The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “No noise, mind?” he ordered in a harsh whisper.

  Of course: his first thought would be that no one hear us. I was pinned against the wall, helpless and trapped, yet still I knew what I must say, the only threat I could make. I twisted my face free of his palm, even as his other hand was hooking his arm beneath my thigh to lift me higher.

  “If Mistress hears you—”

  “Damnation, Mary,” he growled. “Not a word.”

  He worked me hard and fast against that wall. It had been nearly ten years—ten years!—since I’d been with my husband, and he had loved me. There was no love in this. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my face away, my cheek pressed against the pale blue quilted silk of his banyan and the hard bone of his shoulder beneath it.

  I didn’t cry.

  When he was done, he was breathing as hard as if he’d run a footrace. He stayed pressed against me, covering me, until at last he slipped free of my body, and stepped back. At once I pushed my petticoat down over my bare thighs, and crouched down to retrieve my little linen cap from where he’d knocked it to the floor. My legs trembled and shook beneath me, and I linked my arms around my knees, as if that would be enough to calm myself. His spendings were warm and sticky between my thighs.

  “Mary.”

  I didn’t want to look up at him, but I did. His face was flushed, his eyes heavy lidded with satiation.

  If Mistress saw him now, she’d know in an instant what he’d done.

  “Mary,” he said again, his voice gruff. I was thankful he didn’t call me by my full name, as he usually did. I do not think I could have borne it to hear him speak Lucas’s name just then.

  He bent to take one of my hands, and raised me up and into his embrace. He held me close, his arms linked lightly around my waist. I could guess what was coming, and I was right.

  “Mary, sweet,” he said, in that same low, gruff voice. “You know this must stay our secret.”

  I didn’t answer, letting him wallow in his guilt. I could hear other voices in the distance inside the house, and I’m sure he did, too.

  He cleared his throat. “We’ve always been friends, you and I.”

  I drew apart from him enough to look him squarely in the eye, where he couldn’t hide. I couldn’t tell if I was calm or numb. Maybe it amounted to the same.

  “We are more than that now, sir,” I said quietly. The anger and frustration I’d felt earlier had scattered and vanished. What was done was done. Pitying myself would accomplish nothing. I’d come here with an honorable plan that had failed, and failed disastrously. Now I’d have to scramble to devise another, and quickly, for I might not have another chance.

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. We are.” He touched his fingertips to my cheek, trailing them down along my jaw. He was already thinking of the next time, and the next after that.

  I let him have his dear, wanton dreams for a long moment before I eased free of his arms.

  “I must go, sir,” I said, smoothing my hair and pinning my cap back over it. “Mistress will be awake by now.”

  “Of course, of course.” He frowned in the face of that reality, and cleared his throat. “We must talk, Mary.”

  I was glad that he wished to talk. I wished it, too, and raised my chin a fraction.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Any child born to a mother in slavery is likewise a slave, regardless of the father’s state.”

  He drew in his breath sharply. “If there’s already a brat in your belly, it’s not mine.”

  “There isn’t, sir.” My cheeks grew hot at what he implied, but I didn’t flinch or look away. “This is—was—the first time since my husband.”

  I could almost see his thoughts on his face, and how being the first man but one puffed his pride.

  “Then I do not believe it requires discussion.” His voice softened a fraction, and he smiled, coaxing me to agree. “Surely you will understand that.”

  “I do, sir,” I said. “But I would never want any child of yours to be born into bondage because of me.”

  His smile disappeared. So he hadn’t considered that possibility, and I thought bitterly of how desire could blind even the most brilliant of gentlemen. Yet because I knew how dearly he loved his daughters with Mistress, I was gambling that he’d feel a similar devotion to a child of ours.

  And, if I was fortunate, to me as well.

  The silence stretched between us, longer and longer still. Why hadn’t I been aware before of the little brass clock on his mantel, ticking away every minute of my misery?

  My hope faltered, certain that I’d gambled from desperation, and I’d lost. I remembered how on the first day I’d belonged to Mistress, she’d curtly told me that if I ever bore a child she would take it from me and give it away. At that time, I’d thought this uncommonly cruel. Now that I was older and knew more of suffering, I realized that a loss like that would break both my body, and my heart. I, who never cried, now felt my eyes fill. At once I lowered my gaze, unwilling to let him see my defeat.

  “Don’t cry, Mary,” he said softly, gently, speaking at last. “I’ll never do that to you.” He took my hand and lifted it gallantly to his lips, the way he would have done with a white lady. “You have my word, Mary Emmons. I’ll see to it that you’ll never want or suffer.”

  Unchecked, the tears were sliding down my cheeks now, wet and hot. It was more than I’d expected, more perhaps than I’d deserved, and yet the one word I’d wanted most to hear was missing.

  “What of freedom, sir?” I whispered, daring.

  “In time,” he said too easily, his lips grazing the back of my hand. “All in time.”

  In time, in time. What did that mean? A year, a month, a week, or a lifetime of empty hope?

  Perhaps I should have asked him to explain. Perhaps I should have demanded he write and sign his promise, so that I might hold him to it. My life was filled with things like this that had been left undone, some my fault, some not. I told myself I’d pressed him enough. More honestly, I feared what he might say if I demanded more.

  Instead, I let him kiss my lips one more time before I left him. He didn’t want me to leave, and I believe he would have been on me again if I’d remained. But I insisted, not wanting my absence to be noticed by Mistress.

  In the hall, I wiped my eyes with the corner of my apron and tried to set my thoughts only to the duties before me. I felt as if I’d been in the library with him for so long that I blinked with surprise at the morning sunlight streaming through the arched window over the front door. More likely it had been only a half hour’s time, scarce enough for the rest of the household to take notice.

  I met Celia at the bottom of the stairs, carrying the tray with Mistress’s tea and toast.

  “Where’ve you been at, Mary?” she asked crossly. “Mistress’s having fits over you not coming to her.”

  “Then you better let me bring her breakfast,” I said, taking the tray without answering her question. “There’s no need for her to be unhappy with you, too.”

  The door to Mistress’s bedchamber stood ajar, and she was still in bed, propped against a mound of pillows with open books on the coverlet. With her was her older daughter, Miss Burr, sitting cross-legged on the bed with her small hand pressed to her mother’s belly.

  “I can feel my brother move,” Miss Burr announced importantly, and her dark eyes widened as she felt the unborn baby kick beneath her hand. “There, Mama, there he is!”

  “He’ll be chasing you about before you know it, Theo,” Mistress promised. She raised her daughter’s hand and kissed her chubby fingers, one by one with a large smack for each, which made the little girl laugh with delight. “Now go prepare your lessons, and let Mama have her tea.”

  Obediently Miss Burr slid from the tall bed and trotted from the room as I set the tray on the table beside the bed.

  “Where have you been, Mary?” Mistress asked. “You know Celia can’t be trusted to carry a tray up the stairs without spilling half th
e contents, and besides, you’re the only one who knows exactly how I like my tea.”

  “Forgive me, Mistress,” I said. “There were matters in the kitchen that required me.”

  “Well, I require you, too.” She sighed, and spread her own fingers across her belly. “What a restless brave fellow this is, even if he keeps me awake at night with his antics.”

  This had not been as easy a pregnancy for her, and her eyes were ringed with weariness. She was nearly forty-one, old for childbearing, not that any woman with a husband like the Colonel would have a say in that.

  “You are certain the child will be a boy, Mistress?” I asked as I spooned sugar into her teacup.

  “I am willing it to be so,” she said, “because that is what my husband desires. Oh, he loves his two darling girls beyond measure, but every man wants a son in his own likeness. In his heart, my Burr is no different, no matter how content he claims to be.”

  She smiled, though whether at the thought of her restless son, her darling girls, or her contented husband I cannot say.

  On one account, however, I knew she was wrong. I handed her the cup and smiled as she expected me to, and prayed for both our sakes that she’d never learn the truth.

  CHAPTER 17

  City of New York

  State of New York

  March 1787

  If this were a happier fiction, and not a story based upon truth, I would write only of days of sunshine and bliss, and how his friendship—for so the Colonel would now always style our connection—with me gave us both nothing but pleasure. But this would be wrong, and the new year was not a joyful one in the Burrs’ house.

  For most of January and February as well, the Burrs’ house was filled with guests, visitors from both the Colonel’s family and Mistress’s, who, having arrived in New York, found them to be far more hospitable than a public inn, and treated it that way, too. The festivities of Twelfth Night lingered in the house, with elaborate dinners and suppers that required considerable toil upon my part to arrange and oversee. In addition, the Colonel was called upon to travel to various courts, with his journeys often hampered by winter snows and days longer than expected.

  But then privacy was always a luxury, especially the furtive kind of privacy required for our friendship. Even without guests, we were now eleven of us in the house: the Colonel and Mistress, their two daughters and her sons by Colonel Prevost, as well as the five of us servants. On an ordinary day, that was only the beginning. As Mistress came closer to her lying-in, she received friends, tradespeople, and physicians in her bedchamber. Clerks and messengers and other men of business and law called upon the Colonel in the library. Even little Miss Burr had visitors in the form of the tutors and private teachers that her father deemed necessary for her education.

  In such circumstances, the Colonel could contrive few opportunities to be alone with me, and to my considerable relief, too. Despite the benefits I dared to believe might someday come my way in return for having finally obliged his desires, I was not at ease either with what I’d done or said. I took off the heart-shaped pendant that Lucas had made for me; my unhappy conscience no longer permitted me to wear such proof of my husband’s love. How could it be otherwise? The shame I felt over what had happened was a constant burden, and one I’d no choice but to bear alone.

  During this time, the Colonel and I had but two assignations (another word he used) in his office, early in the day, and another late at night in the kitchen. Although the kitchen offered a greater chance for discovery, I much preferred it, for the kitchen was my room, not his. Either way, he was quick to find his satisfaction. Though he’d often call me sweet names and embrace me when he was done, I knew he said those things to ease his own conscience, in the same way he always maintained that I’d been the one who’d tempted him.

  Afterward he’d sit with me upon his lap and talk, about everything and nothing. He’d tell me of cases and clients, of various schemes to buy and sell land to the west that he hoped would make him rich, of unpleasant people he’d encountered on the packet from Albany and the new fortepiano he was considering buying for his daughters. He’d ask me of my days, too, and listen when I replied.

  And because I was so trusted by Mistress, he’d ask me about her, most specifically after her health while he’d been away. He worried over her, and did not trust the physicians who attended her. He’d every reason to do so, too. Her constitution was sorely taxed not only by childbearing, but also by the noise and commotion of the city and its society. Of course the Colonel could see this for himself, for it was evident to everyone that she was unwell. But because I was so familiar with her intimate habits, I could also tell him of how her headaches had increased, how she’d other pains that came and went throughout her body, how some days she couldn’t keep any food at all in her belly, and how she’d come to rely more and more upon the laudanum to ease her suffering.

  I know that this sounds wrong: that the Colonel would show such concern for his wife’s welfare even as he was being unfaithful to her with me, and even worse that when he’d asked me of her health I’d answer those questions as directly as I could.

  Yet at the time, I understood. Mistress was his wife and the mother of his daughters, and he did love her, even if her illnesses had often kept her from being a true wife to him. I was who—and what—I was. Bound to Mistress, I was expected to obey both her and the Colonel, even if adultery was the consequence. It wasn’t my place to question his actions. I wished him to be happy, so that he’d be more inclined to please me in return, and keep his tenuous promise to me that I’d be granted my freedom.

  Late in February, the snow and cold that had held the city at last gave way, and in its place came a thaw that no one had expected, but everyone welcomed. To be sure, it was a false hint of spring, for true spring never came in New York before April, but the warmth still brought people from their homes and into the streets to turn their faces up toward the sun. The gray piles of old snows that lined the streets shrank, and the bravest souls opened windows to let winter’s stale air out, and fresh air within. From every eave came the sound of melting snow, rhythmic drips as steady as a clock’s ticking, and as maddening, too.

  On one of these warm nights, Mistress’s labor began, and Ben was roused from his sleep and sent running through the slush to fetch the midwife and her assistant. Unlike Mistress’s previous travails, however, this one proved long and tedious, and shortly before daybreak the Colonel sent for the surgeon as well, and then Dr. Miles from St. Paul’s Chapel, at Mistress’s own request. No one spoke aloud what was most feared: that Mistress was too weak to survive an arduous birth.

  Her two sons and two daughters were all brought into her bedchamber. The Colonel asked them to bid their mother good morning with a kiss, but I doubted the older ones were fooled that this was anything but a grim farewell. Mistress’s eyes were closed and her face was waxy-pale and shiny with sweat, her breath coming in heaving gasps against her pains. She was so weak she could not lift her head from the pillows behind her. The mood in the entire house was somber, punctuated only by the agonized groans of Mistress.

  The Colonel insisted on remaining at Mistress’s side, sitting beside the bed to clasp her hand. He’d hastily dressed; his jaw was dark with last night’s beard and his hair untied and loose about his shoulders, all more proof of his dread.

  At the midwife’s insistence, there was a raging fire in the hearth that made the room too warm, and the air was heavy with the fetid smell of fever and sickness. With so many others crowded within, there was no purpose to me staying there as well. Instead, I did what I would have done on every other morning, which was to return to the kitchen to prepare breakfast—even if, on this day, it might prove to be a breakfast that no one wanted.

  I sighed as I made my way down the back stairs, thinking of Mistress. No matter what our history had been, I would not wish that kind of suffering upon her. At the bottom of the stairs, a slight movement caught my eye in the shadows, an
d I turned quickly.

  “Miss Burr!” I exclaimed, crouching down to be able to meet her gaze eye to eye. “Why are you here?”

  She stepped from the shadows like a little ghost in slippers, still in her nightgown with a pink shawl around her shoulders and her dark hair plaited from the night. She would be four in the summer, a pale, pretty child who already resembled her father, complete with his self-assurance, which made her manner seem that of others twice her age.

  “Papa told me that I’d have no lessons today, on account of Mama,” she said. “He told me I should do my readings to be ahead for tomorrow, but I was too hungry for it.”

  “Then come with me to the kitchen, Miss Burr,” I said gently, taking her by the hand. “I was already planning to finish making breakfast.”

  But she hung back, tugging on my hand. “I cannot, Mary,” she said. “Papa says I’ve no place in a kitchen. He says I belong with books, not kettles and pots.”

  “Did he now,” I said. I didn’t doubt it. The Colonel was pushing his little mite of a daughter at her studies as hard as if she were a boy. She could already read and write, and was learning ciphering and geography and French and Heaven knew what else, in lessons that often began before dawn and continued until supper. How could mere cooking hold its place against that?

  “I think this morning he wouldn’t mind, Miss Burr,” I said. “You can help me make your mama’s tea so it will be ready for when she feels better.”

  “Once my brother is born,” she said importantly. “That’s why Mama is ill, Mary.”

  “Childbirth is hard work,” I said. Her fingers had tightened into mine, and now when I began to walk she followed, coming close beside my legs.

  She stared about the kitchen, her eyes wide. I realized she never had visited this room, although when I considered it, I realized Mistress herself had been here only a handful of times. I had Miss Burr sit on a chair, close enough to the fire that she’d be warm, but not so close that she’d find mischief.