“Because it’s a ghastly journey,” Angelica said, with a sniff. “The only way my son could persuade me to visit western New York was to name a town after me.” Before he left for England, Flip had done that, to the not-so-secret delight of his mother. “Of course, your wanderlust is far less concerning than the other report I’ve received that you spend hours upon your knees, sorting through boxes of dusty papers like a madwoman.”
I gulped at my coffee and shrugged. “I’m looking for Alexander’s draft of Washington’s Farewell Address. It’s as important a contribution as anything else he ever wrote and if I can find his notes, I can prove it.”
“Maybe he didn’t keep notes,” Angelica said. “Or perhaps he sent them to someone for safekeeping.”
“I think someone took them,” I replied. But I couldn’t stay to elaborate, because a glance down at the timepiece suspended from my needlework chatelaine told me I ought to leave soon to interview a new teacher for the orphanage.
My son Johnny was to escort me, and he was seldom late. But on that day, he sauntered to our table slowly and sat beside us with a certain gravity.
At nineteen, Johnny was a gentle, bookish student of literature. Of all my sons, he was the last I might ever suspect would announce that he was to join the military. But he said, “As the son of Alexander Hamilton, I cannot shirk my duty.”
So it was that I lost my eldest sons all at once to the Hamiltonian desire to rise up on the tide of war.
*
March 1814
New York City
It was called the War of 1812, though most of the fighting took place after that year. They also called it the second war for independence, and a new generation of Hamiltons were fighting it. My battle-hardened Alex returned from Europe to serve as a captain in the U.S. infantry. James commanded a New York militia brigade. Johnny served as aide-de-camp to Major General William Henry Harrison. And seventeen-year-old William—a wild and lanky mischief maker whose indifference to his studies, and to wearing shoes, would’ve snapped even his indulgent father’s patience—now trained to be an officer at West Point.
Angelica’s son had returned to fight for America, too. “When our boys come for a visit, we’ll have a veritable army at our table,” she said. We’d just left Sunday service at Trinity Church to stroll, taking our exercise in the brisk air. And I remembered a long-ago night when I’d had another veritable army around a platter of steaming waffles at my table—Alexander, Monroe . . .
And Aaron Burr.
Which brought me to my purpose in haunting the occupant of a little office on Nassau Street. It’d come to our attention that the tiny tin placard on the door reading MR. A. ARNOT, ESQUIRE was actually an assumed name for Burr, who’d returned to the city after a decade of exile.
After so many years, the criminal charges against him had been dropped, and now, it seemed the younger generation didn’t remember him. Or what he’d done.
But I remembered.
Burr might have chosen any other city in America. But he’d chosen to return to mine. So whenever I passed Burr’s shabby little door, and saw any person about to knock, I’d call, “Oh! Is that your solicitor? You should know that he murdered my husband.”
Soon after I made a habit of this, Burr changed the placard on his door to MR. EDWARDS. And I wondered what name I’d force him to adopt next. If I could take satisfaction in nothing else, I smiled to think I’d deprived him of a name—the thing my husband died for.
“If it’s your purpose to make him a miserable recluse,” Angelica said as we walked. “I’m told you’re succeeding . . .”
Burr’s grandson had died of a childhood illness the previous year. Then his daughter was lost at sea. He was left alone. Without family. Severed from the human race. I wasn’t monstrous enough to take joy in these tragedies.
Somedays I even wondered if these tragedies may have shaken loose some morsel of a soul, so that Burr now understood what he’d inflicted upon me. Other days, I had the absurd thought he might open his office door as we passed and beg my forgiveness.
But he never did. He was hiding from the world. He was hiding from me.
On this day, I peered at the bare snow-dusted window, in search of a glimpse of that crooked man in the shadows. But while I was looking, I felt my sister grasp my arm. “Betsy,” she whispered, and I turned to see her go pale as death. Then, before I could steady her, my sister’s knees buckled and she collapsed onto the icy street.