And knowing this, I would not ask him to.
He caught my fingers between his and sighed. “The rest of the children can stay here with their governess, but let Philip take you to the Pastures. For your sake and his. He’s almost a man grown, now. His friends will have heard the gossip. I do not wish for him to feel compelled to defend me. Or maybe, I cannot bear to face his disappointment . . .”
Downstairs, we heard the door open and close, then footsteps trudging up the stairs that could only belong to a troubled boy. Perhaps my husband was right. “But I worry to leave you now, Alexander. Especially now.”
My husband took a breath. Then another. “Eliza, if you stand beside me the public will eviscerate you. With such men as those hounding me, nothing is sacred. Even the peace of an unoffending and amiable wife. They will hurt you because of their fury against me.” He took my face in his hands and stroked my cheeks tenderly. “No man who loves his wife could wish this upon her. No loving father could wish his child born into such circumstances. I realize that I have forfeited my right to command you as a husband, but I command you in love to go. To take care of yourself, to keep up your spirits, and to remember always that my happiness is inseparable from yours.”
Stand by him and die, renounce him and live.
Once, I wondered what I would have done if I’d been caught in such a conundrum. I did not face death, of course, but the choice before me seemed strangely similar, and the answer no clearer or easier now.
*
August 1797
Albany
The river washed over my bare feet with a pleasant coolness, my petticoats bunched up at my knees. Seated on the dock next to Papa, who held a fishing pole in his hand and wore a broad straw hat upon his head, I squinted into the bright sun and imagined I was a girl again. Perhaps my father was imagining it, too, because, puffing his pipe, he put a worm onto the hook for me, as if I didn’t remember how to do it.
A week before, Hamilton had seen me and Philip off at the sloop, simultaneously solicitous and morose. And Angelica dashed off a note that same night to tell me that my dejected husband had gone to her house thereafter and stayed well into the night, unable to speak of anything but me.
Meanwhile, we all tried to speak of anything but him.
On the deck of the sloop, my fifteen-year-old son treated me as if I were made of glass. Philip had become a man already, I’d realized with a motherly pang. He took his quick wit and devilish smile from his father, but the rest of him was all Schuyler. Tall, dark, and loyal. Having been commanded by his father to watch over me in my delicate condition, my son carried my bags, fetched lemonade, and played games of backgammon with me in our berth at night.
My family was even more solicitous in Albany. Mama had everything ready for me—sweet herbs for my pains, pastries for my cravings, and the Bible from which she read to me. Peggy came to help me birth the babe and told my son what great things were expected of him at Columbia College, where he was soon to enroll. Papa tried to distract me with talk of canal projects and the Indians.
Even Prince, now a bit bent with age, said to my son, in a whisper meant for me to hear, “Master Philip, of all these Schuyler daughters I helped bring up in this house, your mama was the one who gave me the fewest white hairs.”
Philip always cringed to be called Master, as it did not rest easy with him that his otherwise heroic grandfather still kept a few plantation slaves in his service. And so he took the extra pillows from Prince’s arms and said, “Well, my mother wouldn’t want to give you any more white hairs climbing those stairs, so let me get her settled.”
On the night that my labor pains began, my father finally raised the subject. Bending to kiss me, he whispered into my hair, “My dear beloved child . . . rest easy in knowing that no one of merit believes this filth in the newspapers.”
I dreaded to tell him the truth, and weeks after birthing a wondrously healthy little boy named William, I still did not know how. Finally, sitting beside Papa on the ferry dock with fishing poles, I blurted, “I’ve forgiven Hamilton.”
My father bit the clay pipe between his teeth, his lips thinning as understanding dawned that Alexander was guilty. At the prospect of my father learning the truth, my husband had shuddered. The censure of the country, he believed he could withstand. My father’s judgment was another matter altogether. And I began to fear it, too, because for a few moments, the only sounds were the rush of the water. The cry of a peregrine falcon hunting overhead.
“Elizabeth,” Papa finally said. “When you were born, I was an officer in the king’s army—a young soldier of three and twenty. I knew next to nothing about little girls. Less of nursing, or lullabies, or medicines. That was your mama’s domain.”