Philip broke away from me, rushing to his father’s defense, elbowing his way into a knot of red-faced, meat-fisted men.
“Philip!” I cried, trying to stop him, pushing forward past a brine-scented sailor and shoving a carpenter with sawdust on his apron. “Philip!”
I couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from the furious men. Close enough to see Alexander pop up out of the sea of people, holding his head with one hand even as he spat contemptuous laughter. “Well, if you use such knock-about arguments, I must retire!”
Almost comically, my husband bowed and ducked away while the crowd broke apart. Some following the Livingstons to Trinity Church. Some marching to the battery, where they promised to burn the treaty and, presumably, another effigy of Jay.
“Dear God,” I said, reaching my husband’s side, not knowing whether I should tend his head or give it another thump. “What, in the name of prudence, could you—”
“It only grazed me,” my husband said, wiping blood away with his now-torn sleeve.
Meanwhile, my son shouted after the retreating assailants, “No doubt you want to knock out my father’s brains! It’s the only way you blockheads could ever win an argument with him.”
“Philip.” Having barked his name in a fashion so like my mother that I was secretly appalled, I then rounded on my husband, hissing, “Fine things you teach your son.”
Hamilton had no reply to that. Fetching his now dusty black hat from the ground and straightening his coat, he made ready to walk us home, a number of his friends following us down the block, making me feel less that he was the head of a political party and more that he led a street gang.
More and more, I wondered if there was much difference between the two.
We’d only gone a little way before coming upon some lawyers in an altercation on Wall Street. “Gentlemen,” Alexander said, stepping between them. “Why don’t we resolve this matter between us at Fraunces over some glasses of brandy?” Now this suggestion was more in keeping with the conduct I expected, but Alexander said, “Philip, I bid you escort your mother home.”
As I was in high dudgeon with the both of them, I exclaimed, “By no means! Stay with your father and make no more mischief.” Either of you, my eyes said.
And with that, I returned home, grateful that my husband had escaped his latest brush with the mob with no more than a scrape on the head. That evening, he said he counted it a price worth paying for having disrupted the protest, but four days later, I was to learn just how high a price he’d been willing to pay . . .
“Kitty,” I said, startled to find my one-time companion upon my doorstep wearing a broad-brimmed black hat and clutching a black lace parasol. We’d not spoken a word in the six years since the inaugural ball, and the feud between the Livingston family and mine had only worsened since then. Still, I found myself glad to see her, especially since I knew she’d recently been widowed. “Please, come in.”
She gave a delicate shake of her head. “I should rather—well, I would prefer if we spoke in your garden.”
This was becoming curiouser by the moment. Nodding, I led her to my herb garden. “I was so sorry to learn of your husband’s passing.”
She self-consciously smoothed the bodice of her widow’s weeds. “Thank you. Amongst many other sorrows, I’m afraid widowhood has deprived me of fashion. Do you find me much changed?”
“You look just the same,” I said, though black did not flatter her and her skin no longer glowed. “I didn’t realize you’d returned to New York. Are you visiting?”
“I’m here to stay. I’m to be married again in the coming year to my cousin, John Livingston.”
Another Livingston, of course. “I congratulate you.”
“Thank you,” she said brusquely. “But I’ve come on a matter of more interest to you. Namely, to speak about the man you married. You see, I’m of the opinion that Hamilton is trying to get himself killed.”
I’d stooped to pluck some flowers for the dinner table, but now stood up abruptly. “Kitty, just because a man expresses an opinion—even an unpopular one—doesn’t justify your family’s faction stoning him in the street.”
Kitty’s lips thinned. “I’m not speaking of the mayhem at Federal Hall. It’s what happened afterward that has forced me to deliver a warning. Your husband is embroiled in an affair of honor. Two, actually.”
Affairs of honor. That meant my husband had either challenged or been challenged to a duel. Two of them, if Kitty was to be believed. But I stiffened because experience had taught me not to believe anything from the unholy Jefferson-Livingston-Clinton alliance. “With who?”