“Why must you always go away?” she cried, storming out of the room and up the stairs. The slam of her door shook the whole house.
Kissing my cheek, Alexander sighed and spoke as if he’d read my mind. “Don’t worry. She’ll adapt to the circumstances.”
I wasn’t so certain, but just then, the welfare of another member of my family weighed on my mind. “Are you sure it isn’t too much trouble to visit Peggy?” Though my younger sister insisted she was just tired, she’d been feeling poorly for months, so Alexander made a point of frequently dropping in at her manor north of Albany while he attended to his cases at the court.
He shook his head. “Of course, not. It’s on the way. And I’ll take her the basket of crabs the boys hauled out of the river.”
I walked with my husband out onto the porch, where our eldest son had the little phaeton hitched to a horse. “Seeing you will cheer Peggy, I’m sure.”
“Perhaps, then, I’ll even roast the crabs for her. Though, as a Creole, I’ve some sympathy for them.” Alexander hefted the crustaceans onto the bench seat just as little William bolted out the door and leaped off the porch, shoeless and shirtless.
As my husband swung our four-year-old ruffian into his arms, I couldn’t help but muse that Alexander being able to refer to himself as a Creole—the word for the mixed-race people who sometimes subsisted upon shellfish on the islands where he’d been raised—was what had persuaded me that my husband had somehow, finally, made peace with his dubious origins. And with our whole life now. For Alexander would never before have made such a jest.
We’d both come quite a long way together indeed.
“Can I go with you, Papa?” William asked.
“Not this time, little man,” Alexander said, pressing a big wet kiss to the boy’s neck that made him giggle. “But what if I bring something back for you?”
“A bow and arrows?” William asked, clambering down with a little war whoop.
I shook my head in exasperation, for our youngest son was endlessly fascinated by stories of the Indians and the frontier. I supposed it was the Schuyler in him. Chuckling, Alexander climbed into the phaeton and grasped the reins. “How about I surprise you?”
Grinning at our son’s excitement, I hugged him to me and waved in fond farewell. “Give my love to Peg. And tell her to write.”
Alas, I never received another letter from Peggy again.
* * *
My dear Eliza, your sister took leave of her sufferings and friends, I trust, to find repose and happiness in a better country. I long to come home to console and comfort you.
—ALEXANDER HAMILTON
The blow fell upon me like a hammer to an ox.
How could Peggy, who lived so bold a life, have succumbed so suddenly to some ignominious and unnamed disease? Though I had four sisters, I’d come of age with only two—Angelica and Peggy. From my earliest memory, I was the one in the middle. My older sister on one side, my younger sister on the other. Now, Peggy was gone at just forty-two, and Angelica and I came all unmoored.
On our knees in Trinity Church, we were bid by Bishop Moore to leave off our tears and remember the duty of Christian resignation. God had seen fit to take Peggy from us, calling her to a realm of bliss, and we must be happy for her.
But Angelica and I indulged in our tears anyway.
And we clung to each other even tighter when, not long after, Papa wrote that Mama, just a few months shy of her seventieth birthday, had passed peacefully in her sleep. The woman who’d taught me about medicine and housekeeping and Dutch traditions, who’d helped birth my children. Gone. Poor Mama!
It was almost more than Angelica and I could bear, losing them both in such quick succession, but the fire of it forged us even closer. And, in the months that followed, Angelica and I became constant companions. She made the three-hour-long round-trip through woods and farmland to see me at the Grange, complaining only a little that I’d fled the city. And I returned her visits with bumpy carriage rides to her house downtown.
On one such visit to lower Manhattan, we were treated to a noisy Fourth of July celebration during which an insolent young pup named Captain George Eacker told the crowd that President Jefferson had rescued the Constitution from my husband, who would have used his army to overthrow it.
Much accustomed to such rabble-rousing abuse, Alexander and I merely continued on to our own celebrations amongst the Society of the Cincinnati, of which my husband had become president.
But Philip could scarcely contain himself. That night, after playing billiards on his uncle Church’s new game table, he exploded. “Do those mongrels realize my father gave Jefferson the presidency? They should be tarred and feathered for spreading such lies.”
“Our son is apt to be a little intemperate,” Alexander later complained.
A complaint I took for the richest irony. “There’s no help for it, I’m afraid.”
From behind his new spectacles, my husband arched a brow. “Because I’m his father?”
“And because I’m his mother. His Schuyler blood will out.” I remembered, after all, a time when I was just as angry on my own father’s behalf, wishing to defend him against malicious lies and conspiracies.
So, the next morning, I reassured Philip that patience was the best thing. “Just as your grandpapa was eventually seen for the patriot he is, so will your father be appreciated and vindicated in the fullness of time.”
Then I forgot the matter entirely, because abuses and slanders had been too numerous in our lives to hold on to each one.
Before the weather turned to winter, Angelica and I accepted an invitation to play a game of pall-mall with Kitty Livingston upon her new husband’s lawn. After vanquishing the other ladies with mallet and ball, not to mention haranguing them for donations, I retreated to a red velvet-covered divan in a corner where my sister and I could enjoy our tea with a little privacy.
Perhaps because the loss of Peggy and Mama still felt so recent to us, we commiserated over the trouble we’d given Mama, something we understood with greater clarity now that we both had grown children of our own. And we reminisced about how Peggy had somehow convinced General Burgoyne to make a present to her of his shiny shoe buckles, how she’d fended off a hatchet-wielding Tory, and how she’d run off to marry the man of her heart.
Of course, that was no mark of distinction in our family. In fact, elopement was an epidemic in Papa’s household. Our little sister Cornelia ran off with a beau a few years prior, and now our little Caty—the very baby sister Peggy had rescued from the tomahawk-wielding loyalists—was threatening to do the same.
“I’ve always set the trends,” Angelica said, sniffling into her kerchief. “My dear Eliza, you were the only one unfashionable enough to do everything properly.”
“Poor Papa,” I replied. “He has only one unmarried daughter left, and I predict she’ll run off with her beau the first chance she gets.”
Balancing her teacup, Angelica whispered, “Poor us if it’s in Schuyler blood. Given her gaggle of suitors, Church is forced to keep his eye on our eldest daughter every moment. Meanwhile, I scowl disapprovingly at every penniless Jacobin who looks her way.”
“Are there any Federalist boys left?” I asked, for my husband’s political party had crumbled in the wake of the election, and what they considered to be Alexander’s unpardonable role in helping Jefferson win. “Or are only yours and mine still standing?”
“Well, I dare say there will soon be more little Federalists. Given the scandalous behavior of the girls at the last dance I attended, there’s not a young lady in New York who wouldn’t run away with your Philip or mine.”
The realization that my son was old enough to marry—and to sire children—was still somehow astonishing. Almost as astonishing as hearing Angelica speak about anyone else’s scandalous behavior. “How did we become the disapproving matrons, clucking our tongues at the edges of a dance hall?”
“Advancing age.” Angelica scowled. �
�It’s an appalling condition.”
I smiled over the rim of my teacup. “I don’t feel so very advanced in age.”
“Because you won a vicious game of pall-mall? Well, you’ve always had remarkable stamina, but—”
“I’m soon to add another little one to the family,” I said, splaying my fingers lightly over my bodice with excitement.
“Another!” Angelica cried in equal parts delight and dismay. “It’s the turn of the century. Have neither you nor Hamilton discovered French letters?”
I smirked. “Well, you know how Hamilton distrusts all things French . . .”
My sister quite nearly howled. “You Jezebel.”
“Oh, hush,” I said because I didn’t want her lady friends to overhear. So I leaned forward to confide, “If it’s a girl, we’ll name her after Peggy . . .”
“Peggy,” Angelica said, her eyes misting with emotion. “How lovely.” Together we melted over that sweet notion, only to be interrupted by a commotion at the door.
The wife of my husband’s law partner, Mrs. Pendleton, had arrived, apparently uninvited, without a coat or hat. She appeared in some disarray, insisting that she must see Angelica straightaway. As we rose to greet her, Mrs. Pendleton literally trembled. “Mrs. Church, there is some manner of pandemonium at your house. You had better come quick. A young man has been shot and carried there and a doctor called for. I fear—I fear . . .”
My heart leaped to my throat, because I knew just what she feared—that my sister’s boy had been shot. Angelica obviously feared it, too, clutching at my hand and trying to remain upright. As Kitty swiftly gathered up our hats and handbags for us, I urged my sister to calm.
I had, after all, treated many men in the war who survived gunshot wounds. Then I hurried my very pale and shaking sister to her house, where carriages blocked the drive. It seemed as if half the city’s doctors crowded the entryway—with, to my surprise, my nephew, apparently unharmed.
Angelica flew to him. “Oh, you infernal boy. I feared you’d taken part in an affair of honor!”
“No,” Flip said, ashen as he looked my way. “It’s my cousin.”
In that moment, someone steadied me; I think it was my brother-in-law, murmuring some explanation. But the only thing I understood was that it wasn’t my sister’s boy who’d been shot.
It was mine.
* * *
HOW DID I make my way to the gilded guest room in which my eldest son writhed? I don’t recall. My only fixed memory is crashing through the door to find Philip, his pale neck spattered in a veil of his own vivid red blood.
Alexander was there already, holding our son’s shoulders as Philip convulsed with pain. Though my husband tried to warn me away with a shake of his head, I cried my son’s name as I rushed to tend him, pressing frantic kisses upon his hand.
“Don’t worry, Mother,” Philip said, trying to muster a smile. “It just hurts like the devil . . .”
That attempt at levity cost him—his pulse raced then ebbed beneath my lips. I hushed him, as the war nurse in me frantically searched for the wound. I pulled back bedcovers to find the spot on his side where the doctors had already cut the clothing away.
What I found nearly drove me to my knees.
Dark blood, not bright red like the spatter on his face.
Dark blood, not red.
Dark blood, an inky Madeira.
The bullet had passed through his side and lodged itself in his opposite arm. It was the arm that bled red. But from the torso oozed the dark blood. Which meant the bullet had passed through some vital organ. There was no help for it. I’d seen soldiers suffer such wounds, and I knew, with horrifying clarity, that my son was dying.
Philip must have known it, too, because he whispered, “I need you to know I tried to escape the duel.” He followed this with a gasping breath. “And when I c-couldn’t, I determined to take no man’s life, but merely offer my own in preservation of honor.”
He grimaced again, writhing in pain, and Alexander shushed him with strained, halting words. “Oh, my dear boy. Save your strength. We could never doubt your honor.”
I’d only heard that tone in my husband’s voice one time before, when we lost our little baby, dead before she was born. Which meant he, too, knew it was happening again. Now.
Meanwhile, Philip was determined that we know he behaved bravely. “I reserved my fire . . . to throw in the air.”
A duel. He’d fought a duel. And he’d thrown away his shot. It was all sinking in, and I didn’t care. Dear God, I didn’t care for anything but keeping him alive and I hadn’t the faintest notion how to do it.
“Doctor,” I cried. “He must have laudanum.”
Alexander reached to still me and our fingers tangled, sticky with our son’s warm blood, as he drew my attention to the bottle at the side of the bed. Philip had been dosed with it already. Any more, and perhaps we would hasten the end.
I recoiled from the thought, though my desperate mind would later fasten upon the notion as some manner of mercy when our poor boy lay hour after hour, pale and languid, his rolling eyes darting forth through flashes of delirium.
Caring naught for the blood, we climbed into bed with him, Alexander on one side, me on the other, and whispered tearful words of love and comfort as the darkness fell. “My sweet son,” I said in a voice I normally reserved for the littlest children. “You cannot remember the happiness you gave us when you were a baby, but oh, the joy we felt, just to hold you between us in bed, just like this.”
Philip pressed his head against mine, and in my mind’s eye, he was still the little jester who’d made us laugh. The brave eleven-year-old who’d saved all my other children. The fiery thirteen-year-old who’d defended his father in the streets. And I wanted to know who did this to him. What fiendish murderer could have pointed a pistol at my beautiful, sweet boy?
I had so many questions. But they would have to wait.
For as Philip groaned in desperate pain, I realized my duty to him. I was his mother. I’d nourished him, baptized him, taught him, clothed him, and watched him grow into a man. And yet, he needed me still. Now, the most important, the most sacred thing that I could do for my son was deliver him from this world just as I’d delivered him into it.
“You mustn’t be afraid,” I whispered. “These pains will soon pass. They will pass, and you will find your rest with God.” Alexander tried to swallow a moan but couldn’t hold it back.
But Philip nodded, his blue-tinged lips trembling. “I have f-faith in the Lord and my conscience is c-clean.”
He closed his eyes, already more gone from the world than still in it. So I met my husband’s gaze across the expiring body of our son, and met eyes so full of agony that I had to look away.
Before dawn, Philip roused himself. “What s-shall I tell Aunt Peggy when I see her in heaven? I—I think she’ll be angry t-to see me so soon.” Philip said this last part with a little laugh that brought a fresh cycle of convulsions.
“Don’t laugh, my sweet,” I told him, choking back a sob as I pressed my nose into his hair and inhaled the scent of him. “Don’t laugh if it hurts you.”
Alexander echoed me, his voice cracking. “You always laughed too much. Your only fault, my dear boy.”
Philip tried to turn his grimace into a grin. “Father, I shall debate you that laughter can be a f-fault.”
“And I shall let you win,” Alexander said, his voice a raw scrape.
“A first,” my son whispered, closing his eyes with apparent relish.
His breath rattled.
Then fell silent.
Frightful, heartbreaking silence.
That silence echoed through the room.
I reeled from the bed, shaking my head, vehemently, backing away in denial, nearly crashing into my sister’s gilded chairs and mahogany tables. Half-hysterical, half-furious, I wanted to tear at my hair and beat my breasts and awaken myself from this cruel nightmare.
But while I retreated, Alexa
nder clutched our dead son, choking out, “Go, my boy. Go out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger . . .”
All my life I’d taken comfort from religion, but these words offered me no solace, and from my mouth came the keening of a wounded animal, a ghastly howl of despair. My cheeks streaked with salty tears, the skirt of my delicate pink dress stained with acrid sweat and dried blood, I was overcome with a desire to smash everything in my path—silver mirrors, blue china, crystal wineglasses. To sweep off the elegant tables all my sister’s goblets, candlesticks, and trinkets that held no worth in a world without Philip.
But I was stopped by the sight of Alexander hovering, shattered, over the deathbed of our boy, and the absurd thought that I couldn’t endure to see one more thing broken . . .
And because my husband was shattered, I couldn’t endure to see him.
Angelica tended me that night. She took the pins from my hair. She undid the fastenings of my pelisse coat, sliding the bloodstained embroidered cuffs off my arms. She stripped from me my stained pink dress. She bent down and removed my shoes and dosed me with the laudanum that was left. Where Hamilton slept that night I did not know, but my sister put me into her own bed where the sweet, merciful oblivion of sleep overtook me. And from that dream state, where my son was still alive, I did not ever wish to wake.
Chapter Thirty-Three
IT WAS THE will of heaven,” said my well-meaning Christian lady friends. “Remember the duty of Christian resignation.”
It was God, they said, who took my child from me.
But upon my aching knees in the pew in Trinity Church, clutching my Bible, I knew better.
My Dear Hamilton Page 45
