“Of course, we will,” I said, fighting back my own tears for my daughter’s sake. Fanny may not have been her sister by blood, but Ana had never known another. And the loss seemed to break her. She alternated between inconsolable sobs and dazed stupors, and it was all I could do to comfort her about something that broke a piece of me, too.
Because Fanny’s relations no longer saw fit to let her stay with us. Her married older sister wanted to take Fanny into her household. A respectable household, I was brusquely informed. Thus, we were forced to surrender the girl we’d loved as our own since the age of two.
We’d packed twelve-year-old Fanny’s trunks with new petticoats and pearled combs and every sort of frippery a girl should need. Alexander had vowed to the girl that she was always welcome back. We were all heartbroken at the loss.
And to comfort my twelve-year-old daughter, I said, “It’s no different than when your aunt Angelica went to live in London for a while. Fanny will come back one day and you’ll have each other’s company again.”
But Ana couldn’t be comforted. She’d always been a sensitive child, but lively and clever—eager to show off her accomplishments in dancing, music, and French. Now she withdrew to her room, complaining of illness. And I wondered if the danger to my children was never to end. The physicians could find nothing whatsoever wrong with her, but she would eat next to nothing but little bits of bread. Sometimes even then, she left the crumbs upon her windowsill for the birds.
Like her father, she took loss hard. And my heart ached for her. I knew what it was to love a sister, how tight that bond could be. How difficult it was to understand one’s place in the world without it.
In Ana’s tenderness—the way only feeding these little birds could lift her spirits—I thought I recognized in her my own calling. Thus, one Sunday morning, I said, “Get dressed for church services, darling. Afterward, we’re going to help some children as needy as our dear Fanny once was . . .”
Thereupon we threw ourselves into a cause to which I was happy to lend my name—tainted though it was. The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, founded by the devout Scotswoman Widow Graham, supported at least a hundred destitute widows in the city. Together with Ana, I spent afternoons assembling baskets of food and clothing for the needy in the hopes of saving them from the poorhouse.
I’d always felt best when I was busy. Besides, the unfortunate situations of these widowed women reminded me that my troubles were comparatively few. How fortunate I was. How the Lord had made me rich in every way that mattered. I imagined that it made the same impression on Ana because, by summer, she was playing her piano again for our old friend James McHenry, the secretary of war. He came to visit in a show of loyalty and support, reciting poetry and recalling old war stories well into the evening.
“To Lafayette,” McHenry said, raising his glass. “The luckiest Frog alive.”
“To Lafayette,” we said, because the marquis was lucky, alive, and—after five years of imprisonment—free. Napoleon Bonaparte saw to Lafayette’s release from prison, the only thing of merit, by my estimation, that tyrant ever did. And when we learned of Lafayette’s release, Alexander wrote:
My friendship for you will survive all revolutions and all vicissitudes. The only thing in which our parties agree is to love you.
After we drank, McHenry sat back and put his knife on the edge of his plate. “This veal is delicious, Mrs. Hamilton—melts in the mouth like butter, it does. You serve as fine a meal as I remember from the old days.”
“You must be forgetting that dreadful wartime tripe stew . . .”
Mac patted a somewhat rounder belly than he’d had in those far-off days in winter quarters. “I was so hungry during the war, you could’ve baked me a sawdust cake and I’d have savored it. But this meal is exquisite. Have you a chef?”
“Oh, no,” I replied. “We’ve an Irish girl who scrubs the pots, but I do the cooking.”
McHenry seemed impressed. “Hamilton, my lucky friend, your wife is still as frugal and good a treasurer of your household as you were a treasurer for the country.”
“Better,” Hamilton said, smiling at me with warm affection. “After all, no one has ever demanded an investigation into her account books.”
We laughed, then Mac shook his head. “I worried, you know, all those years ago in Morristown. How the devil did a man like Hamilton see fit to marry such a saintly girl? Now I see, Mrs. Hamilton, that you were the only woman tireless enough to match him.”