I nodded, pressing away the tears with my fingertips. “And you must promise to do as the doctor bids you.”
“I am much recovered!” Papa said, rising from the table on his own efforts to prove it. “Indeed, I am not without hopes of being able to visit you in the winter, if there should be sledding.”
I planted a kiss upon my father’s cheek, by his hairline, right where I used to kiss him when I was a small child returning from the wilds before he would haul me up into his arms. “Well, if you cannot come to us, we’ll return for the holiday.”
But my father didn’t live to see another Christmas.
*
January 1805
New York City
“I’m giving you part of my inheritance,” Angelica was saying while I pored over bills for meat, flour, and candles. “And I don’t want an argument.”
Papa’s death had been a cruel blow for both of us. But for me, one more catastrophe in a parade of them. All my life, I’d taken strength from knowing I might always seek refuge in my father’s strong and loving arms. In Philip Schuyler’s home, power, name, and wealth.
Now my father—my first hero, the first man I ever loved—was gone from this world. And there seemed no refuge for me anywhere. Except, perhaps, in my older sister, upon whose generosity I’d unquestionably presumed too much.
She’d already made it her habit to stop by each week with parcels of clothes, food, and other necessities—much as I’d once done for impoverished widows. And I felt humbled. “I cannot accept your offer, Angelica. You’re entitled to your share of Papa’s—”
“What am I going to do with little patches of dirt in the wilderness?” she asked, for our father’s wealth had been tied up in land that he’d divided amongst all his children—and little else, in the end. We knew Papa’s wish was to emulate George Washington, who had ordered the emancipation of his slaves upon Martha’s death. And so, though my father had not provided for it specifically in his will, we had directed the executors to release Papa’s few remaining slaves from bondage. And seeing that finally accomplished was more valuable to me than any inheritance.
As I swallowed with bittersweet emotion at the thought, Angelica coughed on the smoky haze of my parlor. The town house young Alex had procured for us was a bargain, but every sort of thing was wrong with it, from leaky roof to a neglected chimney flue.
“Take what I’m offering, my dear Eliza. If only to rent a better house. Besides, I want you to have something you own outright—something Hamilton’s creditors can have no claim upon. Even if you only sell it off, parcel by parcel, to pay a biographer.”
She knew the trouble I’d had in engaging a writer. And not only because of the disapproval of the executors, who didn’t seem to realize that no greater investment could be made than in memorializing Hamilton.
My husband’s name and reputation were the only patrimony he’d left my children, and it would determine their future prospects. Even if a biography hadn’t been a mission of love, it was a mission of survival. The work could be sold for a profit if written seriously by a man of letters. But the first writer I tried to engage had—upon one glance at the thousands of pages Alexander left behind—virtually fled, quitting the project before it was begun. “You know, the writer said the strangest thing to me. He actually mused out loud that there was more money to be had in refusing to write a biography of Hamilton.”
It’d seemed too odd a thing to mention before; I thought perhaps he meant only that he could find better-paying work. But it nagged at me.
Angelica narrowed her eyes. “You think someone is trying to thwart you?”
“I should like to think it sounds preposterous,” I replied, but having been the wife of a man so often conspired against, how could I dismiss it? “It’s been half a year since Alexander’s death, and what has Jefferson said about it? Nothing. Silence. Which is just what he wants. An eternal silence from Alexander Hamilton . . .”
Even knowing all we now knew of Jefferson’s duplicitous nature, Angelica didn’t seem quite convinced that the president of the United States would stoop to conspire against the widow of his dead nemesis, but she allowed, “There are plenty of others who have cause to worry about what might be revealed in your husband’s papers.”
That much was true. Alexander had tangled with nearly every powerful man in the country. What my overly frank husband might have written about any of them—or what they might have confided to him in a letter—meant that his entire record of correspondence had the potential to ruin political careers.