When I save enough money, I’ll build you a country house, with a flower garden all your own, he promised. With room for all the children and more besides, if God should see fit to bless us with more.
Meanwhile I found contentment with what we had. And now, watching my husband spread a picnic blanket beneath the shade of a statue near the orchestra pit, I felt like a cat purring in a warm patch of sun. I unpacked our basket as the musicians tuned their instruments with “Yankee Doodle,” and I marveled at how well Alexander carried his forty years. Though his auburn hair had gone silver at the temples and his nose seemed a bit sharper, my husband was still handsome and distinguished, and mine in a way he’d never been before.
“Is there something wrong, my angel?”
“Nothing at all,” I answered, tearing off a chunk of bread for Johnny. “In this moment, I feel as if there is nothing whatsoever wrong in the world . . .”
“Then I’m doubly sorry to tell you that your boy is about to topple that wax figure of a Roman general,” said a familiar voice, and we looked up to see the wryly amused visage of Aaron Burr.
Sipping at a lemon ice, Burr accompanied his polite twelve-year-old daughter, Theodosia, who took so much after her mother that it allayed some of the wariness her father’s presence unleashed in me.
“James!” my husband shouted after our eight-year-old troublemaker, while Burr and his daughter settled onto a blanket beside us to wait for the sun to set and the fireworks to begin.
“Welcome home, Senator,” I said, determined to keep the conversation friendly.
Burr nodded in polite acknowledgment, having returned recently from a special session of Congress in Philadelphia, where he’d done his utmost to undermine President Washington and everything my husband had put into motion.
At least Washington remained to defend the Federalist cause. When we’d said our farewells to the Washingtons, my husband with true respect and affectionate attachment, me with a teary and grateful embrace for Martha and one of awe for the great man, I knew the president’s continuance in office was the one thing that allowed Alexander to retire. The reason he could be here with us now.
We remained on cordial terms with Burr if only because he still worked with the Manumission Society to help free blacks from being snatched up on the streets and sold back into slavery in the southern states. Still, I couldn’t keep myself from twitting him. “I’m afraid we missed you at the dinner in honor of my husband hosted by the Chamber of Commerce.”
“Ah, well, yes. I was sorry to miss it,” Burr managed, clearly attempting to play nice as well, though we all knew he’d have been pilloried by his own political party if he’d attended. The merchants of the city had given Alexander a hero’s welcome, celebrating us with champagne, a feast, and a ball. Well-wishers pressed into the overcrowded ballroom to listen to my husband’s mercifully short remarks on the virtues of the city’s businessmen. And they’d cheered, three times for Washington, three times for Adams, and nine times for Alexander Hamilton.
However vilified my husband might’ve been in Philadelphia, he was still New York’s favorite son. And I was quite sure Burr took my meaning.
Clearing his throat, he changed the subject, “I hear your law practice is thriving, Hamilton.”
“I’m kept quite busy, thank you,” Alexander replied, and he wasn’t boasting.
After a few months of riding and fishing and hunting with my father and our sons upstate, Alexander had decided that vacations disagreed with him entirely. In fact, he blamed this leisurely sojourn for the loss of his bank account book, which mortified him, since he’d created the bank that issued it. He’d since become convinced that he might lose his faculties altogether if he let them rest, so he’d thrown himself into the enterprise of paying off our debts and rebuilding our fortune.
“It’s a good strategy,” Burr said, sipping the last of his lemon ice.
“What is?” Alexander asked.
Burr stretched upon his checkered blanket. “Temporary retreat from the political arena. Retirement is very fashionable these days amongst men who wish to be president . . .”
How relieved I was to hear Alexander laugh. “That’s Jefferson’s game. As for me, I’m about the care of my family now. Congratulate me, friend, for I am no longer a public man.”
“Exactly what a man would say if he wanted to be president,” Burr replied. “You’re wise to let John Jay take the blame for this treaty of amity, commerce, and navigation he’s forged with the British. Then sweep in after it passes in Congress and reap the benefits.”