That was . . . unexpected. Burr didn’t have to advise Maria Reynolds to keep quiet. Indeed, he had no motive to do so, so I was immediately suspicious. “Why would you . . .”
“Friendship, my dear lady,” Burr said, as if it should be obvious. “I’ve never seen a reason why a mere difference in politics should be a reason for personal discord.”
His words brought to mind the dinner table policy I’d once naively embraced. “Perhaps this reassuring message is better delivered to my husband.”
“By my reckoning, Hamilton has less of a right to reassurance than you do,” Burr said, eyeing me levelly. “You’re the one I wish to comfort.”
My throat tightened. “And yet, I came to offer you comfort.”
“I cannot be comforted.” That’s when the impenetrable armor of Burr’s character, which made it so easy for him to slip from one political faction to another—amiable to all, sincere to none—fell away. “My wife was the best woman and finest lady I ever knew, and now I go to attend her funeral knowing I never made enough time to attend her in life.” He said this bitterly. “Do you know I offered to give up my ambitions and leave government for her? Theodosia wouldn’t have it. Now she’s gone and ambition is all that’s left.”
I should’ve heard the threat in those words. But at the time, my heart filled with such pity for his agony that I took the liberty of squeezing his hand—never dreaming that same hand would one day inflict that same agony upon me.
*
September 1794
Philadelphia
It was a time for terror.
For two years, the French Revolution had depended upon it. Now, a flood of refugees washed into our American capital, so many that the French language rang out on every street corner. Even the newspapers featured advertisements in that language for everything from wines and perfumes to fencing lessons and theater performances. And the refugees brought with them chilling tales of abuse and deprivation, horrifying stories of victims shortened by the national razor, their silently screaming heads held up for the jeers of the crowd, still dripping bloody red gore.
“Quelle horreur,” said Mr. Moreau, the owner of the bookstore on the corner of Walnut Street.
I’d come to replenish my husband’s ever dwindling supply of paper and ink, as well as to purchase a book of French for Ana, who was learning the language from a tutor. The store was also a meeting place for some of the most prominent French exiles, and Mr. Moreau knew them all.
“Poor Vicomte de Noailles,” he said, rummaging amongst the clutter of maps, engravings, and scientific instruments for sale. “He hasn’t come out of his house for days.”
Noailles was Lafayette’s brother-in-law, and he, too, had fought heroically for us at Yorktown. Now Noailles found himself persecuted, forced into flight, and grieving the murders of those he’d left behind in France—women of Lafayette’s family, too.
“Last I saw the vicomte,” Moreau continued, “he kept murmuring that his wife must have been spattered by her own mother’s blood going up the stairs to the guillotine. That he should’ve divorced her when he fled so as to spare her this fate.”
Clutching Ana’s book in my gloved hands, I said a silent prayer. “He couldn’t have known that the monsters would come for women and children . . .”
“No,” Moreau agreed. “But maybe his wife could have renounced him. Maybe it would have saved her.”
Stand by him and die, renounce him and live.
I wondered, in her place, what I would’ve done.
My husband was determined that I should never find out. “I must leave you,” Alexander whispered softly the next morning, regretfully rising from my pillow as dawn glowed rosy in our window.
There was an uprising in western Pennsylvania against the whiskey tax my husband had levied to pay the country’s war debt. Tax collectors had been tarred and feathered. Whiskey rebels had blown up the stills of their neighbors who paid the tax. They’d kidnapped a federal marshal. They’d even threatened to build a guillotine. Here. In America.
President Washington had been forced to muster an army. He would lead it, personally, against these rebels to establish, once and for all, that the laws of this new nation must be obeyed. That terror here would not be countenanced.
And Alexander meant to ride out at the president’s side.
My husband reassured our children that there’d be no real fighting, that a show of force would be enough. But I also heard him tell a friend that the game afoot was for no less than true liberty, property, order, and heads.