I smiled softly, knowing that none of Hamilton’s bookish boys were suited to working the soil. Nor were there resources at the Grange that might make us a profit. “We’ll take a house in the city so you can study the law,” I said. “A house big enough for all your brothers and sisters, and for Ana to have her privacy. And large enough to store all your father’s papers—perhaps with a library that a writer might visit.”
Alex squinted. “A writer?”
“I want to hire a biographer,” I explained.
They’d murdered my husband. They’d taken him from me. But I still had his words, and they were my solace. Hamilton could still speak to me through those pages. His love letters. His ideas. His essays. Thousands of pages.
They could kill him, but they couldn’t silence him. Not if his story was told. Not if his work was preserved. And I resolved to collect the pieces of the legacy Alexander left behind.
For, just as “Captain Molly” had taken her fallen husband’s place at his cannon, I would take my husband’s place fighting for his country. And this—Alexander’s life, his death, and everything he stood for—had now become my battle.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I pray God that something may remain for the maintenance of my dear wife and children. But should it be on the contrary, probably her own patrimonial resources will preserve her from indigence.
—ALEXANDER HAMILTON IN HIS LAST WILL
August 1804
Albany
LET ME TAKE you home,” Angelica had urged when New York indicted Burr for murder. “Papa has been frantic to embrace and comfort you. He’s too old and sick to leave the house now, but I fear he’ll attempt it anyway if you don’t fly to his arms. And it may kill him.”
I’d won the first battle in my war against Burr, so I went. Because I was a dutiful daughter. Because I needed my father as much as he needed me. And because my sister convinced me it might do Ana some good.
Together, the three of us arrived at the Pastures, and my heart beat faster. And only belatedly did I realize why. Alexander and I married in this house. Philip had been born here. We’d started our life and our family here. And perhaps some part of me hoped to be reunited with him here, too. I longed to hear his laugh float down from the upstairs salon where he’d studied for the law and planned our future. But of course now our dreams and plans were nothing more than the dust that had collected on every surface.
Prince would never have allowed the dust in his day, I thought, running a finger over the sideboard beneath Mama’s portrait, who would have thrown a fit to find dirt in her house. Prince had died the previous summer and been buried on the plot of Schuyler land where slaves were laid to rest. Next to Jenny, and Dinah, who had perished without having experienced the freedom she had once tried to seize for herself.
Jenny, Dinah, Prince, Mama, Peggy, Philip, Alexander . . .
All ghosts, and the house was like a tomb. A lonely clock ticked in the deserted blue parlor. A faded green velvet chair propped open the door to Papa’s vacant study—a study we’d once made available to Aaron Burr.
And it made me remember that right from that first moment, Burr had wanted something from my family. He’d borrowed my father’s books for his own advancement. In repayment, he’d told me of my husband’s victory of Yorktown, and oh, I think he was jealous even then.
Burr was always clever. But what did he accomplish? He never penned any great treatises. Never signed his name to our founding documents. Never wrote a book that I knew of. Even the bank he created was birthed of trickery. He was never more than a crooked gun.
But Jefferson had aimed him against us and he struck true.
Bitterly I climbed the stairs as the memories washed over me, my fingers tracing the hatchet mark in the banister. Then I found myself standing outside the room where Alexander and I first made love.
Empty study. Empty parlor. Empty bed.
It took me a moment to compose myself.
Then I knocked upon my father’s bedroom door, where he was confined by his illness. “Is that you, my pretty pet?” Papa called.
My youngest sister, Caty, was the pet. Which had not stopped her from running off, in what was now fine Schuyler tradition, to marry her forbidden beau. So I replied, “No, Papa. It’s your obedient daughter.”
At the sight of me, my father’s eyes teared over, and then so did mine. He reached out his hands, and I went to him, where his badly damaged legs, cut and drained of gouty matter, were propped upon pillows.
Age had rendered my father smaller than I remembered. He’d let himself grow frail, stubbornly resisting the doctor’s orders and taking little in the way of food. Fortunately, as we exchanged greetings, it was clear his heart was unchanged.