“With my cousin, for one. I know you may not be disposed to believe me but I heard it from your own husband’s mouth when we crossed paths outside his law office.”
Now I definitely didn’t believe her. “My husband told you he was going to duel with a Livingston?” I asked, dubiously. Men didn’t tell women such things. It wasn’t gentlemanly. It would cause alarm in a man’s family. And that family might persuade a man to forgo pistols, thereby risking his honor.
“Hamilton pretended to let it slip,” Kitty said with a fleeting smirk. “I still remember perfectly well what he’s like when he wants something. And in this case, he wanted me to warn my cousin’s wife that he’d shoot her husband dead unless she put a stop to it.” Kitty’s smirk now became more than fleeting. “So I thought to myself, turnabout is fair play. Which is why I’m warning you.”
I sobered as my doubts were swiftly replaced with the cool chill of dread. “Fair play? Dueling is not a game, Kitty.”
“Tell that to your husband,” Kitty replied. “Because after leaving Federal Hall on Saturday, he not only embroiled himself in two affairs of honor in the space of an hour. He’d also thrown up his arms and declared himself ready to fight my family’s whole ‘detestable faction’ one by one.”
The heat of shame it brought to my cheeks to imagine my husband stooping to the level of a street brawler! He, who’d been George Washington’s secretary of the treasury!
But, of course, now he was not.
And maybe he didn’t know what he was anymore if not that.
*
“ARE YOU MAD?” I asked Alexander. I had accosted him in the carriage house, where the heat gave rise to the scent of horse. And though my husband preferred that we have the conversation inside, I didn’t want to give him time to formulate a jury argument. “Aren’t you the same man who toiled to make this country a nation of laws? Yet, you resort to threats of duels and fisticuffs? And in front of Philip? It’s barbarism.”
He gave a little sigh. “It won’t come to a duel.”
Remembering that Angelica’s husband had been all but exiled from England for having nearly killed a man in a duel, I asked, “How can you be certain?”
“Because I’ve been involved in affairs of honor several times before without a shot ever being fired.” This staggering bit of news I’d scarcely digested before he continued, “I manage them to my satisfaction, and my opponents withdraw, which is why I tipped my hand to Kitty.”
“So you did tell her.” Given the color that darkened his cheeks, this embarrassed him, but not enough. What an incurable schemer!
“I expected Kitty to warn the womenfolk of her family, who would, in turn, exert pressure upon Livingston to come to terms with me. I never predicted she’d take license to alarm you.”
“Well, as always, you are too clever by half.”
“Eliza, this is the way of honor with gentlemen.”
“If it’s honor that you value, then perhaps you ought to guard the esteem your country still has for you by not offering to brawl in the streets like a madman.”
“I am not mad.”
“No?” I asked, thinking his behavior erratic. To prove it, I held up three different scribblings I’d found on his desk. “What do I see here? An essay in defense of the Jay Treaty that you wrote for the papers under one pen name. A second, written under a different name in which you anonymously praise yourself for writing the first. And then a raving third, pretending to add to the imaginary choir! It’s madness.”
“I am not mad,” he repeated, kicking at a bit of straw on the floor.
“Then what in blazes is wrong with you? Because issuing the challenges, threatening fistfights, breaking up protests, and throwing yourself into gazette debates with such duplicity . . . all of this seems as if you’re half out of your mind!”
“I am out of my mind!” he suddenly shouted, and then he pressed his fist to his mouth, his eyes going shockingly glassy. “I . . . I lost a child, Eliza,” he choked out. “I lost a child, too.” He threw down the leather satchel he carried with him nearly everywhere, and sank down onto a bale of hay. He stayed there, silent, as I nearly quaked at the revelation. He’d lost a child. Of course he had. But consumed in a mother’s grief, I’d thought only of the fact that I had lost a child.
I will hold you together, he’d promised in the darkest hour. He’d done that with tenderness, patience, and devotion. But he’d suppressed his own grief so long that now he was the one flying to pieces, and I’d neither seen the cracks forming, nor done anything to heal them.