I saw the truth in his eyes before he spoke. “He . . . he asked me to give you hope.”
Bile crawled up my throat as I remembered what Alexander once said to me.
I thought you might take easier to a thing if it was gradually broken to you, my angel.
He was wrong then, and he was wrong now. Already moving toward the house, I rasped to Ana, “Stay here. All of you.”
Oh, merciful God, why?
“Alexander!” I cried, finding him amidst onlookers gathered round Mr. Bayard’s grand bed. And when my husband’s head turned to me, it nearly took me to my knees.
I’d seen that look before—the gray pallor of blood loss, the waxy sheen of fever, the cloudy eyes of laudanum. The look of death.
“Eliza,” Alexander wheezed. “My angel.”
Taking his hand, I nearly collapsed onto the edge of the bed. And that’s when I saw the bloodied bandages around his waist. I knew the truth before it was even explained to me. He’d been shot. He’d been shot in a duel.
Voices I could barely hear recounted how he’d met Aaron Burr across the Hudson upon the cliffs of Weehawken, New Jersey. How, like my son, Alexander had thrown away his fire. How his opponent had taken lethal aim anyway.
“Will he live?” I asked the doctors, panic squeezing my throat and making it hard to choke out the words.
Four doctors huddled in the room—two Americans, and two French surgeons I later learned were stationed on a frigate in the harbor who were much experienced with gunshot wounds. The French had been our saviors in the revolution; maybe their expertise could save us now. “Can you save him? Please save him!”
“Mrs. General Hamilton.” One of the doctors finally stepped forward, wearing an expression of brutal sympathy, an expression mirrored on the other men’s faces. “I’m afraid the bullet has fractured a rib and, I suspect, ruptured the general’s liver. The bullet remains lodged in his spine . . .”
I could hear no more. I couldn’t see, couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. This couldn’t be happening again. How could it possibly be happening again? Was I, like my eldest daughter, caught in some delusion, except in my waking dream everyone I loved was to be taken from me?
Frantic with grief, I sobbed a desperate prayer to a God who had already required so many sacrifices from me.
Not Alexander, too. Not my dear Hamilton.
Though his weak pulse yet gave proof of life, I already sensed his withdrawal from me. And I felt his loss in my bones, in my flesh, as if the very heart of me was being violently rent asunder. It was an unbearable agony of spirit. One loss too many, and far too soon.
As I wept and bargained and prayed and raged, Alexander murmured, “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian.”
The first time he said it, pale and aware of his impending death, I believed he was offering me consolation, beseeching me to find comfort in my religion. Delirious with pain, he murmured it again as Angelica arrived, weeping her heart out as if joy no longer existed in the world and never could.
And I couldn’t decide if my sister’s anguish halved or doubled mine. I fanned Alexander’s feverish face and mopped his brow and when his precious blood soaked through the bandages and the mattress to pool upon the floor beneath the bed, I begged Bishop Moore to consent to give my husband communion, despite the sin of the duel. When the bishop finally relented, Alexander declared, “I have no ill will against Colonel Burr. I forgive all that happened.”
I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Not ever.
But Alexander said again to me, “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian.”
I knew then that it was a plea not for my comfort, but for my forgiveness. And I nodded my head, eager to give him what he wanted and needed before the Lord took him and I could give him nothing else. But in that crucial moment, I also turned and fled the room, because I knew I’d told my dying husband a lie. After all, how can one forgive what one doesn’t understand?
How had I not known? How had I let this happen? Why hadn’t I predicted that the long rivalry between my husband and Aaron Burr would come to this?
After I composed myself, I returned to my husband’s side. Then, all we could do was wait and wonder if each labored breath would be the last. In the morning, though those blue eyes appeared clearer and tinged with violet in the light of dawn, my beloved lay nearly motionless. And so I did perhaps the hardest thing I’d ever before had to do as a mother—I gathered my darling babies around me and somehow uttered the words, “Your father is dying, my little loves. And we must now say farewell.”
It was a scene of shattered innocence and grief that I still cannot allow myself to recall too closely. The way those little faces crumpled. The disbelieving despair. The younger ones who cried because the older ones did, not because they understood what was happening, or ever really would.
I’d lived forty-six years and I would never understand, either.
I led the children into the room and lined them up at the foot of the bed so that Alexander might be able to see them all. The fruit of our love. I lifted Little Phil, too short to be seen, to give his father a kiss, and then we waited as Alexander gave each child a final look, as if committing them to memory. Suddenly, seeing them became too much, and my husband clenched his eyes shut and pressed his lips into a tight, trembling line. Over the protests of my oldest sons, my sister took them from the room. And I was grateful for it.
I wanted to do something, but there was nothing to be
