Glancing over her shoulder, as if for fear her mother might overhear, Dolley leaned in to confide, “In truth, I’ve an ardent suitor already. ’Tis the custom for a widow to wait, but keen to be wed again, I crave the advice of a woman as sensible as thee.”
Remembering the trial of my own delayed marriage, I knew it was a difficult thing to wait. But still I advised, “You’ll do yourself a great service in the eyes of society to observe the custom.”
“If I was to observe custom, the wait would be eternal,” she said, forlornly. “For my suitor is not of my faith and I shall be shunned if I marry the fellow.”
“Oh, dear.” The churches of my childhood had been Anglican and Dutch Reform. I’d baptized my children at the Episcopal Trinity Church. And having shared services with persons of different faiths, I did not trouble myself with differences of denomination. But the Quakers were much stricter about such things. I sipped at the strong brew as I debated how best to advise her. “Marriage already demands heavy sacrifice. Are you certain your suitor is worthy of it?”
“Oh, he is worthy,” Dolley said a little breathlessly. “I admire him above all other men. He says he dreams of me and burns with such passion for me he that he yearns to relieve his flame!”
“My goodness,” I said, half-convinced she would, in her excitement, run off with this honey-tongued lover by night’s end. Fanning myself against the heat of summer—or perhaps the heat of Dolley’s words, I asked, “Just who is this charming young Romeo?”
Dolley bit her pink lip. “An older gentleman. Decidedly good-looking.”
Several dispossessed but distinguished nobles had recently fled to our shores, so I guessed, “A Frenchman?”
“A Virginian,” Dolley whispered. “Mr. Madison.”
I nearly choked on my coffee. She couldn’t have surprised me more if she’d named a Barbary pirate. “James Madison?”
She nodded in answer, her smile incandescent.
“James Madison, the congressman?”
“The very same,” she chirped.
And truly, in that moment, I knew that love was no respecter of persons or explainable passions whatsoever. For I would scarcely have described little Jemmy Madison, professorial and pale as a parson, as decidedly good-looking, nor imagined him yearning for relief for his flame. And though I was wicked enough to take private amusement in this revelation, I knew I must never tell my husband this gossip or he’d wield it in such merciless mockery that the whole city would be laughing.
“Well,” I said, trying to smother my merriment. “Will you deprive Philadelphia of its last confirmed bachelor, then?”
Dolley weighed the question, staring down at her noisy boy. “In Mr. Madison my little child will have a generous and tender protector. But what a price, to give up one’s faith.”
It was a high price. But in the wake of yellow fever, I loved Alexander with such a terrifyingly renewed passion that I believed I might choose him even at the expense of my own soul. And I told her this.
Whereupon she embraced me with gratitude and a tearful little laugh. “Perhaps I will agree to marry him. I fear I never had the soul of a Quaker anyway. Or so Senator Burr tells me.”
Burr.
I’d forgotten that he was boarding here. I was too much a Schuyler to have forgiven Burr for ousting my father from the Senate. But because word had recently reached us that Theodosia had died, the victim of a lingering cancer, I softened. “How is he bearing up?”
Dolley shook her head. “He’s in a terrible grief . . . it would do the sorrowful man some good to hear kind words before he goes off to New York for her funeral.”
My friendship with Theodosia had once been close, so I mourned her loss. How much worse for her husband, now facing alone the care of their eleven-year-old daughter. I couldn’t think it disloyal to offer condolences. Politics be damned. “I shall call on Senator Burr, if he’s in.”
Pointing the way, Dolley said, “He sits on the balcony overlooking the street while reading. All day, sometimes.”
I mounted the stairs and found Burr, his boots propped up on a chair, his eyes shadowed by the brim of a hat. Always of a languid air, he looked up from his book with obvious reluctance, and blinked. “Do my eyes deceive me, or do I see the wife of the secretary of the treasury?”
Despite the playful words, Burr’s tone was lifeless.
“Your eyes do not deceive you, Senator Burr. I wanted to tell you how much I regret to hear of the passing of your wife. I remember Theodosia so fondly.” When he didn’t respond, I went on. “In those early days when I was a new mother, she offered me friendship, companionship, and advice. I remember how she watched over my children, and helped at dinner parties, and . . .”
Burr said nothing to this litany but instead stared down at the street, as if he couldn’t look at me. And perhaps he couldn’t. At the time, I thought that perhaps my condolences weren’t welcome because he couldn’t see me as anything other than the wife of a rival. But now, I know that Burr was already becoming an empty vessel, more able to separate politics from the personal than any man I’d ever known.
Into the awkward silence, I added, “Theodosia was a very interesting conversationalist and had a very great spirit.” Still, he said nothing, and I wished I hadn’t come on this errand. “Please take comfort in knowing that Theodosia loved you.”
Hoping that was enough to extricate myself, I turned to go.
He stopped me with a chuckle. “And do you consider yourself an expert in love?” For a moment, I knew not what to say. What an odd creature Burr was. I attributed it to his grief, but then he said, “Mrs. Hamilton, I know.”
Confused, I peered back at him, and the shrewd cast of his eyes turned my blood to ice.
He wasn’t responding to what I said. He knew. Somehow, Burr had learned of my husband’s infidelity. And he was laughing. For a moment, I dared not move a muscle lest I betray my horror.
Steadying myself, I looked to the street below. Horses cantered. Wagon wheels clacked. Men called to one another. But I heard not a sound but the beating of my own heart.
Then Burr’s cough. “That was ill-done of me,” he said, with what might have passed for chagrin in any other man; I realize now that he wasn’t entirely capable of it. “My wife’s death has apparently stolen my capacity for subtlety. I assumed you were aware of your husband’s indiscretion, and because you’re not an actress of any talent, I see that you are aware.”
For a moment, I considered whether I could throw him from that balcony. Responses flashed through my mind, one more horrible than the next until he forestalled any reply with his next revelation.
“Mrs. Reynolds has retained me as a lawyer in filing for divorce.”
It was all I could do to blank my expression. To think that we’d convinced Monroe and the other investigators to keep quiet, only for my husband’s harlot to tell tales. And because I was, more and more, learning to think like my husband, I worried it might become a matter of court record in a divorce proceeding.
Burr seemed to read my mind. “I’ve advised Mrs. Reynolds to mention nothing of her connection to Hamilton. She will, instead, accuse her own husband of adultery, and the scoundrel doesn’t dare contest it. So I think the matter that concerns you has a good chance to remain a private one and I will do my best to keep it that way. I hope that gives you some peace of mind.”
That was . . . unexpected. Burr didn’t have to advise Maria Reynolds to keep quiet. Indeed, he had no motive to do so, so I was immediately suspicious. “Why would you . . .”
“Friendship, my dear lady,” Burr said, as if it should be obvious. “I’ve never seen a reason why a mere difference in politics should be a reason for personal discord.”
His words brought to mind the dinner table policy I’d once naively embraced. “Perhaps this reassuring message is better delivered to my husband.”
“By my reckoning, Hamilton has less of a right to reassurance than you do,” Burr said, eyeing me levelly. �
��You’re the one I wish to comfort.”
My throat tightened. “And yet, I came to offer you comfort.”
“I cannot be comforted.” That’s when the impenetrable armor of Burr’s character, which made it so easy for him to slip from one political faction to another—amiable to all, sincere to none—fell away. “My wife was the best woman and finest lady I ever knew, and now I go to attend her funeral knowing I never made enough time to attend her in life.” He said this bitterly. “Do you know I offered to give up my ambitions and leave government for her? Theodosia wouldn’t have it. Now she’s gone and ambition is all that’s left.”
I should’ve heard the threat in those words. But at the time, my heart filled with such pity for his agony that I took the liberty of squeezing his hand—never dreaming that same hand would one day inflict that same agony upon me.
* * *
September 1794
Philadelphia
It was a time for terror.
For two years, the French Revolution had depended upon it. Now, a flood of refugees washed into our American capital, so many that the French language rang out on every street corner. Even the newspapers featured advertisements in that language for everything from wines and perfumes to fencing lessons and theater performances. And the refugees brought with them chilling tales of abuse and deprivation, horrifying stories of victims shortened by the national razor, their silently screaming heads held up for the jeers of the crowd, still dripping bloody red gore.
“Quelle horreur,” said Mr. Moreau, the owner of the bookstore on the corner of Walnut Street.
I’d come to replenish my husband’s ever dwindling supply of paper and ink, as well as to purchase a book of French for Ana, who was learning the language from a tutor. The store was also a meeting place for some of the most prominent French exiles, and Mr. Moreau knew them all.
“Poor Vicomte de Noailles,” he said, rummaging amongst the clutter of maps, engravings, and scientific instruments for sale. “He hasn’t come out of his house for days.”
Noailles was Lafayette’s brother-in-law, and he, too, had fought heroically for us at Yorktown. Now Noailles found himself persecuted, forced into flight, and grieving the murders of those he’d left behind in France—women of Lafayette’s family, too.
“Last I saw the vicomte,” Moreau continued, “he kept murmuring that his wife must have been spattered by her own mother’s blood going up the stairs to the guillotine. That he should’ve divorced her when he fled so as to spare her this fate.”
Clutching Ana’s book in my gloved hands, I said a silent prayer. “He couldn’t have known that the monsters would come for women and children . . .”
“No,” Moreau agreed. “But maybe his wife could have renounced him. Maybe it would have saved her.”
Stand by him and die, renounce him and live.
I wondered, in her place, what I would’ve done.
My husband was determined that I should never find out. “I must leave you,” Alexander whispered softly the next morning, regretfully rising from my pillow as dawn glowed rosy in our window.
There was an uprising in western Pennsylvania against the whiskey tax my husband had levied to pay the country’s war debt. Tax collectors had been tarred and feathered. Whiskey rebels had blown up the stills of their neighbors who paid the tax. They’d kidnapped a federal marshal. They’d even threatened to build a guillotine. Here. In America.
President Washington had been forced to muster an army. He would lead it, personally, against these rebels to establish, once and for all, that the laws of this new nation must be obeyed. That terror here would not be countenanced.
And Alexander meant to ride out at the president’s side.
My husband reassured our children that there’d be no real fighting, that a show of force would be enough. But I also heard him tell a friend that the game afoot was for no less than true liberty, property, order, and heads.
I was no young bride anymore, confronted for the first time with the terror of her union being torn asunder, of losing a man who’d become a part of her to the vagaries of war. I was older and wiser. Wise enough to say, “But you’re the secretary of the treasury, not the secretary of war.”
“Regardless, Jefferson is calling this Hamilton’s Insurrection. And in a government like ours, the proposer of a measure which involves danger to his fellow citizens should partake in that danger.”
“So now you admit, there will be danger?” I wanted to know the truth of what we faced. All of it. “Is Jefferson our Robespierre?” I asked, searching my husband’s eyes, wondering how scared I should be. “Would he cheerfully condemn us to the guillotine and lap up our blood?”
“No,” Alexander said, stroking my cheek. But lest I think he said it only to comfort me, he added, “That philosophical fool would be forced to mount the scaffold behind us. A victim of the same mob he’s emboldened.”
Alexander wouldn’t allow a repeat of the Citizen Genêt affair, with mobs threatening us on our doorstep. He meant to take the fight to the rebels this time.
But what if he doesn’t return?
I shook the thought away. If I was sick with worry it was because I was with child again. Proof of our love and mutual desire. Proof of forgiveness and grace. This baby represented something new and hopeful between Alexander and me, and it pained me to think that after such a long struggle, everything remained so fragile.
But I was determined to be his lioness now, so I asked no more questions and said nothing more about my fears. Instead, I drew him back to our warm bed, and climbing astride, reminded him of that intimate day in a faraway field when we made love like a sacrament.
At my boldness, Alexander’s hands gripped my hips, his heated interest making me wish I’d been bolder in love before. “A new start indeed, Eliza . . .”
Later that day, I saw him off on Market Street where he prepared to ride out to war with the aging president. I didn’t care what anyone else said, the sight of even an aging George Washington still inspired me and stiffened my spine. And so I teased my husband, “At long last it seems I have persuaded you to return to the side of your general.”
We’d come far enough that Hamilton smiled. “It seems you shall always have your way.”
“Then come back to me,” I said, fighting my own battle against foreboding and kissing him farewell.
Martha Washington and I clasped hands as we watched them go. Then I spent the next two months trying to keep the children from missing their father as much as I did. The boys had their schooling, but as my daughter was ten years of age and Fanny only a few months younger, I took them for lessons from the French dance master. And while they danced, I collected donations and delivered them to the needy.
“Voici le chapeau idéal pour Monsieur le secrétaire, Madame,” said Madame le Grand from behind the hatter’s stall in the market. She held up a black felt riding hat with a black cockade.
“Yes, I’ll take the hat. Merci,” I replied, fishing money from my purse as Madame le Grand’s two barefooted children wrestled in the cold street over a loaf of bread.
Not old enough to help their mother look after their hatter’s stall in the market, they were lean as wild dogs and dressed in rags that offered them no defense against the weather. And though I knew it shamed Madame le Grand, and the other refugees, to rely upon charity, they had little choice unless they would starve.
“Take this as well,” I said, pressing into her hand a pouch of donations I’d collected for her. “And if you come by the house on Sunday morning before church service, I’ll have some warm clothes that my children have outgrown.”
“Merci,” Madame le Grand said, clutching the pouch against her faded linen dress, worn without stays, her eyes lowered. She’d had a little cottage outside Paris. With a flower garden. A fine tea service.
Now, without a husband, she had nothing. Alone and desperate. And I had cause to imagine myself in her miserable condition as Madame le Grand thanked me agai
n and again, boxing up a hat for my husband that he might never wear.
“Mrs. Hamilton!” I turned to see Dolley in a swish of red cloak, a veritable rainbow of ribbons flowing from her fancy bonnet. Freed from Quaker restraint, she was never plain now. “Is that a surprise for the secretary?”
“Oh, yes,” I answered. “When my husband returns home, I should like to present him with a little gift.”
A basket of apples looped over one arm, Dolley glanced at my pregnant belly and chirped, “I should think a baby the very best gift of all! Or so Mr. Madison tells me.”
She’d married him, even though it meant expulsion from her faith. Even though it put a little distance between us because of the estrangement of our husbands. But I didn’t blame her. In marrying Madison, she’d lifted her child from poverty to wealth in one stroke. And, despite the strangeness of the pairing, the Madisons were a love match. “Well then, do you mean to give Mr. Madison the gift he most desires?”
“As soon as I can,” Dolley replied, and then, with a twinkle that proved she really never did have the soul of a Quaker, she added, “I’m certainly making every effort to procure it, all hours of the night.”
Halfway between scandalized and horrified by the image that conjured, I laughed too hard, and a sharp pain knifed through my abdomen. Doubling over, I gasped as the market suddenly spun, assaulting me with the sound of horse hooves on cobblestones, passing wagons, brooms being whacked free of dust in doorways.
The roar of grocers in the market shouting the price of mustard, apples, and sugar . . .
I dropped my purse.
And Dolley Madison was at my elbow. “Let’s get her home,” she was saying to a black man who steadied me. One of her husband’s slaves, I suspected, and in a swirl of half-formed, absurd thoughts, I couldn’t help but wonder, given the Quakers’ strict antislavery position, what she thought of now owning slaves herself.
Next I knew, I was jostling in the carriage beside her, shivering with cold. Then I was being put into bed. “Here, drink this,” Dolley said, bringing hot chocolate that she’d stirred together in my kitchen.
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