The man couldn’t seem to meet my eyes. “The general isn’t well. He . . . has spasms.”
“His kidneys again?” Just when I thought Alexander was over his old ailment.
“I’ll wait in the carriage,” he said, hurrying down the steps.
In a matter of minutes, the four children and I were on our way. I took solace in knowing that the older boys had gone into the city with Alexander two mornings before when he’d departed on his weekly trip to his office. At eighteen and sixteen, Alex and James could look after him until I arrived.
The trip was faster than I expected, given that it was the middle of a fine Wednesday. That is, until we began to encounter small crowds of people on every street corner, abuzz over some news I couldn’t make out. And then I was distracted from that oddity when the driver turned the wrong way. “Sir! Driver! Where are you taking us?”
“Mr. Bayard’s house,” the man called in reply.
I didn’t have time to process that before I heard my name. From the crowd. Again and again. “Look, it’s Mrs. General Hamilton! His poor wife!”
A dark, hazy memory assaulted me. The crowds. The crowds in front of Angelica’s house when my son was shot dead. And my heart began to hammer. Then it all but stopped when the carriage slowed in the drive before Mr. Bayard’s grand mansion on the river, where another crowd parted like the Red Sea as the driver guided us through.
Wailing. The women were wailing. And gloom hung on every man’s face.
We’d barely come to a halt when I sprung from the carriage unassisted, my voice shaking with certain knowing dread. “Not well,” I said to the driver when he offered his hand. “You said the general was not well.”
I saw the truth in his eyes before he spoke. “He . . . he asked me to give you hope.”
Bile crawled up my throat as I remembered what Alexander once said to me.
I thought you might take easier to a thing if it was gradually broken to you, my angel.
He was wrong then, and he was wrong now. Already moving toward the house, I rasped to Ana, “Stay here. All of you.”
Oh, merciful God, why?
“Alexander!” I cried, finding him amidst onlookers gathered round Mr. Bayard’s grand bed. And when my husband’s head turned to me, it nearly took me to my knees.
I’d seen that look before—the gray pallor of blood loss, the waxy sheen of fever, the cloudy eyes of laudanum. The look of death.
“Eliza,” Alexander wheezed. “My angel.”
Taking his hand, I nearly collapsed onto the edge of the bed. And that’s when I saw the bloodied bandages around his waist. I knew the truth before it was even explained to me. He’d been shot. He’d been shot in a duel.
Voices I could barely hear recounted how he’d met Aaron Burr across the Hudson upon the cliffs of Weehawken, New Jersey. How, like my son, Alexander had thrown away his fire. How his opponent had taken lethal aim anyway.
“Will he live?” I asked the doctors, panic squeezing my throat and making it hard to choke out the words.
Four doctors huddled in the room—two Americans, and two French surgeons I later learned were stationed on a frigate in the harbor who were much experienced with gunshot wounds. The French had been our saviors in the revolution; maybe their expertise could save us now. “Can you save him? Please save him!”
“Mrs. General Hamilton.” One of the doctors finally stepped forward, wearing an expression of brutal sympathy, an expression mirrored on the other men’s faces. “I’m afraid the bullet has fractured a rib and, I suspect, ruptured the general’s liver. The bullet remains lodged in his spine . . .”
I could hear no more. I couldn’t see, couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. This couldn’t be happening again. How could it possibly be happening again? Was I, like my eldest daughter, caught in some delusion, except in my waking dream everyone I loved was to be taken from me?
Frantic with grief, I sobbed a desperate prayer to a God who had already required so many sacrifices from me.
Not Alexander, too. Not my dear Hamilton.
Though his weak pulse yet gave proof of life, I already sensed his withdrawal from me. And I felt his loss in my bones, in my flesh, as if the very heart of me was being violently rent asunder. It was an unbearable agony of spirit. One loss too many, and far too soon.
As I wept and bargained and prayed and raged, Alexander murmured, “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian.”
The first time he said it, pale and aware of his impending death, I believed he was offering me consolation, beseeching me to find comfort in my religion. Delirious with pain, he murmured it again as Angelica arrived, weeping her heart out as if joy no longer existed in the world and never could.