You bastard.
That’s what I wanted to say. What you did to us. What you did to your children. What you did to yourself!
For a moment, I felt as if I hated Hamilton as much as I’d ever loved him.
That’s when I began to laugh. A sputtering, hiccup of a laugh. Because no one, nowhere, had ever been able to make themselves indifferent to Alexander Hamilton. My husband was loved and hated, but never a subject of dispassion. Not even in death.
And certainly I could never be indifferent to him, no matter how I’d deceived myself to the contrary. I’d never know if he went to Weehawken with the hope of losing his life. If he’d bedded my sister. Or a thousand harlots, for that matter, instead of just the Reynolds woman. These were mysteries for which I’d never have answers. And yet, coming here after all this time put me in a near state of self-destructive madness to know the truth.
It must have been madness, for I’ve no other explanation for the way I rose up again, suddenly, and charged after Lafayette. On the path by my sister’s tomb, the old general turned, his eyes widening as I marched toward him with purpose and fury. “Did they laugh at me?”
Stopping amidst stone angels and sepulchers, Lafayette tilted his head in confusion, “Madame?”
“Laurens and Hamilton,” I said, firing the names like bullets. “Did they laugh as Alexander drew up his list of qualifications for a wife, and then celebrate how easily simple, stupid, saintly Betsy Schuyler was wooed and won for her father’s fortune?”
Lafayette seemed as startled by the question as I was to have allowed it past my lips. “The sun has addled your senses, madame. Let me get you from the heat.”
But when he reached for me, I retreated. “I am not addled. Only insulted by the man I married.”
“Insulted?” Lafayette softened his voice, as if gentling an unruly horse. “My memory for those years is very keen. I can say with conviction that never in my presence did any man disparage you, nor would I have allowed it, then or now. My dear lady, only a derangement of grief could lead you to think the husband who loved—”
“John Laurens,” I said, thinking that perhaps I was deranged. For no woman of sound mind would admit this. “Alexander loved John Laurens.”
There. I said it. And now it hovered between us like a cannonball just before impact.
I didn’t know whether to be horrified or gratified to see a flicker of recognition in Lafayette’s eyes. I thought he’d pretend at ignorance, or deny it, but instead, he shrugged. “I think so. But what of it?”
“What of it?”
I was, after all, not speaking of mere fraternity between brother soldiers. And yet I believed that Lafayette knew that perfectly well when he said, “C’est la guerre. That is war!”
Only a Frenchman would dismiss it with the permissiveness of a libertine, but this Frenchman defied kings and emperors in the pursuit of principle. He was known throughout the world as a deeply honorable man. And his words carried a tone that said such a relationship was less shameful than to question it. Which shocked me into silence.
“Madame,” he said, more gently. “You are the mother of Hamilton’s children, his wife, and his beloved companion of more than twenty years. Why should you be troubled by an attachment formed before you met?”
Did he think my resentments were petty jealousy—like a new bride enraged to discover her husband had once danced with a pretty girl at a ball? I, too, had formed attachments before I met Alexander Hamilton. But I did not feel guilty or disloyal for them, nor did I wish Lafayette to think me petty. “I’m troubled because I wasn’t beloved. I’ve read the old letters, and they’ve poisoned everything.”
A good-hearted girl. Not a genius. Not a beauty.
I could recite them line for line, but I told Lafayette only as much as I could bear, feeling diminished with every word I repeated. When I was finished, Lafayette rubbed at his face. “It is regrettable, what haunted people we are, you and I.”
I stood, trembling, aghast at my indiscretion in matters that I feared must have seemed to him quite trivial. And now there was nothing to do but pray his pressing engagements would soon force a merciful end to our conversation. But Lafayette led me to a bench by the church doors, and settled into it, as if he meant to stay with me awhile.
He patted the bench. “Please, we are both of an age now when we must sit.”
Suddenly tired and unimaginably weary, I sank beside him in silent mortification.
Meanwhile, he cast a serene gaze across the cemetery. “We are also of an age when we live in the past. We speak to old ghosts more real for us than the strangers of this new age who pass us on the street, yes? We try, in vain, to crawl into letters and memories for the comfort of those who cannot talk to us any longer.”