You are not the only man who shed blood in the cause of this country, I wanted to say. And having been forced so often to listen to chatter about forms of government, I knew the point of a republic was that nothing should rest entirely upon one man. Surely the whole enterprise would not fall to pieces simply because thirty-four-year-old Alexander Hamilton did not have command of its accounting books.
But I didn’t say any of this for fear he would bury me in an avalanche of arguments. Instead, I kept quiet, and what he mistook for submission seemed to ease him. Heaving a breath, he pulled me to him again. “My angel, the treasury is where I can do most good for the country. And this consideration must outweigh every consideration of a private nature.”
It was a reminder that I was a general’s daughter. A colonel’s wife. That ours was a family that had led soldiers in the cause of the country and must see it through troubled times to safety.
Perhaps I was more saintlike than I’d wanted to admit, because I found myself softening to the one approach that had the power to cut through my anger—patriotism. Moreover, I knew what a godly woman would do. A saintlike woman. She’d resign herself to the will of her husband and master, and devote herself with resignation to his decree. Besides, if Church could stop loving Angelica, who was so charming and agreeable that she’d fascinated royalty, how easy might it be for Hamilton to stop loving me?
Suddenly, the hurt I felt that he hadn’t consulted me felt petty, so I didn’t give voice to it. Not when I wished to right the wrong I’d caused between us. I gave a little nod. “Of course, Alexander. I understand.”
His expression softened and he fastened those irresistible eyes on me. “This position is what I’ve been hoping for—planning for—all along.”
And all at once I knew it was true. All those treatises on economic policy. All the late-night conversations with Papa and the powerful financiers of New York. All the books on economic systems. All those times Hamilton had gone off to war or to Philadelphia and left me alone for months on end—or even when he was so absorbed in his work that he didn’t look up for days.
I’d been planning our domestic life together.
But he’d been planning this. And it made me realize I still had so much to learn about my husband’s ambitions.
Chapter Twenty
June 1789
New York City
WELCOME TO THE menagerie,” I said to James Madison as a cacophony of our chickens squawked in their pen in the yard. There were advantages to living across the street from the busy Federal Building—for example, when my husband left the house to attend business there, he wasn’t far—but it was also too easy for him to return home with colleagues.
One hot summer afternoon when my daughter was shrieking at the top of the stairs because one of her brothers had taken her ribbon, I was obliged to receive Mr. Madison. As I wrangled the children, he glanced out the back door—propped open to permit a cooling breeze—and asked, “Is that—”
“The neighbor’s monkey,” my husband answered, with more gravity than I would’ve expected. He led his friend into the yard for the shade of a tree. “It keeps climbing over the fence to taunt the chickens.”
I watched the men settle themselves, fretting over Alexander’s pensiveness. And I took them some lemonade. “Is anything the matter?”
The men exchanged a glance that made my stomach drop. “Washington has fallen ill,” Alexander said, glumly. “They say it’s anthrax. I worry for the man, of course, but more than that, too. What comes of the Constitution if he dies?”
Madison’s expression was equally grim. “The crisis this could bring about in our public affairs may be insurmountable.” It was already bad enough, he explained, that our countrymen were getting into tavern brawls over whether we should prefer to trade with the British or the French. The only thing everyone agreed on was George Washington. “If Washington dies, we’re to entrust the whole enterprise of the federal government to a man lambasted as His Rotundity, the Duke of Braintree?”
John Adams, he meant. And yet, was the possibility of the president’s death not the entire purpose of having a vice president? So my prayers, when I made them, were not for the Constitution. I prayed for the president and for Martha Washington. Because how would she bear it if her husband were to die?
Leaving the men to talk, I sent Jenny to fetch more water and cut lemons to fill a pitcher for more lemonade—all this before greeting Angelica at the front door and hefting fourteen-month-old James into my lap to nurse.