The Colonel grumbled with frustration that likely matched my own.
“Very well, then,” he said. “I was wrong to take Jean-Pierre to shoot with me. I am sorry, and ask your forgiveness. But I’m not Hamilton, Mary. I’ve never been involved in a duel in my life, not even in the army.”
I didn’t believe him, not after what I’d seen this morning.
“Besides,” he continued, “I’m not one of the principals. Seconds are almost never called upon to fire.”
I shook my head. “That brings me no comfort, sir.”
For a long moment, he was silent, and so was I. He knew how to use silence as powerfully as his words, and he’d always possessed the uncanny ability to stand very still. He was doing both now, knowing how it unsettled me.
Finally he took a step—only one—toward me. “You said that you were angry that I’d put myself in the way of Hamilton.”
“I said Hamilton’s madness, sir.” I sighed deeply, still hugging my arms against my body. Of a sudden my anger seemed spent, and now that it had gone, I felt close to tears. “He hates you beyond reason. In some way, he is mad, sir, and you must be as well, to agree to this.”
He held his hand out to me. “I’m many things, Mary, but I’m not mad.”
I looked at his offered hand, and shook my head.
“Is it any wonder that I fear for you, sir?” I asked. “If you were brought home having been killed for the sake of honor—I couldn’t bear that, sir, nor would I wish that sight upon my children. Our children. I couldn’t bear that at all, and I would rather leave here than be forced to see it.”
He still held his hand outstretched to me, and still I refused to take it.
“You care that much?”
“For you?” I asked, incredulous that he would ask. “Yes, I care for you, sir, and the greater fool I am for doing so.”
He nodded, and slowly lowered his hand back to his side.
“What must I do to make you stay?” he asked quietly.
I bowed my head, avoiding his eyes. I didn’t want to weep before him, and yet I would if I tried to answer.
When I opened my eyes, he was gone.
* * *
As the Colonel had told me, the confrontation and challenges between Colonel Hamilton and Colonel Monroe had all come from Colonel Hamilton’s infidelity with Mrs. Reynolds, and his subsequent blackmailing by that wretched woman’s husband six years before. At that time, Colonel Monroe had believed the blackmailing related to Colonel Hamilton’s position as Secretary of the Treasury, and had headed an investigation into the matter. When he learned the truth, he’d dismissed the investigation, and the shameful matter was considered closed, as was the way between gentlemen.
Somehow, however, the papers related to the investigation had lately found their way into the hands of an unscrupulous publisher, who had printed them. This had resulted in the would-be duel. At least Colonel Burr appeared to be successfully dismantling it, easing the tensions so that the entire affair would dissipate honorably, and without bloodshed.
But Colonel Hamilton’s anger—and his madness—remained unchecked. To prove that he was innocent of the rumors of financial impropriety, he wrote and published himself a pamphlet describing his seduction by Mrs. Reynolds in lurid detail, a confession that must have broken the heart of poor Mrs. Hamilton.
“What would possess him to do such a thing, sir?” I exclaimed after I’d read the pamphlet, which of course the Colonel had bought and brought home.
The Colonel barely glanced up from the book he was reading. “What possessed him was Mrs. Reynolds, a most alluring if empty-headed creature. Like a sugary pink-and-white confection that only brings regrets after consumption.”
“I meant how he could treat his wife so, sir.”
“Reticence has never been one of Hamilton’s strengths,” he said. “You know that as well as I. His mouth runs on like the flux.”
Not for the first time, I thought of how different the two men were in this regard, with the Colonel always so reluctant to commit anything to paper. No wonder that he and I together had safely kept our own secret for so many years.
“I’ve heard his wife has left him,” the Colonel continued, “and that she has taken the younger children with her to stay with her parents in Albany. Who can blame her? Imagine having to listen to his blather day and night.”
I rose and went to kneel beside his chair, so he could not avoid me or what I said.
“Listen to me, sir, I beg you,” I said, my words soft but urgent. “If Colonel Hamilton would willingly injure his own wife like this to preserve his reputation, what would he do to someone he despised, someone he saw as his enemy?”
He closed his book, and began instead to caress my shoulder, likely intending to distract me.
“My dear Mary,” he said. “I can already see the twisting path you wish to lead me along, and like a recalcitrant nag, I am going to refuse to follow. I have known Hamilton since we were both fresh from school. I know both his qualities and his flaws, and his hazards with them. But I also know how not to let him vex me, or draw me into his imagined intrigues and schemes.”
“Then why did you let him involve you into his duel, sir?”
“I didn’t, sweet,” he said mildly. “That was by Monroe’s invitation, and I agreed because he, too, is my friend.”
“I am your friend as well, sir,” I said, daring, for the word applied to Colonel Monroe was not at all the same as to me. “Might I likewise ask a favor of you? Swear to me there’ll be no more affairs of honor, not with Colonel Hamilton or anyone else.”
He frowned indulgently. “When will you ever trust me, Mary?”
“Your word, sir,” I insisted. “I do not want to see you dead.”
“You won’t,” he said, leaning forward to kiss me. “Be assured that I am safe, you are safe, and our children are safe, and that should be an end to it where you are concerned.”
* * *
Even as Colonel Hamilton’s follies were paraded through the press, I soon learned there were other ways, equally painful, to be humiliated in the public eye.
While I myself remained the Colonel’s greatest single secret, he’d many others besides. He’d always had a love for rich living and fine things, and a dangerous attraction for speculations in land and finance. In a way, I think he believed himself equal to any great English aristocrat in taste and refinement, and entitled to all the trappings that accompanied that refinement, no matter the cost.
There was no doubt that he possessed a brilliant mind, educated and precise. Yet like too many other men before him and since, he believed that brilliance in one area—in his case, politics and the law—meant that he was equally wise in others. It was a special kind of arrogance, and a terrible flaw as well, as all New York soon came to understand.
He listened to most any rascal who presented himself as a gentleman, and who invited him to invest in a tract of land that was certain to be increased tenfold in value in no time at all. He craved the easy reward without the unpleasant bother of toil. He trusted where he shouldn’t trust, and let himself be dazzled and seduced by false promises like the most foolish of maidens. To make it worse, like all gentlemen, he believed in standing by his friends, and signed as surety for their investments just as they signed for his, until their financial affairs were so tangled that if one of them were to fail, they all would be drawn down into disaster together.
It wasn’t entirely the Colonel’s fault. There were at that time certain upheavals in the country’s finances that I myself couldn’t begin to comprehend, but enough that made for great unease among both bankers and amateur investors like the Colonel. Regardless of the causes, the results soon became painfully apparent.
“There’s men with wagons out front, missus,” Alexis said one morning, finding me. “The Colonel’s with them now, but he says you should come, too.”
“Are they come with a delivery?” I asked. I was accustomed to that, a new marble-topped side
board for the dining room or another Italian painting for the Colonel’s gallery in the upstairs hall.
Alexis shook his head. “No, missus,” he said. “Looks like they’ve come instead to take away.”
I hurried up the stairs. The Colonel was standing in the center of the back parlor, his expression grim, while several rough-looking men were beginning to carry away the suite of Roman-style mahogany chairs covered in French silk.
“Mrs. Emmons,” he said, speaking loudly in a fashion that I realized was meant for the carters’ men to overhear. “I am making some, ah, adjustments to several of the rooms. Once these men have finished, I wish the room well swept and cleaned, and then closed for the present.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, agreeing for the sake of our audience. “As you wish, sir.”
“Papa, what is happening?” Miss Burr appeared in the doorway to the parlor, her eyes wide at the sight of the familiar room being torn apart by strangers. “Who are these men? What are they doing?”
At once her father went to her side. “I’ve decided to sell a few things, Theo, that is all,” he said, too heartily to fool anyone. “A change will benefit us all.”
“But that man has Mama’s looking glass!” she protested with distress. “Papa, you can’t mean to let them take that away!”
As we soon learned, the Colonel had no choice. He tried to put the best light upon it for his daughter’s sake, but even so the reality was unavoidable. He’d become so deeply in debt—“embarrassed” was the term he used—that he was forced to sell many of the furnishings to be able to keep the house itself. Most of the horses in his stable went to auction, as did the carriage. He’d sold other properties at a loss, mortgaged Richmond Hill itself, and leased a portion of the acreage to farmers. He’d even drawn his grown stepsons, Bartow and Frederick, into co-signing on one of his schemes, and now Frederick had likewise been forced to sell his own house and farm to make good on the bonds.
The Colonel’s debts struck the lower household, too. One morning, Mr. Strong arrived at the house and asked for the two newest servants, Bet and Anny, to fetch their belongings and join him in the yard. We all wept as the two women were taken away to be sold, and never seen by us again.
To be sure, the Colonel was not the only New York gentleman in this predicament. There were some prominent families who lost everything they owned. But because of who he was, the Colonel’s situation was widely reported in the papers, and gloated over by his political enemies, who held him up as an example of Democratic-Republican finances. He was called impecunious, a wastrel, a spendthrift, a debtor who could never be entrusted with the public good after so shamefully endangering his own family’s estate.
Most painful to the Colonel, however, was the effect his losses had upon Miss Burr. Now a young woman, she didn’t mourn the end of dancing lessons and new dresses from the mantua-maker, as some girls would. Instead, she thought only of the sorrows that had befallen her father and brothers, and lamented that she’d no fortune of her own to help relieve their suffering.
I understood, for I felt much the same way. I’d carefully saved both my wages and anything extra I’d been able to earn through sewing and cooking for others. Though I’d worked for years to save it, my own little security, I knew it was a pittance compared to his debts. Even one of those dining chairs would have been worth five times my savings. Still, one night I offered it to him. The gesture reduced him to near tears, shaking his head, as he’d held the small, battered tin box in his hands as if it contained the ransom of a king. As warmly and nobly as any gentleman in his situation could, he’d pressed the box back into my hands, and called me the most generous woman in Christendom.
In spite of all these woes, by late summer he’d thrown himself wholeheartedly into campaigning for a seat in the State Assembly. It was, fortunately, one election that had never been in doubt, and once he’d been declared the victor, he returned to Richmond Hill, and me, for the last few weeks before he’d take his new seat in Albany.
There were no merry celebrations at Richmond Hill that January, no rich dinners or fine wines or sprigs of mistletoe hanging in the doorways. Instead, the house was cold and ghostly quiet, the now-empty rooms echoing with the winter and the sounds of ice and snow rattling against the glass panes behind the latched shutters.
With Miss Burr visiting her cousins, the Colonel was living entirely in his old bedchamber upstairs, the only room that still kept a fire. He jested that he was in hibernation, and indeed he did put me to mind of some great bear waiting out the snows in his lair, gathering his own strength from the force of the winter.
There was no doubt he’d been bowed, but he still wasn’t beaten. He’d never been a man to make a public show of either his disappointments or his triumphs, preferring to keep such things to himself as a gentleman should, and he didn’t now, either, no matter how diminished his circumstances had become.
The cherrywood bedstead with silk hangings had long ago been sold, as had his desk, the tall chest of drawers, the washstand inspired by Pompeii, and all the rest of the furnishings. All that he’d kept were books—his as well as Mistress’s—stacked in neat towers along the walls, and a few trunks and chests on the floor that contained personal belongings. To read and write his correspondence, he sat upon an old rush-bottomed chair with a portable desk balanced on his knees, and he slept in an old camp bed that must have dated back to Queen Anne’s War.
I often lay there in that narrow bed with him during these last weeks, the two of us neatly curled together as we always had. He spoke to me about what he hoped to accomplish in the Assembly, whose support he meant to attract, and what influence he planned to wield. To him the empty house was not a reminder of what he’d lost, but a challenge for what he intended to regain. The loss of the actual paintings and furnishings hadn’t meant nearly as much to him as the power and prestige that they’d represented.
Over and over again I heard of how he meant to take it all back and more besides, and with each telling his determination seemed to grow. He didn’t intend to remain in the Assembly for long. He was considering running for governor again, and higher. He believed that President Adams was vulnerable, and that Vice President Jefferson’s support was growing stronger by the day. If Mr. Jefferson became president, then he’d need another Democratic-Republican to run with him for the vice presidency.
As the Colonel lay beside me, his eyes were fierce as a hawk’s with their intensity, and I didn’t doubt that his ambition burned brighter than it ever had. When he vowed that he’d do whatever he found necessary to succeed, I believed him. It also made me uneasy, because I’d seen it before. This was the kind of talk that led him to the deepest of intrigues, and made him believe that no risk was too great to be taken. It was dangerous talk, because he believed it himself.
Yet I listened as I always had, with my palm resting upon his chest and his arm around my waist. I listened, and while I hoped he’d achieve all he desired, I prayed that no harm would come to him from it.
On the last day before he was to meet Miss Burr in the city, the sky was clear and blue and the air not as cold as it had been. The Colonel had bought Dutch-style skates with curving steel blades for Louisa and Jean-Pierre to use on the frozen pond at the bottom of the hill, and during the time he’d been here he’d patiently held each of them in turn as they’d learned to find their balance on the ice. Now I watched from the bank, as proud as any mother hen, as they darted about with the other children from the area who came to the pond.
I watched the Colonel skate, too. I’d been surprised to see that he had owned skates himself, and further, that he was an accomplished skater, cutting swift, graceful curves over the ice and around anyone else who was slower or less skilled—much, I realized, as he navigated through his life.
At last he sat on one of the rocks beside the pond and unbuckled his skates to come and stand by me.
“Thank you again for bringing the skates,” I said. “Jean-Pierre in particular has wan
ted them ever since he could walk.”
“He does well,” the Colonel said with approval. “He’s as fearless with this as in everything else.”
“Sometimes a little fear would not be amiss, sir,” I said ruefully. “There’s a fine line between being fearless, and reckless.”
“That’s a line every man must decide for himself,” he said, and though he was watching his son, I wondered if he was thinking of himself as well.
I drew my cloak more tightly around my shoulders. “For his sake, sir, I hope he decides soon.”
The Colonel smiled, still intent on the skating children. “Mary, I cannot take you with me to Albany.”
“No?” I asked, instantly disappointed. I’d never wanted to return to Albany. Yet as much as I enjoyed being here at Richmond Hill with my children, I’d little to do with the house closed up, and I’d missed the challenges and excitement of arranging his entertainments. Most of all, if I’d admit it, I missed being with him. “But I’d thought you need me—”
“I’m taking Theo with me instead,” he said. “She’s old enough now for the responsibility of greeting my guests, if I should have any.”
I didn’t tell him that if Miss Burr was ready for this responsibility, it was because I’d always been at her side, guiding and teaching her in place of her mother.
“Albany’s a smaller place,” I said instead, striving to find another reason. “There’s a greater chance we’d be noticed.”
“No, that’s not it,” he said, taking away the excuse that I could have believed. “I can scarcely afford decent lodgings for Theo and me. Albany’s become every bit as dear as Philadelphia. You’ll fare much better here with the children.”
I nodded, numb, saying nothing, the both of us still staring forward at the children and not each other.
“I’ll continue to send you an allowance for their care, of course,” he said. “That will never change. They’re my responsibility.”
“Is this how it’s to end, sir?” I asked, at last saying it aloud.
He turned quickly to face me.
The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr Page 52
