The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr

by Susan Holloway Scott

  Yet somehow throughout that ugly autumn, my children and I escaped the Federalists’ notice. I do not know how this was possible, but it was, and I thanked Heaven that we’d been spared. I’d understood the danger, and the consequences, too. If I’d been publicly denounced as the Colonel’s concubine and my children revealed as his bastards, then no white lady would ever consider me for her housekeeper. Had I still been in bondage (like Sally, who belonged to Mr. Jefferson), then the assumption would be that I’d had no choice, and those ladies wouldn’t have cared. But the fact that I’d remained with the Colonel after I’d been freed—and continued to do so—would make it seem as if I truly were a wanton, and no lady would wish me in her home, temptation to her husband and sons.

  It was during this time that I did something I’d never before done: I wrote a letter. To be sure, I knew how this was done, and I’d even written them on behalf of Mistress, when she’d been too ill to hold a pen herself. But this was the first I’d written for myself, in my own words. My letter was addressed to Mrs. Madison, and in it I inquired if she did in fact know of a Philadelphia lady looking for a housekeeper with my skills. It took me many attempts before I had the wording to my satisfaction and could take it to be sent with the general post from the city, rather than with the Colonel’s mail. Although he’d no right to keep me, I judged it better not to alarm him in advance of my hopes. To be doubly sure, I asked Mrs. Madison to reply to me not at Richmond Hill, but in care of the tavern keeper who bought raised rabbit pies from me.

  To my disappointment but not my surprise, I never received a reply. I did not know if this were due to the color of my skin, or if her promise had been simply an empty one, like that of so many ladies in her position. I also worried that somehow the Colonel had learned of my letter, and interfered.

  The Colonel, however, had much more to consider than me. Instead of the election going the way that the two factions had hoped, most men voted according to their regions, not beliefs. When the final votes were tallied, the new president was John Adams, with Thomas Jefferson as vice president. Thomas Pinckney came in third, with a dozen or so other additional men claiming a few more straggling votes.

  And despite all his canvassing, meetings, travels, speeches, and dinners, Colonel Burr only managed to be fourth.

  It was a staggering blow to his pride. For the last decade, he’d served the public in one position or another, and now that same public had rejected him. To his credit, he didn’t rage or grieve. Intemperate displays were never his way. Yet as I oversaw the packing of his belongings from his Philadelphia lodgings in March, the sense of defeat and humiliation was unavoidable—not only for his own political ambitions, but for the Democratic-Republicans as well. Their leader Mr. Jefferson would now serve as vice president and be in constant conflict both with President Adams and with the Federalist-dominated Congress.

  As if all this were not sufficient, true sorrow came at the end of the month, when the Colonel received word that his sister, Sally, had died. Though she had been an invalid for much of her life, her death was still a shock to him. Mrs. Reeve had been his only sibling, the sister who’d been his constant comfort since they’d been children, and a close friend of Mistress’s as well. Now she, too, was gone.

  During this last, brief sojourn in Philadelphia, I’d made a few desultory inquiries regarding new places. But even if something had come of my queries, at this time I knew I hadn’t the heart to leave the Colonel, not when he’d lost so much. Some might say this was weakness on my part, that after how he had used me in the past he deserved no kindness from me. I won’t deny that perhaps it was.

  “What next, sir?” I asked as we stood together on the deck of the ferry, the first part of our journey from Philadelphia to New York. While the others went with our belongings on the cart, he and I would return together by stage.

  It was a question I hadn’t dared to ask before, but one I knew he’d considered long and hard. It took him only a moment to reply.

  “What next, Mary?” he repeated, looking out over the murky water of the Delaware River. “Why, to move forward, of course.”

  “That is wisest,” I said carefully, not certain of his meaning.

  His smile was melancholy. “You needn’t be so gentle with me, Mary. I am resilient, and I am philosophical. As are you. We’ve always been alike that way.”

  I smiled, too, for he was right. Compared to what we’d each seen in our lives, the loss of an election was insignificant indeed. “You see, sir, I’ve always said that you were wise.”

  “Philosophical, not wise.” If there hadn’t been others on the deck, I am certain we would have embraced. “Nothing is gained by looking backward, Mary. Only forward, and toward the future.”

  Once again in New York, he did exactly that. While his enemies surely wished otherwise, he did not withdraw into private life at Richmond Hill. Instead, he remained engaged in politics, determined to learn from what he now saw as his mistakes. He ran for the New York state legislature as an assemblyman, and won with ease. A lesser gentleman would have seen this as a terrible fall from his exalted seat in the Senate, but he did not, relishing the challenge of politics so well that he saw only the opportunities.

  He remained thick among the Democratic-Republicans, and now–vice president Jefferson continued to seek his advice and opinions. He would travel back to Philadelphia whenever his voice was needed, and think nothing of the journey.

  When James Madison—another whose fortunes had seemingly fallen—returned from France after his abrupt dismissal, the Colonel was there to greet him along with Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Gallatin. Dinners at Richmond Hill often seemed more like a political caucus than a genteel gathering. As had always been the case, men with influence, men who could persuade others with money and favors, were also welcome.

  He also resumed his legal career, and only in part for the income. More important to him was choosing cases that would increase his prominence around the state and in the city, and continue to bring him in contact with men who were powerful in their regions, as well as the individual voters whose favor he would need for another race in the future.

  In short, he carried himself not in defeat, but as a gentleman vigorous and eager to fight fresh battles for the good of the country. He was only forty-one, and as he noted more than once, General Washington had been nearly sixty when he’d become president.

  But while I was glad of all this for the Colonel’s sake, his return to New York politics as well as to Richmond Hill was not easy for me. Keeping my children from the inquisitive and often cruel gaze of others had been simpler while the Colonel had been in the capital. Louisa was content to remain belowstairs when there were guests, but Jean-Pierre wanted nothing more than to be in the Colonel’s company as much as possible. At five, he was still too young to understand that his presence in turn might not always be desired, nor, for that matter, did the Colonel send him away, as I often begged him to do. I knew it would be kinder in the end and, after the incident with Mr. Vanderlyn, the more cautious course as well.

  “Where’s the harm in it, Mary?” the Colonel asked when I confronted him again as he sat at his desk in his library. Jean-Pierre had been with him there for most of the afternoon before I’d come to send him back to the kitchen. The blocks that had once been the toys of Miss Burr were still scattered on the carpet, a fortress that Jean-Pierre had left half knocked down. “Why can’t my son be with me?”

  “Because to the rest of the world, he’s not your son,” I insisted.

  The Colonel sighed, looking up from whatever letter he’d been writing. “I still don’t see the harm in it.”

  “Because you do not wish to see it,” I said as firmly as I could. “No other man can compare to you in Jean-Pierre’s eyes. You are his hero in every possible way. But someday he’ll realize that while you truly are his father, you’ll never be able to acknowledge him as your son. It will fall to me to console him as best I can, and explain to him what will be impossibl
e to explain without making him suffer more.”

  “You underestimate the boy, Mary,” he said with maddening composure. “I’ll tell him the truth at the proper time. You’ll see. It will all settle itself.”

  I’d left then, before my frustration spilled over. I could not comprehend his stubbornness, even as I knew how unlikely he was to change. It was not laziness on his part, or determined inaction, but his constant belief that things would fall into place without any help. Years before in Albany, when Carlos was still his servant and eager to relay to me everything that the Colonel said or did in the course of his workday, there had been one story that I’d never forgotten.

  Another attorney had urged the Colonel to make more preparations in a defense than the Colonel had believed necessary, quoting the old maxim of never putting off for tomorrow what could be done today. The Colonel had merely smiled, and told him that he preferred never to do today what could as well be done tomorrow, because something might occur before then that could make one regret one’s premature action. Carlos had found this wonderfully clever, especially since in the Colonel’s ever-changing legal affairs its wisdom had been proved again and again.

  But my son’s little heart was neither a legal brief nor a scrap of diplomatic intrigue, and I did not want to see him hurt by his father’s selfishness.

  Later that July, I witnessed exactly that.

  The Colonel had planned a large supper for the evening, and because the day was already warm, I’d risen before dawn to begin the preparations, leaving my children asleep. The Colonel had especially requested mille-feuille pastries to astonish his guests and make a statement about French loyalty. The many layers of pastry would be a special challenge in the day’s heat, and I went to work in the stone springhouse near the pond, where I could keep the flour and butter chilled.

  By the time I’d returned, the sun had risen and Peg, Louisa, and the others were gathered at the table at their breakfasts. Jean-Pierre, however, was nowhere to be seen.

  “Colonel Burr came and took him,” Peg said when I asked. “Said they’d plans together, out in the north field.”

  I frowned, and still wearing my flour-dusted apron, I quickly crossed the formal gardens and orchards. I saw them at a distance against the green, one large figure and one small, but I heard them, too. Not their voices, not at first, but the repeated crack of the pistol through the heavy morning air.

  I hurried toward them, practically running. I’d always considered the Colonel to not be much given to shooting, as some men were. Oh, I remembered overhearing at the Hermitage during the war that he was regarded as an excellent shot, but though he’d take a rifle hunting if another gentleman invited him, I’d never seen him choose the pastime on his own. I hadn’t known he even possessed a pistol. Yet obviously he did, and knew how to use it with ease and skill, too.

  Jean-Pierre saw me first, his curls bobbing in the sun as he danced with excitement. With his back toward me and his arm steady, the Colonel fired another shot. Fear for my son’s safety clutched in my chest as I rushed forward, terrified that my unpredictable child would run across the grass and into the path of his father’s gun.

  “Mama, Mama!” Jean-Pierre called. “Come see what the Colonel is doing!”

  “I can see from here, darling.” I grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him close, though he tried to wriggle free. The Colonel joined us, his boots cutting a path across the dewy grass.

  “Good day, Mrs. Emmons,” he called cheerfully through the acrid clouds of gunpowder smoke, as if he weren’t holding a pistol in his hand with studied nonchalance. “A fine summer morning, isn’t it?”

  “We were dueling, Mama,” Jean-Pierre said proudly. “Like gentlemen. Those apples were supposed to be heads.”

  Now I noticed that the pistol the Colonel held was designed for that deadly practice, the barrel longer than usual and a curving spur on the trigger guard, and that the row of green apples set along the tall fence at the height of a man’s head and exactly twenty paces in the distance. I also saw that the space where other apples must previously have stood was now empty, having been shot clean away.

  “Why?” My single word was as sharp as the gunshots had been.

  The Colonel smiled, unperturbed. “Monroe and Hamilton exchanged words the other night about that old business with Mrs. Reynolds and the bribes to her husband,” he said. “I shall tell you the particulars later.”

  He glanced pointedly down at Jean-Pierre, though it struck me as a bit late to be protecting him.

  “I intend to do my best to mitigate the disagreement,” he continued. “But you know what a hotspur Hamilton can be.”

  I didn’t need further explanation. Colonel Hamilton and Colonel Monroe were on the verge of a duel, an affair of honor where one or both of them could be killed over impulsive words and stubbornness. Somehow Colonel Burr had been drawn into it, likely as Colonel Monroe’s second, which had brought him here to practice, pistol in hand.

  Oh, I understood, and the risk and the danger and the foolishness of it made me sick.

  “Then tell me, sir,” I said. “Why did you bring my son here for this?”

  “The boy’s old enough to learn the importance of marksmanship,” he said with a studied blandness. “Familiarity with weapons and an ease around them is important to a man. It’s also a useful lesson in the potential cost of honor to a gentleman.”

  “Colonel Burr said the apples were heads,” Jean-Pierre said, jerking on my hand with excitement. “Before you came, Mama, he’d shot every one of them dead!”

  “Are you happy, sir?” I demanded. “Are you content? Is that what you wished to hear? He’s a child. What if he’d run forward into your path? What if you were distracted, and your aim had been off?”

  He took a step toward me. “Dear Mary, please—”

  I took a step back, pulling my son with me. “I’ll thank you not to call me that, sir, and I’ll also thank you not to fill my son’s head with your talk of honor. I thank God he’s not a gentleman and never will be, if your variety of honor is the price he’d have to pay.”

  I grabbed Jean-Pierre and swung him onto my hip, and went striding off back across the field. I ignored how Jean-Pierre wailed in protest and how heavy he was bouncing in my arms, and I also ignored the Colonel. I do not know if he continued his shooting practice, or if he called after me. I was too angry to hear either.

  I didn’t see the Colonel again until much later that evening, when he was surrounded with his guests. These were important gentlemen with loud voices and louder laughter. Their ladies were all dressed in fashionable white muslin, their painted fans moving briskly before their flushed faces despite the Colonel having ordered every tall window in the dining room open to the air. The Colonel laughed with the gentlemen and flirted with the women, as he always did. But whenever he tried to catch my eye as I glided through the room at my tasks, I pretended I didn’t see him. I was still too angry.

  Because Colonel Hamilton had confronted Colonel Monroe while he was dining with his wife at their lodgings, the entire affair had swiftly become public knowledge. Everyone in the room knew of it, and the conversations were filled with what exactly had been said, who was in the right and who wasn’t and what Colonel Burr could do about it, and even the costly dueling pistols from London—bespoke from the legendary Wogdon himself!—that Hamilton’s brother-in-law and noted duelist John Barker Church was sure to provide.

  As always, that night I was the last one awake in the kitchen, and as I closed and latched the windows the Colonel appeared. After today, I would have been surprised if he hadn’t.

  “That was a splendid dinner, Mary,” he said. He’d shed his coat, and the white linen of his shirt and waistcoat seemed very white by the muted light of the banked fire, while the gold chain, watch, and toys of his fob glittered at his waist.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said curtly, with no hint of forgiveness. He didn’t deserve it.

  “Are you still angry about this m
orning?” he asked behind me.

  I continued putting things to rights for the night, and not looking his way.

  “I’m angry about this morning, yes,” I said. “I’m angry that you would dare introduce my son to such dangerous idiocy, and put him at risk by doing so, and I’m also angry that you would tangle yourself in the middle of Hamilton’s madness.”

  “The boy is mine, too, Mary,” he said. “You often seem to forget that.”

  I turned about quickly to face him.

  “I never forget it, sir, not for a moment,” I said. “Every time I look into Jean-Pierre’s face, I see yours. Yet you treat him like a pet, not a son, to be your plaything when it amuses you, and forgotten while you’re away.”

  “That’s hardly fair, Mary,” he began, but I cut him off.

  “It’s fair, sir, because it’s the truth,” I said. “Why do you protest? You have no responsibility, no obligations, and no rights to either Louisa or Jean-Pierre. You’ll never even have to admit that they’re yours. That’s the law, isn’t it? Your precious law?”

  “Is that how you mean to leave here, and take them from me?” he asked abruptly. “Don’t look at me like that, Mary. I know what Mrs. Madison told you. Dolley herself asked me last month if you’d left my employment now that I was no longer a senator.”

  Sharply I drew in my breath. I hadn’t expected that, not at all, and I crossed my arms over my chest, marshaling my anger into a defense.

  “If I leave, sir, that wouldn’t be the reason,” I said. “I’d leave because I wished to provide a better life for my children.”

  “Better than you have here?” He flung his hands out as if to encompass all the richness of Richmond Hill, as if that alone were enough.

  “Better for us, sir,” I said. “Better for the people my children will become. Today you took my son to play with pistols, and pretended to shoot other men in the head for the sake of an affair of honor. You conveniently forgot that he will never be a gentleman, and that he has no need to learn of such things, ever.”