After a moment’s thought, he said, “Just letters for the children. After all, we own nothing outright but some furniture, clothing, and paintings.” He gave an exceptionally wry grin. “At last, an advantage to marrying a man without means.”
We laughed. We actually laughed.
It all seemed so trivial now. The trouble we went to in getting lights and upholstered divans and imported wallpaper with trellises and vines to impress our Federalist friends. We could take none of it with us to the grave, and little good it should do our children.
When yellow fever took us, we knew it would be gruesome. We would, by tomorrow or the next day, bleed from every orifice and pore. Which made me grateful that I’d sent the children away, so they might never witness the ghastly spectacle. But Alexander and I would not look away. I knew we’d hold one another through every agony, until the last drop of blood.
Fortunately, God had given us this one last beautiful day. And so we found each other’s lips, until we found each other, skin to skin, as if for the first time, and there we made love beneath His blue sky, revealing ourselves in all our weaknesses to each other, and to the Lord.
Part Three
The War of Words
Chapter Twenty-Five
Autumn 1793
Albany
WE WERE SAVED.
Alexander was certain Dr. Stevens’s remedies had cured us and recommended it to others. But even medicine had become a political battleground. My husband’s enemies had allegedly wished him dead, toasting to his speedy demise, and now that he’d survived they refused to believe in the cure that had saved his life.
I wasn’t sure I believed it either.
It wasn’t the baths and the wine and the cinnamon and the Peruvian bark that saved our lives, I thought. It was a miracle. A miracle of grace and love and forgiveness.
And we were both changed by it.
Our bodies were weaker—Alexander would suffer from kidney pain ever after, and it would be years before I regained my vigor—but our spirits were replenished. Having fallen in love anew, we found within ourselves a new sense of what we valued most.
“Mama! Papa!” the children cried as we climbed the hill of the Pastures with nothing but the clothes on our backs. Oh, my babies! We hugged and kissed every one of them until we were all laughing and crying at the sweetness of the reunion. And we were inexpressibly proud of our brave Philip, who had seen his siblings to safety.
As we recovered at my father’s house, Alexander decided to resign his position in the government. “Six months and the new government would be on stable footing. Maybe less.” Having come so close to leaving our children penniless, he intended to return to his law practice and rebuild his fortune. Swinging in a hammock overlooking the Hudson River, he said, “I want to leave my family with more than a memory of me sitting up all night at a desk while mobs shout outside our house. I want to sing duets with the girls at the piano and take the boys duck hunting and—”
“Plant turnips with me?” I mused, nestled against him.
Alexander laughed. “What if I were to confess that having lived nearly all my life in a city, I haven’t the faintest idea how to grow turnips or any other sort of crop?”
Delighting in the way the dappled autumn sunlight illuminated pale freckles upon his face, I kissed him. “I would say you were fortunate to have married a woman who came of age on a farm . . .”
He smiled, closing his eyes to the music of our children playing hoops on Papa’s lawn. “In this, and all things, I must now content myself to be guided by the wisdom of my wife.”
I was myself content. But our respite was short.
A missionary friend of Papa’s wishing to establish a school to help the Oneida wrote seeking my husband’s endorsement and support. Not to mention the use of his name. “They wish for me to become a trustee,” Alexander said. “And to call it the Hamilton-Oneida Academy.”
This was an honor, I thought. But also a risk to have his name, so often slandered, associated with yet another controversial cause. Yet my husband had championed an enlightened policy toward the Indians, even after the war, when so many others hadn’t.
“We’ve done too little to protect them from lawless frontiersmen,” he said, as if to convince me. “But perhaps we can provide their children the means for a better life.”
“Which is why I hope you will accept.”
He beamed to find us in accord. “Then I will afford it all the aid in my power.”
I swelled with pride in him. With love for him. And renewed purpose.