The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “But my daughter, Mistress,” I said plaintively, though I already knew the answer. Louisa was now three, a lively, quick, and beautiful little girl, and my dearest joy. We’d never been parted since her birth.

  “Peg can mind her while you’re away,” Mistress said. When I didn’t answer, she glanced back at me, her brows raised incredulously. “Come now, Mary. You didn’t believe you could bring your child with us, did you?”

  “No, Mistress,” I said softly, already dreading the separation that Louisa would not understand. “I shall begin our preparations tomorrow.”

  And yet it was for the best that I would see the Colonel again in person. I’d news for him that could not wait, and that I didn’t dare write to him, from fear my letter might fall into malicious hands. When he’d left New York in the fall, he’d also left me again in an unfortunate condition. I’d taken care to count the weeks until I was sure, but my body had told me long before my reckoning did. It had been the same with Louisa. My breasts were full, my waist was thickening, and I was so weary that I could scarcely complete my tasks each day.

  Yet I did, because I’d no choice, and I didn’t complain, either. It wouldn’t be long before I’d have to contrive and confess another passing indiscretion to Mistress. I already knew that, whatever story I told her, she would not be happy with my news.

  I was less certain of what the Colonel’s reaction might be.

  I’d no doubt that he loved Louisa, and that he’d keep his word to see that she’d never be in want. I hoped he’d feel that way about this babe, too. But a second child would only be more difficult to explain, not just to Mistress, but to anyone else who might be too inquisitive. A trail of mulatto bastards would not be a benefit to a United States senator, and an easy target for his enemies.

  Within the week, I found myself in Philadelphia, a place I’d never before visited. Unlike New York, Philadelphia had not suffered much during the war, and its streets were lined with imposing brick houses, churches, and public buildings. Also unlike New York, whose streets wandered willy-nilly from following the shape of the island as well as old Dutch boundaries, Philadelphia had been planned by Quakers in a straight and orderly fashion that made it both pleasant and convenient, a modern city in every sense.

  That convenience, however, did not include the Colonel’s lodgings. He wryly called it his Spartan quarters, a half-hearted jest with too much truth. All the congressmen in the city were suffering from the same plight, with a great many gentlemen and not enough rooms. The Colonel had only a small room that faced an alley, with a disagreeable privy in the yard outside. A low field bed with a blue-checked canopy, a washstand, a ladder-back chair of pine, and a table for writing were the sum of the furnishings. He and Mistress would share the bed, while Theodosia and I would have pallets on the bare floor. She thought it a great adventure, but I found it a grim reminder of where I’d been, and where I and my daughter could easily find ourselves again if circumstances turned against me.

  I also doubted that I would be alone with the Colonel for any time during our stay. He and Mistress attended as many of the gaudy dinners and balls as they could, even though they ridiculed them and their hostesses’ pretensions afterward. On several afternoons, Mistress also instructed me to take Miss Burr to walk along High Street to a confectioner’s shop, and to show no haste returning. She’d been almost giddy, her cheeks pink with anticipation, while the Colonel pretended to attend to business at his makeshift desk. I didn’t want to think of what they did together while I was banished to the confectioner’s shop.

  The days of our visit slipped by and dwindled in number. I’d tried to tell the Colonel I needed to speak with him alone, but there’d never been a proper time, and my desperation grew. Finally, three days before Mistress was to sail on the packet back to New York, the Colonel asked me to come out with him under some pretext or another while Mistress was resting and their daughter was at her lessons.

  At first we didn’t speak at all, with me following a half step behind him, as was to be expected. The air was sharp and crisp, yet the sun was warm enough on my face that I pushed the hood of my cloak back against my shoulders. I stole a glance at the Colonel, his black cocked hat pulled low over his brow as he stared steadfastly ahead. There were many people on Chestnut Street on so bright a day, and often he’d touch the front of his hat and smile in greeting to someone we passed.

  I knew we were playing our usual roles of Colonel Burr and his wife’s girl. I knew that was what the world must see, and yet I longed to be able to reach out and slip my fingers into his, even if only for a moment. I wanted him to look directly at me and smile, and call me his own Mary. Most of all I wanted to tell him the secret I carried within my belly.

  “Please, sir,” I said at last as we paused at a cross street for a wagon to pass. “I must speak to you.”

  “Soon,” he said curtly, as a master would. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  He walked on without looking at me, and I lowered my head and followed, taking no comfort in his brusqueness. There was a small hole on the back of his left stocking, large enough that the pale skin of his calf showed through it. I’d have to mend that, I thought absently, or at least see that he had a proper new stocking. It wasn’t right for the senator from New York to be so shabby.

  “This way, Mary,” he said, and we turned down a narrow street that was lined on either side by tall brick walls that hid the gardens and yards behind them. There were no other people in this street, and at last he slowed his pace to match mine, so we were side by side.

  “Mary Emmons,” he said softly. “I’ve missed you. You wished to speak, and here we are. How is our Louisa?”

  “Oh, she is very well, sir,” I said, breathless not from walking, but from being in his company. “When I left, she’d just discovered how to run, back and forth as fast as can be along the path in the backyard, like a tiny pony. And her smile, sir . . . she’s so many teeth now, as white as little pearls, and when she smiles, she shows a dimple in each cheek, and she’s—”

  I barely caught myself before I erred. I was going to say that her smile was exactly like Miss Burr’s had been at the same age. Like her, too, my daughter had her father’s eyes, large and dark and full of life. But I’d learned that such remarks made the Colonel uneasy. He might love my daughter, but he still wouldn’t think it proper to liken her to Miss Burr.

  “She’s a beautiful child, sir,” I said instead. “Happy and beautiful.”

  “How I wish you’d brought her with you,” he said impulsively. “I miss her merry little face.”

  “I couldn’t, sir,” I said sadly. “I had to leave her behind with Peg and the others to look after her. Mistress wouldn’t—”

  “Oh, I know, it wasn’t possible,” he said, “and with good reason, too.”

  The only good reason was that Mistress didn’t wish to be troubled by my daughter on our journey, or to have less than all my constant care for herself. To me, neither were acceptable reasons to separate a mother from her child. But I also knew better than to say that to the Colonel.

  And now I must tell him that he’d fathered a second child with me.

  “How do you like Congress, sir?” I asked, stalling. “I overhear what you write when Mistress and Miss Burr read your letters aloud, but you make so many jests for their amusement that I cannot tell for certain. Is being a senator all you wished?”

  He smiled wryly. “Nothing is all that I wish,” he said. “But while the company is often fatuous, the actual labor of the Congress is not. The most useful of my committees addresses the woes of the widows and orphans left destitute by men who served in the war. Their petitions would break the hardest heart, and I am glad to help ease their suffering.”

  “That is most admirable, sir.” How curious the twists of life could be, that he’d be called to this particular task on behalf of soldier’s widows, when his own wife had stolen this same benefit from me.

  “It is,” he said. “But there is
so much else that is discussed and addressed. The violent troubles in France, the unrest among the native peoples along the western frontiers, new laws and regulations and tariffs at every corner: little wonder that each day brings its own challenges and satisfactions with it.”

  “How fine it must be to do such good work, sir,” I said absently, paying little heed to his words. “Does Congress ever speak of abolition?”

  He grunted. “You would ask me that, Mary.”

  “I would, sir,” I said, “because it affects my life and that of my daughter far more than what the French will do with their king and queen.”

  “Then I regret to tell you that abolition is not discussed as a federal issue, and likely never will be,” he said frankly. “Too much of the wealth and economy of the southern states are bound to the labor of slaves for them to abandon it. When the country’s Virginian president and his wife hold over a hundred slaves of their own—”

  “You and Mistress own slaves, too, sir,” I said with more sorrow than anger.

  He pretended not to have heard me, exactly as I’d expected.

  “It’s as I’ve always believed,” he said. “Abolition will eventually come through the states, in a manner that suits the people and economy of each particular place.”

  It was what he always said, a convenient explanation and a ready excuse, though I’d never been able to tell whether or not he truly believed it.

  Perhaps that was what made me say what I did. “I’ve heard from other servants, sir, that if Mistress kept me here in Philadelphia for six months, I’d become a free woman by the laws of this city.”

  He stopped walking, and I stopped, too. He scowled down at me, his eyes as penetrating as a hawk’s, and though my cheeks grew warm beneath his gaze, I did not retreat.

  “Is that truly the law, sir?” I asked, though I already knew it was: a tantalizing possibility, there for the taking. “I ask, because you of all gentlemen would know if it was so.”

  “It is,” he said at last. “Any slave that resides in Philadelphia for a period of six months can claim his freedom without fear of retribution, and also without any financial recompense made to his owner for the loss of his property. But this does not pertain to you, because my wife has no intention of remaining here for such a considerable length of time.”

  “But if Mistress did, sir, then—”

  “You would not abandon our daughter,” he said bluntly.

  I gasped with shock, reeling from it. “You would keep Louisa from me?”

  “You and she are both my wife’s property,” he said. “You seem to know the law as well as I.”

  “But, sir,” I said. “You would make a hostage of Louisa? You would use my child like that?”

  “Would you leave me?”

  I had no words for an answer, at least none that he’d wish to hear.

  “I’m with child again, sir,” I said.

  He went very still. “So that is why you asked about the laws of this place,” he said slowly. “You’d abandon one child in New York to assure the freedom of the second here in Philadelphia.”

  “No, sir, never!” I exclaimed, stunned he’d consider me capable of such a coldhearted action. “But I would be dishonest if I said I didn’t want this child born into freedom, just as I’d wanted for Louisa.”

  “What is your reckoning?”

  I still could not judge his reaction. “Summer,” I said. “July.”

  He nodded, the first sign of possible acceptance. “You’ve said nothing to my wife?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I thought it best to tell you first.”

  He glanced down from my face, judging my figure. “There is no need to tell her yet.”

  “I won’t, sir,” I said, disappointed in spite of myself. He’d been so kind, even playful to me earlier, and now he’d become cold and hard and unfeeling.

  “You’ll return to New York this week, and give birth there,” he said brusquely. “I’ll be in New York by then on recess. But remember, Mary. If you ever try to run from me with our children, I will hunt you down, and find you, and bring you back. Remember, and do not forget.”

  I was fighting tears as I edged away from him. Nothing I could say would make any of this right.

  Words were not what he wanted. He pulled me into his arms and kissed me roughly, there in the street, and heedless now of who might see. I struggled at first, and then did not, my hands hanging limp inside my cloak. Possession, not passion: with him I’d learned to understand the difference.

  Two days later, I sailed from Philadelphia for New York in the company of Mistress and Miss Burr. Over those two days, I do not believe the Colonel spoke directly to me again. He’d no need to, for there was nothing left to say. I thought often of the beckoning temptation of freedom that the laws of Philadelphia had so briefly offered to me, and the child I carried in my belly.

  But in the end, it had been a mirage, shimmering and unattainable, and gone as swiftly as it had appeared.

  Mrs. Emmons

  CHAPTER 21

  City of New York

  State of New York

  July 1792

  I did not wait for Mistress to ask me about this child. Instead, I told her outright, in April, before the Colonel returned from the session of Congress. Unlike last time, when I’d been made to feel like a guilty sinner, I addressed her as directly as I could one afternoon while she sat writing at her desk. I stated my impending confinement as a fact, rather than the confession of a disreputable wanton, and I offered nothing of my child’s father.

  She sighed, and gazed at me, her expression filled with sad regret, and perhaps resignation as well. She’d long ago abandoned her habit of sitting so that sunlight would not fall over the scar on her forehead, and now it stood in stark prominence, a jagged line over one weary eye.

  She set down her pen, and folded her hands before the letter she’d been writing. “Do you intend to keep this second bastard as you did Louisa?”

  “Yes, Mistress,” I said, determination clear in my voice. “I’d be a poor mother otherwise.”

  “I’d be a poor mistress to let you do so,” she countered, “and give myself another hungry mouth among my servants to feed and clothe.”

  “Please, Mistress,” I said softly. “Louisa has never brought you a moment’s care or interruption.”

  “A child is not a stray dog to be brought into my home on a whim, Mary,” she said, and for one dreadful moment I thought she’d tell me she intended to sell my child. Then she sighed again, and picked up her pen to dip it freshly into the well. “Fortunately for you, the Lord God advises us to be merciful, and you have managed well enough with Louisa. All I ask is that you look after yourself as well, Mary. You are too valuable to me to risk losing. Now go, and finish ironing those white-work ruffles. You are the only one I’ll trust not to scorch them.”

  Now I have always wondered why, when she’d been so distraught when she’d learned of Louisa, she raised so little fuss over this second child. Had I earned that trust from her? Had she turned so much to her faith that she could be this benevolent toward me? Had the wasting succession of her illnesses made the effort of outrage simply too great?

  Or had she finally come to realize what I was to the Colonel, and that my children had been sired by her adulterous husband—the husband she still loved beyond measure, even enough to forgive him?

  I didn’t know then, and now I never will. I simply curtseyed, and left her, and returned to my ironing.

  * * *

  My son was born soon after dawn on a fiery-hot morning in July 1792. My travail was easy, and he was the one who cried in loud amazement and irritation at the undignified process of his birth. Again I’d Mrs. Conger to support me, there in my room in the house on Partition Street.

  Louisa instantly took to her place as an older sister, content to gaze at her brother and rock his cradle by the hour, though Miss Burr, too, found the little man to be a source of enchantment. I’d no trouble understand
ing their fascination, either. My son was a handsome fellow from his birth, with golden-brown skin and curling black hair, and his father’s same eyes.

  The Colonel was away in Albany when my son was born, engaging in his legal practice during the recess to augment the miserly sum paid to senators. This time, I waited to name and christen my child until his father had had the opportunity to make his acquaintance.

  As he’d done when Louisa had been born, the Colonel came directly to me when he returned, his boots dusty and his clothing grimed from travel. All that seemed forgotten the moment he saw our child in his cradle, waving his tiny fists impotently in the air.

  “My son,” he said softly, marveling again as I suppose every father does. “What a beautiful boy he is, Mary.”

  In that instant, all the animosity and uncertainty between us in the last months fell away. What mattered was that we had made this child between us, and like Louisa he bound us together in ways that neither of us could deny.

  Quickly the Colonel shed his coat, and carefully lifted our baby from the cradle, neatly tucking him into the crook of his arm. At once the child’s fussing stopped, and he gazed upward, solemn and unfocused, into his father’s eyes. My own eyes—and my heart—filled with tears at so tender a sight.

  “What have you called him, Mary?” the Colonel asked without looking away from his son, nestled so happily against the white linen of his sleeve.

  “Miss Burr began calling him mon petit homme—my little man—and we’ve all followed,” I said. “I waited for you for something more proper.”

  He smiled, clearly pleased. “What should you like to be called, mon petit homme?”

  “By rights it should be Aaron, sir,” I said wistfully. “But I do not think that would be wise.”

  He glanced at me, his smile briefly fading. “I wish that it could be so, too,” he said. “My own son! But as you say, I fear my name is too distinctive.”