Indeed, Burr spent so much time at the Pastures that he had no compunction whatsoever about debating Angelica as if she were a man, good-naturedly disputing with my husband about what should come next for America, and arguing whether the principles spelled out in the Declaration of Independence really would become the basis of the enterprise.
The rest of us were all marvelously hopeful.
So it was notable when, in the midst of one of these dinner parties, my husband received a packet of letters and started for the stairs without a word.
“Where are you going?” I asked, but Alexander only mumbled something inaudible in reply.
I wished to follow him but needed first to politely disentangle myself from a surprisingly learned discussion with Angelica, Peggy, and Mrs. Theodosia Burr, a lady of daring outspokenness whose friendship and frequent companionship had further ensured my fondness for Colonel Burr. “What do you think about voting rights for women?” she asked in her typically provocative way.
“Our Livingston cousins never tire of reminding us that women have been granted the right to vote in New Jersey,” Peggy said conspiratorially.
Angelica nodded and raised her glass, as if to toast. “So why not New York?”
But I was entirely too distracted by my husband’s unexpected withdrawal to be drawn into even such an exciting conversation. “Please excuse me,” I said, forcing a polite smile. “I’ll rejoin you shortly.”
I thought to find Alexander at his desk or, failing that, checking upon our child, as was his nightly habit. Instead, I found him seated on the edge of our bed, his head in his hands.
“Alexander?” When I reached for him, he actually flinched. “What’s happened?”
He didn’t look at me. He didn’t reply. My usually loquacious husband didn’t say a single word, which made me sure something was dreadfully, horrifically wrong. For answer, I was left to glance at a letter, discarded upon the pillow, that informed of the passing of John Laurens.
Quickly grasping the loss, I reached for him again. “Oh, my love . . .” This time he didn’t pull away, but he also didn’t soften to my touch.
Though I’d never met Laurens, I knew he was as dear a friend to my husband as any other member of Washington’s little military family. Since hearing them talk about Laurens at Morristown, he’d loomed large in my imagination as a man I would admire if only because everyone else admired him.
“How tragic,” I whispered, reading the rest. Colonel Laurens had led a small force to attack a British foraging party in South Carolina, one of several footholds in America to which British forces still clung, but was himself ambushed and mortally wounded in the first volley of battle. He was, I would later learn, one of the last casualties of the war.
An unspeakable, unnecessary tragedy.
And though my heart ached for his family, it also ached for my husband, who still hadn’t moved or spoken. And he didn’t speak the rest of that night, even after Papa had seen out all of our guests. Nor did Alexander utter a word the next day.
“You’re frightening me,” I finally said, when he wouldn’t hold our baby boy. “Won’t you speak to me?”
It was a jest between us that my husband ran hot—his temper, his blood, his skin. And yet, when I reached for his hand that sweltering summer day, it was like ice.
“I can’t,” Hamilton rasped, as if forcing just those two words was an agony.
“Alexander, I’m your wife. I’m—”
“You didn’t know him. You can’t understand.”
He was right. I didn’t understand. John Laurens was not, after all, the first of my husband’s comrades to fall in battle. And though Hamilton always spoke of the fallen with grief and respect, their deaths had not made of him a shell of a man. Not like this. I thought perhaps it was because we believed the war to be finished, that all the sacrifices were now to be rewarded with glory, not loss. Or perhaps it was because, in the army, there hadn’t been time for grief and this was the outcome of Hamilton holding himself together for so many years.
There was something else that alarmed me. Quite beside the pain at having my own attempts to comfort him rebuffed again and again, there was the bewildering realization that my husband had retreated someplace inside himself I couldn’t reach. Some dark place I hadn’t even known was there. And so instead of shaking him, I asked, “Who would understand, then?”
Alexander turned, warding me off with an upraised hand, as if willing me to be silent.