Please God don’t let him die, I prayed, a panic seizing me. Whatever our troubles, I couldn’t bear for him to die. Perhaps especially because of our troubles, and all that remained unresolved between us. I sent straightaway for a physician who was, by happenstance, an old friend of my husband’s from the West Indies.
“Am I done for, Neddy?” Hamilton asked Dr. Stevens. Glowing with fever, my husband complained of aches in his swollen kidneys.
“It’s yellow fever,” the doctor said. “Which means you may seem to get better, but that is the crucial time.”
He didn’t have to explain why. It was only after sufferers of this ailment seemed to recover that they would suddenly jaundice, spew blood and black vomit, and die. And so the doctor said to me, “Send the children far away. All of them. Even the baby.”
I’d already sequestered the children in an adjoining house, bringing meals to the door and waving at the window, never letting them get close enough to spread the contagion. The mother in me refused the idea of sending my frightened children away in such perilous times—especially little Johnny, so recently weaned.
Sending them away felt like asking me to amputate a limb. But I’d learned during the war that sometimes amputation was necessary. Alexander was in no condition to make the choice, so it fell to me to speak very frankly with my eleven-year-old son, who would have to manage his siblings all on his own. “Philip, I need you to take your brothers and sisters to the Pastures.”
My son’s eyes went wide. “By myself?”
The fear on his face nearly broke my heart, but I couldn’t let him see that I shared it. “If you can drive the carriage as far as Germantown, you can stay with friends there. It’s only a few miles and your grandpapa will send a servant to fetch you the rest of the way. You can watch over the little ones and manage the horses just that far, can’t you?”
“Why can’t you and Papa come with us?” he asked from the window.
“Because your father is too ill and I must care for him.”
“Father has a doctor to care for him.” Because Philip had always been a boy who laughed more easily than he cried, it wounded me to see his eyes fill with tears. “If you stay, won’t you get sick, too?”
“The doctor has many other patients to tend to,” I said. “And you mustn’t worry about me. You’re a young man now. You must be the man of the family while your father is ill.” If his father died, he’d become the man of the family in fact, before the age of twelve. And it would be the worst calamity of his life.
Better a mother die than a father; it was a father who could provide for the children.
Saving Hamilton was the best thing I could do for my babies.
In Philadelphia, bodies had rotted in the streets, husbands had abandoned wives in their sickbeds, mothers abandoned sick children, and children forsook their doomed parents. That seemed to me a greater evil than death. And though I’d taught my eldest son many lessons at my knee, now was the time to teach him the most important of all.
Semper Fidelis. Always loyal. Always faithful.
“I’m not going to leave your father alone when he needs me. Get ready to go, now. See your siblings to safety. Can we depend on you, Philip?”
Manfully, our boy swiftly wiped tears away and nodded with determination. “Yes, Mother. I can do it. But you must come as soon as you can.”
“We will,” I promised, watching gratefully, from a distance, as he coaxed the children into the carriage that would take them away. My heart ached that I couldn’t hug or kiss them in farewell, that I couldn’t inhale the baby scent of their hair. And as the carriage rolled away, I wept bitter tears, fearing that our separation might be of the eternal kind.
For what I’d not told Philip, nor even wished to admit to myself, was that I, too, now felt aches and chills . . .
Inside the house, I found Hamilton submerged in a bath of cold water, his teeth chattering. It wasn’t the treatment recommended by the city’s foremost physicians, like Dr. Rush. But Dr. Stevens refused to induce vomiting or bleed my husband with leeches. No, he said that he’d successfully treated this fever with baths and bark tonics. And so that’s what he did.
He cared for both of us, though I was barely aware of him because my head now throbbed intolerably and my eyes burned. Scorching heat stole my ability to think, as if I stood on the precipice of hell’s fires. Then I was cold. So frightfully cold, that not even the warmed Madeira wine the Washingtons sent us chased away the chill.