I could neither leave my husband nor love him without offending somebody. As the wronged wife, there was nothing whatsoever I could now do that might be counted appropriate, except, perhaps, to lay down and die of shame.
And I was not about to give anyone that satisfaction.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come back to me,” Hamilton admitted that night, rocking his infant son against his shoulder, and eyeing the two empty wine bottles on our table with a furrowed brow. “Unless . . .”
“Unless?” I asked, covering a hiccup.
“Unless you’ve returned to hire a divorce attorney.” His eyes crinkled at the corners, as if he’d said it in dark jest, but there was an edge of fear to it. He watched me carefully for an answer even as he continued, “As it happens, I’m acquainted with the best in the city if you should need a recommendation.”
Though I was a little tipsy and unsteady on my feet, I stood to embrace him. “I’m with you, Alexander.” And I was. For even though the world didn’t wish for us to put our troubles behind us, we’d done it. We’d survived.
And we’d become stronger for it.
Alexander swallowed, then, with our little William between us, pressed his forehead to mine. “You are infinitely dear to me, Eliza. And I am more in debt to you than I can ever pay. Please believe that I know you deserve everything from me. And my future life will be devoted to your happiness. I only wish I could stay . . .”
He was obliged to argue a federal case in Connecticut—one of the many cases he took on to make a fine future for our children and build the house he promised. Still, he worried, because our oldest boy, Philip, had taken ill on the boat as we’d sailed back from Albany.
A summer cold, we thought. Nothing serious. But days after my husband went off to Connecticut, as Philip tossed and turned feverish in his bed, the physician pronounced the dread verdict. Typhus. Typhus could leave our boy deaf or addled. Or it could kill him.
“Mrs. Hamilton, you must prepare for the worst,” the doctor said, his coat thrown over the chair by the bed where my son burned with fever. “Your husband must be sent for.”
“Send a courier by express,” I whispered. Then I sent the rest of the children and my servants away, lest the illness spread. Angelica insisted on staying with me, so it was me, my sister, and the doctor left to care for Philip as he slipped into a state of delirium, his pulse fading by the moment. I took Philip’s face in my hands and told him a truth that mothers ought never utter—that he would always be my firstborn and first in my heart.
Because Philip was too weak to move on his own, the three of us plunged him into a hot bath of Peruvian bark and rum. When he roused, I spooned wine whey into his mouth while his aunt Angelica covered him in dry blankets. But the nightmare continued as we waited for my husband’s return, listening with anxiety for every chime of the clock.
At length, my sister said, “Eliza, let me sit with him while he sleeps. You should rest so his mother can be with him when he awakens.”
I started to my room, stumbling away in a delirium of my own. Don’t take him, God, I prayed that night, and again the next morning. Not Philip, who’d brought joy to us since the day he was born. Not the boy who’d been my companion during those lonely early years when his father was seldom home.
Not my Philip. The best of me and Alexander combined. Our best and brightest hope.
I’d just finished uttering this morning prayer when boots thundered up the stairs, the door shaking at the noise of it. “Eliza!” I found Alexander in the hall, his hair plastered to his head in sweaty ringlets, his legs spattered in mud, eyes wild. “Is he—”
“Awake,” Angelica said from the doorway. “And it’s no wonder with all the racket.”
We rushed into our son’s room to find him revived, sensible as to where he was and who we were, and we knelt beside his bed and thanked God for his deliverance. Later, while Alexander cooled his forehead with a cloth, I thought nothing else matters but this.
Let the newspapers say what they would. Let every woman in the country giggle behind their hands and whisper behind my back. Our family mattered more. Our family meant everything. And so long as we were together, I could bear anything.
*
Hamilton is fallen for the present, but even if he fornicates with every female in New York and Philadelphia, he will rise again.
—DAVID COBB TO HENRY KNOX
Winter 1797
New York City
“We’ll never see her again, will we?” my daughter rasped as we watched the snow-covered carriage roll away from the front of our house, a tearful Fanny pressing her hand to the frosted window in farewell.