My family was even more solicitous in Albany. Mama had everything ready for me—sweet herbs for my pains, pastries for my cravings, and the Bible from which she read to me. Peggy came to help me birth the babe and told my son what great things were expected of him at Columbia College, where he was soon to enroll. Papa tried to distract me with talk of canal projects and the Indians.
Even Prince, now a bit bent with age, said to my son, in a whisper meant for me to hear, “Master Philip, of all these Schuyler daughters I helped bring up in this house, your mama was the one who gave me the fewest white hairs.”
Philip always cringed to be called Master, as it did not rest easy with him that his otherwise heroic grandfather still kept a few plantation slaves in his service. And so he took the extra pillows from Prince’s arms and said, “Well, my mother wouldn’t want to give you any more white hairs climbing those stairs, so let me get her settled.”
On the night that my labor pains began, my father finally raised the subject. Bending to kiss me, he whispered into my hair, “My dear beloved child . . . rest easy in knowing that no one of merit believes this filth in the newspapers.”
I dreaded to tell him the truth, and weeks after birthing a wondrously healthy little boy named William, I still did not know how. Finally, sitting beside Papa on the ferry dock with fishing poles, I blurted, “I’ve forgiven Hamilton.”
My father bit the clay pipe between his teeth, his lips thinning as understanding dawned that Alexander was guilty. At the prospect of my father learning the truth, my husband had shuddered. The censure of the country, he believed he could withstand. My father’s judgment was another matter altogether. And I began to fear it, too, because for a few moments, the only sounds were the rush of the water. The cry of a peregrine falcon hunting overhead.
“Elizabeth,” Papa finally said. “When you were born, I was an officer in the king’s army—a young soldier of three and twenty. I knew next to nothing about little girls. Less of nursing, or lullabies, or medicines. That was your mama’s domain.”
I smiled a little to think he’d ever felt ill-equipped.
But my father didn’t smile. Instead, he shook his head. “I knew only that as a father, it was my duty to protect you. With sword or musket or my own life if it should come to it. And this I have tried to do. When I gave you to Hamilton, I thought I had secured for you a life of security, love, and happiness. I chose a man I believed would defend you, and your heart, as I have always tried to do.” His mouth tightened, ruefully. “I did not choose your sisters’ husbands. But I chose Hamilton.”
And he blamed himself for it. “You didn’t choose him, Papa,” I said, quite firmly. “You only approved him. The choice was mine. A choice I make anew every day. A choice I do not regret, no matter how unpleasant our enemies intend to make it for me.”
My father, whose hair had gone white and wiry, whose strong arms had withered, and whose health had never been good, suffered from painful gout in his legs. I knew he was suffering now, as he took off his boots, lowered his feet into the water next to mine, and stared at the churning river. “Do you know what you’re facing with that choice?”
After years in public life, I had some idea. “Yes, Papa. I’m not a child anymore.”
“You are my child,” he said quietly. “Always.”
The sentiment set off an ache in my chest, for as a mother myself, I understood the depth of his meaning. I felt it for my own children. No matter how tall Philip grew, I would always see him in my mind’s eye as the laughing little piglet with chubby legs.
It took Papa a few moments, but when he looked up again, he said, “Do you recall that when you, Angelica, and Peggy were small, toddling about in pink ribbons, I went to London for a year on business?”
“I recall something of it,” I said, for, at five years old, dolls from England seemed almost as marvelous as welcoming home the tall and fierce warrior of a red-coated father I scarcely knew.
“While I was gone,” my father continued, “I asked my commander—Colonel Bradstreet—to watch over my family. At my request, he helped your mother build our new mansion here. And I returned home to find all of you living together here with Colonel Bradstreet . . . with whom your mother had formed an uncommon friendship in my absence.”
An uncommon friendship.
I remembered. Colonel Bradstreet was so fond of Mama that when he died, he left property to her. And all my life, I’d thought nothing of it until this excruciating moment. In shock, I whispered, “Surely you’re not intimating—”
“I am intimating nothing but that the friendship was a subject of speculation.”
My father’s jaw hitched and my belly roiled at the thought that he might have known the pain of adultery. Yet, everything I knew of my parents forced my mind to rebel. “Mama would never!”
With more calmness than he perhaps felt, Papa puffed at his pipe. “There was gossip.”
That I did not remember. That I’d never known. I was too young to have realized it. And I wondered if Angelica, who was older, had been more aware and if it accounted for her sometimes troubled relationship with our mother. “Surely Mama denied any impropriety.”
A small, bittersweet smile tugged at his lips. “I did not ask her.”
Indignation positively burned in my breast. “Why ever not?”
Papa’s fingers drummed lightly upon his knee, as if he were counting. “If she were guilty, she might confess. And how should
