But for whatever reason, he had now resolved to make a true wanton of me, and he’d all night to do so. He wooed me with the most skillful caresses, and by his touch and tender words made me believe for that moment that I was most dear in the world to him. He built my passions as if he were building a fire, with practiced experience, until I’d no choice but to burst into the same greedy flames that soon consumed him as well.
Yet when that was done, he still was not content. Twice more that night he claimed me, in twisting, diverse ways that I’d never imagined, and together we took such pleasure in each other that afterward I was left sobbing and shuddering and weak from the force of it.
I stayed with him throughout the night, sleeping curled against him. I had never slept in a bed: raised from the floor, upon a mattress stuffed with downy feathers, between fine linen sheets, and beneath a soft coverlet, with the warm glow of the fading coals in the grate.
Nor had I ever slept with a man: his skin warm against mine, our arms and legs tangled together as if we were one, his measured breath against my back, and his heady animal scent mingled with my own.
But when I awoke, the fire had burned out and the room was cold. The first light of the new day was gray in the windows, meaning that it was long past the time I should have been in the kitchen. The dirty plates and glasses still sat on the table along with the guttered candles, and what remained of the curry in the serving bowl had settled with a dull skim over it.
The Colonel’s possessive arm was heavy across my waist, holding me close to him, and the rough stubble of his beard grated against my shoulder. My head ached abominably and my mouth was dry and foul. My limbs were sore from the contortions of the night, my lips raw, and my thighs sticky with our spendings. Yet all of it together was nothing compared with the weight of my conscience, and the shame I felt to my very core.
Somehow I eased free without waking him, and found my scattered clothes. I shivered as I dressed, making a sorry mess of repinning my hair, and tucked my shoes into the crook of my arm so as to make no noise upon the floor. With great care, I opened the door only far enough to escape, and finally, too late, I left him.
CHAPTER 18
City of New York
State of New York
January 1788
“Mary, my dear,” the Colonel said. “There is something I want you to do for me tomorrow night. I trust you won’t object.”
Drowsy, I opened my eyes. He was lying on his side next to me, his head propped on his hand as he gazed down at me. His hair was loose about his bare shoulders, the dark strands still dusted gray from having been powdered for an appearance in court yesterday. During these last nights, there had been a great many things he’d wanted me to do for him, and he hadn’t bothered to ask if I’d object.
“What is it, sir?” I asked, unable to keep the wariness from my voice.
He chuckled. “Nothing too demanding, I assure you,” he said, idly trailing his fingers along my ribs to my breast. “You might even find it amusing. Why won’t you trust me?”
I didn’t reply. The truth was obvious, at least to me. I didn’t trust him because he’d yet to give me reason to do so.
To be sure, I was not without blame in this, either. When I had first come here to his bedchamber two nights earlier, I had made the mistake of drinking the wine he’d offered me. It had been sufficient to soften both my conscience and my resistance to the point that I’d submitted to him with shameful ease, even eagerness. I’d scuttled away the next morning, and had carried my guilt with me throughout the day, certain that every person I encountered could read what I’d done written boldly across my countenance.
But the following night I had gone to him again when he’d summoned me, and there hadn’t been any wine in my glass to dull my wits, either. I could say that I’d joined him only because I’d no choice, as any other woman in my position would have done and understood, but I couldn’t entirely claim that defense. It was more complicated than that. Between us, it always was.
“Tonight I have invited several men here to dine,” he continued. “You will note that I have not called them gentlemen, for they do not deserve that designation. I wouldn’t inflict them upon Mrs. Burr, but while she is away, she need not know.”
I didn’t believe he kept much of anything from Mrs. Burr (except, of course, his connection to me). I was intrigued. I also decided that, lying here beside him, I’d earned the daring right to ask a question.
“If they are not gentlemen, sir,” I asked, “then why entertain them within your house?”
“Because I want them to see that I am a gentleman,” he said easily, and not in the least perturbed that I’d questioned him. “I wish them to be impressed as much by what I represent as by who I am. That will be the surest way to make them desire to be my associates, and oblige me however they can.”
This was curious, and made no sense. “Forgive me, sir, but I don’t understand why, as a lawyer, you should wish to impress these men.”
He smiled. “Oh, this has nothing to do with my legal career,” he said. “The law pays me respectably well, but there is little challenge to it, and traipsing from court to court is tedious, low labor for a gentleman. I win my judgments, and I receive my fees. It is all very dry and dull.”
Now I understood. The country had been foundering about like a rudderless boat since the end of the war, but at last a constitution had been written that would provide laws and reason—and that rudder—to the federal government. This new constitution required the approval of a majority of states for it to become the rule, and while this seemed to be taking more time than it should (doubtless because it was men who voted), it likewise seemed destined to happen. The papers had been full of it, and so had the conversations at the Burrs’ table. Once the Constitution was passed, there would be all kinds of fresh opportunities in the new government for gentlemen like the Colonel.
I smiled, more pleased with myself for deciphering his explanation than with him. “Do you mean to return to politics, sir?”
“My wise little sphinx.” He agreed without admitting it, a particular habit of his. “These men are aligned with that old rogue Governor Clinton, and they may in time support me as well. Tonight I intend to keep their glasses full—though mind you, not the best brandy—and listen to what they say. That is what I wish you to do, Mary.”
“I, sir?” I said, surprised.
“You, my dear,” he said. “I know you are a consummate eavesdropper. Every servant is. At some point in the evening, I shall excuse myself. You and Tom shall remain in the room to see to my guests’ needs. They will continue to talk, and doubtless speak of me. I want you to listen, Mary, and remember all, and tell it to me later.”
I settled against the pillow and tipped my head to one side, regarding him with sidelong skepticism. “What if their remarks are critical, sir?”
“Especially if they are critical,” he said without hesitation. “It’s always more useful to know enemies than friends.”
I smiled. I much preferred the Colonel when he spoke like this, plain and direct, rather than the flowery nonsense and flattery he’d employ when he and Mistress were with company. I liked his truth, and it also meant he felt sufficiently at ease with me to share it with me.
“You wish me then to be a spy among your guests, sir?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. He took a strand of my hair and idly began to twist it around his fingers. “A spy, an agent, an intelligencer. Whatever word pleases you.”
I watched him, thinking how he never seemed to weary of toying with my hair. I suspected this was because I usually kept it knotted and pinned and covered by my cap; having it loose like this must seem somehow like one more exotic, forbidden thing about me that he could relish.
“There is a risk to me, sir, in doing this,” I said. “If these men realize that I am listening, they will not take it well. A servant caught listening to betters is always punished. Will you put me at that risk, sir?”
/> “What, the risk that I would punish you for doing what I asked?” he said, making a jest of it.
But I wasn’t jesting, not entirely. Men who’d been encouraged to drink so freely that they’d be unguarded in their speech were also men who’d likewise be free with women.
“A female servant is always at risk from men, sir,” I said. “Or do you expect me to be agreeable in that way, too?”
From his expression it was clear that the notion hadn’t crossed his thoughts, even though he himself had expected exactly the same of me.
“I would never want you to do that,” he said, his surprise genuine. “You should know that of me by now.”
I didn’t answer beyond a low hum in the back of my throat. Sometimes it was better not to trust to words.
“Not you, Mary, not that,” he said as he leaned forward to kiss me, and slide upon me as well. “I’d never want to share you with any other man.”
As we kissed, I tried not to think of how he’d turned my question around to be his worry, and not my risk. I knew I shouldn’t expect more. He was a white gentleman, and like most every other gentleman, he believed the sun and the moon rose and set on his bidding.
But that night I did as he’d asked, carrying dishes to the table, then standing beside the sideboard to anticipate any need that a guest might have. I was also the Colonel’s conspirator. Even if he hadn’t told me, I would have known at once that these were not gentlemen; serving Mistress as long as I had, I’d learned to tell the difference.
These men wore clothes that were rougher, not the usual silk worn for evening dress. Their linen wasn’t as tidily pressed, their hair wasn’t powdered, and they didn’t have a small cluster of elegant gold toys and seals hanging from the fobs of gold watch chains, if they’d watches at all. They spoke with the broader accents of Albany and Saratoga to the north, some even tinged with a memory of Dutch, rather than the quick, clipped speech of Manhattan Island. They stared at the prints and paintings on the wallpapered walls, and took their seats in Mistress’s silk-covered mahogany dining chairs gingerly, as if fearing the chairs might break beneath them.
Yet I couldn’t dislike them for that. From their conversation, it was clear that they’d all fought in the war, some of them for many years. This was the one thing that they had in common with the Colonel. I listened as he skillfully kept the conversation on old battles and generals and why the British had deserved to lose, and saw how that—combined with the second-rate wine, and whiskey for those who preferred it—made the men slowly relax and become more jovial and at ease.
By the time that the Colonel excused himself to reply to an urgent message that I’d pretended had just been delivered (a message that was in fact an old apothecary’s bill that he’d plucked from his desk earlier, part of the ruse we’d planned together), the six men had nothing but the best things to say of their host.
To them, the Colonel was a fine, right gentleman, sharp as a whip, and the sort of clever officer they’d wished they’d served with in battle. With no grounds except what the whiskey had supplied to their imaginings, they also declared him to be brave and honorable and likely a good shot with a pistol. In short, they said that he was exactly the kind of gentleman that Governor Clinton should bring to the capital to help look after the concerns of honest men like themselves, and they agreed that they’d do whatever was necessary to bring that to pass.
“That is all they said?” the Colonel asked when I told him later, after the others had left and we were alone in his bedchamber. He hadn’t sent for Carlos to come undress him, but was shedding his clothes willy-nilly as he paced about the room, tossing his coat over the back of his armchair, letting his waistcoat fall to the floor when he’d shrugged it from his shoulders, yanking the silk bow from his queue like a crushed black butterfly. “That is all?”
“That is all, sir,” I said, echoing him. I followed after him to gather up the discarded garments, and smoothing and setting them aside as best I could. “They’d only compliments for you.”
“How the devil can I tell their true nature if that’s all they say?” he demanded, cross and disappointed both.
“Why should what they say matter, sir?” I asked, hoping to soothe him. “They were pleasant enough men, but I cannot see them being of much importance to you for politics.”
He wheeled to face me.
“But they are, Mary, they are,” he said. “Despite their shambling appearances, they’re wealthy men with more acres of land and timber, rich farms, and trading schooners and barges among them than you’d ever imagine. Blast these buttons!”
He was twisting and fumbling with the buttons on the cuffs of his shirt, venting his irritation on them so forcefully that I feared he’d soon rip the fabric.
“They have influence in their own counties,” he continued, “and their opinions will be heeded by their neighbors. Hamilton and Livingston can keep courting the gentlemen like themselves, chasing around and around like dogs after their own tails, but there are far more men like the ones here tonight who’ll vote for the future of New York. Unfasten this damnable button for me.”
He thrust his wrist out to me, upturned and oddly vulnerable.
“Forgive me, sir,” I said, my fingers slipping first one button, then the next, free of their buttonholes. “But didn’t you find the terms you served in the Assembly to be disagreeable?”
“It was disagreeable, and a blathering waste of time,” he said impatiently, though whether at me or the cuffs I could not tell. “I gained nothing and achieved nothing from the experience. That whining little Congress in Philadelphia is much the same. But soon there will be power, real power, to be had in government.”
I finished the last button, and at once he pulled the shirt up over his head and off in a cloud of white linen, tossing that aside as well. He remained as lean as when he’d been a soldier, without an ounce of fat or softness to him.
“Is that what you want, sir?” I asked. I remembered how he’d once introduced a bill for the statewide abolition of slavery, and I thought of all the good he could do in such a setting. “More power so that you might achieve more, and better serve those who you represent?”
He stopped and stared at me. I couldn’t tell his thoughts, or his mood, either, and I felt my cheeks warm from his scrutiny. When he still did not answer, I wondered if it were my question, and I decided to repeat it in a different manner.
“What more would you do if you’d the power, sir?” I began again. “How could you help—”
“Don’t make me into what I’m not, Mary,” he said sharply. “I’m not one of those stargazing idealists like Hamilton or Adams or Washington—Washington, for God’s sake!—dreaming of some fantasy Rome or Athens that never existed. I’ve no delusions regarding this world, nor the men who inhabit it.”
He could have added my husband’s name to that list, and mine as well: a noble, proud list, or so I believed.
“Yet you fought in the war, sir,” I insisted. “You served as a gentleman officer. You must have believed you were fighting for something worthy, didn’t you?”
“Oh, the war, the war, the endless war,” he said, all weary scorn. “When I volunteered, I was only nineteen and fresh from college, and the sum of my knowledge had come from histories and prayer books. It took only one campaign to see of how little use any of that was, and how often the grandest of ideals are employed by the lowest of men to justify their deeds.”
I shouldn’t have been shocked. I remembered how disillusioned he’d been after the Battle of Morristown, and how he’d never made any effort to hide his contempt for General Washington. Nor, since then, had he ever taken the kind of noble and high-minded court cases that had become Colonel Hamilton’s specialty.
I shouldn’t have been shocked, but I was, and that shock gave more heat to my indignation than was likely wise.
“Then what would you do with more power, sir?” I demanded. “You convinced these men this evening to support you, but for wh
at cause? What purpose?”
He turned his head to one side to regard me sideways.
“Do not step too far, Mary Emmons,” he said, his voice low. “What I choose to do is not your affair.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, not heeding his warning. “Yet if you—”
But before I could finish, he seized my jaw in his hand, holding me so I could neither speak, nor look away from him.
“You ask too many questions, Mary,” he said, “and questions are not what I want from you.”
He kissed me then, hard, still holding my jaw. He didn’t wait for me to undress, but pushed me back onto the bed and took me that way, with my petticoat shoved up around my waist and no care for me. As soon as he was done, he rolled away from me and sat with his legs over the far edge of the bed. His back was like a wall against me, a broad, dark silhouette against the candlelight. I watched as he used that same candle to light one of his prized cigars, drawing deep to make the tobacco catch the spark, and with more interest in it than in me.
I hadn’t wronged him, and I hated that he’d taken out whatever had vexed him upon me. The abrupt change in his manner left me both furious and hurt, and in that moment I forgot the circumstances of who—and what—I was to him.
Without a word, I rose from the bed and went to the door. I’d sleep on my own pallet in the attic tonight. I turned the latch as quietly as I could, not wishing to disturb him.
He heard it anyway.
“Stop,” he said sharply. “I didn’t give you leave to go.”
I turned. He’d turned, too, and now we faced each other over the rumpled bed.
“Stay,” he said, the sharpness lessening a fraction. “You know I do not like to sleep alone.”
As he’d ordered, I didn’t leave, but I didn’t move any closer to him, either, my hand still on the latch, and I purposefully kept my expression as empty and blank as I could. I’d years of experience at little things like that.
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