall. This same king who’d come to our aid in the cause of independence. A king who’d put his fate into the hands of his people. The people who claimed to love him.
And he’d been cruelly betrayed.
I’d read in the papers that the French thronged to watch King Louis die, and cheered when the blade fell and severed his head. They stuffed the king, head and all, into a box. And, afterward, the peasants wanted cuttings of his hair, scraps of his shirt, anything to mount upon a mantelpiece as a trinket. The public wanted to consume him. Like the hounds of hell, they even knelt and lapped up the king’s blood.
Here in America, some called that justice. And I couldn’t help but shudder, because I wore round my neck a pendant with a trinket of George Washington’s hair—a man who’d just been unanimously reelected to the presidency and sworn in for his second term but was now derided as a tyrant in the making. Perhaps even by these very gentlemen standing beside me on the street corner who I wanted to trust would never serve us up to a slavering public.
What a high-minded thing revolution had seemed when it started; but now I wondered if, in trying to bring about liberty, we’d instead opened the gates of endless war, bloodshed, and immorality.
* * *
“THEY’RE THROWING A ball for the French ambassador, Citizen Genêt,” Lucy Knox huffed, perusing the lemon cake on Martha Washington’s table before returning to her knitting. We Federalist ladies were always knitting, though I worried how easily it could all unravel.
A country. A reputation. A marriage . . .
We were discussing the French ambassador, who was recruiting troops to fight for France in defiance of President Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality. And radical Francophiles in our country encouraged it!
“Surely you’re mistaken, Mrs. General Knox,” Abigail Adams replied, peering over the length of her sharp nose. “These democrats wouldn’t host a ball. A ball is too aristocratic. It’s to be an elegant civic repast that just happens to be held in the city’s largest ballroom where they’re going to hand out liberty caps and sing ‘La Marseillaise.’”
The ladies laughed, except for Lady Washington and me. Because all I could think was that if French revolutionaries could kill a king and his ministers, Americans could kill a president and his treasury secretary . . .
Shrewdly eyeing the way my hands had stopped working my knitting needles, Abigail said, “Mr. Adams tells me we have our own Robespierres, but fortunately for us, they cannot persuade the people to follow them.”
Thin-lipped, Lady Washington replied, “I’d never have guessed Vice President Adams to be such an optimist.”
This did make me sputter with a laugh. A bitter one. Because the people seemed entirely persuadable, especially as so-called Democratic Clubs sprang up around Philadelphia based on the French Jacobin model. And I began to think nearly treasonous thoughts about this experiment with self-government. My husband couldn’t even govern himself. Not when passion took him. What hope did the common citizenry have of making wise decisions for themselves?
My fears seemed justified when, a few weeks later, ten thousand people were in the streets of Philadelphia threatening to drag Washington from his house and force us to join France’s war against England. Outside our door men shouted, “Down with Washington!”
They seemed to believe that by keeping America out of a costly foreign war, we were betraying our sister republic in France; that President Washington had turned his back on the values of the revolution. And I dared not go out, not even for church. Not when, clutching broadsheets depicting our president being sent to the guillotine, the mob screamed, “Enemies of equality: Reform or Tremble!”
Instead, I kept the curtains closed and read the Bible to the children upstairs where we’d gathered them, afraid and trembling, into our bed. Nearly nine years old, our daughter Ana was close to hysterical. Fanny, only a few months younger, sucked her thumb, as was her wont when she’d been a babe. While I rocked the littlest ones in my arms amongst a mountain of blankets Alexander had made for the boys, Ana cried, “Will they behead the president?”
“I will never let such a thing happen,” Alexander reassured us, very gravely. “Not while I draw breath.”
I knew that was true. But so, too, did anyone who wished to drag George Wa
shington to the scaffold.
Which was why they would come for my husband first.
Having finally coaxed the children to sleep in our bed with their favorite Dutch stories of elves and river Nixie, Alexander and I retreated to the divan in the back parlor, where a few candles still sputtered in the braziers on the wall. The protesters would return at dawn, but now, in the blessed quiet, I asked, “Are you not weary of all this?”
“More than you can know. Truly this trade of a statesman is a sorry thing. But I cannot quit it. Otherwise, what’s to become of our fame and glory?” He gave a wry grin, one of his most appealing. “How will the world go on without me? I am sometimes told very gravely that it could not.”
He wanted me to laugh with him. But I didn’t. It’d been his habit for months now to crawl into bed with one of the boys at night, claiming that their sleep was troubled or that he didn’t want to wake me. This was the fiction—the polite lie—that allowed us to go on as if all was well. There was no intimacy between us now, and so I wanted no more lies, either.
“All you do is fight,” I whispered. “You fight Jefferson, you fight Madison, and Burr. You fight the Jacobins, the Clintons, the Livingstons, the newspapers, the Congress, the French ambassador—”
“And I beat them,” Alexander replied. “You mustn’t fear, my love. I will defend you and the children to my last breath.”
He said this with fierce devotion, leaning over to kiss me. And I could hear my sister say, Ah, Betsy! How lucky you were to get so clever and so good a companion.
But I whispered, “I could leave you.”
I startled as if the words had come from someone else’s mouth.
Hamilton startled, too, his eyes ablaze. “What?”
I straightened up, and this time I spoke clearly. “I could leave you.” I’d scarcely allowed myself to acknowledge these thoughts much less speak them aloud, but now the words mutinied upon my tongue, beyond my command. “A divorce would be a scandal, but some society ladies quietly abandon their husbands if they have the means and inclination.”
Perhaps Alexander hadn’t believed his sweet, docile wife could contemplate such a thing because he paled. “Betsy, of all times to even muse—”
“Papa would take me back at the Pastures,” I said, idly twisting the interlocked gold bands of my wedding ring as my voice gained strength. “And his grandchildren, too. I am not without options. There’s only one thing that compels me to live with you, to cook your meals, to tend your house, to warm your bed. To admire your brilliance. To stay with you, at your side, even against a mob. And that one thing is a love you have sorely abused.”
In a flash of temper, he snapped, “There is also the matter of marriage vows.”
“Vows you failed to honor,” I shot back.
My shot must have hit its mark, because he buried his guilty face in his hands. Still I gave him no quarter; he was, after all, the one who taught me that if blood must be drawn, you must strike at the most vulnerable place.
“You say you were lured to that woman’s bed. Maybe you believe it. But I know better.” His shoulders tensed, as if he would argue, but I stopped him with one word. “Reynolds.” I spit the name, dragging in a few ragged breaths. “I couldn’t place it at first. It buzzed about like a gadfly, stinging me until at last I remembered, all those years ago, how you went to taverns seeking out the man who’d passed a slander about you . . .”
I stood up from the sofa, arms crossed over myself as I paced.
“A nobody, you said at the time. A ne’er-do-well named James Reynolds, from whom you could have no satisfaction. And yet, you wish me to believe it’s only by happenstance that, years later, you fell into bed with that man’s wife?”
Alexander colored. “How can you believe otherwise?”
“Because there’s one thing I know about you.” I whirled on him. “You never forget an offense. Maria Reynolds was the wife of a man upon whom you wished revenge. And a relation to the Livingstons, too. She was an opportunity to strike a blow against several enemies at once, so you took it. Never mind the blow you dealt me. As long as you had satisfaction.”
A long silence followed. One so long that I didn’t know whether to fear the chasm between us or welcome it. In the end, he denied nothing. “Betsy, I can never cease to condemn myself for this folly and can never recollect it without disgust, but you cannot wish to subject our children to a childhood of separation and insecurity.”
His childhood, he meant. The one that had left him with these dangerous vulnerabilities and destructive compulsions.
But I wasn’t the one to subject them to such a possibility, so I said, “I wouldn’t wish that. Yet, in trying to cure you of your fear of abandonment, I’ve somehow convinced you that you may do and say anything, and your Betsy will stay loyally at your side. I convinced myself, too. But I think it better, in times like these, for us to acknowledge that marriage is a choice, one made, every day, anew. And trust me when I say I don’t know which choice I shall make come morning.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
August 1793
Philadelphia
BRING OUT YOUR dead!”
In the high stink of summer, when Philadelphia’s outhouses overflowed gutters and dammed up alleys filled with trash, an outbreak of illness emptied the streets of rioters. An illness that may well have prevented the overthrow of the government. For now, instead of mobs shouting in front of our house, we heard only clacking carts carrying fly-bedeviled corpses.
Yellow fever.
The same horrible illness that had killed Jenny.
The fever started, they said, amongst the dock workers. They suffered chills and tremors that eventually gave way to blackened, bloody vomit. The illness spread swiftly, with fatal effect and without known cure. People in good health one morning would drop dead the next day. In the hurry to stop the spread of the contagion by getting the victims into a grave, some were likely buried alive. And when vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs and garlic offered little safeguard against the disease, everyone who could flee the city did so.
Everyone, it seemed, but us.
As late summer turned to early autumn, Hamilton believed that the business of keeping the government going in the face of anarchy was more vital than ever. “Jefferson will make much of my supposed cowardice if I leave now. I have to set an example. If I flee, it will only increase the panic, which is depopulating the city and suspending business. But you and the children should go.”
He looked away when he said this, his profile a study in agony. And I realized that he was giving me permission. Acknowledging my power to abandon him, as I had so recently threatened to do. All of it under the face-saving cover of exigency.
No one would blame me for leaving the capital at a time like this. And after the crisis had passed, we could say Mrs. Hamilton simply can’t abide Philadelphia, but the secretary visits his children at the Schuyler home from time to time . . .
That’s how it was done in high circles. Perhaps I could make that choice. Perhaps I would make that choice. But I was not ready to make it today. “We can rent a summer house a few miles outside the city,” I suggested. “Close enough that you can return for work if need be.” Encouraged by his nod of agreement, I added, “And I could ride with you, some days. Except for the few free blacks in the city who volunteered, nurses in Philadelphia cannot be had for any price. I’ll help tend the sick.”
“I cannot allow that. You’re a mother with small children, and there’s no known immunity to the disease.”
Alas, he had no immunity to it either.
The next day, returning from his office at the treasury, he made it only two steps into the front door before falling to his knees and retching into a brass urn that normally held umbrellas. And at the head of the stairs, I nearly stumbled in an effort to get to him. “Alexander!”
We left that night by carriage, the children piled atop one another like cordwood. Hamilton followed on horseback at a distance, fevered a
nd sick, his back throbbing with pain. We made it only as far as our rented summer house two and a half miles from town before he was in a near delirium.
Please God don’t let him die, I prayed, a panic seizing me. Whatever our troubles, I couldn’t bear for him to die. Perhaps especially because of our troubles, and all that remained unresolved between us. I sent straightaway for a physician who was, by happenstance, an old friend of my husband’s from the West Indies.
“Am I done for, Neddy?” Hamilton asked Dr. Stevens. Glowing with fever, my husband complained of aches in his swollen kidneys.
“It’s yellow fever,” the doctor said. “Which means you may seem to get better, but that is the crucial time.”
He didn’t have to explain why. It was only after sufferers of this ailment seemed to recover that they would suddenly jaundice, spew blood and black vomit, and die. And so the doctor said to me, “Send the children far away. All of them. Even the baby.”
I’d already sequestered the children in an adjoining house, bringing meals to the door and waving at the window, never letting them get close enough to spread the contagion. The mother in me refused the idea of sending my frightened children away in such perilous times—especially little Johnny, so recently weaned.
Sending them away felt like asking me to amputate a limb. But I’d learned during the war that sometimes amputation was necessary. Alexander was in no condition to make the choice, so it fell to me to speak very frankly with my eleven-year-old son, who would have to manage his siblings all on his own. “Philip, I need you to take your brothers and sisters to the Pastures.”
My son’s eyes went wide. “By myself?”
The fear on his face nearly broke my heart, but I couldn’t let him see that I shared it. “If you can drive the carriage as far as Germantown, you can stay with friends there. It’s only a few miles and your grandpapa will send a servant to fetch you the rest of the way. You can watch over the little ones and manage the horses just that far, can’t you?”
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