And Aaron Burr.
Which brought me to my purpose in haunting the occupant of a little office on Nassau Street. It’d come to our attention that the tiny tin placard on the door reading MR. A. ARNOT, ESQUIRE was actually an assumed name for Burr, who’d returned to the city after a decade of exile.
After so many years, the criminal charges against him had been dropped, and now, it seemed the younger generation didn’t remember him. Or what he’d done.
But I remembered.
Burr might have chosen any other city in America. But he’d chosen to return to mine. So whenever I passed Burr’s shabby little door, and saw any person about to knock, I’d call, “Oh! Is that your solicitor? You should know that he murdered my husband.”
Soon after I made a habit of this, Burr changed the placard on his door to MR. EDWARDS. And I wondered what name I’d force him to adopt next. If I could take satisfaction in nothing else, I smiled to think I’d deprived him of a name—the thing my husband died for.
“If it’s your purpose to make him a miserable recluse,” Angelica said as we walked. “I’m told you’re succeeding . . .”
Burr’s grandson had died of a childhood illness the previous year. Then his daughter was lost at sea. He was left alone. Without family. Severed from the human race. I wasn’t monstrous enough to take joy in these tragedies.
Somedays I even wondered if these tragedies may have shaken loose some morsel of a soul, so that Burr now understood what he’d inflicted upon me. Other days, I had the absurd thought he might open his office door as we passed and beg my forgiveness.
But he never did. He was hiding from the world. He was hiding from me.
On this day, I peered at the bare snow-dusted window, in search of a glimpse of that crooked man in the shadows. But while I was looking, I felt my sister grasp my arm. “Betsy,” she whispered, and I turned to see her go pale as death. Then, before I could steady her, my sister’s knees buckled and she collapsed onto the icy street.
“Angelica!” I cried, dropping to my knees beside her. As she sprawled, gasping and staring at the sky, I feared that she’d knocked her head or broken a bone. I called for help—and some part of me dreaded that Burr might emerge from his office to lend assistance. But it was actually the Reverend Mason who happened by and helped me convey Angelica back to the warmth of her own house.
“All this for beauty?” I asked, furious when she confessed that she’d simply not eaten that day, hunger the probable reason for her swoon.
“Anxiety of the war leaves me no appetite,” she protested weakly.
But two days later, in a state of delirium, her hair plastered with sweat to a ghostly white face, she whispered, “Don’t tell Betsy.”
I’d come to tend her with a basket of tonics and herbs, but my brother-in-law, in shirtsleeves and dishevelment, stood stone-faced in the entryway of her bedroom. “She’s been unwell. She didn’t wish for you to know.”
“Unwell? What can you mean?”
“Cancerous tumors,” Church replied stiffly.
It was several agonizing moments before I could take a breath. “Where have the tumors arisen?” I finally had the clarity to ask. Sometimes tumors could be surgically removed—a painful and gruesome procedure, but one with a chance for survival.
As if he knew what I was thinking, Church shook his head and rubbed his unshaven jaw. “They can’t be cut away.”
Which meant . . . Angelica was dying. My gaze flew past him to where my once vivacious sister lay withered and frail in her bed, moaning softly in pain. And I could do nothing to help her. I was again to lose someone I loved better than myself. And the crushing weight of our impending separation made me grasp at the doorframe for balance. Helplessly, I looked into the eyes of my brother-in-law. “How long has she been suffering?”
“Quite some time.”
Quite some time. She’d been sick, and fearful, and hadn’t told me. She’d told her husband, but not me, and I resented him, though I had no right. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“She didn’t wish you to see her this way, with her mind lost to the laudanum and—”
“I don’t care,” I hissed. “You will not dare keep me away. You do not dare.”
He didn’t. Especially since Angelica was soon out of her bed, making little of her illness, putting off my tearful enquiries with teasing. But now that my eyes were open, I saw the laudanum glitter of her eyes, the exhaustion of her thinning body. She quipped that she would be dancing at a ball in no time, but that attack of weakness in the street had been some catalyst of a terrible kind, because she was soon bedridden—and I found it both a cruelty and a mercy that my irrepressible sister was not long bound in the struggle of dying.
When she awakened one morning to find me at her bedside, she took my hand and kissed it. “My dear Eliza. It’s only right that I die before you. I’m the oldest. I should have gone before Peggy. I should go before you. Besides . . . I am a sinner, and you are a saint.”
“No, Angelica,” I said, shaking my head in denial and anger at the Lord himself. My sister had been my touchstone—before and after my husband’s death. In the worst days of my grief, I couldn’t have remained standing without her steadfast support. And now the only pain worse than the knowledge she was to be taken from me was pity that she should suffer so much.
But closing her eyes Angelica said, “Envy me, my sweet sister, for a merciful God is taking me to see all our lost loved ones . . .”
Then her pain became too great to bear. We dosed her, and under the laudanum’s spell, she spoke
