“Not this time, little man,” Alexander said, pressing a big wet kiss to the boy’s neck that made him giggle. “But what if I bring something back for you?”
“A bow and arrows?” William asked, clambering down with a little war whoop.
I shook my head in exasperation, for our youngest son was endlessly fascinated by stories of the Indians and the frontier. I supposed it was the Schuyler in him. Chuckling, Alexander climbed into the phaeton and grasped the reins. “How about I surprise you?”
Grinning at our son’s excitement, I hugged him to me and waved in fond farewell. “Give my love to Peg. And tell her to write.”
Alas, I never received another letter from Peggy again.
*
My dear Eliza, your sister took leave of her sufferings and friends, I trust, to find repose and happiness in a better country. I long to come home to console and comfort you.
—ALEXANDER HAMILTON
The blow fell upon me like a hammer to an ox.
How could Peggy, who lived so bold a life, have succumbed so suddenly to some ignominious and unnamed disease? Though I had four sisters, I’d come of age with only two—Angelica and Peggy. From my earliest memory, I was the one in the middle. My older sister on one side, my younger sister on the other. Now, Peggy was gone at just forty-two, and Angelica and I came all unmoored.
On our knees in Trinity Church, we were bid by Bishop Moore to leave off our tears and remember the duty of Christian resignation. God had seen fit to take Peggy from us, calling her to a realm of bliss, and we must be happy for her.
But Angelica and I indulged in our tears anyway.
And we clung to each other even tighter when, not long after, Papa wrote that Mama, just a few months shy of her seventieth birthday, had passed peacefully in her sleep. The woman who’d taught me about medicine and housekeeping and Dutch traditions, who’d helped birth my children. Gone. Poor Mama!
It was almost more than Angelica and I could bear, losing them both in such quick succession, but the fire of it forged us even closer. And, in the months that followed, Angelica and I became constant companions. She made the three-hour-long round-trip through woods and farmland to see me at the Grange, complaining only a little that I’d fled the city. And I returned her visits with bumpy carriage rides to her house downtown.
On one such visit to lower Manhattan, we were treated to a noisy Fourth of July celebration during which an insolent young pup named Captain George Eacker told the crowd that President Jefferson had rescued the Constitution from my husband, who would have used his army to overthrow it.
Much accustomed to such rabble-rousing abuse, Alexander and I merely continued on to our own celebrations amongst the Society of the Cincinnati, of which my husband had become president.
But Philip could scarcely contain himself. That night, after playing billiards on his uncle Church’s new game table, he exploded. “Do those mongrels realize my father gave Jefferson the presidency? They should be tarred and feathered for spreading such lies.”
“Our son is apt to be a little intemperate,” Alexander later complained.
A complaint I took for the richest irony. “There’s no help for it, I’m afraid.”
From behind his new spectacles, my husband arched a brow. “Because I’m his father?”
“And because I’m his mother. His Schuyler blood will out.” I remembered, after all, a time when I was just as angry on my own father’s behalf, wishing to defend him against malicious lies and conspiracies.
So, the next morning, I reassured Philip that patience was the best thing. “Just as your grandpapa was eventually seen for the patriot he is, so will your father be appreciated and vindicated in the fullness of time.”
Then I forgot the matter entirely, because abuses and slanders had been too numerous in our lives to hold on to each one.
Before the weather turned to winter, Angelica and I accepted an invitation to play a game of pall-mall with Kitty Livingston upon her new husband’s lawn. After vanquishing the other ladies with mallet and ball, not to mention haranguing them for donations, I retreated to a red velvet-covered divan in a corner where my sister and I could enjoy our tea with a little privacy.
Perhaps because the loss of Peggy and Mama still felt so recent to us, we commiserated over the trouble we’d given Mama, something we understood with greater clarity now that we both had grown children of our own. And we reminisced about how Peggy had somehow convinced General Burgoyne to make a present to her of his shiny shoe buckles, how she’d fended off a hatchet-wielding Tory, and how she’d run off to marry the man of her heart.