Because they were guilty, the devil inside me whispered. And they lied to you. They lied to you all your life and all of theirs. To their very last breaths.
Blinking back acid tears, I realized these poisonous doubts could put the lie to my whole life. Yes, I had evidence, but it didn’t prove the case. Where, but in death itself, might I ever confront either my husband or my sister and have an answer?
I needed to stop this mad inquiry.
Like my father before me, I needed to exert the self-discipline Hamilton lacked, the ability to let a thing alone when pursuing it could end in despair.
But in the end, and perhaps inevitably, I’d become more like Hamilton than Papa.
For I carried Angelica’s box of letters, and my inquiry, up to the attic, where, assailed by a cloud of dust motes that floated in the light of my lamp, I made of the private space a makeshift office for my investigation. There, amidst crates of papers in the stifling heat, I sat hour after hour, hunched over yellowed pages, sneering at Angelica’s coquettish missives, taking satisfaction that at least Hamilton hadn’t bundled her letters in a sentimental ribbon.
Perhaps he hadn’t loved her. But had he loved me? Had either of them ever loved me? Or had Alexander and Angelica clung to each other in the fevered sweat of lovemaking, laughing at me all the while?
When there was nothing left to read, I spied the engraved wooden strongbox with leather buckles where Alexander kept his old military uniforms and ornamental swords.
His glory, I thought, with a contemptuous snort. And all at once, I wondered if that was where I’d find the definitive evidence I was seeking. Perhaps my husband kept some treasured token of his love affair with Angelica just as she’d kept that garter. Perhaps I’d find a matching ring, with a clipping of her hair, and then all my doubts would vanish.
Knowing he was to duel, Alexander would have hidden anything incriminating or entrusted it to someone to destroy if he died. Hamilton was too smart for me. Too smart for everyone, except Burr.
Nevertheless, I unfastened the latch and was struck by the arresting sight of the blue-and-buff military coat Alexander wore the first day I met him. The wool, rougher than I remembered when I first touched him. When we first kissed. And the pain, oh the pain of remembering that with now jaded eyes, sliced into me like the bayonet beside the uniform.
Like a wounded soldier, bleeding my heart out, I searched every item in the trunk until it was empty, running my hands over the velvet lining . . . to find the false bottom I somehow expected. And that’s where I found it.
A bundle of letters and a dark braid of hair . . .
*
MY HANDS SHOOK as I unfolded the pages, finding neither the scent of my sister’s perfume nor the feminine scrawl of her hand. But instead, the shock of a firm, masculine signature.
John Laurens.
A man I’d never met, whose death dealt to Alexander his worst wound of the war. Here were the letters between them. Not only the ones Laurens wrote, but also copies of what my husband wrote to Laurens as well. That both sides of the correspondence were so carefully preserved spoke volumes of its importance to my husband.
And now I read them, with near incredulity.
Cold in my professions, warm in my friendships, I wish, my dear Laurens, it might be in my power, by action rather than words to convince you that I love you.
It was, in those days, the style for men to speak of love to one another. But it was not a style Alexander embraced in his letters. Not to any man I knew save, perhaps, Lafayette.
And yet, these were different. Ardent. Complete with a lewd suggestion that John Laurens had intimate knowledge of Alexander’s body. Letters that indicated a liaison between Washington’s young officers for which they might both have been shot.
And—quite beyond the capacity to be scandalized by anything now—I nearly laughed at my mind’s sudden opening to things that ought to have been perfectly obvious before.
My husband had loved this man.
Clutching a lock of dark hair that was not, after all, my sister’s, I remembered Alexander’s unnatural grief for Laurens. My husband’s attachment to the baron, whose handsome young male companions Theodosia Burr had once identified as sodomites. Perhaps my husband had been one of them, adopting the vice because it was forbidden.
Forbidden, like another man’s wife.
Forbidden, like his wife’s sister.
If Hamilton could commit those sins, why not this one? Why not sate his lust with another soldier while the winter was cold and the war was harsh?
Then, in a letter Alexander had written only months before we met, I found this: