But I persisted. “Who will you talk to?”
He merely went to the window and stared.
Frightened and at a loss as to how I could help him, I again offered, “I’ll bring up tea. Or coffee. Or something to—” I cut myself off, realizing that he wasn’t listening.
He had his back turned to me, maybe turned to the whole world.
Perhaps what he needed was time to grieve in his own way, to make his peace with the sorrow. Perhaps Papa could make my husband see sense. I turned to the door, thinking to do just that, when I heard Alexander whisper, “Lafayette.”
“What?”
“Lafayette would understand.”
And then, suddenly, so did I.
My husband maintained friendships with all his fellow aides-de-camp. But none of them seemed to know the depths of his emotions as well as the Frenchman, who had warned me from the start that behind my husband’s mask was “great pain and loss.”
If I could have summoned our friend to the house in that moment, I would have, but an ocean now separated us, because Lafayette had returned to France. So I went to my husband’s desk, intending, I suppose, to take the liberty of writing a letter to the marquis. But there already, to my surprise, was a letter from Lafayette, a fact that nearly startled me with its prescience.
However silent you may please to be, I will nevertheless remind you of a friend who loves you tenderly and who by his attachment desires a great share in your affection.
Though Lafayette had written before Laurens died, the marquis was, like me, faced with Hamilton’s silence and waiting for a reply.
And that decided it for me. I took from the desk a blank sheet of paper, an inkwell, and a quill pen. Then I returned to the window where Alex stood and pressed the pen into his palm. “Write him.”
“Betsy—”
“If you won’t speak to me, speak to Lafayette,” I insisted.
Then I left him.
By the light of dawn, my husband had managed to scribble only two lines.
Poor Laurens; he has fallen a sacrifice to his ardor in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina. You know how truly I loved him and will judge how much I regret him.
Those two lines were enough.
Though he didn’t send them to Lafayette for a few months—and even then, only as a postscript to a letter—it broke the dam open, allowing my husband to flow back to me and to our son.
But he never again spoke to me of John Laurens.
The subject remained closed for the rest of his life.
How I wish it remained closed for the rest of mine.
Part Two
The War for Peace
Chapter Fourteen
February 1783
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
I WAS NOW A congressman’s wife.
In the year since the fighting ended, Alexander had been elected to serve as one of New York’s five delegates to the Congress of the Confederation. We rented a little house in Philadelphia, and though I’d been there only a month, I’d already learned that it was the fate of a politician’s wife to find herself unexpectedly with guests.
And sometimes even engaged in a bit of very irregular entertaining.
Three quick raps upon the back door followed by two slow ones.
That would be Mr. James Madison and the signal for me to answer the back door to the darkened alleyway that I’d never otherwise open past dusk. “Come in,” I said to the slight-statured Virginia congressman who’d become my husband’s unexpected ally within Congress.
Dressed all in black, unprepossessing and bookish, Madison’s manner was somber and reserved to the point of being shy. In fact, he was my husband’s opposite in seemingly every way—except, I learned, in the most important way.
Both men supported a strong union and believed that the Articles of Confederation required revision to ensure it.
I did, too. I recalled too starkly—sometimes even in nightmares from which I woke in a gasping, cold sweat—the terrible conditions of the soldiers during the war. The gaunt faces. The bare feet blackened from frostbite due to exposure. The shrieks of amputees operated upon without medicines to dull the pain. Deprivations all caused by the unwillingness of the states to adequately support the national cause . . .
Now, Alexander’s and Mr. Madison’s work to find a way to pay the army, fund the war debt, and bring the states together as a nation was being undermined at every turn by a faction in Congress more attached to state interests than to the federal. The only way to get anything done was to do it out of the public eye. Which was the reason for the subterfuge.
And I was rather proud of the fact that the plan had been mine.