For almost forty years, I’d called John Barker Church my brother, but there had always been a wall separating us. At first, only a little overgrown hedge of jealousy for having won my sister’s love and attention and carrying her away. Then, upon learning of his secret identity, and his marital troubles, I’d wondered about the character of such a man. But most of all, as I found him at the center of nearly every tragedy in my life, a fortification of resentment built between us, stone upon stone. And now, there was no crossing that barrier. So I didn’t offer him comfort or accept any.
Instead, I opened the box.
*
WE THINK WE know the people we love.
We think that love gives us more than a glimpse into one another’s souls. But the idea that human beings are knowable is one of the many lies we tell in the service of love. That’s what I learned reading my sister’s letters.
For I hadn’t appreciated that in her correspondence with princes, philosophers, and statesmen that she commanded their respect, as well as their lustful fascination. And I hadn’t known that in spite of countless letters from esteemed persons—including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Charles James Fox, and Lafayette—only one bundle of letters did she keep separate.
One bundle lay wrapped in a lace garter, with a memorial ring enclosing a tiny braid of auburn hair I knew so well. Alexander’s hair. Alexander’s letters. And as for the garter, I recognized it, for my sister had worn it to Washington’s inaugural ball.
It was the garter that she said had slipped from her thigh while she was dancing, and my husband gallantly swept it from the floor to spare her embarrassment. Angelica had teased that she couldn’t make him a Knight of the Garter in this new country of ours, where we didn’t make such distinctions. And Kitty had confronted me in the middle of the ball, insisting that Peggy had said, “He’d be a knight of your bedchamber if he could.”
Peggy denied it. But was it not precisely the sort of thing that Peggy would have blurted out?
More importantly, Angelica had kept the garter, wrapped closely round treasured letters. And what to make of the ring? I hadn’t given it to her. Had she had made it herself as a memorial after his death, or as a token of remembrance during his life?
I dreaded to find the answer.
Knowing for quite some time of her impending death, surely she would have burned any letters that might have led to painful revelations. But perhaps the reckless girl who’d crept out of our father’s house to run off with a beau—not caring whether it might cost Papa sleep, his rank, or even the war—was too selfish to burn what she treasured, no matter the pain it might cause.
Stop this, I told myself, thumbing through the pages. The flirtation between my sister and my husband had been a private jest among the three of us. I’d encouraged it. I’d read my husband’s letters to Angelica before he sent them. I’d watched him write them! At least once, he asked me to deliver a letter to her personally so that his waggery wouldn’t cause eyebrows to lift amongst those who didn’t share our little joke. And when Angelica’s letters arrived in the post, we read them together.
There could be nothing secret or untoward in any of them, I reassured myself.
But now, to my dismay, I found that I hadn’t seen all the letters. Once, when his hands were cramped writing The Federalist, Alexander somehow had found the time to write a letter to Angelica that taunted her, flirtatiously, about the misplacement of a comma.
I seldom write to a lady without fancying the relation of lover and mistress, he began, adding in closing that I sent my love. But never had I set eyes on this letter.
Surely I would have remembered.
There is no proof of my affection which I would not willingly give you, he wrote my sister a few months before he took Mrs. Reynolds to our bed.
And another, later that year, while he was still bedding that harlot. You hurt my Republican nerves, Angelica, by your intimacy with Princes, while I can only console myself by thinking of you.
Each letter brought new pain, and I held my breath upon opening every one.
Your sister consents to everything, except that I should love you as well as herself and this you are too reasonable to expect, my husband wrote.
But I hadn’t consented to this.
What had Alexander been capable of, this man I’d loved and honored? He was capable of betraying our marriage bed. And I knew, from the stories Angelica told me of her time in Europe, that my sister might have been capable of betraying her husband, too.
Perhaps even with Jefferson, no less. And another thing I knew—had always known—was that at the heart of my husband’s infidelity with Mrs. Reynolds, was the base motive of revenge. If Alexander could be jealous of my sister’s intimacy with princes, I could well imagine his feelings upon knowing that Jefferson may have been smitten with her. Was my sister’s favor another battleground over which the two men fought?