Smitten by his flirtation, I gave a helpless shrug. “Oh well, for the country then . . .”
I forgot about the dinner party. I forgot everything but the familiar thrill of matching minds with the man I married. “Not that line,” I remember telling him. “That business about the ignorance of facts and malicious falsehoods will be taken harshly.”
“That’s the president’s line, not mine,” Alexander protested.
“Nevertheless, it portrays him as a partisan in the mud,” I argued, and our debate went well into the night. In truth, it went on for days as Alexander worked on the address, scribbling words and crossing them out.
Eventually, he removed the line to which I objected. That and many others, taking into consideration my suggestions, leaving me awed with the magnitude of the masterpiece. I knew, even then, that the Farewell Address was a moving and worthy tribute to the United States and its people. A plea for unity. A statement of purpose and guidance for the nation George Washington helped bring into being.
And because of Alexander Hamilton, I had the great and everlasting fortune to be a part of its shaping.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
May the present coolness between France and America produce, like the quarrels of lovers, a renewal of love.
—CHANCELLOR LIVINGSTON
May 1797
New York City
I WAS HAPPY.
I somehow forgot that. In the blazing trail of my husband’s wake, it has been easier to remember the hard times. The wars and the riots. The illnesses and exhaustion. The arguments and betrayals. The things people call history.
But happiness grew in the cracks between great events. I was happy in the little things. In falling asleep beside my husband each night, and waking up in his arms every morning. In walking my boys to the ferry to attend their school on Staten Island. In listening to Alexander and Ana sing duets at the piano. In the sermons at Trinity Church, where we rented a pew. And in the company of my sister Angelica, returned after more than seven and a half years of separation.
Finally, it seemed, I had everything I wanted.
“Angelica!” I called, tearful with joy, waving over the workaday crowd bustling along Broadway in front of her new town house. Upon seeing me, my sister abandoned her baggage, retinue, and children to rush into my arms.
Such was the force of our embrace that her dazzling diamond earrings caught in my dark hair and we were briefly entangled, laughing and crying at the same time. “Just look at you!” Angelica exclaimed, laying both hands atop my pregnant belly. “Have you grown fat with too fond a taste for marzipan or has my brute of a brother begotten another baby upon you?”
“Brute, am I?” Alexander asked, archly, swooping forward in elegant top hat.
Angelica nearly wilted at the sight of him. “Oh, my amiable!” she cried, throwing her perfumed arms around my husband’s neck. “You know I jest. But oh, how naughty you two have been.”
“Very naughty,” I replied, for my sister always brought out my saucy side. “We do love to overindulge . . . in marzipan.”
We were caught up in a gale of laughter when my sister’s brood gathered around us and I gasped at the sight of her eldest son. How in the world had the little boy who spent that frigid winter with us in Morristown grown up to be an outrageously handsome young Englishman?
“Aunt Eliza, I presume,” he said, with a charming, Eton-educated accent.
“Oh, my darling nephew,” I said, tugging my own boy close. “Meet your cousin, Philip Hamilton.”
Both Philips grinned, mischief in their eyes, as if already wondering which one might best the other in charming the young ladies of New York.
“My friends call me Flip,” my nephew said. “So, it shan’t be difficult to distinguish.”
Our reunion was so deliriously pleasurable that, as we stepped inside Church’s grand new house, I couldn’t seem to stop weeping—a thing I blamed upon pregnancy, but it had more to do, I think, with my most cherished dream to have my sister near. And for that, I had Mr. Church to thank. To please his wife, he’d retired from public service in London and moved their entire family to New York, where they planned to stay.
“Church has changed,” my sister confided later, while our combined family of hooligans ran through the wide halls of her nearly empty house and her new lady’s maid, a slave named Sarah, unpacked her trunks. “For the better.”
“Truly?”
Angelica sighed with apparent contentment as we toured her new home. “By some miracle, we’ve found our way back to love. Isn’t marriage funny that way?” Then she laughed. “Not that you know anything but the delight of marriage, of course! Not you and Hamilton. But for the rest of us . . .”