“Angelica!” I cried, dropping to my knees beside her. As she sprawled, gasping and staring at the sky, I feared that she’d knocked her head or broken a bone. I called for help—and some part of me dreaded that Burr might emerge from his office to lend assistance. But it was actually the Reverend Mason who happened by and helped me convey Angelica back to the warmth of her own house.
“All this for beauty?” I asked, furious when she confessed that she’d simply not eaten that day, hunger the probable reason for her swoon.
“Anxiety of the war leaves me no appetite,” she protested weakly.
But two days later, in a state of delirium, her hair plastered with sweat to a ghostly white face, she whispered, “Don’t tell Betsy.”
I’d come to tend her with a basket of tonics and herbs, but my brother-in-law, in shirtsleeves and dishevelment, stood stone-faced in the entryway of her bedroom. “She’s been unwell. She didn’t wish for you to know.”
“Unwell? What can you mean?”
“Cancerous tumors,” Church replied stiffly.
It was several agonizing moments before I could take a breath. “Where have the tumors arisen?” I finally had the clarity to ask. Sometimes tumors could be surgically removed—a painful and gruesome procedure, but one with a chance for survival.
As if he knew what I was thinking, Church shook his head and rubbed his unshaven jaw. “They can’t be cut away.”
Which meant . . . Angelica was dying. My gaze flew past him to where my once vivacious sister lay withered and frail in her bed, moaning softly in pain. And I could do nothing to help her. I was again to lose someone I loved better than myself. And the crushing weight of our impending separation made me grasp at the doorframe for balance. Helplessly, I looked into the eyes of my brother-in-law. “How long has she been suffering?”
“Quite some time.”
Quite some time. She’d been sick, and fearful, and hadn’t told me. She’d told her husband, but not me, and I resented him, though I had no right. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“She didn’t wish you to see her this way, with her mind lost to the laudanum and—”
“I don’t care,” I hissed. “You will not dare keep me away. You do not dare.”
He didn’t. Especially since Angelica was soon out of her bed, making little of her illness, putting off my tearful enquiries with teasing. But now that my eyes were open, I saw the laudanum glitter of her eyes, the exhaustion of her thinning body. She quipped that she would be dancing at a ball in no time, but that attack of weakness in the street had been some catalyst of a terrible kind, because she was soon bedridden—and I found it both a cruelty and a mercy that my irrepressible sister was not long bound in the struggle of dying.
When she awakened one morning to find me at her bedside, she took my hand and kissed it. “My dear Eliza. It’s only right that I die before you. I’m the oldest. I should have gone before Peggy. I should go before you. Besides . . . I am a sinner, and you are a saint.”
“No, Angelica,” I said, shaking my head in denial and anger at the Lord himself. My sister had been my touchstone—before and after my husband’s death. In the worst days of my grief, I couldn’t have remained standing without her steadfast support. And now the only pain worse than the knowledge she was to be taken from me was pity that she should suffer so much.
But closing her eyes Angelica said, “Envy me, my sweet sister, for a merciful God is taking me to see all our lost loved ones . . .”
Then her pain became too great to bear. We dosed her, and under the laudanum’s spell, she spoke as if she were still a girl leading our troop of children in Albany. “Go Blues!” Sometimes she imagined herself a young mother again, singing lullabies to her babies. Or a high-society lady in France, confiding gossip about nobles, long since beheaded. Other times she said strange and haunting words about things that never happened at all. But mostly, as she died, it was the same torturous refrain.
Don’t tell Betsy. Don’t tell Betsy.
Then, finally, frantically, and heartbreakingly:
Don’t tell Betsy, Alexander.
Never confess it.
Not even if I am dead.
*
IT WAS ONLY the laudanum, I told myself in the days after Angelica’s death.
After all the other losses I’d suffered, I’d always found some way to get up, get dressed, feed the children, go to church, and work in the causes the Lord had pointed out to me as a sacred duty.