But not this time.
Even though it worried my children. My youngest daughter, fourteen-year-old Lysbet, climbed into the bed next to me. “Mama, it’s past noon,” she chided, trying to rouse me.
I reached for her and tucked a braid of hair behind her ear, even though the sight of her struck me with an arrow of bittersweet pain. Lysbet had my nut-brown complexion, Alexander’s auburn hair, and her Aunt Angelica’s features. I had the disturbing thought that she was a perfect amalgamation, as if she’d been born from the three of us . . .
It was only the laudanum, I told myself again.
People said strange things under its influence. Dying people said strange things even without laudanum. One could scarcely be held to account for murmurs halfway between this life and the next. That I should fixate upon my sister’s dying words with dark suspicion was surely some madness of grief.
Yet I didn’t cry for my beautiful brilliant sister. I didn’t cut clippings of Angelica’s hair. I couldn’t think what the point of it might be. What the point of anything was.
Perhaps God knew, but I did not. All I felt was a slow, calm suffocation under the avalanche of relentless losses that started with my son and would not end until I, myself, found oblivion. Which was why I didn’t wish to rise from the warm cocoon of my blankets. My heart felt in the throes of reverse metamorphosis, where the butterfly was to fold its wings and become the ugly, misshapen worm.
Was this Christian Resignation at last?
With her head upon my pillow, Lysbet murmured, “Aunt Angelica must be buried, but Uncle Church . . . well, he won’t . . . he can’t . . .”
That’s what finally roused me. The shocking discovery that my brother-in-law couldn’t afford—or simply refused to pay for—a fitting sepulcher for Angelica in Trinity Churchyard.
Though he’d wooed and won a patriot’s daughter, made his fortune supplying an American army, and was the father of children in this country, Church intended to return to England. He said he couldn’t endure the pain of living in a place where he’d be confronted with memories of his beloved wife. And I believed him.
For Church, too, had been at his wife’s side when she whispered my husband’s name.
It was only the laudanum, I insisted, wondering where I’d find the strength and money to do for my sister what Church could not or would not.
As it happened, it was Kitty Livingston, of all people, who offered to let my sister rest in the Livingston family vault, not far from where my husband and son were buried. After church services, and without looking at me, Kitty straightened her gloves and said, “Your family may be Federalists, but I have, over a lifetime, grown accustomed to having the Schuyler sisters near me, and I’m too old and set in my ways now to wish for a change.”
Kitty was, as always, some strange combination of mean and magnanimous. An example of how virtue and vice could live inside a person, side by side. She was a living embodiment of how I could still be surprised by people I’d known most of my life. Or even, from the moment I was born . . .
After the funeral, my brother-in-law said, “Take what you like of her belongings.” He sat on a chest at the foot of Angelica’s bed, a drunk, unkempt stranger amidst her intimate things—a brush and a gilded mirror left casually upon the dressing table, bottles of perfume and pots of cosmetics, ribbons and silk stockings, and ornaments that she’d treasured.
Angelica had exquisite taste. Any item that belonged to her was likely to fetch a price, and my brother-in-law ought to have them valued. At the very least, he should save something sentimental for their children. That he seemed not to have thought of it made me wish to take it all. Everything from portraits to pearls to the silver nutmeg grater my sister had purchased in London.
I thought to keep my sister’s elegant hats and dresses for Lysbet. Her leather-bound books, which spanned such a range of intellectual subjects from science to finance, knowing that my sons could benefit from them. Yet what I wanted most was a painted chest with a bronze latch where, for many years now, Angelica had kept her correspondence neatly folded, and wrapped in white silk to keep the broken wax seals from sticking.
“I would be grateful to select a few things for my children,” I said to Church, though I was wary that he might find my next request a terrible intrusion. “But most of all, I’d like to look at her letters.”
He only gave a bleak shrug, the light gone from his once-shining eyes. “As I said, take whatever you like.”
It was only the laudanum, I wanted to shout at him. I wanted to scream it and shake him. Or reach for his hands and reassure my brother-in-law that the people we loved would never have betrayed us. That to let memories of Angelica and Alexander be stained with suspicions was an evil. A sin.