My Dear Hamilton

by Stephanie Dray

  THE SOLDIER OF APPROVED VALOUR.

  THE STATESMAN OF CONSUMMATE WISDOM.

  WHOSE TALENTS AND VIRTUES WILL BE ADMIRED BY GRATEFUL POSTERITY LONG AFTER THIS MARBLE WILL HAVE MOLDERED INTO DUST.

  The last line inscribed on the headstone had been comforting when we buried Alexander here, but I no longer believed it.

  Lafayette, however, was deeply affected.

  With a quivering lower lip, the old general gently rested his gnarled hand atop the white stone and spoke to my dead husband. “At last, here I am. It is Lafayette, your old and constant friend. It is my hope that wherever you are now, you will remind me to our brother soldiers who have not forgotten their long absent comrade—and to my ancient friends all gathered about you . . .”

  As it happened, it didn’t matter how firmly I had resolved to feel nothing. It simply wasn’t possible to stand at my husband’s grave and give dry-eyed witness to this sad reunion. My own lip quivered when Lafayette placed the wreath against the stone and bowed his head in silent and tearful communion.

  He passed a long time like that, quiet and stooped.

  And I found that my heart was not made of stone after all. For Lafayette’s emotion stirred something in me that I simply couldn’t contain. And when he raised up again, he noticed. “You will want a moment alone with him.”

  “No, it’s—”

  “I will wait by the gate,” Lafayette said, withdrawing. “I understand.”

  He didn’t. He couldn’t. Because I didn’t understand it myself.

  Now left alone at my husband’s graveside, I hugged myself tightly, trying to make sense of it. Aware that for the first time in a very long time, no one was watching me. The way the graveyard was situated, people passed gaily on the street just beyond the iron rail, laughing and going about their business without any sense of respect for the gravity of the place. And maybe I shouldn’t respect it, either.

  “Integrity?” I scoffed at the engraving. “Was there integrity in deceiving me, Alexander?” Because I didn’t sense any part of him still in this world, it seemed silly to continue. But then it’d been so many years since I’d spoken to my husband that I couldn’t resist imagining that he could hear. “Valor, I admit you had, in stupid quantity. But wisdom? I spent our whole marriage keeping you from foolhardiness. And if you’d told me . . .”

  I blinked back a rush of bitter tears.

  “If you’d told me what you meant to do that morning at Weehawken, I would have stopped you. You’d be alive, and I more the fool, but—”

  My eyes fell upon the spot where our sweet, innocent Philip was buried in the earth, and I brought my fist to my mouth to stifle my words. For I’d protected the rest of my children from this anger I felt for their father. And now, absurdly, I worried about speaking these truths in front of Philip.

  I knelt at my son’s grave and pressed my hand to the cool grass.

  “You’re with him, aren’t you?” I whispered, realizing that if Philip was united with the Lord, then none of this would be any secret to him. Even so, I couldn’t bring myself to utter the venom at the tip of my tongue, especially not the two words that would’ve hurt Alexander the most.

  You bastard.

  That’s what I wanted to say. What you did to us. What you did to your children. What you did to yourself!

  For a moment, I felt as if I hated Hamilton as much as I’d ever loved him.

  That’s when I began to laugh. A sputtering, hiccup of a laugh. Because no one, nowhere, had ever been able to make themselves indifferent to Alexander Hamilton. My husband was loved and hated, but never a subject of dispassion. Not even in death.

  And certainly I could never be indifferent to him, no matter how I’d deceived myself to the contrary. I’d never know if he went to Weehawken with the hope of losing his life. If he’d bedded my sister. Or a thousand harlots, for that matter, instead of just the Reynolds woman. These were mysteries for which I’d never have answers. And yet, coming here after all this time put me in a near state of self-destructive madness to know the truth.

  It must have been madness, for I’ve no other explanation for the way I rose up again, suddenly, and charged after Lafayette. On the path by my sister’s tomb, the old general turned, his eyes widening as I marched toward him with purpose and fury. “Did they laugh at me?”

  Stopping amidst stone angels and sepulchers, Lafayette tilted his head in confusion, “Madame?”

  “Laurens and Hamilton,” I said, firing the names like bullets. “Did they laugh as Alexander drew up his list of qualifications for a wife, and then celebrate how easily simple, stupid, saintly Betsy Schuyler was wooed and won for her father’s fortune?”

  Lafayette seemed as startled by the question as I was to have allowed it past my lips. “The sun has addled your senses, madame. Let me get you from the heat.”

  But when he reached for me, I retreated. “I am not addled. Only insulted by the man I married.”

  “Insulted?” Lafayette softened his voice, as if gentling an unruly horse. “My memory for those years is very keen. I can say with conviction that never in my presence did any man disparage you, nor would I have allowed it, then or now. My dear lady, only a derangement of grief could lead you to think the husband who loved—”

  “John Laurens,” I said, thinking that perhaps I was deranged. For no woman of sound mind would admit this. “Alexander loved John Laurens.”

  There. I said it. And now it hovered between us like a cannonball just before impact.

  I didn’t know whether to be horrified or gratified to see a flicker of recognition in Lafayette’s eyes. I thought he’d pretend at ignorance, or deny it, but instead, he shrugged. “I think so. But what of it?”

  “What of it?”

  I was, after all, not speaking of mere fraternity between brother soldiers. And yet I believed that Lafayette knew that perfectly well when he said, “C’est la guerre. That is war!”

  Only a Frenchman would dismiss it with the permissiveness of a libertine, but this Frenchman defied kings and emperors in the pursuit of principle. He was known throughout the world as a deeply honorable man. And his words carried a tone that said such a relationship was less shameful than to question it. Which shocked me into silence.

  “Madame,” he said, more gently. “You are the mother of Hamilton’s children, his wife, and his beloved companion of more than twenty years. Why should you be troubled by an attachment formed before you met?”

  Did he think my resentments were petty jealousy—like a new bride enraged to discover her husband had once danced with a pretty girl at a ball? I, too, had formed attachments before I met Alexander Hamilton. But I did not feel guilty or disloyal for them, nor did I wish Lafayette to think me petty. “I’m troubled because I wasn’t beloved. I’ve read the old letters, and they’ve poisoned everything.”

  A good-hearted girl. Not a genius. Not a beauty.

  I could recite them line for line, but I told Lafayette only as much as I could bear, feeling diminished with every word I repeated. When I was finished, Lafayette rubbed at his face. “It is regrettable, what haunted people we are, you and I.”

  I stood, trembling, aghast at my indiscretion in matters that I feared must have seemed to him quite trivial. And now there was nothing to do but pray his pressing engagements would soon force a merciful end to our conversation. But Lafayette led me to a bench by the church doors, and settled into it, as if he meant to stay with me awhile.

  He patted the bench. “Please, we are both of an age now when we must sit.”

  Suddenly tired and unimaginably weary, I sank beside him in silent mortification.

  Meanwhile, he cast a serene gaze across the cemetery. “We are also of an age when we live in the past. We speak to old ghosts more real for us than the strangers of this new age who pass us on the street, yes? We try, in vain, to crawl into letters and memories for the comfort of those who cannot talk to us any longer.”

  Renewed shame washed over me. “I
shouldn’t have troubled you—”

  “We have a saying in France,” he interrupted. “L’habit ne fait pas le moine. The robe does not make the monk . . . do you understand?”

  “No,” I said, still trembling with humiliation.

  “It means that the way things are clothed is not always as they are. Are you so modest, madame, that it has never occurred to you the letters Hamilton wrote you were the sincere ones?”

  I took a deep breath as I digested his implication—that Alexander had deceived Laurens, not me.

  Lafayette cleared his throat and rested his top hat on his knee. “If this has not occurred to you before, I can only think it is because of a delicate subject yet to be mentioned . . . Bah. What we do to women.”

  I brought my hands to my face with fear of what he might say next.

  “My friend has left you haunted by some notion that he did not love you. And to see you in this state, I am now haunted by the idea I may have given my wife the same doubts. A husband at sixteen, what did I know! But there were other women even when I was old enough to appreciate what I had in a wife.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, wanting him to stop talking. I willed him to stop talking.

  But Lafayette was never a man easily silenced. “In America, a mistress is scandal. In France? Expected. In my mind, having nothing to do with my love for my wife. I am certain it was the same for my friend.”

  I gasped softly, my stomach clenching at the realization he was defending my husband. And all I could hear was my sister’s words.

  All husbands stray.

  The memory made me so angry, I snapped, “I am long acquainted with these justifications.”

  “You mistake my purpose. I only mean to say that though a man might cause misfortune and pain to his loved ones, he can still love them. I spent five years in a dungeon, convinced I would die there, and yet, I did not actually know what it was to be unhappy until I lost my wife. That is how completely I loved her. My friend Hamilton loved you the same way.”

  “You cannot know that.”

  “How can I not know how he felt about you after a thousand intimate conversations?” Lafayette shifted toward me. “I am grateful to speak for a man who spoke for me when I was imprisoned and could not speak for myself. But what I say only echoes the voice inside you that already knows from a lifetime of kisses and tender proofs that Hamilton belonged to you. Hear me when I say there was never a person—not a soldier, coquette, or femme fatale—that he ever spoke of with such devotion, or besotted passion, as he spoke of you to me.”

  Oh, how dangerous were his words! Believing them would only lead to disappointment. No man could have been devoted to and besotted by me, and taken my sister as a mistress.

  Except perhaps for one man, said that accursed inner voice that Lafayette had summoned. Needy, insecure Alexander Hamilton, who could never forgo an impulse or resist the affections he’d been starved of as a child.

  And while these thoughts battered me, Lafayette took the liberty of resting his aged hand upon mine. “Maybe it is impossible to forgive. This I understand. But I beg of you remember that our dear Hamilton was not a man to govern his emotions. It was not in his nature. If ever you felt his love, it was real. Because to pretend at hate or friendship or love is possible for some men. But not for Hamilton. For him, impossible.”

  This, I couldn’t deny. And Lafayette was, I realized, still a resourceful general. He’d somehow stolen inside my inner fortifications and brought them down. And now my defenses were left in smoldering ruins, leaving me only to retreat. “You are too loyal a friend.”

  “I take this for a compliment, madame.”

  Sniffing, and remembering a long-ago conversation with Hamilton, I shook my head. “I’m not sure that I meant it as one.”

  “Yet, I take it anyway,” Lafayette replied. “Did I not sometimes find myself being angry with Hamilton, making within my heart a ridiculous fight between love and anger, and wishing for him to behave more sensibly? Oui! He was no perfect man. But he was a great one. It is only plain justice that his wife should remember him better. And his country, too.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  LAFAYETTE WAS THE Guest of the Nation, and despite my repeated demurs, he was determined to win me to his side.

  The general’s campaign began the next morning when Georges delivered to us a handwritten invitation to attend the grand festival at the Castle Garden, along with a gift of a book by Fanny Wright, an advocate for women’s rights and abolitionist school reformer who was traveling in Lafayette’s entourage.

  Clasping the book and the invitation with equal delight, Lysbet cried, “Can we go, Mama?”

  I didn’t relish the inevitable crowds, but it wouldn’t do for me to be seen holding myself aloof from a celebration of Lafayette to which he’d specifically invited me. Besides, I wanted to make my daughter smile.

  But when I told her we could go, her smile fell away. “Oh, but I have nothing to wear . . .”

  My Lysbet, who’d never come out properly into society, possessed a wardrobe that consisted entirely of drab workaday calicos and one fancier brocaded gown for church. Her whole life, my Lysbet had patiently forborne the money spent to educate her brothers and the attention paid to her troubled sister. She wasn’t the oldest, or the youngest, and therefore, had often been lost in the shuffle.

  But she was the daughter I’d always wished for, and she deserved a ball gown.

  It was far too late to employ a seamstress; there wasn’t a tailor or sewing girl in the city not feverishly engaged in last-minute alterations for the forthcoming ball. But inside a very old and neglected trunk, I found a beguiling gown made of blue satin with a golden belt, embroidered in the pattern of a Greek key.

  “It was your Aunt Angelica’s,” I said, unwrapping it. It was the gown my sister had worn to our dinner party at the Grange not long before Hamilton’s death and it was now two decades out of style. I’d saved it—even when I’d wanted to burn every token of every person who ever hurt me—because when I’d burned Monroe’s kerchief, it’d seemed almost to do him too much honor.

  Nevertheless, I expected that the sight of the dress would pain me deeply, as all reminders of my sister now did. But when my daughter pulled the gown against herself and twirled, a different emotion rose in my breast. For the dress flattered Lysbet to the point of transformation, revealing the natural beauty she usually hid behind seriousness and spectacles.

  Instead of pain, I felt nothing but my daughter’s joy.

  And that now seemed to be a wonderful gift. One my sister had made possible.

  “Oh, but the beadwork and embroidery,” Lysbet suddenly fretted. “It’s too much for a dedicated spinster. Too much for me by far.”

  “It’s exactly right,” I said, taking up my needle. It’d been years since I’d dedicated much time to my sewing, and doing it now in the service of my daughter’s happiness seemed the best cause. “We shall make it a perfect fit.”

  And when that was accomplished, I retrieved for Lysbet an ancient pair of blue paste earbobs to match. Earbobs that made me remember that whatever Angelica had done, or been, she’d also been my touchstone—always finding small ways to support and embolden me as I now wished to support and embolden my daughter.

  As for me, my own formal attire was greatly simplified by virtue of widowhood. I owned one black gown proper for such an occasion, scented by the cedar chips with which it had been stored. Thus, donning a bonnet and the pearl-encrusted pendant in which Washington’s hair was enclosed, I braced myself to return to society.

  We went by carriage to the Battery from whence my husband first stole British cannons and made his reputation at the start of the revolution. The bridge to the Castle Garden was covered with rich carpets from one end to the other. In the middle of the bridge arose a pyramid sixty-five feet high, lit with colored lamps and surmounted by a brilliant star in the center which blazed the name Lafayette. And then we stepped into the magnificent entryway to f
ind a vast amphitheater inside the circle of the old fort, containing at least a thousand torches and nearly six thousand persons.

  An eager crowd jostled Lysbet and I beneath an arch formed of the flags of all nations, surmounted by a colossal statue of Washington. I expected always to encounter the Father of the Nation at any celebration, but I didn’t expect to find a richly decorated marquee ornamented, upon a platform, with a bust of my husband and two pieces of cannon taken at Yorktown.

  “It’s Papa!” Lysbet cried with a breath of astonishment, as if she’d never expected or dared to hope to see her father honored outside of our intimate circle of family and friends. And my heart seized to see her hands go to her mouth, as if to contain her surprise and joy.

  Had Lafayette arranged for this display? And was it meant for the crowd or for me?

  He was not a perfect man. But he was a great one. It is only plain justice that his wife should remember him better. And his country, too.

  I was still not convinced by Lafayette’s argument, even as a murmur rushed through the crowd around us. “It’s Mrs. General Hamilton!”

  The whispers rose like the murmur of the sea, and Lysbet clutched my hand. “Everyone’s staring.”

  They were. And I met their gazes. Each and every one. And what I saw reflected back at me, after so many years out of the public eye, was a pleasant surprise. Admiration. Curiosity.

  And without question, respect.

  In that moment, a curly-haired officer in uniform and sash bumped into us so hard that Lysbet would’ve fallen if he hadn’t caught her by the waist. “Oh, dear. I am so very sorry,” he said, looking not a bit sorry. Forgoing all protocol that might’ve required a gentleman should be introduced, he presented himself as one Lieutenant Sidney Holly.

  We returned the introduction—forced as we were to it—and the young man’s cheeks reddened. “Hamilton?” With wide eyes, he glanced at the bust, then back at us, seeming so discomforted that I thought he must be a rabid Republican. But then he said, “I daresay I wouldn’t have employment without your father’s innovations, Miss Hamilton. I work as a customs inspector.”