I smiled a little to think he’d ever felt ill-equipped.
But my father didn’t smile. Instead, he shook his head. “I knew only that as a father, it was my duty to protect you. With sword or musket or my own life if it should come to it. And this I have tried to do. When I gave you to Hamilton, I thought I had secured for you a life of security, love, and happiness. I chose a man I believed would defend you, and your heart, as I have always tried to do.” His mouth tightened, ruefully. “I did not choose your sisters’ husbands. But I chose Hamilton.”
And he blamed himself for it. “You didn’t choose him, Papa,” I said, quite firmly. “You only approved him. The choice was mine. A choice I make anew every day. A choice I do not regret, no matter how unpleasant our enemies intend to make it for me.”
My father, whose hair had gone white and wiry, whose strong arms had withered, and whose health had never been good, suffered from painful gout in his legs. I knew he was suffering now, as he took off his boots, lowered his feet into the water next to mine, and stared at the churning river. “Do you know what you’re facing with that choice?”
After years in public life, I had some idea. “Yes, Papa. I’m not a child anymore.”
“You are my child,” he said quietly. “Always.”
The sentiment set off an ache in my chest, for as a mother myself, I understood the depth of his meaning. I felt it for my own children. No matter how tall Philip grew, I would always see him in my mind’s eye as the laughing little piglet with chubby legs.
It took Papa a few moments, but when he looked up again, he said, “Do you recall that when you, Angelica, and Peggy were small, toddling about in pink ribbons, I went to London for a year on business?”
“I recall something of it,” I said, for, at five years old, dolls from England seemed almost as marvelous as welcoming home the tall and fierce warrior of a red-coated father I scarcely knew.
“While I was gone,” my father continued, “I asked my commander—Colonel Bradstreet—to watch over my family. At my request, he helped your mother build our new mansion here. And I returned home to find all of you living together here with Colonel Bradstreet . . . with whom your mother had formed an uncommon friendship in my absence.”
An uncommon friendship.
I remembered. Colonel Bradstreet was so fond of Mama that when he died, he left property to her. And all my life, I’d thought nothing of it until this excruciating moment. In shock, I whispered, “Surely you’re not intimating—”
“I am intimating nothing but that the friendship was a subject of speculation.”
My father’s jaw hitched and my belly roiled at the thought that he might have known the pain of adultery. Yet, everything I knew of my parents forced my mind to rebel. “Mama would never!”
With more calmness than he perhaps felt, Papa puffed at his pipe. “There was gossip.”
That I did not remember. That I’d never known. I was too young to have realized it. And I wondered if Angelica, who was older, had been more aware and if it accounted for her sometimes troubled relationship with our mother. “Surely Mama denied any impropriety.”
A small, bittersweet smile tugged at his lips. “I did not ask her.”
Indignation positively burned in my breast. “Why ever not?”
Papa’s fingers drummed lightly upon his knee, as if he were counting. “If she were guilty, she might confess. And how should a gentleman respond? If I ran Bradstreet through with my sword, it would have gained me nothing but a momentary pang of satisfaction and a dead friend. It would not forestall the gossip of cuckoldry, nor the destruction of your mother’s fine name. It would have followed you, my dear children, and made you unhappy all your lives.”
As the gossip about Hamilton would now follow my children all their lives.
To his litany of horrific consequences, my father added, “And if your mama was innocent . . . as she surely was . . . then to insult her with an accusation would make me the vilest of knaves. I should consider myself condemned to hell-fires if I treated your mother with such rank suspicion—a woman who entrusted herself to me, risked her very life to bring my children into the world. A woman who defended my lands, served as wise steward over my household, and blessed my life with her wisdom, friendship, affection, and love. Such ingratitude would damn me in the eyes of myself and my god.”
So, he would not ask, I thought. He would never ask. My father, like the mathematician he was, had added it all up—the sums of love and happiness and disappointments in a marriage—and come to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. Just as Maria Reynolds did not matter, regardless of what the papers said. Regardless of what anyone said.