Knowing he was to duel, Alexander would have hidden anything incriminating or entrusted it to someone to destroy if he died. Hamilton was too smart for me. Too smart for everyone, except Burr.
Nevertheless, I unfastened the latch and was struck by the arresting sight of the blue-and-buff military coat Alexander wore the first day I met him. The wool, rougher than I remembered when I first touched him. When we first kissed. And the pain, oh the pain of remembering that with now jaded eyes, sliced into me like the bayonet beside the uniform.
Like a wounded soldier, bleeding my heart out, I searched every item in the trunk until it was empty, running my hands over the velvet lining . . . to find the false bottom I somehow expected. And that’s where I found it.
A bundle of letters and a dark braid of hair . . .
* * *
MY HANDS SHOOK as I unfolded the pages, finding neither the scent of my sister’s perfume nor the feminine scrawl of her hand. But instead, the shock of a firm, masculine signature.
John Laurens.
A man I’d never met, whose death dealt to Alexander his worst wound of the war. Here were the letters between them. Not only the ones Laurens wrote, but also copies of what my husband wrote to Laurens as well. That both sides of the correspondence were so carefully preserved spoke volumes of its importance to my husband.
And now I read them, with near incredulity.
Cold in my professions, warm in my friendships, I wish, my dear Laurens, it might be in my power, by action rather than words to convince you that I love you.
It was, in those days, the style for men to speak of love to one another. But it was not a style Alexander embraced in his letters. Not to any man I knew save, perhaps, Lafayette.
And yet, these were different. Ardent. Complete with a lewd suggestion that John Laurens had intimate knowledge of Alexander’s body. Letters that indicated a liaison between Washington’s young officers for which they might both have been shot.
And—quite beyond the capacity to be scandalized by anything now—I nearly laughed at my mind’s sudden opening to things that ought to have been perfectly obvious before.
My husband had loved this man.
Clutching a lock of dark hair that was not, after all, my sister’s, I remembered Alexander’s unnatural grief for Laurens. My husband’s attachment to the baron, whose handsome young male companions Theodosia Burr had once identified as sodomites. Perhaps my husband had been one of them, adopting the vice because it was forbidden.
Forbidden, like another man’s wife.
Forbidden, like his wife’s sister.
If Hamilton could commit those sins, why not this one? Why not sate his lust with another soldier while the winter was cold and the war was harsh?
Then, in a letter Alexander had written only months before we met, I found this:
Such a wife as I want must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape) sensible (a little learning will do), well bred, chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness). But as to fortune, the larger stock of that the better as money is an essential ingredient to happiness in this world.
Well, then.
Even sinners needed money, didn’t they?
And hadn’t he found just what he wanted in me? I met his cold list of qualifications precisely. It hollowed out my heart to know it. Made of my soul a barren land. Surrounded by the detritus of my husband’s life, I didn’t think there were any new ways in which his letters could hurt me.
But then they did.
Next fall completes my doom, Hamilton wrote to Laurens before our wedding.
I give up my liberty to Miss Schuyler. She is a good-hearted girl who I am sure will never play the termagant; though not a genius she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes.
A good-hearted girl. Not a genius. Not a beauty.
Not enough . . .
He wrote these things to John Laurens while whispering against my lips that I had bewitched him. While writing me sonnets. While buying me wedding gifts with John Laurens’s money . . .
In spite of Schuyler’s black eyes, I have still a part for the public and another for you; so your impatience to have me married is misplaced; a strange cure by the way, as if after matrimony I was to be less devoted than I am now.
The page slipped from my hand.
Our courtship had merely been another scheme.
Lies, lies, schemes and lies!
When we danced together at that first winter’s ball in Morristown, I’d been wary of Hamilton because he reminded me of the watery Nix of Dutch legend, luring maidens to dangerous depths. And now, at long last, I was drowning. Wrenching my wedding ring off my finger, I threw it into the trunk with the rest of Alexander’s deceit, thinking to send all of it to the bottom of the river.
Because, my God, this was to lose him again. A second kind of widowhood. One that obliterated the first. For I could have no hope of meeting with Alexander in heaven now; he was more likely to be found in hell. And I hoped . . . I hoped he burned there.
For he never loved me. He was never mine. He made me vows before an altar and played the part, to the last. But Alexander Hamilton was as false a villain as his enemies claimed he was. He had cheated me of my whole life and got away with it.
Cheated. That was how I felt, surveying all that remained of my husband’s legacy.
What was his legacy? Not the eternal bonds of love, not the earthly but enduring stone of monuments. Only paper. A worthless Constitution that the Republicans shredded with each successive administration. A few books filled with words he probably never meant in earnest. Just crates and crates of paper.
And I wanted to set fire to it all.
* * *
I AWAKENED TO the whisper of papers falling like
