Such a wife as I want must be young, handsome （I lay most stress upon a good shape） sensible （a little learning will do）， well bred, chaste and tender （I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness）。 But as to fortune, the larger stock of that the better as money is an essential ingredient to happiness in this world.
Well, then.
Even sinners needed money, didn’t they?
And hadn’t he found just what he wanted in me? I met his cold list of qualifications precisely. It hollowed out my heart to know it. Made of my soul a barren land. Surrounded by the detritus of my husband’s life, I didn’t think there were any new ways in which his letters could hurt me.
But then they did.
Next fall completes my doom, Hamilton wrote to Laurens before our wedding.
I give up my liberty to Miss Schuyler. She is a good-hearted girl who I am sure will never play the termagant; though not a genius she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes.
A good-hearted girl. Not a genius. Not a beauty.
Not enough . . .
He wrote these things to John Laurens while whispering against my lips that I had bewitched him. While writing me sonnets. While buying me wedding gifts with John Laurens’s money . . .
In spite of Schuyler’s black eyes, I have still a part for the public and another for you; so your impatience to have me married is misplaced; a strange cure by the way, as if after matrimony I was to be less devoted than I am now.
The page slipped from my hand.
Our courtship had merely been another scheme.
Lies, lies, schemes and lies!
When we danced together at that first winter’s ball in Morristown, I’d been wary of Hamilton because he reminded me of the watery Nix of Dutch legend, luring maidens to dangerous depths. And now, at long last, I was drowning. Wrenching my wedding ring off my finger, I threw it into the trunk with the rest of Alexander’s deceit, thinking to send all of it to the bottom of the river.
Because, my God, this was to lose him again. A second kind of widowhood. One that obliterated the first. For I could have no hope of meeting with Alexander in heaven now; he was more likely to be found in hell. And I hoped . . . I hoped he burned there.
For he never loved me. He was never mine. He made me vows before an altar and played the part, to the last. But Alexander Hamilton was as false a villain as his enemies claimed he was. He had cheated me of my whole life and got away with it.
Cheated. That was how I felt, surveying all that remained of my husband’s legacy.
What was his legacy? Not the eternal bonds of love, not the earthly but enduring stone of monuments. Only paper. A worthless Constitution that the Republicans shredded with each successive administration. A few books filled with words he probably never meant in earnest. Just crates and crates of paper.
And I wanted to set fire to it all.
*
I AWAKENED TO the whisper of papers falling like dead leaves upon a forest floor. And as I blinked against the bleary haze of shadow and cracks of sunlight, I couldn’t fathom where I was.
The attic. I’d somehow fallen asleep there, in the heat, exhausted by an agony of the soul. And now I saw my son’s bare feet upon the wood planks, loose pages strewn by his toes. For one absurd moment in the delirium, I thought to scold William, as I’d done when he was a child, for walking about like a barefooted street urchin instead of a young gentleman.
But then I saw the lace garter clutched in his hand.
William was reading my sister’s letters, and I didn’t think the burning flush upon his cheek was exertion or summer heat. “I came up because I worried for you—but I didn’t want to wake you when I found you asleep. You haven’t slept much lately.”
My heart jolted, and I shoved myself up. It was all I could do to resist pulling the paper and lace from his hands, but in doing so, I’d only expose myself. Expose everything. He couldn’t possibly attach any meaning to that garter, which had slipped off my sister’s thigh long before he was born, but oh, dear Lord, how much had he read?
“I’m sorry to have worried you,” I managed, struggling for breath in the now hellish heat of the attic. Perspiration pooled at my nape, and my black frock clung to my back.
William quietly nodded, but his expression was bleak and his eyes were a storm. “My father wrote these letters to Aunt Angelica?”
Those were the words he spoke, but not what he truly meant to ask.
And I could almost see it. Almost see William standing at the precipice of a suspicion that would shatter everything he believed about his father, and about himself. And what mother—especially one clinging to that same edge by her fingertips—could allow her child to fall?