Alexander reached to still me and our fingers tangled, sticky with our son’s warm blood, as he drew my attention to the bottle at the side of the bed. Philip had been dosed with it already. Any more, and perhaps we would hasten the end.
I recoiled from the thought, though my desperate mind would later fasten upon the notion as some manner of mercy when our poor boy lay hour after hour, pale and languid, his rolling eyes darting forth through flashes of delirium.
Caring naught for the blood, we climbed into bed with him, Alexander on one side, me on the other, and whispered tearful words of love and comfort as the darkness fell. “My sweet son,” I said in a voice I normally reserved for the littlest children. “You cannot remember the happiness you gave us when you were a baby, but oh, the joy we felt, just to hold you between us in bed, just like this.”
Philip pressed his head against mine, and in my mind’s eye, he was still the little jester who’d made us laugh. The brave eleven-year-old who’d saved all my other children. The fiery thirteen-year-old who’d defended his father in the streets. And I wanted to know who did this to him. What fiendish murderer could have pointed a pistol at my beautiful, sweet boy?
I had so many questions. But they would have to wait.
For as Philip groaned in desperate pain, I realized my duty to him. I was his mother. I’d nourished him, baptized him, taught him, clothed him, and watched him grow into a man. And yet, he needed me still. Now, the most important, the most sacred thing that I could do for my son was deliver him from this world just as I’d delivered him into it.
“You mustn’t be afraid,” I whispered. “These pains will soon pass. They will pass, and you will find your rest with God.” Alexander tried to swallow a moan but couldn’t hold it back.
But Philip nodded, his blue-tinged lips trembling. “I have f-faith in the Lord and my conscience is c-clean.”
He closed his eyes, already more gone from the world than still in it. So I met my husband’s gaze across the expiring body of our son, and met eyes so full of agony that I had to look away.
Before dawn, Philip roused himself. “What s-shall I tell Aunt Peggy when I see her in heaven? I—I think she’ll be angry t-to see me so soon.” Philip said this last part with a little laugh that brought a fresh cycle of convulsions.
“Don’t laugh, my sweet,” I told him, choking back a sob as I pressed my nose into his hair and inhaled the scent of him. “Don’t laugh if it hurts you.”
Alexander echoed me, his voice cracking. “You always laughed too much. Your only fault, my dear boy.”
Philip tried to turn his grimace into a grin. “Father, I shall debate you that laughter can be a f-fault.”
“And I shall let you win,” Alexander said, his voice a raw scrape.
“A first,” my son whispered, closing his eyes with apparent relish.
His breath rattled.
Then fell silent.
Frightful, heartbreaking silence.
That silence echoed through the room.
I reeled from the bed, shaking my head, vehemently, backing away in denial, nearly crashing into my sister’s gilded chairs and mahogany tables. Half-hysterical, half-furious, I wanted to tear at my hair and beat my breasts and awaken myself from this cruel nightmare.
But while I retreated, Alexander clutched our dead son, choking out, “Go, my boy. Go out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger . . .”
All my life I’d taken comfort from religion, but these words offered me no solace, and from my mouth came the keening of a wounded animal, a ghastly howl of despair. My cheeks streaked with salty tears, the skirt of my delicate pink dress stained with acrid sweat and dried blood, I was overcome with a desire to smash everything in my path—silver mirrors, blue china, crystal wineglasses. To sweep off the elegant tables all my sister’s goblets, candlesticks, and trinkets that held no worth in a world without Philip.
But I was stopped by the sight of Alexander hovering, shattered, over the deathbed of our boy, and the absurd thought that I couldn’t endure to see one more thing broken . . .
And because my husband was shattered, I couldn’t endure to see him.
Angelica tended me that night. She took the pins from my hair. She undid the fastenings of my pelisse coat, sliding the bloodstained embroidered cuffs off my arms. She stripped from me my stained pink dress. She bent down and removed my shoes and dosed me with the laudanum that was left. Where Hamilton slept that night I did not know, but my sister put me into her own bed where the sweet, merciful oblivion of sleep overtook me. And from that dream state, where my son was still alive, I did not ever wish to wake.
Chapter Thirty-Three
IT WAS THE will of heaven,” said my well-meaning Christian lady friends. “Remember the duty of Christian resignation.”
It was God, they said, who took my child from me.
But upon my aching knees in the pew in Trinity Church, clutching my Bible, I knew better.
It was not God who took my son from me.
It was a Jeffersonian.
Captain George Eacker, the violent Jacobin we saw ranting against my husband on the Fourth of July. Having come across the man at a playhouse, my son and a friend had confronted him. Captain Eacker had grabbed my son by the collar and called him a rascal. Rascal. A word which, when spoken by one gentleman to another, demanded bloodshed.
“Eliza,” Alexander now whispered, his hand upon my elbow, offering to help me rise.
I startled to realize that we were alone in the church. How long I’d knelt in desperate prayer amidst wooden benches and the scent of incense, I didn’t know. How long my husband had prayed beside me, I didn’t know either.
It seemed
